Four of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

There are three well-known states of consciousness—deep-sleep, dreaming, and waking—and while we are immersed in any one of them, we think that it is the true reality. For example, a dreamer thinks her dream-self is real. Our authentic Self, however, is the pure consciousness that both encompasses and transcends the other three states. Some mystics call this fourth level of consciousness, which is characterized by serenity and bliss, “god consciousness,” and our eternal yearning for peace and happiness reflects our deep-seated desire to return to this state of transcendent consciousness, to rediscover our true Self.

For help in understanding the fourth level of consciousness, consider this analogy: this transcendent state of awareness is to our waking consciousness as our waking mind is to our dream mind. This is an ancient concept that has been around for millennia. For example, in Hindu philosophy, the true reality is Brahma’s consciousness while the manifest universe is His dream.

Similarly, we may say that we are dreaming our own reality, and when that dream is not what we want (which it usually isn’t) we think we need a better dream. But really, what we need is to awaken to the true reality of transcendent consciousness.

On the face of it, this seems very esoteric and impossible to verify. However, science has also begun to discover a fourth state of consciousness. In the early 1970s, researchers at UCLA discovered that meditation shifted people into a state of consciousness where brain activity is very different from that of waking, dreaming, or deep sleep. In mediation, brainwave scans reveal a state of restful alertness and integration of mental activity, which some meditation practitioners describe as pure consciousness or unbounded awareness.

The Four of Swords tells us that there is a fourth level of consciousness that we may discover through a practice such as meditation. And in this way, we may find the peace and happiness we so deeply desire and which is our true nature and birthright.

Three of Swords Quotes

I want to share a few quotes that reflect spiritual aspects of the Three of Swords:

‎”A wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi

“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” — Kenji Miyazawa

“There is no way to get the healing without knowing what the wound is.” — Alice Walker

“The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves ‘inside the skin’ of the other. We ‘go inside’ their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another’s suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, ‘to suffer with.’” —Thich Nhat Hanh

Spiritual numerology for the Tarot’s Minor Arcana

The following is a rough draft of my numerological take on the cards of the Minor Arcana that reflects a spiritual framework:

1. Aces (ONE) are about the true reality of Unity. We are one with each other and with the Divine. (It is significant that there is a hand of God offering the suit icon on the Aces in many Tarot decks.)
2. TWO is about Duality. It can indicate our illusion of separateness—from each other ad from the Divine.
3. THREE calls to mind “Trinity,” which is a common religious conceptualization of the divine, generally quite anthropomorphic. (Attempting to conceptualize the Divine is a consequence of our illusion of duality.) This number is also symbolic of creativity.
4. FOUR, being the number of structure (four seasons, four directions, etc.), symbolizes the material world. The separate reality of this material world is an illusion, but we typically think it is the ultimate reality.
5. FIVE indicates our humanity (five senses, five fingers, etc.), and the FIVE cards all have an element of the suffering that is common to us all and that results from our illusion of separateness. These cards thus show us our lessons in life.
6. The number SIX represents reciprocity. These cards depict acts of compassion as we tire of the suffering of the FIVE cards and begin to learn their lessons. We also are beginning to see through the illusion of duality.
7. In the SEVEN cards, we see the resistance that the persistent and seductive illusion of duality (and of the reality of the material reality) creates in opposition to our realization of divine unity.
8. EIGHT is movement and power, so here we see that in working to overcome the duality illusion we can move forward toward the reality of oneness. (Our success here is dependent upon having passed the tests of the SEVEN cards.)
9. NINE is the manifest result of the work of the EIGHT cards.
10. TEN can be a return to divine union and a return to our community with an intent to help others along this path. However, it also can indicate that our failure to realize divine union sends us back to start the process over.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts about this.

Addendum: We can use these (or any) card associations as a tool to help us expand our awareness of the cards, but we should not use them as a straightjacket to constrain and limit our understanding of the cards.

Three of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

“We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions that we have of things.” – Epictetus

In a prior blog post about the Three of Swords I talked about how holding on to thoughts of resentment hurts us far more that the original offending act against us. Here’s a similar take on this topic, but with a slightly different twist.

This card reminds me of the message in Byron Katie’s book Who Would You Be Without Your Story? Katie tells us that it’s not the world that causes us suffering, and it’s not other people. It’s our own beliefs about the world and about other people; it’s our own stories about them that cause us suffering.

Despite this, we hold onto those stories, and we do so with a rather fierce tenacity. Why is that? If these thoughts cause us so much pain and suffering, why do we cling to them? There are a variety of reasons, such as:

• Holding on to them makes us feel superior. We like to think that other people do bad things, but we’re better than that.
• It means our problems are not our fault. “It’s their fault.”
• These thoughts are familiar territory. Letting go of them would take us into unknown territory, which is frightening.
• Thinking these thoughts is a habit that’s hard to break. The dark stories we keep thinking about are like a rut in a road that our minds fall back into easily.
• These stories are barriers that our ego sets up to keep us separate from each other. Without them we would realize our oneness with everyone else, which is a threatening concept for the ego.
• Our egos hate to say “I was wrong.” We’ve held onto these stories for a long time, so releasing them would force us to admit that we were wrong. Worse yet, it may force us to admit that we’ve been unfair to someone else, which means we weren’t superior after all. The suffering of our fear and anger is easier to take than that humiliation of admitting our error.
• Often these thoughts make us angry, which gives us an adrenaline rush. So holding onto them is a form of drug addiction.

How can you discover where there’s a dysfunctional story at work in your life? A feeling like being stabbed in the heart is a sure sign, but essentially, wherever there is anger, hate, and fear, there’s a dysfunctional story. Where there is peace, joy, and love, there’s authentic vision.

So today, think about what story causes you suffering. For example, “My mother didn’t love me,” or “John treats me unfairly.” Then try to see why you hold onto that story. What do you get out of it, and what does it cost you in pain and suffering? (For more help in learning how to let go of your story, I refer you to Byron Katie’s book) When you see your story as untrue—even if only to some extent—you can start living more in a way that arises from your soul and less in a way that is from your ego.

Finally, remember that we all behave badly sometimes because of our stories. Everyone has painful personal myths that they believe are true and that make them act from ego instead of from Spirit. So when other people act negatively and irrationally, keep that in mind. Of course, it’s not up to us to judge them or to compel them to fix their stories—we have enough of our own to deal with—but it is up to us to have some sympathy, understanding, and compassion for them when they act badly.

Two of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

Every decision you make is not a decision about what to do; it’s a decision about who you are. — Neale Donald Walsch

Every day, circumstances and events in our lives confront us with choices by which we create who we are and shape the character of our very being. Thus, for every decision we make, we would do well to keep in mind the profound, underlying question, “Is this who or what I want to be?” In light of this consideration, we can choose our thoughts and actions in ways that affirm our divine nature and our deep connection to everyone else, or we can make decisions that reinforce the illusion of our separateness from the Divine and from other people. The choice is always ours to make.

Discussion: What card? (When insanity is sanity)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing said, “He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.” I came across this quote while reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, where it was paraphrased as “There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.” Frankl used this quote in his discussion of the horrific circumstances of Nazi concentration camps and how the insane circumstances of the camps brought out bizarre patterns of behavior in people. Their unusual behavior, however, did not indicate a lack of sanity. On the contrary, it was a sign of sanity that the horrible situation was greeted irrationally.

So … What Tarot card does this quote from Lessing remind you of? What card do you think indicates irrational behavior in the face of insane circumstances?

I would love to hear your thoughts about this. Please post your comments here.

Ace of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

From Ram Dass (in his seminal work, Be Here Now) to Eckhart Tolle (in his bestseller, The Power of Now), the message of modern spiritual leaders is increasingly clear: spiritual enlightenment arises out of a state of awareness that comes from living in the present moment as we focus our attention on the here and now. This is not a new message, of course, but with its growing popularity, it is entering into our collective consciousness now more than ever.

A benefit that we derive from this awakening to the present moment is a transcendent bliss and serenity. As Henry Miller said, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” In addition, this focused attention on the here and now creates an attractive and uplifting quality in our relationships as it enables and strengthens our divine connection to others. Richard Moss said, “The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.” Try it, and you’ll discover an amazing improvement in your interactions with other people.

Ace of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

“I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard ‘new things’: that is, things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language.” — P. D. Ouspensky

The Ace of Swords symbolizes new ideas, and the above quote is an insightful comment on how people often avoid or discount such innovative thinking. Another way to put this is to say that it’s very hard to see anything except through the filter of what we already believe. Of course, it’s easy to see how other people do that when we tell them about spiritual truths we’ve discovered, but it’s not so easy to see how we do it too. But truth, as they say, is a two-edged sword, so let’s look at this phenomenon from both sides.

First, if we listen carefully when people respond negatively to insights that we share with them we will begin to see how this works. We will see that they often don’t really hear what we’re saying. Instead, they hear what they are conditioned to hear, which may be what they’ve heard (or think they’ve heard) before about the topic or it may be the straw man arguments they’ve come to confuse with what we’re saying.

For example, in one of my blog posts a while back I talked about the Judgment card and how it can indicate the value and necessity of forgiveness. When I mentioned this post to someone on Facebook, that person strenuously insisted that we shouldn’t forgive everyone, and he used as an example the use of torture during wartime.

Now, I was talking about forgiveness for personal grievances, which is something that sometimes comes up during my readings, and not about international forgiveness of war crimes, which has never come up during any of my Tarot readings. Be that as it may, though, I believe the problem was that blame and grudges are such a strong part of this man’s habitual mindset that my discussion of forgiveness was perceived by him as being an attack on his reality and his way of dealing with other people. After trying to clarify the issue but having my clarification ignored, I left the discussion alone. Apparently he wasn’t ready to hear what I was saying and, as hard as it can be to come to that realization, it’s okay because everyone has to progress in their own time. As Ramakrishna said:

Dislodging a green nut from a shell is almost impossible, but let it dry and the lightest tap will do it.

So that’s the first part of this message from the Ace of Swords. Then once you’ve heard this sort of reaction enough so that you can recognize it easily, listen for it coming out of your own mouth so that you may come to question your own “habitual language” (to use Ouspensky’s term) whenever it keeps you from hearing something new. This is not easy, but it enables you to begin questioning your habitual language so that you may hear new truths and see the world through new eyes.

Ten of Swords — Spiritual Message of the Day

In a previous post about this card I talked about reasoning’s dead end and how the end of reasoning is a good thing if it means that we stop over-analyzing everything. This points toward a beautiful interpretation of a card that most people dread, seeing it as failure and ruin. We must remember that this is not a pentacles card; it is not primarily about physical manifestation. Instead, being in the suit of Swords, it is about thought (among other things), so we may see the prostrate and pincushioned man (in the RWS version of the card) symbolically as the end of the tyranny of what is called “Monkey Mind.” (For more about the monkey mind, see my post about the Five of Wands.)

Thus, this card says that when we finally put an end to the tyranny of our thoughts, which should be our servant instead of our master as they usually are, we find silence and stillness. And bliss.

Discussion: What card (Postsecret)?

PostSecret is one of my favorite blogs. (For those who don’t know, PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard, and select secrets are then posted weekly on the PostSecret website.)

Many of the secrets remind me of Tarot cards, so I thought I’d share a recent one to see what card it reminds you all of.

Obviously, this can call to mind the Five of Pentacles, but what else? What other cards does it remind you of, or does its message and meaning remind you of?