Predicting The Present

by Daniel Kelley

  If we step back and examine Amy's spread, we see that although she exists primarily on a sociocentric level of cognitive growth (most cards range from 6 to 1), she can't organize these responses into a coherent philosophy. Consequently, Amy hasn't the foggiest idea who does or doesn't belong in her range of concern.

  The Tarotist needn't confine himself to the above method. You may, for example, wish to use the Trumps as representative of the various developmental lines, the four suits to represent the physical, rational, emotional, and spiritual waves through which they pass, and the Court cards for Yin and Yang Typology. The rule is, as always, to be as inclusive of as many perspectives as possible. From there it's all about how deep you're willing to go. After all, the magic isn't in the cards. Rather, it's in the Goodness, the Truth, and the Beauty of Spirit's evolutionary unfolding.

  -Daniel A. Kelley

  7/12/06

  4:35 pm

  Esopus Island, Hyde Park NY.

  Teatime in the Garden of Gethsemane

  (The Significance of Suffering on the Mystical Path)

  Prophets and sages of all times and places have almost unanimously agreed that life is suffering. Christ preached that suffering was the first grace. Buddha called it the First Noble Truth. And Sri Ramana Maharshi said that all things not present in deep sleep aren’t only sources of suffering, but they’re not really real at all!

  It’s hard to top that one.

  But what about the good things in life? Aren’t there beautiful things in life, too? I mean there are puppies, birthday parties, and apple pie, yes? Well, yes, but there’s also disease, death, and poison sumac. Not only that, there are dentists, too! And once you’ve analyzed it ad nauseum, once you’ve ceased escaping from the fact, you’re astonished to find that the amenities of life are like small islands of smiles in a vast ocean of tears.

  No one feels the truth of this as much as the spiritual adept. In fact, if you investigate the lives of saints, sages, and shamans the world over you will find that they all have faced the annihilation of their ego and the disintegration of all that they hold dear. It seems mandatory that when one comes into the orbit of that which exists beyond the world of time, if I may be allowed to put it that way, one is then forced to leave behind all that belongs to that world. It’s the price of admittance, or so it seems. And this is hell, make no mistake, because you are the world and the world is you. All that you love, cherish, fear, hope for, define yourself by, enjoy, reject, marry, and divorce: it all exists as the world, as your world. So, when those things begin to lose their savor, that is, when they reveal their transient and disappointing nature, the adept is forced---and oftentimes he is forced---to make a choice. He must decide whether he wants to remain fixated on worldliness or else abrogate his attachment to the world altogether. And herein lies the problem: there comes a point from which you can’t safely turn back to embrace the world without involving yourself in some serious complications. You’ve seen its dissatisfying nature. At the same time, however, you don’t yet know if there’s a beyond that’s any better, or for that matter if there’s a beyond at all. The adept wavers between the two, between the world and the abyss that separates him from his Higher Self. And it’s this gap between the world and the Self that creates the ultimate suffering of the soul.

  One of my favorite poems, AHA!, written by Aleister Crowley, describes this spiritual terror better than anything else I’ve ever read.

  “Easy to say. To abandon all,

  All must be first loved and possessed.

  Nor thou nor I have burst the thrall.

  All---as I offered half in jest,

  Skeptic---was torn from me.

  Not without pain! THEY slew my child,

  Dragged my wife down to infamy,

  Loathlier than death, drove to the wild

  My tortured body, stripped me of

  Wealth, health, youth, beauty, ardour, love.

  Thou hast abandoned all? Then try

  A speck of dust in the eye!”

  The point is clear enough. One becomes dissatisfied with the world, subsequently strives to transcend the world while keeping one foot within it, and then suffers tremendous agony as the Beyond exerts a pull and exacts a toll quite outside the aspirant’s capacity to oblige.

  Now I am not saying that it always happens the way it’s described in AHA! It’s not a rule that everyone embarking on a spiritual path must suffer the agony of the saints. I do, however, maintain that a certain degree of crucifixion---in the metaphorical sense---is required for total Liberation for the very reason that the spiritual “seeker” is composed of the very world-stuff he’s being forced to surrender. When that worldliness begins to fall away, it’s like death. And just as no two people die in the same way (e.g., some die suddenly, some die slowly), so too does the spiritual death differ in its flavor and tone.

  Jesus, when in the garden of Gethsemane, was experiencing exactly this egoic death:

  “And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then sayeth he unto them, ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.’ And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.’”

  I could multiply examples like this forever, but I trust you get the point. And though it may sound blasphemous to Christians when they hear such comparisons being made, more open-minded thinkers might understand that all of us, whether we are avatars or just average, are equal in suffering and death despite the idiosyncrasies of death-style. But I can tell you from my own experience that there’s a vast difference between suffering that exists as the opposite of peace and suffering that goes beyond both pain and pleasure. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing significant in the suffering of, say, a single parent working three jobs to support a child, or what have you, only that there’s a vast difference between the existential anguish of the world-transcending soul and the anguish of the world-oriented soul. The former often has everything she loves stripped away despite herself whereas the latter suffers because of the very effort to maintain that which she already has. The former agony is inevitable whereas with the latter agony there’s hope.

  If you believe that suffering is building toward relief then you can endure it with grace. But if you see no light at the end of the tunnel, suffering reaches a feverish pitch. Your fractured ego reels against the encroaching world, and you feel there’s nothing you can do to insulate yourself from it.

  Why does this terrible fate seem to befall so many mystics? It’s because the Adept has come into the orbit of what I call the “event-horizon” of enlightenment---to borrow a term from astronomy---that separates duality from nonduality, involution from evolution, nunc stans from nunc fluens. When this happens, one is literally straddling the realms of the personal and the transpersonal. It’s exactly that state of schizophrenia that creates so much suffering, or so I maintain. One is torn between the realm of dukkha (suffering), on the one hand, and the realm of nirvana (enlightenment), on the other. The problem is, however, that you can’t have both; you’re either in the world of grasping and avoiding or you’re in the world of release and equanimity, until the nondual reckoning.

  As for myself, I began to notice that whenever I gave in to social pressure to “get with the program,” as it were, I suffered. This suffering was due to the unavoidable stripping away of all that I vowed to work toward. Sometimes it felt like I was being tested by the Powers That Be; but regardless what the source of suffering was, it was clear to me that to grasp anything in this world is to accept its eventual demise. I don’t apply this uncanny feature of The Path to everyone, but it’s unarguably one of the better-known landmarks on Liberation Street.

  From AHA!:

  “Black pit of all insanity!

  The adept must make his way to thee!

  This is the end of all our pa
in,

  The dissolution of the brain!

  For lo! in this no mortar sticks;

  Down comes the house---a hail of bricks!

  The sense of all I hear is drowned;

  Tap, tap, isolated sound,

  Patters, clatters, batters, chatters,

  Tap, tap, tap, and nothing matters!

  Senseless hallucinations roll

  Across the curtain on the soul.

  Each ripple on the river seems

  The madness of a maniac’s dreams!”

  Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh (Osho), in Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic, gives us his own experience of the “event-horizon”:

  “For one year I was in such a state that it was almost impossible to know what was happening. For one year continuously, it was even difficult to keep myself alive. Just to keep myself alive was a very difficult thing---because all appetite disappeared.”

  He elaborates elsewhere:

  “And I had to keep myself close to myself. I would not talk to anybody because everything had become so inconsistent that even to formulate one sentence was difficult. In the middle of a sentence I would forget what I was saying. In the middle of the road I would forget where I was going. I made it a point not to talk, not to say anything, because to say anything was to say that I was mad.”

  Summary: The more I become acclimatized to the formless state, I’m increasingly convinced that true happiness is a product of timelessness meeting time from a place beyond grasping and avoiding. Food tastes better when you’re not attached to taste, when you’re eating because you’re hungry and not because you’re sad or bored. Sex feels better when you’re not doing it as a duty, as a habit, as a concession to marital law. Work is less tiring when you do it for its own sake and not because you’re competing with your neighbor. Money is more enjoyable when you have enough to spoil the ones you love, and not yourself exclusively. Heartbreak is far more poignant when you focus not on the pain, but on the love that remains despite the loss of your beloved. Death is less frightening when you die daily, from moment to moment. Life is vibrant against the backdrop of death. Life is lucid against the backdrop of death. Life is prayerful against the backdrop of death. On the cross, at Golgotha, when the spear pierces the side of a dying Jesus, does not the crimson blood glisten like rubies on the forehead of the dawning Christ? Rubies, one and all!

  You suffer, yes, so that you may learn how not to suffer. But you suffer also that you may come to know your sibling in every stranger. So that you might see in a child’s eyes the promise of a blessed tomorrow. She (the child) too shall suffer. She too shall choose water over wine and then beg that the cup be taken from her. But on that day of the Passion, on that night of deliverance, when the sun is darkened, and the temple veil is torn asunder, you shall be with her to help her bear her cross. And exactly then, at the final hour, when even God forsakes her, you shall be with her. Yes, you and all those that took up their crosses before you; all shall be present at that hour. And the voices of all who have suffered yesterday, and the voices of all who suffer today, and the voices of all who shall suffer tomorrow, will raise up their voices in a single sigh, saying: “It is finished”.

  Through a Glass Darkly

  When I was a teenager, I was taken by my friend's grandmother to a Catholic church to watch my friend, an altar boy, assist the priest in performing the sacred Mass. I had, up until then, never set foot in a Catholic church as I was raised a Baptist. I remember very vividly the gothic architecture, how I marveled in quiet awe at the beautiful murals, the sacred icons, and the sunlight as it played through the intricate patterns on the stained-glass windows. “Why couldn't protestant churches be constructed in this way?”, I thought to myself, as the somber notes emanating from the pipe organ filled the spacious cathedral.

  Just then, I was distracted from this seraphic vision by my friend's grandmother, who was now anxiously pulling on my sleeve. "Let's go sit somewhere else," she said with an air of self-importance. "We shouldn't sit here with all these sinners." I was positively shocked at her suggestion. And when we had finished resituating ourselves in a different corner of the church, I asked her why it was she believed herself to be distinct from her fellow Christians. "Because," she said, "Once you say your rosary and receive Mass, you are washed clean of your sins by the blood of Jesus." She continued, "And if you have been thus absolved, you should take it upon yourself to find an environment clear of those who have not been cleansed; that's why we have moved to a vacant isle in the cathedral."

  I spent the remaining time in that church in deep confusion…

  The above account is just one out of countless others I have witnessed, and, since the moment I was first able to think clearly for myself, have been scrutinizing passionately. I can't remember exactly how, when, or why I started to do so, but I found myself one day pushing that ostentatious envelope as far as I could. Although it most certainly is true that not all of these were done in service of a "higher cause," but they were for the most part experiments which I conducted throughout my life and which led me to a deep acquaintance with my own darker elements and those of my fellow man. These experiments confirmed for me the universality of primal impulses and the arbitrary nature of the boundaries erected to constrain them. That isn't to say that these boundaries should be crossed, as I would eventually come to learn, only that they do not exist anywhere else but in the mind of the person (or group of people) hiding behind them. You can wander only as far as the length of your repression-rope, yes? Thus, if you have erected a boundary between, say, sex and yourself, then you will be able to venture only so far into the experience of romantic love; a field that is, to be sure, not without its dangers, but neither is it without its joys. So, if you do succeed in eviscerating sex from your psyche you have also to a large extent gutted happiness.

  There is a situation for just about every event imaginable in which those dreadful things against which you have erected boundaries might happen. You may, for example, be married to what you think is a stand-up guy---ever faithful, honest, a good father, principled to the utmost---all the while oblivious to the very real possibility that this apparent saint of a man can become, in the proper situation, everything to the contrary. And you may console yourself with the thought that your husband is astute enough to avoid those situations in which these god-awful things might happen. But let's face it: life doesn't follow your regime, life throws curve balls---and if the batter (your husband) is wearing a blindfold, well.

  Now I am not saying this to frighten you, but I have personally known dozens of married women (and I use the word "known" with tongue planted firmly in cheek) whose husbands were quite sure of their wife's undying faithfulness, only to come home early one day from work to find a young man who looks a lot like the author of this essay sneaking out the back door. My understanding of the psychological Shadow was won by extracting from even the hardest stone-personalities the truth-water running like poison beneath their rocky surfaces. I have long ago lost count of the many tales told by some of the most upright characters I have ever met regarding their secret meanderings with every plaything sacred to the Devil himself. I am not going to reveal these secrets, for obvious reasons (I may be a bastard but I'm not a fucking bastard). I will instead leave the reader with my main point and leave the "juicy" details to rest with the skeletons in the closet of my toxic memories. So here it goes:

  People are rarely what they seem to be. Even when they sincerely try to be authentic, most people are rarely what they appear to be. In the first place, society (rightly) doesn't allow for unbridled expression, or (wrongly) even discussion, of half the things that make us earth-creatures. In the second place, even when we try to be as honest with others (and ourselves) as much as possible, we are not aware of a clear majority of items existing beneath the surface of our immediate awareness. The net result of all this is, in the latter case, a pitifully hypocritical lifestyle, while in the former we find sincerity of character coupled wit
h dishonest action, for we can guide our wayward ships only toward those beacons of light that shine brightest through the fog of our unknowing. As the saying goes: "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow." We should pray that this light is coming from port and not from another ship lost at sea. We do not want to chase the demons of our repressions, but rather, illuminate with the light of compassion every dark corner in the halls of our psyche, thereby shining like the sun on all things with equal intensity, despite the boundaries constructed by the fearful to demarcate them one from the other.

  Other Titles by Daniel Allen Kelley

  *Behind The Veil: The Complete Guide to Conscious Sleep

  *A Garden of Vines: The Collected Poetry of Daniel Allen Kelley

  *Subliminal Cognition Training: An Integ

  ral Approach to Conscious Sleep

  *The Art of Being Honest: The Truth About Meditation

  *Tarot For Lucid Dreamers: The Animitariomancy Method

  Bibliography

  *The Book of Thoth: By Aleister Crowley (Weiser Books 1944)

  *Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot: By Lon Milo DuQuette (Weiser Books 2003)

  *Mirror Of The Soul: By Gerd Ziegler (U.S. Games System, INC 1997)

  *Tarot For Yourself: By: Mary K Greer (Red Wheel/Weiser 2002)

  *Tarot Wisdom: By Rachel Pollack (Llewellyn Publications 2008)

  *777: By Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser 1977)

  *The Book Of The Law: By Aleister Crowley (Ordo Templi Orientis 1938)