Souls – Just the Tarot

The Star, Fairies, Cat’s Milk, and Roe V. Wade

Our ancient ancestors believed that some stars were alive. They looked at the night skies and observed that some of the stars, which we now call planets, moved around in the sky. Since things which are alive move, it was perfectly reasonable – given the extent of their knowledge at the time – to conclude that these moving stars were actual living beings and give them names like Mars, Jupiter, or Venus. They couldn’t prove they were alive but this unprovable metaphysical belief was accepted by most of humanity throughout most of our history. Some people still think that stars and planets are alive and have their own souls, which is a perfectly fine, harmless metaphysical belief.

All metaphysical beliefs are created equal.

If that sounds a little abstruse, allow me to explain. All metaphysical beliefs – ALL OF THEM – are by their nature unprovable using physical means. Metaphysical beliefs deal with the invisible world of souls, spirits, gods, demons, elves, fairies. These are not physical entities and, therefore, cannot be quantified in the physical world.

I may believe very strongly in the existence of the Soul – and I do – but I can’t prove its existence. I can’t take a picture of it, I can’t weigh it, I can’t pull it out of a paper bag and say, “See? Here it is. Told you it existed, didn’t I?”

I also believe in elves, fairies, ghosts and gods and goddesses in the plural. If you’re a materialistic atheist, you might look at me and say, “You know, you’re a little touched in the head. You’re saying that you believe in invisible things that no one can actually prove exist.”

That would be quite a reasonable statement from a materialist atheist, and it would be equally reasonable for me to say, “So what? What business is it of yours, what I believe in? If I believe in fairies, it’s not hurting you in the least, is it? It’s not like my fairies are stealing your cat’s milk or anything.”

Keep in mind, though, that this scenario is valid for ALL metaphysical beliefs, not just fairies and elves and ghosts. It applies equally to Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Ganesh, and Tara. All of these are beliefs in invisible beings whose existence can’t be proved (or disproved) any more than hob-goblins and imps.

All metaphysical beliefs are created equal. And equally unprovable.

As long as they don’t hurt anyone else, there’s really no problem with them. For millions of people, they’re actually sources of great comfort. They help us to feel that we’re not alone in a vast, cold universe and that there’s some meaning and purpose to our existence. They help us to face death and tragedy with faith and courage. There’s much to be said for them, but they are ALL equally unprovable.

Where we start to run into a little trouble with them is when we decide that OUR unprovable metaphysical beliefs are better than THEIR unprovable metaphysical beliefs. To a certain extent that’s just human nature and doesn’t cause any great harm. If I say, “My Goddess is better than your Jesus, neener, neener, neener!” you may find that obnoxious and annoying, but it doesn’t really harm you in any way.

Where we run into REAL trouble is when we decide that OUR unprovable metaphysical beliefs are better than THEIR unprovable metaphysical beliefs, THEREFORE they have an obligation to adopt our unprovable beliefs and abandon their own.

By way of an example, if I believe in fairies, this belief isn’t harming you at all (assuming my fairies aren’t stealing your cat’s milk.) On the other hand, if I go up on a mountain top to meditate and I come back down with the Ten Fairy Commandments and DEMAND, on penalty of death, that everyone follow the Fairy Commandments, then I’ve made a very serious step into a spiritual dictatorship. If I decide that the faces of fairies are sacred and that it’s a sin to portray them in paintings and drawings, and that it’s okay for me to kill anyone who does that, I’m a psychopath who should be locked up.

Because, you see, they’re all unprovable metaphysical beliefs.

We laugh at the idea of the fairies issuing Ten Commandments, or them behaving like Allah and saying their faces can’t be depicted. We might not laugh at the idea of a fairy who was crucified, killed, and then walked out of his tomb, but we’d at least find the story goddamned peculiar.

Now, all of these stories and cultural myths about unprovable beliefs are, as I said, relatively harmless, right up to the point where we insist that other people have to share our belief in them. In forcing other people to act according to our beliefs, we violate their freedom and their personal choice.

There’s a matter of degree in that, of course, and it’s based on how much the other person’s beliefs are actually harming us and interfering in our lives. I have atheist friends, for instance, who become quite irate over the fact that United States coins bear the slogan, “In God We Trust.” For the most part, we shrug that off because it really doesn’t harm us in any way, therefore it’s not important. On the other hand, if they were to put Jesus or Allah on the quarter dollars, we’d be pissed. That’s crossing a line where someone is trying to impose their unprovable metaphysical beliefs on our daily lives and that violates our freedom and personal choice. It’s going from a generic, multi-purpose god-we-trust to a specific, “In THIS god we trust.”

All of which brings us to the overturning of Roe V. Wade.

Now, there’s been a lot of political posturing and folderol wrapped around that decision by the Not Very Supreme Court. There are people writing about constitutional, “originalism,” and states rights and decentralizing our government to return power to the voters. All of which is bullshit.

The real issue here is exemplified by the anti-abortion protesters holding up signs that say, “Abortion Is Murder.”

We all know what murder is: it’s the killing of another human being. If you walk up and shoot me in the head, that’s murder. If I fly into a rage and run over you with an ice cream truck, that’s murder (even if it’s a slightly more interesting form of murder.) There’s no debate or ambiguity in our minds about exactly what constitutes murder. No, the question revolves around exactly what constitutes a human being.

On the face of it, the answer to that seems simple. I’m a human, you’re a human, all of those bipedal critters at the mall are humans. We tend to define humanness in terms of walking around, talking, being conscious, and being able to interact with the world. There are certain physical, cognitive, and emotional qualities which, when taken together, we call a human being.

There are basic qualities that we all recognize as a being that’s human and we don’t pretend that something which doesn’t have those qualities IS human. While we may know that every sperm cell is a POTENTIAL human being, we don’t view them as actually BEING humans and prosecute men for mass murder when they masturbate. We may know that every egg that a woman produces is a POTENTIAL human being, but we don’t hold a funeral when she has her period.

Roe V. Wade was the simple recognition of the fact that when a sperm cell penetrates an egg, it remains a POTENTIAL human being. At the point of impregnation and well through a large part of the pregnancy, the fetus has NO characteristics that constitute what we think of as a human being. Pregnancy is a continuum in which the fetus becomes more and more human but is not, in fact, a human being at the inception of the pregnancy. And if there’s no human, there can’t be any murder. There can’t be any violation of human rights because there isn’t a human being there until late into the second trimester.

What’s glitching up our national conversation on this is the unprovable metaphysical belief that there is an entity called, “the soul,” combined with the unprovable metaphysical belief that this invisible entity enters into the egg at the exact second that the sperm cell does and – shazam! – we have a full human being.

If – and only if – we all mutually accept those unprovable metaphysical beliefs is it legitimate for the courts to abolish abortion. Since most of us DON’T accept those metaphysical beliefs, what’s happening is that a minority’s religious views are being imposed on the majority without their consent. Which is a theocracy, not a democracy.

I’m not meaning to denigrate or mock christian beliefs. If they want to believe that the Soul zips into an egg the second a sperm cell enters it, that doesn’t hurt me a bit. As long as it doesn’t steal my cat’s milk, their christian soul is welcome to do whatever it fancies.

What does hurt me, though, is when those unprovable beliefs are imposed on me as a government policy. Because, let’s face it, the christians do NOT have a good track record in being a part of governments. These are the same fine folks who brought us the Inquisition. These are the same folks who raped and pillaged and murdered their way through South America in the name of Jesus. These are the same folks who enslaved millions of innocent Africans because the Bible said that slavery was alright. These are the same folks who sat silently in their golden churches while Hitler murdered most of the European Jews.

We have no reason to believe that christian fanatics will respect other people’s beliefs or even their lives. And we have many reasons to believe that they won’t, so we need to stop this, now, before it gets worse. And that is NOT an unprovable metaphysical belief. That’s history.

The Sun Card and The Uncarved Block

Seeing the human Soul in the Taoist concept of The Uncarved Block.

One of the core tenets of Taoism is an idea called, “The Uncarved Block,” or, as it’s written in Chinese, “Pu,” (not to be confused with The Tao of Pooh although it IS the Tao of Pu.)

It refers, quite simply, to a piece of wood that’s never been touched, never been carved into a statue or an ornament or a utensil. It’s just the wood, as it came into and grew into this world. It’s in its’ primal, original state of being.

When the term is used to refer to the human experience, it means the primal state in which WE came into this world, untouched by experiences, prejudices, or dualistic thinking. And, of course, it implies that there was a SOMETHING that arrived when we were born, other than just a tiny little human body. There was a primal NATURE that came into the human body. Some people call it a Soul.

This has actually been a pretty hot topic for philosophers and psychologists for hundreds of years. Are we just reducible to the sum total of our bodies and brains, or is there something else that’s greater and somehow inhabits our bodies and brains? Another way of putting it is, “nature versus nurture:” are we born with a certain nature, an essence that existed before our birth, or are we simply whatever we learn as we go along in life, whatever we learn by being nurtured by our culture?

Aristotle came down firmly on the nurture side of the equation, saying that we are born as a, “tabula rasa,” a blank slate that life and culture writes upon. There is no soul, no pre-existing essence. The idea was later picked up by the English philosopher John Locke and thus made its way into modern psychology.

New Thought writers, of course, are advocates of nature, of the idea of our having a Soul that, “arrives,” in this world using the vehicle of our bodies. What’s more, they see the Soul as being pretty cool when it dances into the physical world. To quote Esther Hicks/ Abraham in Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires:

“You are eternal beings who have chosen to participate in this specific physical life experience for many wonderful reasons . . . You are eternal Consciousness, currently in this wonderful physical body for the thrill and exhilaration of specific focus and creation.”

In other words, when we first get here we are beautiful, spiritual beings, full of joy, who have come here on a mission that INCLUDES having a lot of fun. To use a phrase from AA, we are happy, joyous, and free. We would feel a lot like The Sun Tarot card looks.

We arrive as beautiful, innocent, children, full of elation and radiating the euphoria of being alive in this enchanted garden that we call the Earth. We are naked and unadorned, and our original nature, our essence, our, “uncarved block,” is love. Pure love.

But then something happens. Perhaps we forget our original nature in the process of transitioning from being Spirits to existing in physical bodies. Perhaps, as some children do, we remember our original nature and still see the angels and the fairies, but our families and society soon beat that magic out of us. As Don Miguel Ruiz put it in The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book),

“We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach how to dream the way society dreams . . . we learned a whole new reality, a whole new dream. We never had the opportunity to choose what to believe or what not to believe.”

And we find ourselves wandering in Paradise, lost in the collective dream of our existence, with no memory that we are something far, far greater than our mere physical bodies. As the bible expressed it – in a phrase that christians never, never, never EVER quote – because then we wouldn’t need preachers: “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.”

Or to use Joni Mitchel’s riff on it, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

That’s the rub, that’s the rough part for most of us: just remembering that we ARE spiritual beings and getting back to that garden. It’s not as if society exactly encourages us to act like we’ve all got Souls. If we really believed that we’re all part of the Divine, we’d treat each other with a shade more respect, wouldn’t we? If we actually looked at killing as killing a part of the Divine, we’d have a lot fewer wars, doncha think?

It’s actually become quite fashionable to laugh at the idea of a Soul. Many people view it as an anachronistic belief on a par with the idea that god is an old man sitting on a golden throne. Just silly crap that’s left over from our primitive religious views.

Can we PROVE that there’s a Soul? Of course not. Can materialists or atheists prove that there ISN’T a Soul? Of course not. What we CAN do is to intuit that there is a something that lies beyond and beneath our ordinary consciousness and reality.

In discussing the difference between the ego and what we really are in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61) Eckhart Tolle says:

“What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought happens.”

In a similar vein, Jeffrey Schwartz, who is a neuropsychiatrist and uses very strict scientific standards of proof, argues in You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life that there is something beyond the mere thoughts that our physical brains generate, something that directs our focus and can override our thoughts. He calls it, “The Wise Advocate,” and it sounds very much like the description of a Soul.

“The Wise Advocate knows what is best for you, it loves and cares for you, so it encourages you to make decisions in a rational way based on what’s in your overall best interest in the long term.”

That Wise Advocate, that space that exists between our thoughts, is where our Soul lives. It’s where our Soul is still naked, beautiful, innocent, and playing. It’s our original nature, our uncarved block.

All we have to do is find it again. Or at least try to be a chip off the old block.

Donald Trump, Pharaohs, and the Peculiar Royalty Cards of the Tarot

\If you’ve ever studied the Tarot you know that the definitions for the royalty cards in the Minor Arcana pretty much suck. For every suit of cards – wands, cups, swords, and pentacles – there are corresponding royal figures: the Page, Knight, Queen, and King. The definitions for these come about as close as any of the cards to the stereotypes of Gypsy fortune tellers muttering that you’re about to meet a tall, dark stranger.

Unlike the definitions for all of the rest of the cards, these tend to be very gender and age specific. As in, “An older, dark haired man with a hatchet face will play an important role in your life.” Or, “A troubled young person with red hair may cause mischief.” Or, “A very strong, dark haired, materialistic woman will be difficult to defeat in legal problems.”

Perhaps the definitions are so awful because the very concept of royalty is so NOT the Tarot. The Tarot is not about, “exceptionalism,” or people who are removed from the normal human experience by virtue of their wealth or power.

The Minor Arcana cards describe common human experiences and states of being that we all go through. Poverty, disappointment, broken hearts, celebrations, love, hate, passion. The Major Arcana describe archetypes that blow through all of our lives. Illumination, spiritual quests, death, lovers, evil, power, sudden turns of fortune.

In a word, the Tarot is, “egalitarian.” Egalitarianism is, in its original meaning, the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. We see that built into the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, we know that the people who signed that document were, for the most part, rich white dudes who owned slaves and would have been horrified at the possibility of women voting. Nonetheless, let’s look at the truth that underlies the statements that they didn’t live up to.

We are ALL of us much more alike than we are different. If you take it right down to the core, right down to the bedrock of existence, we are ALL Souls on the earth plane trying to do our best and figure out why in the hell we’re here and what we’re supposed to do next. Just forget for a moment all of the strange earth plane illusions of skin color, gender, countries, languages, creeds and religions, wealth, poverty, genius and stupidity. Underneath the whole, bizarre, flashy, Mardi Gras parade of colorful costumes and masks, we’re Souls on a common journey. On the Soul level, we are all equals.

Which is why the Tarot works for everyone. It’s about that bedrock of human experiences that every person on the planet shares in common. It’s about what we – ALL OF US – encounter in our lives.

Being a King or a Queen, a Knight or a Page . . . except metaphorically and momentarily, those are NOT experiences which most of us will share. And so those cards seem like rather odd appendages to the Tarot as a whole.

Karl Popper, who was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, once wrote an essay called, “Is There Meaning in History?” And the first sentence in his essay was, “No.”

His point was that history is mainly about the egomaniacs, killers, misfits, and psychotics who seized power, created thrones, and caused endless misery for their fellow Souls, and NOT about the majority of people who were living during their periods of time. The French, for instance, are fond of remembering the, “military genius,” of Napolean while ignoring the millions of deaths that the little over-compensated dictator caused.

Americans love to talk about their cowboys but not so much about the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to make room for the cowboys.

The real story of the pyramids should be about the slaves and artisans who built them. Instead, we remember them by the tricked out, inbred Pharaohs whose bodies they contained.

On the current scene, Donald Trump is an extremely wealthy man who has taken over control of the world’s most powerful office. He, not us, will be remembered in the history books. But on a Soul level, he’s a rather pathetic old man who’s stuck in his first and second chakras, whose own mother didn’t like to touch him, who’s had a series of mail order wives he’s cheated on, who never had a pet and who, as near as we can tell, has never been loved by another human being. Pretty sad.

In all probability, decent definitions for the royalty cards in the Tarot won’t emerge until we give up our fascination with and admiration for royalty and the ultra-wealthy.

At that point the definition for the King of Pentacles may be, “A totally materialistic, shallow soul who is obsessed with money to a point of crushing anyone in his path.”

And the Queen of Cups might be, “A pathologically jealous bitch who will destroy anyone she views as a potential rival.”

And the Knight of Wands might be, “An intellectual zealot who will ride right over anyone who disagrees with his elitist, fanatical point of view.”

It’s just a matter of looking at the real Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages in, “history,” and seeing how they really behaved. What human qualities do the royalty cards really represent? What kind of a person was Henry the Eighth? Was the Sun King all that sunny? How horrible were most of these people?

We may have to create a special card to represent Trump, though. Maybe the King of Putz? I’m open to suggestions . . .