I had a realization the other day I didn’t get around to mentioning. I understood, all the sudden, just how much ego has played a part in my meditative experiences. When I first began shamanic, archetype, inner guide, active meditation, work (whatever you want to call it, there are some differences but they are not major) I was in a very small group of people working on this (and hands-on energy work). We would do a meditation on a given archetype, and then we would share our experiences.

I was the entertainment. Seriously. The funnier part is that I actually felt just slightly superior about the whole situation, despite that I was constantly invalidating myself and the entire experience. There would be classmate A who would say, as always, “and then there was {mystical/religious figure X}, and he/she put a {crystal/rose/etc} in my {name of chakra here}!” And then there would be classmate B who would say, as always, “and then there was {person with animal head X}, and he/she put a {feather/stone/arrow} in my {name of chakra here}!” And then it would be my turn, and I would just be rather bewildered about how they had managed to have such predictable experiences. Repeatedly. And that worked for them. I wouldn’t have got 6 seconds into one of those before scoffing it out of my head! So I would share my experience, and it would be more like, “…and then there was this giant black knight chess piece, and it put a metal rotary sawblade in my left elbow.” The class thought I was utterly hilarious. I mean really, I had to go last because after all the laughter that inevitably accompanied my retelling, it was time for a break. And I am just not that funny. My meditation symbolism ranged from offbeat to bizarre. I was like the designated meditator-retard. But secretly, in my own head, I thought they were so… “simplistic” that I wasn’t even sure we were practicing the same thing.

After the oddly semi-predictable “Universe” archmed recently, I understood something: that my focus has been totally wrong. That it isn’t about the symbolism. I can have deep emotional responses to symbols that are literally near cartoons. I can have zero response to symbols that are realistic and vivid. It doesn’t matter if I literally just “played out” the jack & jill or hansel & gretel stories or something else everyone knows. It doesn’t need to be unique in the universe. It doesn’t need to sound believable. It doesn’t need to sound like the symbolism of someone you respect instead of someone you think is a total geek, because it isn’t about that. It isn’t about the story or how novel it is, or whether it’s interesting.

It is about the ability of the individual, that is me, to psychologically “allow” the energy composite in question to interact with them, and to allow change within themselves in accordance with this experience. If they are capable of doing that while singing and dancing the hokey pokey on roller skates, every single time for every single archetype, rather than while having obscure and deeply occult symbolic experiences in a jungian meditation, then more power to ‘em — because that’s all that matters.

As part of this, I understood that everything in the meditation, everything, is designed to get me to that point. When I am healing them, or raining on us, or cleaning them, or hunting them down, or doing exercises to try and ‘see’ them better, or sending energy into them, no matter what it is, the entire point of the experience is to get me to the “desiring and allowing change within me” state. I am not cleaning and healing them. I am cleaning and healing ME. And yes, I know that already — but I think I’ve gotten slightly fascinated at times by what amounts to the fringe on the carpet. How cool or fascinating I found X or Z.

It’s fair to have some of that, as this represents part of my ‘relationship’ with certain energies; being drawn to them, and admiring them, is a good thing. And I am not the sort that thinks that one needs to have some vow of entertainment-poverty to find spiritual enlightenment; I am not going to stare at a wall for 20 years; if I want my personal exploration of self and the universe and the divine to be interesting and challenging and interactive and fun, why not! But if the requirement for ‘novelty’ is so strong, due to left-brain interference and ego resistance, that it actually puts real limits on the experience — because anything I ‘recognize’ I consider predictable, hence too close to self-invented, and tend to invalidate — that’s a problem.

I see now that IG could do a lot of stuff with me, actually relying on my understanding of various symbols, stories, etc. as useful known elements, a shared language with my internal self in fact — but has not been able to, because I reject anything that does not have a decent degree of novelty. Because if it MAKES SENSE to me, I reject it. Then when it doesn’t make sense, I gripe about how it doesn’t make any sense.

***

I slept well if briefly this morning, and I woke up feeling that, although I certainly hadn’t had the kind of night that Ace of Disks interaction gave me, the Two of Disks (Change) had left me feeling pretty decent. As I laid in bed and mused on this, the no-brainer stuff that I thought I already knew but obviously didn’t (given the ‘aha’ moment) sunk into me:

Each of these energies is time, is space, is form, is dynamic, is some-thing, is no-thing, is an “entity”, and is a full rich pie-slice of “the universe”. They aren’t just cards. Not just labels. Not just “someone’s way of making categories.” They are utterly *alive*, in a very rich way that is far more complex than we are, frankly, at least our focus-personalities. I thought about the QBL Tree of Life and how Crowley had his Thoth tarot attributions articulated upon it. I thought about those, and about meditating with that. And I suddenly just understood, I mean really and truly “grokked”, that the tarot is a map of the manifest universe, and the Tree of Life is a map of the divine structure, and that the two of them conjoined are a map of the Soul. Large capital S. And that the soul IS everything else: it is the geometry of the planets and the cells, the motion of the tides and the cycles of friendship, minerals and butterflies, it’s just the perspective you’ve got on it.

I feel like such a dunce for ignoring Tarot all these years. 15 years! Criminy. Steinbrecher was really into using Tarot along with inner guide work, but I saw it as some people’s chosen divination tool and it meant nothing to me. I was never into astrology with it either although by force with my teacher I learned to do the basic planets. Suddenly it seems very important to me that I map out and work through the ENTIRE tarot in meditation format, that I work through the ‘paths and sephira’ and that I really work on allowing personal change to happen with this. The only pic I found of his map was the tiny one in the booklet with the cards which was making me blind so I made my own version I could kind of color in as I worked through stuff. Thoth Tarot and the Sephiroth and Paths

***

I was, as usual, trying to find some reference that would make my relationship with the Four, and my 12 Aeons, make sense. As usual, no luck. Aside from that one very obscure ancient gnostic ref to the 4 Aeons of Light, and to the ‘awakening’ of the one, I haven’t found anything yet, and that whole doctrine is mind-numbing and seems to be assumed to be about the ‘first’ perfect man or a christ or something — anyway, not the soul structure of your average proletarian California girl like me.

***

I spent some time today speed reading a variety of stuff on QBL, Tree of Life, various mappings of attributes to it, and even another tiny tidbit of the ‘gnostic’ stuff that had mentioned the Aeons. Concerning most — not all, but most — of the above, I again have the same inner feeling I did last time I was stupid enough to do this.

It feels dead. It feels like stumbling on a dead language. No, it feels like stumbling on a bunch of armchair intellectuals who have pontificated at lengths that makes ME look like the soul of brevity, about their opinions on obscure points of someone else’s opinion, of how some other idea or mental model should be, with reference to what 8 other people in history thought, about two words in a dead language. For godssakes! I read at enormous speed when I try, and even I cannot get through most of this stuff. It feels like it is sucking the moisture out of my soul with its mental-masturbation level of intellectual agony. I feel like digging up these corpses and yelling, “Who CARES what someone THOUGHT about it! Why didn’t you have HAVE the EXPERIENCE and ASK the entity?!”

I mean ok, I’m not saying that I am enlightened enough to know that I can just go meet some entity and ask a question and get a useful answer, alright. It takes me hours of misery just to do a tarot card meditation, I’m definitely one of the spiritual short-bus people. Fortunately my sense of humor about myself lets me accept this and just move on, since I can’t abide the alternatives. But we are talking about literally thousands of years at this point! Surely SOMEONE had the spiritual fluency and communication articulation for this stuff!

OK yes, I have read varying amounts of Baily, Blavatsky, Crowley, Dee, James, Regardie, Roberts, Suzuki, Watts, Yeats, and many others, I know there are some people who have done this kind of work and written it down (ad nauseum), and I’m grateful for that. Many of them have spent much of their time agreeing or disagreeing with others alas, or reworking existing systems in their image, none of which is bad, but does make me wonder why it can’t just be a new, individualized model instead, since nobody can agree on it anyway apparently. (I do find interesting some of the cyclical stuff of Yeats, I might get back to that one day.) But to this day we are still looking at a whole legion of diverging opinions about the few most basic systems of modeling these concepts. And the dry intellectualism of it! My god! Not since Dickens spent pages writing about what someone thought as they turned a doorknob have I read authors who could so kill all interest in a topic the more they spoke of it.

Then there is the small segment of mostly QBL “path working” stuff that does not feel dead, people (some) are actually working with this; there is some life; there is hope. Almost. Except… it’s incredibly seldom anybody will share their experiences. They go, “Oh well I meditated with X and concluded that the 17th path should be X instead of Y.” I’m sitting there thinking, “Really? You actually went and talked to this amazing energy and the only thing you got out of that is moving a label on someone else’s chart?!” Not that this is a bad thing, but surely it wasn’t the only thing? And even if it was, HOW did they come to that conclusion, what happened to lead them to that?

Or they will mention such workings but they simply don’t record any of it. What was the environment? Did you meet someone? What did they say? Did you get an insight about the topic? Why won’t other people write this stuff down, darn it! I feel like the Lone Ranger.

Oh, or on the very rare occasion (and I mean so rare it’s barely existent) someone DOES, it turns out that nearly the entire experience was scripted start to finish. Everything! Exactly the ritual, exactly what they were “supposed” to see and “supposed” to ask for. And the answers are supposed to fit in a certain model. The concept of saying, “I’d like to interact with the energies of X!” and see what happens and just work to “integrate it” is apparently not on the list of allowables in occult work, or if it is, nobody’s talking about those experiences where google finds them for me.

I am as left-brain as the next person — too much so for my own good most the time (though getting less so as I get older and as remote viewing and archetype work shift me internally). There are a few small facets of things I find vaguely interesting that are intellectual in the occult world, I admit. But experience is always first for me. Everything has to follow that. I love the Four, and I want to be closer to them. And the Blue Eyes of Soul, my inner spark of the divine, I would do anything to be with him again even briefly. Most everything else is the little stuff on the way to those things, and to experience in general. But even though I really wish I had a left-brain “validation via corroboration” for some of my experience, the more I google these topics, the more completely turned off I am.

I would like to fit into that world, and find friends there, and contribute somehow to some bigger picture, but every time I wander in, reading fiercely, I feel as if I am walking through the abandoned ruins of an ancient city. The structures are still functional, the architecture still well designed, the culture still fascinating even in retrospect. But where are the sounds of children laughing and people singing and artists making NEW things and people finding actual JOY in both creating and discovering something ever-new? Where are the excited chelas finding brand-new meanings and decorating the pages with gold? It’s like the heavy history of mystic studies has weighed down even the internet, long the last-bastion of irrepressible mirth and creativity.

To me, these Tarot energies, and the Sephira and paths, are the ultimate in alive, and an awesome potential for creative interaction. Maybe it’s just a bad day with google, but today it seems like most people are either busy thinking they already have all the answers, or studying someone else’s version of all the answers. If they’re being creative and working on their own, they are not inclined to share about it, apparently.

I’m riding the short bus alone.

P