Predicting The Present

by Daniel Kelley

  Nor can the question of evil be tackled through religion because all religion is going to tell you will be impractical. Religion will tell you that you can't do anything about evil, that you need to repent your sins to God, and then, after convincing you of that, will proceed to give you a list of commandments on the practice of "non-evil." But you can't solve the question of evil simply by practicing "non-evil," as we've already been into. In the first place, non-evil is only an abstraction. You may not even know what evil is, in fact, because most of us have never been allowed to go deeply enough into it to discover its subtleties. We've been taught to be afraid, and in religion our fear is encouraged.

  This is as practical as religion gets:

  By keeping you in constant fear of God and the Devil you'll be less likely to cause a disturbance, and to the unenlightened mind all disturbances are evil. Anything that goes against the dogma is evil, because the unenlightened mind fears change. To avoid a change in the dogma, religion has given commandments to follow. These function like those grooves on the side of the highway that alert you to the fact that you've fallen asleep at the wheel. But you can't rid yourself of evil simply by keeping it in check, any more than you can teach a goat to speak Latin.

  Look closely at the giant phallus that dominates the greater portion of The Devil card. Upon closer scrutiny, you'll discover that this object is also a tree trunk. What is a tree? Simply the longing of the earth to reach the sky! And who’s the sky in our tarot deck? Well, two cards represent the sky in the Thoth deck, The Fool being one of them. The Fool is the Uranus: Father Sky. However, in this light, we're closer to the mark if we see the sky in its feminine aspect; that is, as Nuith (The Star). As it’s been said: "The eternal feminine draws us upward." And what is the Phallus but a symbol of the generative power? And what do we find located at the Fool's genitals? The Sun!

  What does all this mean, you ask?

  Re-own all that you've rejected about yourself. Relax the complexes within you so that you may once again be whole. Do as the great Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, advised and invite all parts of yourself to join you at the peace-table within your heart. Do this and you'll explode into the cosmos. Like a tree, your roots will go deep into the earth and your branches will extend far into the sky. This is why there are wings flanking the sun disk in the present card, for when you're integrated you're free. Others may think you're evil, but that doesn't make any difference. Let them think what they want to think, that's their business. Whenever someone forms an opinion about you---and they're going to form opinions especially about someone whom they don’t understand---always remember to consider the source. Consider the source! The truly wise individual has no set image about who or what he is, or of anyone else for that matter. The spiritual Adept isn't so easily defined, because the Adept has learned that the both the saint and the sinner exist in each of us. A person can be one thing one minute and a completely opposite thing the next.

  One passage from the book of Genesis reads:

  "Ye are of your father, the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye shall do."

  Mankind is generally more at one with the Devil than with God. The Devil is called, "The Prince of this World", and by "world" is meant Matter. To the religious mind matter is an abomination, but this is a complete contradiction. After all, what is Matter? Is matter merely that which you can bump up against, or is it something far more complex? Physicists have found that nothing in the material universe is really material at all; by "material" I mean solid. Rather, everything is vibrating at various frequencies, and vibration implies movement. But how exactly to measure the "stuff" of the universe, the essence of it, has proven difficult because the very act of measuring changes it. In terms of religious thought, we see truth in the position that God can't be known or measured, but herein lies the problem: people do pretend to know God, for the moment you assert that God is this or that, male or female, Christian or Muslim, you've made a statement about God, thereby claiming to know…Him.

  But what is thought?

  Are not the concept, the image, and the idea of God part of thought? Thought is Matter, isn't it? It most definitely is! The image of God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, heaven and hell, are all products of the material process called thought. A scientist can, with the proper instruments, measure the electrical impulse of the God-thought, so it can't be contested that your most sublime religious conception is, when all is said and done, a material process occurring within the brain, and the brain being part of the world of Matter, is the Devil's plaything. Don’t get me wrong. This isn't an attempt to reduce Spirit to "it" language, as we shall see. I'm merely playing Devil's advocate, for just as it's blasphemy to reduce Spirit to spit, so too is it preposterous to reduce matter to Mephistopheles.

  The reality is that you can't separate God from the Devil. You can't, for example, call God "absolute" and yet define Him in relative terms. That would be silly. Your Kingdom of God is located, not in some imaginary New Jerusalem beyond the clouds, but in the very heart of the Kingdom of this world (The Universe). It's by living in this world, all the while not being of it which, paradoxically, is won by embracing the world, that one discovers that which is beyond both good and evil, beyond all thought, and beyond Matter. This is a question, not of belief but of faith. Belief is part of thought. Faith, on the other hand, is beyond your ability to think about, which is why it's so transforming.

  This saying of Jesus is worth repeating:

  "If you have faith, even as small as a mustard seed, then I say unto you that were you to say to this mountain, 'move,' it will certainly move."

  Belief, being part of thought, is like a mountain. It's like a wall, the other side of which is truth. You can't move this wall, because with what will you move it? The mover is himself part of the mountain he seeks to move! And you can't approach faith, that which will move these mountains, directly, because the very act of approaching is a disturbance of faith. Faith functions, but you can't functionally approach faith. Faith arises out of seeing a thing clearly, for example, by seeing that all assertions made about what you call God---that God is good, gracious, merciful, male, female---are assertions made by the Devil himself. If a stone is allowed to be a stone, you won't be tempted to upgrade it by turning it into bread.

  The Devil holds within himself all the forbidden desires of humanity, those things that you'd like to do that are against conventional ethics. Ah, the private fantasies! Indulge them and the Devil works the spell of addiction. Suppress them and you end up with neuroses. Let's take as an example the most basic of taboos associated with this card: SEX. The sexual impulse is by far one of the most primitive forces within you. In fact, every cell in your body exists because of sex. Now, when sexuality is allowed to express itself in a natural way it leaves no scar on the mind. But when the sexual impulse is perverted or interfered with many problems arise, and the more problems arise the more solutions need to be found. But religion will only offer solutions that belong to either the reward or punishment category. By "punishment" I mean the induction of fear and guilt, a process that leads to further suppression and, consequently, further perversion. By "reward" I mean the belief that by behaving according to religious tenets, you’re entitled to the eternal bliss of heaven, or what have you.

  Before I bring our discussion of the fifteenth trump to a close, there's one final interpretation I'd like to share with you.

  The cross-sum of The Devil is The Lovers, as we've seen. This is another route by which many of us get tangled up in the net of guilt and repression. For example, there are many who flower best in a monogamous relationship and there are many for whom monogamy is a prison. In many traditional Tarot decks, The Devil presents us with the image of two people---usually a man and woman---bound with chains to the Devil's throne. As a curious side-note, the reason why the left testicle contains female figurines while the right contains males is probably due to the fact that the ancient Jews believed that the right testicle produced male babi
es and the left one, girls.

  The Devil is a symbol of attachment and also addiction, and The Lovers are bound to his throne. Not only this, but they're bound to it willingly! In the latter portrayal of The Devil, these two figures are actually worshiping their chains, something many people do in the name of love. We learned, in our Contemplation of The Lovers, that this isn't really love at all, but attachment. The man may be dependent upon the woman for sex, and the woman dependent upon the man for security, or vice versa. In fact, if they could eliminate all other facets of the person and keep only that feature to which they're attached, they would. This isn't love! To call by a divine name something as tawdry as attachment is an unfortunate ignorance, but that's exactly what many people are doing. They're calling lust, love; attachment, intimacy; jealousy, concern. But the truth is that love is only won through the negation of these things.

  The Existential philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, used a powerful method to counteract the pernicious manifestations of what Nietzsche called “bad love”. He called this method, “Mastered Irony”. This technique is quite simple. Kierkegaard noted that the correct approach to one’s relationship to oneself and others should involve being subjective to others but objective to oneself. He pointed out that the situation of most people is the exact opposite of that arrangement. That is to say, most of us regard ourselves subjectively and others objectively. This typically results in an embarrassing hypocrisy where one becomes very critical of everyone but oneself. This hearkens back to Jesus’s quip, “Why do you notice the speck in your brother’s eye but not the log in your own eye?”.

  Another important issue that we must confront when dealing with our "inner Devil" is that of desire, the temptation to perpetuate desire, and the consequential avoidance of pain. Most of us are slaves to desire in some form or another. Who among us hasn't felt the emptiness that accompanies desire? An important thing to understand about desire is that it's merely a substitute for bliss. Without bliss life feels meaningless and dry. Without the fulfillment which accompanies bliss we tend to become apathetic. Colors seem duller, food tastes blander, or we never really stop to taste it at all. Without bliss, the mind compensates with pleasure. When you choose to jump from one pleasure to another you've also chosen to suffer the pain of losing it. You can't choose pleasure without choosing pain for they only exist in relation to each other. Nor can you choose pleasure without rejecting pain, because pain is the negation of pleasure. What is happiness without sadness? It wouldn't exist!

  The only way to jump off the wheel of pleasure and pain is to become more blissful; but you can't desire bliss, for bliss comes only when desire has ceased. You can do various practices to attain a blissful state, but that'll only be another form of escape. The only thing you can do is try to understand how you fell into the trap of pleasure in the first place. First, it's natural to want happiness. All beings wish to be happy. That's basic. And there's nothing wrong with seeking happiness through various means. The problem begins when someone experiences something pleasurable and will do anything to secure its continuity. This effort to perpetuate pleasure is itself the beginning of suffering, because you're not at ease. The Hanged Man exemplifies this state of mind. In fact, The Hanged Man and The Devil are constant companions!

  It's only when we can experience pleasure one moment, and abandon it easily in the next, that we learn the reason why the Devil is seen smiling in this card! He's smiling because he's holding a secret:

  The Devil knows that behind the human obsession with pleasure there's a longing to feel the bliss of being fully alive. He also knows that this can't be attained by a mind fearful of the ever-changing flux of life, for such a mind can't truly live. The Devil knows that pain and pleasure are transcended in the full understanding of them. But a mind that thinks pleasure sinful can't reach the heights of bliss, for such a mind has admitted that pleasure is its master. After all, to be fearful of something is to admit its sovereignty. Pain is inherent to life; you can't escape it. You can't cancel it out by replacing it with pleasure. Pain follows pleasure like a shadow. All that you can do is accept the fact, but this doesn't mean you're to compromise by settling for a life of pleasure. Allow pain and then watch it go. Allow pleasure and then watch it go. Touch and go, that's the secret. You can build a castle. Go right ahead! But remember that every castle eventually crumbles.

  *(Consult the Appendix for attached essay, “Through a Glass Darkly”)

  The Tower:

  The Lord of the Mighty Hosts of Heaven

  Trump #16

  Planetary Trump of Mars

  Path: #27 (Netzach to Hod)

  Letter: Peh ("mouth") (numerical value: 80)

  Helpful Quotes:

  "Break down the fortress of thine individual self, that thy Truth may spring free from the ruins!"

  -Aleister Crowley

  "When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to build castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build."

  -R.D. Laing

  "I am continually puzzled by the extreme turbulence that accompanies profound change in the psyche. When a true spiritual awakening and transformation is under way, one encounters images of death and of the destruction of the world itself."

  -John Weir Perry

  Contemplation

  We all have some form of trauma. Trauma may be the result of suffering, premature exposure to a higher stage of consciousness, or even overwhelming joy. Trauma is best defined as the psychophysiological effects of sudden shock. Sometimes the shock is physical, other times the psychological element comes first, leaving physical symptoms in its wake. In this Contemplation on the sixteenth trump, we'll be exploring this issue of trauma. We'll learn about the type of trauma specific to spiritual awakening and how to approach it in a meaningful way.

  The Tower is best studied alongside the other trumps that embody the spiritual ordeal known as the Dark Night of the Soul. These are The Hanged Man, Death, and The Moon, respectively. You may also wish to review the material presented in our contemplation on The Priestess, for the path of Gimel portends this Dark Night more than all others and gives the technique for crossing that Abyss.

  In the mystical poem "Aha!", written by Aleister Crowley, Marsyas the sage informs Olympas his disciple:

  "This is the end of all our pain, the dissolution of the brain. For lo! In this nor mortar sticks; down comes the house---a hail of bricks!"

  The Tower reminds us that life is uncertain and that the world can be a scary place. The message of this trump is that there's no such thing as security, physical or otherwise. Security is a psychological illusion. Psychologist R.D. Laing referred to this realization as "ontological insecurity."

  I'll not be discriminating here between physical, mental, or emotional "loss of ground," as all of these involve the same common denominator: shock. What does stand apart, while at the same time including them all, is spiritual crisis. The greater half of this crisis is carried out in one's inner world. Even when the individual has access to a sympathetic therapist, friends, family, or guru, the process must still be played out in the stormy depths of psychological solitude. It's exactly this combination of disintegration and isolation that gives rise to the milieu of The Tower. It can be a terrifying experience, the aftereffects of which can potentially last a lifetime. Indeed, it may affect an entire nation or even the world at large.

  A woman I loved dearly, during my own spiritual crisis, once told me that I reminded her of a shattered stained-glass window and that it was up to her to put me back together again. I remember wanting very badly to believe that such a thing is possible, but I was to learn the hard way the futility of such a wish, for no one can do this work on your behalf. This work must be cherished as well. In spiritual crisis---and this includes all crises---there comes a time when one must learn to look upon one's
own suffering with compassion, humility, and a good dose of humor. One learns to look with an equal eye on both happiness and grief, to perceive beauty even in moments of sorrow.

  Everybody knows what it means to be dissatisfied with something. In aspiring toward your desired level of financial, emotional, and social contentment plans are bound to go wrong sometimes. Even if you attain a so-called "perfect" state, you’ll inevitably worry over the loss of that perfection. If you define yourself according to what you possess, what you do for a living, or to what social class you belong, then all it takes to break you is the removal of those things. But you can't grow to new heights of splendor if you insist on remaining where you are.

  Action must flow from a center of depth and understanding. This is the key to understanding the riddle of the sixteenth trump. With depth of understanding, life’s problems can become our greatest teachers. In the shallow mind, even small storms appear to be psychological hurricanes; but even the fiercest of storms must pass. There's a renewal, a movement beyond the storm, a child of the union of storm and sky. In the card, we see the fulfillment of this law, its promise, in the figure of the dove. She is Sophia, Mother of all Life, who's also the biblical dove which signaled the end of the great flood.

  We all know what it means to be dissatisfied, and most of us rebel against it. But I'd like to say that there's a vast difference between mere discontent and total revolt. Discontent means that you're only temporarily upset about some imbalance in your pattern; fix the imbalance and you'll be fine. Revolt, on the other hand, is quite different. Revolt is fed up with the pattern completely! Revolt wants to burn the box, not just think outside of it. It would tear down the citadel of the known and blast it apart at the base. This can create problems, as you may wish to be free from the known but tremble at the abyss left in its wake. Slavery may be completely unsatisfying, but freedom looks like a one-way ticket to the madhouse!