Thoth Tarot, Seven of Disks, subtitled “Failure”.

I stared at it for awhile. If I had a clue what the symbols on this card meant it might help, but I don’t. After sitting with it for awhile, I wondered if maybe failure, and the other ‘negative’ cards, are technically energies just as righteous as any other. People learn from failure after all. It is often part of a cycle that resolves. I wondered, if you had a cycle or things, surely there would be at least one point where the energy was just not cohesive enough to succeed at continuing through the top of the cycle, yet was in momentum enough to not simply rest at the bottom.

Maybe this energy on its own doesn’t have any more meaning than we give it; like in music, there are “transition” chords and notes, and it would bother anybody to have ‘stopped’ on that and not ‘resolved’. But that doesn’t make that transition energy any less valid or more ‘bad’ than any other in the world. In fact you could say that everything is equal and it’s merely how we arrange them, and in that case, that particular energy got to play the ‘transition’ energy — not strong enough to push to resolution within that particular structure, but strong enough to provide momentum toward it –maybe next week some different energy would play that part.

When you think about it, many things in our lives that we initially consider failure, we later consider merely a stepping stone to something else that turned out better, or differently. Maybe as a concept it isn’t the energy that fails that is really the focus. I’m having a difficult time articulating this. Say you have a 13-man team and half don’t show up and the others make a big effort but lose the game. They did not succeed; that is failure. But was the “problem” issue there, the energy of the game, or the energy of the team? Seems to me the problem was the lack of sufficient… integrity of the full-team-body which led to the lack of completion of the intent which is, in a nutshell, “failure”. That as a formula it becomes:

{proactive-intent} + {lack-of-sufficient-integrity} = {inability-to-reach-completion}

In English, ‘integrity’ has more than one meaning — both objective and subjective (moral/ethical) — which makes that an interesting formula.

I had this grand idea that maybe I could get through count-them-four of the Disks last night.  Yeah right. As if I’m not lucky to get through any ONE.  I kept getting lost. It was a miracle I even got to that point; I left out that it took a long time of wandering and re-starting. Once I have merged with an energy it doesn’t seem to have that same ‘avoidance’ issue but until then, actually reaching it and working through till the end is hell. I thought that maybe, like with “Worry”, I was actually experiencing the energy of the card as part of the process, which seemed funny.

IG waved a hand, and three sets of four light-spheres joined me. I had no idea what this was. Later I thought it might be the Aeons. I’ve often perceived them with galaxy-overlays so maybe in some natural form they are orbs of light and they’re just “personalized” with me normally. Why this wasn’t kind of obvious at the time, I don’t know.

I also saw a pattern I didn’t really understand, a geometry that looked kind of like a square grid, except 80% of each side in the middle of it stuck out just a little bit farther than the rest, not quite a cross look, but getting there, like just far enough to clearly not be a square, but not far enough to be a cross, either. I thought about this for awhile, still had no idea what the heck it might mean, and gave up.

Then I fell asleep, woke up, did this repeatedly, getting lost, and finally woke up in the morning and tried again, falling asleep repeatedly, thankfully the snooze on my alarm kept waking me up.

IG must have had pity on me. As I struggled to stay awake, alert, and not mentally wandering, this big sphere or ball came rolling rapidly toward me. I stood offside and watched it roll rapidly past me, and I followed it. Finally, something, after it seemed like forever of getting no info at all. I flew after it, and it went right off the edge of a small cliff. I stopped up on the cliff edge and watched it fall to the ground, hit and split open, and there were a bunch of people in it. I couldn’t see them, I just understood they were there.

I went down to the people and studied them, coming to the realization that the sphere was “one” thing, but the people were “many” things, and that this was LEGION on a small scale, the ‘diversity of intent’.

“Why are you all separated?” I asked them.

“I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of –”

“Bullshit!” interrupted another. “We’re –”

“Because –”

…and then I got nothing else because a bunch of people were all talking at the same time. One thing was obvious: they all had a completely different opinion on — and attitude about — why they were separated.

I stood there staring at them while they argued. What is the point of commonality? I wondered. Where is the energy that brings them together? And then I felt that it was this string or cable, it looked like it was made out of the same stuff the ‘light beings who wear [shorter] humans like suits’ seem to be made of, that super smooth, soft but intense white opaque light.  It came from “the center above” — maybe the center of the galaxy, like I imagine when I’m doing my grounding before meditations — but I understood that it was same point of divine for all of them.

The other end of the cable was elsewhere but the bottom was with me. I threaded it through each one, as if I were making a flexible shish-kabob out of them with it, and when I was done, I imagined I put it in the ground and down to the core of earth, and then it pulled tight. They were all then aligned on the string, through their torsos, and they just slid into each other.  I got as this happened that this is like the future of my Aeons (perhaps they were charade-ing for me in this), that the ‘awareness’ a level of above brings them into one Being. I also got a very good physical merge-rush, strong enough to surprise me.  Then I realized that they were part of me, too, and I merged with the single-entity that had remained, and got another much smaller but still decent rush.

I thanked IG and leaped up to make the kid breakfast before school. If these didn’t take me a hundred tries and sleep and more to finally “get through,” my evening meditations would quit running into my mornings!

Palyne

I was optimistic about this meditation. I took out the card in the morning, addressed myself to ‘the energy-conglomerate of the universe which it represented’, and had a little talk with it. I felt I was opening that energy in my day, my reality, to work with. Although the card is negative in context, I accept that as an existent energy, I feel no threat from such things (for the same reason I feel no threat from some random spider in the bathroom: as long as we are not ‘interacting badly’ why should I worry about it? It is what it is.), but aside from that I also felt that there had to be some positive angle on it somewhere.

So I googled. Found a whole bunch of pages telling me there is no positive angle on it anywhere, haha. Honestly this is difficult for me to accept. It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible; surely you can divide consciousness into whatever focii you like, including something all-negative from our perspective. But elementals can be that; very small collections of pure focus; I just don’t believe the energy conglomerate identities represented by Tarot can be. True, I know zip about Tarot. But I find it difficult to believe that dividing the entire universe into a mere 78 cards–which surely puts a fairly massive amount of energy in each category–would leave anything with that small a conglomerate and focus.

So far, every “sense” of a card I have gotten has been very deep, particularly since I started this series just recently. As if there is actually a much larger spectrum of reality and … profundity?… that each covers, than our neat little organized charts of tarot lists or astrology references cover.  It has greatly increased my respect for the Tarot on many levels.  And besides, any planet and any sign is really profound and vast, and each card has one of each of those associated, so how could a card be so simple, given all that? Am I protesting overly much, given I know jack about tarot or even this card yet am opining on the larger subject? Oh well.

Anyway, later in the day when I had some time I sat down to do the meditation.

I had a real hard time arriving at it but that is normal.  I spent a lot of time just sitting waiting for some impression. Occasionally I would talk to it. I didn’t know if IG would give me an archetype straight up, an environ, or something unpredictable. After awhile, I was having some brief, spontaneous talk with a sense of urgency–very altered state–and I heard myself say, something about, “…and I really want to meet with the queen of wands!” and then I went, “Wait–wait!–I’m so sorry — I don’t know why I said that — I want the 5 of disks!”

In my head I was interrupted by every possible issue I could be worried about in my life. This took some time. And then by lots of issues from my past. I don’t know how these relate to the energy. Some of these, I haven’t thought about in a zillion years!

Like for example, when I was living in Los Angeles circa 1990, I worked for a company that made 911 console systems (the huge computer video database audio things that ‘citywide dispatch for all emergency service’ use).  My boss … he had some really serious issues. He was a radio guy who was underground for a long time in the Vietnam war era and it clearly messed him up. Anyway he had bragged to me how he programmed in six languages and used tons of software and so on, right? So I considered him an expert.  The woman who sat next to me, Sharon, would bitch at her computer all day, quietly muttering profanity at it. So one day before I went to lunch, I recoded her dos prompt– as that is what we started from in those days — to say, What the !@#(&!@# do YOU want?? which I thought was simply hilarious.  This is a super simple thing. I couldn’t wait to get back from lunch and see her come back and react to it.

Anyway, it so happened I got back from lunch late that day, and what do I find? A ton of personnel gathered around Sharon’s computer including several company officers and most the managers, exclaiming in shock-and-awe about this bizarre computer behavior, and my boss, who had convinced everyone he was a computer expert, had NO idea what to do. More hilariously, nobody–not one of them!–even thought to just have her type in what she always does, which would have loaded the programs just fine and it wouldn’t have mattered. So I come in, LATE no less, and I am in SO much trouble. “You hacked her computer!” someone says. It was surprising enough my boss was clueless, and that nobody thought to type in the normal thing, but I was boggled that it took about 25 people to have a social event over this totally trivial thing.

I still think it’s hilarious to this day. They did not seem to appreciate my humor.

Anyway for some reason the memory of all that came rushing back and I don’t know why, but it must tie into this energy somehow…

Finally frustrated that nothing seems to be working to “get me close to” the energy’s ‘identity’ yet, I ask the 3rd of 4 (OMG I just realized, we’re the freaking borg hahahaha), “What am I doing wrong?”  and he says, “LISTEN.”  So I really focus on listening. That doesn’t do anything. So then I really focus on opening all chakras to ‘their own form of listening’. That doesn’t seem to have any effect either.  Maybe I imagined it. Maybe he didn’t say that. I don’t know what to think.

IG, Help me! I whine. I don’t like having to ask for help. I feel like I am capable, if she gives it to me, so it’s like admitting stupidity. She starts doing something and I wait semi-patiently until she is done. There is a chair like a ski lift chair for one person and she wants me to get in it. It’s on a wire that goes for a mile or so into a city I can see to the right. So I get in that. I tell myself maybe it is the sense of expectation and acceptance she is trying to help with her, so I work on emphasizing both in myself. But I finally reach the city and touch down, and I still don’t feel or see this ‘identity-of-energy’ anywhere.

MAP! I snap, aggravated, and review the map which shows me where I am, where it is, and the rest of what’s around us. It is near and yet, it does not seem clear even on the map, it does not ‘feel’ clear to me as if I could just call it like I normally do. But I go to it, and I do the normal archmed stuff to try and work with it. At one point, standing very close and imagining holding its hands, imagining the ‘rain of love’ pouring on us, I had a tiny amount of merge feeling but not much. We finish the easy list, and it’s still not clear. I ask it for some of its energy to better absorb over time and it puts something in me, but I don’t even have a clear sense of that really, a small cube or something. I stood there for a little bit, exasperated.

Then I felt fed up. I said, You know what? I don’t need to dirk around about begging to integrate some tiny piece of you. You are ALREADY in me and I am ALREADY in you and we are both distributed throughout this local universe! We are already one! So I’m just going to be AWARE of that and make it so! And I imagined that I spanned a huge conglomerate of stars, and some of it (the tarot energy-identity) was everywhere just like some of everything was everywhere, and I “accepted the awareness of that unto me.”

And then I got the rushing of merge. So … apparently that worked.

When we finished the rushing I asked for the 4, then 3, 2, Ace, of disks, and did the same with all of them. I felt some rushing with them too, especially 2, a little less so with Ace as if it were larger and maybe I was absorbing 2-5 elements better than the rest, which seemed to make sense.

I happened to notice that in previous disk meds I have specifically gotten symbolism from the cards of the knight, the queen, and the prince, even though I was not focused on those cards. Not sure why, just find it curious.

I’m wondering if this is a lesson of sorts.  I felt, through much of this, that I was having a hard time with ‘belief systems’ bizarrely enough, with suspension of disbelief, with allowing. I don’t know why, that seems silly. The realization that there is really no way for anything to BE separate from me — I can merely resist awareness of this, but that is not changing the fundamental nature of things — seems like an important shift in my thinking.

I wondered if it came from the Senior, as he in particular is of the I AM energy, I mean we’ve had many experiences together where that is how he operates, understanding that everything is of-him and hence he has command.  But I don’t really know. Like some other things lately, it has ‘felt like me,’ even though I later felt it was probably sourced from one of the Four. I am starting to wonder if, like the Aeons have told me, “It’s supposed to be seamless” or something. Even with the Four. I dunno.

Anyway, this takes care of the 5 of Disks meditation. Next up is 6, “Success.”

P

PS I have decided that the Tarot working deserves more respect than being buried in fragments around a blog. I’m going to make an index that links to my meds for these things and make a page just for that. I think maybe in the future when I know more than I do now — geez I hope! — that I will look back on these things, and perhaps have more insight into my experiences, and to that energy, than I do today. Since right now I am pretty much clueless, things can only get better, right. :-)