Cards of Wisdom

Tarot cards have long been an interest of mine -- in fact, in some ways, I can say that my interest in the path of Inner Work began in part with my study of Crowley's famous Thoth Tarot deck back in the mid-1970s. Many years later I explored the Osho Zen Tarot deck, which while not based on a traditional Tarot structure, is nevertheless an effective tool for generating insight into one's hidden patterns or potentialities. A very good more alternative version is the deck that was created by my friend Cheryl Harnish, Destiny Cards. 

I have fond memories of my 'Tarot university years', back around 1980, when I would, on occasion, take my Thoth Tarot deck and grab a booth in the corner of a popular pub on Peel Street in Montreal, and proceed to give spontaneous readings (there was never a lack of 'customers', although no, I did not charge them anything -- then, at least :) ). The power of symbols lies in their ability to bring to awareness elements of the psyche that we are not normally aware of -- at least, in any sustained fashion. As Carl Jung once wrote,

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.  

An essential part of the 'path of awakening' is to become aware of our more unsavory elements, and in particular, those parts of us that get in the way of our greater unfolding. To claim that we want 'truth' is not such a big deal. Far more significant is to encounter our particular psychological resistances to that truth. And these forms of resistance can indeed be fierce. So much so, that they have the ability to throw us off the path of awakening altogether; or worse, to convince us, in so many subtle ways, that we are, in fact, waking up, when more likely, we are merely dreaming that we are awake.

Symbols are a language, and essentially, the most 'primitive' of languages. But this is also what makes them the most direct, because they have the ability to 'touch' us in ways that bypass the conventional conscious filters. The whole problem with the human condition can, in a sense, be boiled down to un-naturalness. In this connection, I'm not suggesting that our self-realization lies in some of 'return' to our primordial roots. Ken Wilber (for one) accurately identified such approaches as a type of 'romanticism', in which we erroneously assume that our awakening is based on merely recapturing what we have imagined that we have lost. Christ may have exhorted us to 'become as a child again', but he can't have meant that literally, as the ignorance of the child is not the same as the wisdom of the sage, even if resembling it in some superficial regards. 

No, we are not going backwards to the so-called bliss of Eden. We are (ideally) going forward, into a realization that both transcends and includes (as Wilber puts it). We are going beyond. But we cannot truly go beyond the limitations of our toxic self-image without first being willing to face the unresolved issues in our (mostly subconscious) minds. The Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa once said it well: 'Better not start on the spiritual path. But if you start, you had better finish.'

I always doubted what he meant by that (though I've nevertheless quoted his words often, because they are powerful, something like a vivid Zen koan). What I never quite understood was the idea of 'finishing the spiritual path'. How does one actually finish that? Has anyone ever truly finished that? 

I'm not sure. But what I am sure of, is that we must face our 'darker angels' -- the parts of our nature that are sequestered away in the realms of our mind that are typically without light. We need to bring light to the hidden. As Jung (him again) put it:

Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face. 

Meeting our 'unknown face' is not the end of the journey, of course. In some ways, it is the beginning. But our inner journey toward truth has no foundation if we have not yet undone our projections -- by seeing, square on, what is so difficult to recognize within us.