reincarnation – Just the Tarot

THE EMPRESS AND THE ART OF FLUNKING OUT OF EARTH SCHOOL

A playful look at the New Age paradox of being “perfect souls” who still come to “Earth School” to learn lessons. The post explores both views and suggests that real growth comes not from suffering, but from joy, play, and becoming more fully ourselves.

There’s a rather large pothole in New Age philosophy that I keep tripping over. Let’s call it The Earth School Fallacy — the strange contradiction between “We are perfect divine beings” and “We’re here to learn lessons because… well, we’re NOT perfect divine beings.”

Somehow, we manage to carry both of those ideas around in our heads and not notice that they don’t quite fit together.

THE EARTH SCHOOL MODEL

You’ve heard this one. If you’ve been on a spiritual path longer than a week, you’ve probably used this one.

Earth, we’re told, is a sort of cosmic classroom we incarnate into repeatedly. Each lifetime is a syllabus of Very Important Lessons, and with each incarnation we supposedly level up until we become Spiritually Perfect.

In this model, we actually choose our life challenges before we’re born.

Have a temper? Great! Let’s incarnate into a family whose daily activities include pushing all of your buttons like they’re competing for a prize. Assuming we don’t murder each other we eventually learn enough humility and patience and – SHAZAM – we transform into Mahatma Gandhi.

Have an obsession with sex? Wonderful! Let’s incarnate into a world filled with gorgeous, eager, naked partners who—

Okay, that one never happens. But you get the drift.

Pass your lessons and you move up a grade.

Fail your lessons and you come back as a cockroach or a MAGA supporter and start over in Spiritual First Grade, eating glue and making macaroni art.

In Tarot Talk, Gaia’s classroom often looks like the Five of Wands — a bunch of souls flailing around wildly until one of us finally figures out what the sticks are for.

THE ANGEL WITHIN

Now we arrive at the second New Age idea — the one that directly contradicts the first.

This is the belief that we’re already spiritually perfect, but we’ve forgotten that fact. Our task isn’t to improve ourselves… it’s to remember that we don’t need improving.

Buddhists describe it as our original nature: a perfect jewel hidden under a crust of plain gray rock. Chip away the rock and — surprise! — you’ve been luminous the whole time.

Joni Mitchell phrased it better than all the gurus combined:

“We are stardust, we are golden,

and we’ve got to get back to the garden.”

In this view, we are pure, radiant beings from Source Energy who come to Earth, promptly forget who we are, and then spend the rest of our lives meditating, journaling, and buying inspirational calendars in an attempt to remember.

Put another way:

We’ve got a sleeping angel inside us, and the angel really needs to get its butt out of bed.

THE CONTRADICTION

Here’s the uncomfortable question no one asks:

If we’re already perfect, why would we CHOOSE to forget that and struggle?

It’s like becoming a master at algebra, then signing up for a lobotomy just so you can relearn quadratic equations from scratch.

Imagine your higher self sitting in another dimension saying,

“I’m a being of luminous perfection. You know what sounds fun? Forgetting everything and getting pissed off at the traffic while I drive to a boring, meaningless job that I hate.”

Something about that doesn’t quite compute.

EARTH SCHOOL AND THE WORK ETHIC PROBLEM

The Earth School model borrows heavily from Christian theology, a worldview in which:

• Humans are inherently sinful.

• Life is full of temptations that make us more sinful.

• If we behave ourselves and avoid having sex with the neighbor’s spouse, we get to go somewhere nice after we die.

In this model, Earth is basically the rough school on the dangerous side of town, with a curriculum of suffering, discipline, and fear.

Just keep your head down, work hard, and eventually—good news!—you’ll die.

THE VEDANTA SOLUTION (AKA: THE EMPRESS APPROACH)

Vedanta, from the Hindu tradition, on the other hand, leans toward Joni Mitchell’s interpretation. It suggests that:

• We are already perfect.

• Life is not meant to be hard.

• We’re not here to learn painful lessons.

• We’re here to experience, enjoy, and expand.

If the Vedanta version of Earth School has a model, it’s not the stern monk or stressed-out student — it’s The Empress.

She’s not here to ace the test. She’s here to savor the banquet.

Play, creativity, pleasure, beauty — these are not distractions from the spiritual path.

They are the spiritual path.

That’s a really hard concept for Westerners to wrap our heads around. We’re taught from the moment that we’re born that life is a series of assignments that we’re supposed to complete and that the next assignment will be better than the last. That’s really the way that our whole society is set up. We go to kindergarten so that we can go to grade school so that we can go to high school so that we can go to college or trade school so that we can get jobs so that we can get promotions so that we can retire comfortably and have enough money to pay for our funerals.

If we do all of that, we’ve been, “successful.” If we don’t, our lives have been meaningless.

When someone tells us that the whole purpose of Earth School might actually be recess, it feels slightly insane.

LIVING SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE

We can argue both sides.

If you lean toward Earth School, you can point to all the suffering and struggle that seem baked into our reality. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, human life often appears “nasty, brutish, and short.”

But if you look again, you’ll also see breathtaking amounts of love, generosity, joy, and compassion.

So what’s the truth?

Probably something in the middle.

No, we’re not perfect angelic beings slumming on Earth…

but we can be.

Maybe life isn’t about learning painful lessons, and maybe it’s not about effortless perfection either.

Maybe it’s simply about becoming more yourself, more awake, more playful, more alive.

And oddly enough, the way we get there isn’t through suffering…

it’s through joy. It’s through learning how to play.

We don’t have to wait until we die to graduate.

We can do that right now — as soon as we remember that recess was always the point.

Karma, Having Sex with Republicans, and Being Kind to Yaks

Seeing karma as a way to change our past.

One of my favorite internet memes says, “Karma – It’s spelled K-A-R-M-A and it’s pronounced, ‘Ha, ha, fuck you.’”

That’s a perfect explanation of our usual understanding of karma which is basically, “If you do some shit, you get some shit.” If we do something terrible to another person, something terrible is going to happen to us. If we do something nice, something nice is going to happen to us.

OH, WELL, IT’S KARMA

Counter-intuitively, karma is also used an explanation for why bad things happen to good people. We may have a friend who’s a wonderful person and goes through his life supporting and nurturing others, who’s full of love and gentleness and kindness. And then something horrendous happens to him, like he falls of a cliff or discovers his wife is having sex with a Republican.

We simply can’t understand why such a good person would have such bad luck. Certainly, he did nothing to deserve it and, according to the Law of Karma, all of his good behavior should have been rewarded with good things happening to him.

But . . . we’re told . . . perhaps he did something really, really terrible in a previous incarnation. Maybe he pushed someone off of a cliff or maybe he had sex with a Republican. Maybe he actually – shudder – enjoyed having sex with a Republican.

That allows us to restore some sense of cosmic balance and we say, “Oh, well, it’s just karma.”

IT AIN’T ME, BABE

We can certainly understand that concept when something bad happens to someone else, but it’s difficult to swallow when it happens to us.

Let’s face it, most of us are NOT the Dalai Lama and we have very little memory of our past lives. We may accept the general idea that we’ve lived other lives, but we don’t actually remember being a Yak herder in Mongolia in 40 A.D. or a courtesan in Paris during World War I.

From our current point of view, those people who we were in our past lives were literally someone else and not us.

The idea that I broke my wrist today because some other guy kicked a Yak 2000 years ago seems entirely capricious and cruel and unjust. It feels like . . . how shall I put this? . . . bullshit.

KARMA AND DETERMINISM

From that perspective, karma feels very much like determinism. Determinism is the view that every single thing that happens to us is pre-determined from the moment of birth. There really isn’t any free will or choice in life because our lives are a result of our genetics, our cultures, the families we’re born into, and the times we live in.

We can actually make a strong case for that. Even in the United States, where we worship the idea of free will and choosing our own destinies, the statistics say it ain’t so. If we’re born into a dirt poor family, we’ll probably die dirt poor. If we’re born into great wealth, we’ll probably die rich. If our parents were conservative Catholics, we’ll probably be conservative Catholics. If our grandfather hated socialists for no particular reason, we’ll probably hate socialists for no particular reason.

We tell ourselves that we’re making choices about those issues, but for the most part we aren’t. It was all programmed into us before we came down the birth canal. Life is something that happens to us, not something that we create.

Karma can feel a lot the same way. I, me, the person who I am right now, did NOT kick that Yak 2000 years ago, so why am I being punished for it? It’s something that’s just happening to me, not something I can control or make any choices about.

BUT KARMA’S A CHOICE

Paradoxically, being the people who we are, right here, right now, is the good news about karma.

Determinism basically says, “You’re fucked or you’re not fucked and there’s not one damned thing you can do about it. You have NO choice in the matter.” It’s all predetermined.

The Law of Karma, on the other hand, says that what we do right now is what really counts. Far from saying that we have NO choice in the matter, karma is saying that we always have a choice. And our choices are what determine our karma.

As David Michie said in, “Buddhism for Busy People,”

“A lot of Western people wrongly think that karma equals fate or predestination. They think it’s something you don’t have any power to change. This is a misunderstanding. It is we who create our own karma and we can change it in a powerful, dynamic way. We are creating hundreds, even thousands of such causes every day of our lives.”

Put another way, we are creating our own karma ALL THE TIME. It’s not something from the past that just pops up to bite us in the ass every once in a while. It’s not like The Wheel of Fortune, where we have good luck for a while and then bad luck, for no apparent reason. It’s something we personally create by either being good people or being bad people.

THE PRESENT AS PROLOGUE TO THE PAST

Now, there’s a particularly fascinating doctrine in some schools of Buddhism that says that we can actually change our past karma by how we behave in our present lives.

Suppose, for instance, that I was a really notorious Yak kicker in Mongolia in 40 A.D. I didn’t just kick Yaks occasionally. No, I was a mean, nasty, evil spirited son of a bitch who got up every single morning and kicked the hell out of as many Yaks as I could reach.

Fast forward 1985 years to my current life. Suppose I start an, “adopt a Yak program,” and spend years rescuing and feeding homeless Yaks. I learn to love Yaks and have great compassion for them. Perhaps I even dress them in Yak finery for special occasions.

Under this particular doctrine, I wouldn’t JUST be creating good karma for my present self. My good karma would go backwards through time and actually change the character and behavior of my previous self, the notorious Yak kicker. He might learn to love Yaks just as much as I do and my bad Yak karma would be erased.

IT’S NOT THAT WILD

If that sort of time traveling karma sounds a little too wild, just consider what most of us already believe about karma.

We believe that we have one Soul with many different historical identities and that what a previous identity does can travel through time to affect the life of our current identity. So if all of these past identities are somehow in touch with our current identity, why wouldn’t our current identity be in touch with our past identities? If they can affect us, it stands to reason that we can affect them.

KARMA AS AN ONGOING PROJECT

When we shift our perspective in that way, then karma becomes an on-going project. We’re no longer victims of our past. We’re actually re-creating our past through our current actions.

And if that isn’t free will and choice, I don’t know what is.

Being compassionate, decent people every day and right now is good for us and it’s good for the people around us. And, ultimately, it’s good for the Yaks.

Do it for the Yaks.

Just a reminder that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is available on Amazon for much less than a bag of Yak feed.

The Five of Pentacles, Karma, and God’s Little Baskets of Muffins

Transforming ourselves through karmic selfishness.

I have a younger friend who HATES karma.

More specifically, he hates when he’s in the middle of an, “Oh poor me,” bitching session and someone shrugs her shoulders and says, “Well, that’s karma.”

First of all, it interrupts the rhythm of his complaining and he has to go back and remember what he was so upset about.

“What was I saying? I know it was important . . . oh, I remember . . . life is meaningless and no one understands me . . .”

Secondly, it infuriates him because it suggests that the mess he finds himself in is somehow HIS fault and the whole point of his rap is that it’s everything and everyone else’s fault. Which is just further proof that no one understands him.

This guy was raised by a Buddhist and that may have something to do with his constant irritation. It’s developmentally important that teenagers be able to rebel against their parents. The first way that we really begin to define who we are in the world is by making it clear that we aren’t our parents. I imagine that it must be pretty damned difficult for a teenager to get any rebellion traction against a Buddhist parent.

“You know, Dad, sometimes I really hate you.”

“Well, son, all strong emotions will pass if we simply do a little deep breathing. Remember, you’re the sky and your emotions are just clouds drifting by.”

“I’ve been think about getting a tattoo. What do you think about that?”

“Ah . . . perhaps you should get a tattoo of a double dorje or some other sacred symbol. In a sense, it would be a constant reminder of the spiritual nature that dwells in physical matter.”

“Maybe I’ll paint my face blue and dye my hair orange.”

“Hmmm . . . I wonder if you were a Druid in a past life. Do you feel a particular attraction to oak trees?”

Aargh! So it’s possible that this guy was deeply emotionally scarred by all of that loving kindness and unconditional acceptance from his parents. If only they’d yelled at him or told him he was an idiot occasionally!

Still, he does have a bit of a point about the notion of karma.

It’s perfectly understandable that people get a little riled up over the idea of crappy things happening to them because of what they may have done in a past life. After all, most of us have absolutely no memory of our past lives and so it feels like we’re being punished for something that someone else did.

Suppose I was Attila the Hun in a past life and in a fit of Barbarian Rage I whipped out my scimitar and beheaded a turtle. Then 200 lifetimes later – as Dan Adair – I’m in a traffic accident and I get whiplash BECAUSE I decapitated that turtle. That seems a little . . . unjust. I mean, I’m NOT Attila in any sort of a meaningful sense, so why should I get sent to the principal’s office because Attila was a dick?

And then, to make it even worse, when I’m sitting there in my cervical collar reflecting on exactly HOW unjust it all is, an acquaintance says, “Oh, well, that’s karma.” As my younger friend would put it: “Fuck you.”

Now, there’s a particularly odious Christian doctrine called, “predestination.” It holds that some people are born with the unchangeable destiny that they’re going to heaven when they die. Other people are born with the unchangeable destiny that they’re going straight to hell when they die. It doesn’t matter what we do or how we behave, our ultimate destiny has already been decided at the moment of birth.

It’s like God is up there in the Kosmic Kitchen baking up human Souls and, as he pulls each one out of the Soul Muffin Pan, he tosses them into separate baskets marked, “Heaven,” and, “Hell.”

“Okay, heaven, heaven, heaven – whoops, you’re fucked – hell, heaven, fucked again, heaven . . .” Like the beggars in the Five of Pentacles, we’re out in the cold and we’re going to stay there.

Theologians came up with a perfectly logical reason for this totally insane doctrine. The idea is that God is all powerful and all knowing. So if God knows everything, then that must mean that he knows everything that happened in the past, the present, AND the future! And if God already knows what’s going to happen in the future, then he must already know who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell. Shazam! There you are – it’s already determined.

That’s the kind of weird, Left-Brain, cuckoo for coco puffs vibe that a lot of people get off of the notion of karma. It seems to be some sort of an inexorable process that was put into motion a long time before we came along and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. We’re either in the Heaven Basket or we’re in the Oh, You’re So Fucked Basket. Like it’s something that happens TO us for no particular reason.

Of course, the important point that most of us miss is that karma isn’t happening to us, we’re happening to karma. It’s a totally dynamic process and it’s something that we can change every single day simply by the ways that we behave right now.

The most simplistic way to think of it is as a sort of a bank account. Rather than being born into a You’re-Going-to-Hell Basket or a You’re-Going-to-Heaven Basket, we’re born with a certain amount of Karmic Kash that we earned (or didn’t earn) in past lives. The Dalai Lama will probably be reborn with several savings accounts, a really huge checking account, many certificates of deposit and a great coin collection. Attila the Turtle Beheader, on the other hand, will be reborn with 50 cents in the bank and a lot of overdue bills.

The thing is, though, that the way that we’re born isn’t our destiny. The way that we behave is our destiny. Attila, for instance, might start a refuge for homeless turtles. Every single time that he saves a turtle and gives it a meaningful life – KA -CHING – that’s another deposit in his Karma Account. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, might decide to support Eric Trump for President and – ZAP – that’s a major withdrawal from his Karmic Account.

As David Michie said in, “Buddhism for Busy People,”

In what is one of the most outstandingly ingenious aspects of Buddhist teachings, we come to realize that our own selfish interests lie in being altruistic . . .months, years or decades of being generous for selfish reasons begin to have a predictable effect . . .what starts out as a contrived and self-conscious change of attitude and behavior results in a genuine metamorphosis.

In other words, we don’t have to start out as Mother Theresa or an Awakened Master. We can start out as perfectly normal, selfish, self-centered human beings who are being kind to other beings because we DON’T want to end up wearing a cervical collar. When we pick up a turtle that’s in the middle of the road and leave it safely on the other side, we can be doing it for the completely selfish reason of wanting to fill up our Karmic Account.

As we continue those little acts of kindness they gradually transform us. They become acts of loving/kindness, where we’re actually noticing and caring about the welfare of the people and beings around us. The translation of the word, “karma,” is, “action,” and that’s the key. Our actions change us, even if they originate in selfishness.

And that’s how Attila the Hun becomes the Dalai Lama. Pretty simple.

Old Souls, Young Souls and Reflections on the Death of Thich Nhat Hahn

Upon the death of Thich Nhat Hahn . . .

The great spiritual master, Thich Nhat Hanh, just died. And the world took little note of his passing. There was a brief note from the Dalai Lama. The United States State Department put out about a three paragraph memo recognizing him. The Pope, as near I can tell, didn’t say a word.

I actually scanned through the pages of my FaceBook friends and found a total of three people who mentioned his death. There were far more discussions of the death of a rock star named Meatloaf than there was of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Initially, I was fairly dismayed. And saddened. And a wee bit shocked. I can’t tell you how many memes I’ve seen on FaceBook over the years that were quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m sure you’ve seen them, too. They’re usually posted with a picture of someone meditating or doing yoga or sitting blissfully under a tree. I would guess that the number of them I’ve seen runs into the hundreds or possibly the thousands.

I found myself wondering – did all of those quotations actually mean anything to the people who posted them? Did they read his books? Did they watch his videos? Did they in any way absorb anything that he said or believed?

I remembered a few months ago when Ram Dass passed over and there was very much the same reaction. “Oh, yeah . . . I heard something about that. Oh, well . . . he was pretty old, wasn’t he?”

Between the two of them, these people had a MASSIVE spiritual transmission. They brought concepts and perspectives to the table that have helped millions – literally millions – of people across the world. I don’t know what I expected at the news of their passing but it wasn’t, “Man, did you hear Meatloaf died?”

I know as I’m writing this that they’d both be laughing at the idea that their deaths were somehow important. Both of them stressed throughout their decades of teachings that the whole, “my death matters,” rap is just an ego trip. Ram Dass said that, “death is not an outrage,” it’s the most natural thing in the world. Thich Nhat Hanh said that there is no death and no birth, just transitions of our forms.

Still, I think they were both exemplars of the fact that LIFE matters. That the way we live our lives, that the amount of love and compassion and caring that we manifest matters very much. In the middle of an ocean of pain and suffering and cruelty and despair, they continued to repeat that one simple, brave message: love each other.

So . . . I ponder over the fact that this beautiful human being, this compassionate, loving, deeply insightful man could pass away and it made such a tiny ripple on the consciousness of the world.

I think that the answer is probably that people have become accustomed to NOT having any sort of a spiritual practice, in the sense of consciously integrating spiritual values into their daily lives. There’s a sort of a cliche’ in Texas about the good old boy Southern Baptist businessman who goes to church on Sundays and Wednesdays and screws people over the rest of the week. When you ask him why he’d behave that way, the response is, “Well, that’s just binness (business).”

In other words, there’s a clear demarcation in his mind between spirituality – which happens on Sunday and Wednesday – and business, which happens on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There’s a sort of a spirituality cubby hole in his existence that needs to be filled, but he manages to keep it very much in the background for most of his life.

I would guess that, for many people, posting, “spirituality memes,” on FaceBook operates in much the same way. It’s a way of saying to others – and to ourselves – “Hey, I’m actually a deeply spiritual person. See – I just posted a meme from Ram Dass or Thich Nhat Hanh or Pema Chodron.” And then our friends shine that right back at us and that fills that spirituality cubby hole.

Spirituality becomes a sort of a bon bon rather than a steady diet. It’s something we post, not something we live. It’s scratching an itch, rather than wondering why we’re itching to begin with.

I know that neither Ram Dass nor Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “Yeah, people are pretty much shallow assholes.” I suspect they would say, “Yeah, there’s still a lot of work to do. We need to get back on to our part of it.”

I’m finding a lot of comfort in a paradigm from the 1960s, which is that there are Old Souls and Young Souls. If you’re an Old Soul, if you’ve been around the reincarnation cycle a few thousand times, then people like Thich Nhat Hanh resonate a lot more deeply in your heart than they might for a Young Soul. This isn’t to say that being an Old Soul is somehow superior to or better than or wiser than a Young Soul. It’s not an elitist trip. It’s not a superiority trip. It’s just being in a different place on the path.

The world seems to be awash in Young Souls right now and the best thing to do seems to be to constantly and consistently repeat that message from Ram Dass and Thich Nhat Hanh: love each other.

Ironically, they’d both agree with the assessment of the Young Souls that their deaths didn’t really matter. But their lives did.

Love each other.

Namaste’ Thich Nhat Hanh.