Archives: Cards

Your neurological state is a major player in your life on this plane. The position of neurological materialism, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or secondary effect of biochemical process in the brain, is fundamentally flawed, but while you are incarnated in a corporeal body the condition of your brain is a huge player in your life experience, so take care of it! Avoid excess alcohol consumption, wear a helmet when riding a bike or motorcycle, and eat a high-omega diet -- especially walnuts, which actually look like brains. A diet sufficiently high in omegas (according to recent research) may even allow nerve cells to regrow (once thought to be impossible). Stabilize your blood sugar (your brain lives off of glucose) by eating complex carbohydrates and avoiding refined carbohydrates and excess caffeine. Get sufficient sleep, and be wary of pharmaceuticals that affect your brain chemistry, such as serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (Prozac and related substances). Everyone's chemistry is a bit different so carefully monitor the effects of anything that crosses the brain/blood barrier -- alcohol, recreational substances, stimulants. Consider this a propitious time to look into your neurological influences.

Memory is shadowy, but sometimes it holds the seeds of new life. Conscious reflection on the past can deepen the soul and even provide revelations of great value for the present and future. On the other hand, returning to the past obsessively out of emotional addiction can be a massive, massive draining of vitality needed for full engagement with the present. The past is not fixed or irrevocable. Memories are continually revised. Also, occurrences in the present or future can drastically alter the meaning of the past. For example, let's say someone has a life phase of intense alcoholism in their past. In one timeline that phase is consistent with a general downwardly spiraling life path. In another timeline the person learns from that phase and uses the wisdom gained from encountering darkness to counsel others who are similarly afflicted. The meaning of the alcoholic phase is drastically altered based on what comes after, and this is one of the ways in which the past is mutable. Even neurologically, when memories are recalled they are always reinterpreted based on current values and point of view. The memory is an artifact of the past that, like an antique, has a resonance with the past but exists in the present where it can be re-experienced and re-interpreted. The past is still alive, but like the present or future, how we relate to it determines whether it inspires or entraps us. Consider this a propitious time to heal your relationship to the past.

"I Stood Upon a High Place" I stood upon a high place, And saw, below, many devils Running, leaping, and carousing in sin. One looked up, grinning, And said, "Comrade! Brother!" -- Stephen Crane (1871-1900) There is no such thing in nature as an H-Bomb, that is all man's doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. -- C.G. Jung Be aware of the darker side of your self and of life and know what it is saying to you. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Everything has a shadow side. If you don't see the shadow of a person, you don't see the person and are blinded by idealization. If you don't see your own shadow, you are in denial, and will project your shadow onto others. We all have a side of ourselves we consider dark. Our shadow may include appetites, lust for power, manipulative agendas, chaotic emotions and sub-personalities, addictions, and so forth. The more we deny the shadow, the more it weighs us down. But if we embrace its reality, learn how it works, and then integrate it into our awareness so that it cannot rule us, we become enlightened. We become wiser and more empathic for having a shadow and discover that there may even be hidden treasures in the dark continents of the unconscious. If we are at war with our shadow, then it dominates us. We project it onto individuals and groups, and act out our inferior side. If we are unable to accept our shadow, we become hungry ghosts, forever seeking outside recognitions to compensate for the doubts that gnaw at us. When we recognize and accept our imperfections they strengthen us, and we become more nourishing and attractive to others. All people have a shadow, but only the strongest are able to integrate their shadows with acceptance and love. Summoning the intense moral courage to accept your shadow is an ongoing process that creates healing for yourself, those close to you, and the entire world.

Feelings of inferiority can lead to enslaved infatuations and codependencies. The drawing of this card could indicate such feelings in you or someone close to you. A classic example of human bondage is the person in a relationship with someone he considers much better looking. Feeling inferior to the beloved, he enslaves himself, encouraging the other to manipulate the asymmetry of power. Is there any sort of situation you are in where you find yourself compromising your inner dignity? There are many types of human bondage, but all of them involve a compromise of inner dignity. Is there any sort of situation where you are asking someone else to compromise his inner dignity? Another type of human bondage is the wage-slave scenario where a job demands that you compromise your inner dignity in return for a paycheck. Most of us not born into extreme wealth have experienced this form of bondage. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance about the subtle and not so subtle forms of human bondage.

Bring your masculine and feminine sides together to find your vision. From a neurological point of view, the highest creativity occurs when the right and left hemispheres are working together. Some people confuse androgyny (an intrapsychic orientation) with bisexuality (an interpersonal orientation) or hermaphrodism (an anatomical/genital anomaly). Hermaphrodism, as June Singer uses the term, means the confusion of masculine and feminine, an immature pastiche of qualities typical of rock stars and rock star wannabes, costumed adolescents, and also of the admirers of same. But androgyny is a deep intrapsychic orientation, an integration, a fusion (not a confusion) of your archetypal masculine and feminine aspects. The androgynous person has creative access to the left and the right hemispheres, to critical thinking and intuition. From the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: "Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female [not] be female...then shall you enter [the Kingdom]."

What is blocking your connection to the light? Usually there is some sort of negative inner script that frames life and/or yourself negatively. Negative frames are often just below the surface of consciousness and act as filters through which perceptions pass and are distorted. For example, "Life sucks and then you die. I never get my fair share. I can't do anything right." etc. These negative frames constrict life energy and operate as self-fulfilling prophecies. We can easily perpetuate the eclipse by regret, and feeling bad about feeling bad. Consider for a moment how many other human beings must be in similar straits right now. Pray for compassion and healing for yourself and others who are similarly afflicted. Remember that real change usually comes out of the dark night of the soul. Alchemically, one needs the descent into chaos to create new forms. As the Dylan lyric puts it, "He not busy being born is busy dying." The eclipse comes when your soul feels like it is busy dying. Receiving this card means it is a propitious time to get busy being born. Resources for dealing with inner eclipse follow, but it is also possible that the eclipse is more outer. This card could indicate a time where you are in an environment that is not receptive to what you have to offer. If so, consider this text related to I Ching Hexagram #36," Eclipse". From Brian Browne Walker's The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life's Turning Points Darkness reigns in the external world now, Disengage from negative feelings and maintain your inner light. This is a time when darkness and inferior energies surround you. ..The only light left is that inside your own heart, and you are counseled to return to it, maintain it, and quietly nourish yourself with it. It is in dark moments that a correct attitude is most important. If we fight against the darkness, we are swallowed by it and suffer great misfortune. If we react to the lack of visible progress with despair and negativity, we extinguish our own inner light and block the aid of the Creative. If we try to persuade others that they must return to the light, we exhaust ourselves in vain now. In a time such as this, it is wise to adopt a stance of outer disengagement and inner perseverance. Don not focus on or interact with the negative influences around you; this only strengthens their grip on you. Step aside, yield, let go, allow people and events to pass without attachment. Direct your attention inside, to your inner light, your devotion to what is right, your conversation with the Higher Power. Progress may be slow, but there will indeed be progress. Remember that much of the work of the Higher Power is hidden from us, and that we enable and assist it by remaining detached, accepting, and reserved in the face of negative influences. Again, the above was from Brian Brown Walker's superb, concise I Ching. Additional Resources If you are in a situation where your value is not being recognized consider the following: Keep secret work secret. We live in a cult of confession society where people go on national television to spill out their personal lives. But consciousness work, esoteric work, is depotentiated, loses power, when you share it with those who haven't earned access. As Aleister Crowley said, "If I tell a man something he isn't ready to hear, it is the same as if I told him a lie." Don't spill your pearls before swine, save them for your spiritual allies, those that share a deep commitment to consciousness. Often it is safer and in a variety of ways advantageous to be cloaked and to evade unnecessary attention. Deng Ming-Dao, a modern Taoist sage points out, "Useful trees are cut down. Useless ones survive. The same is true of people. The strong are conscripted. The beautiful are exploited. Those who are too plain to be noticed are the ones who survive. They are left alone and safe. But what if we ourselves are among such plain persons? Though others may neglect us, we should not think of ourselves as being without value. We must not accept the judgment of others as the measure of our own self-worth... Thus, to be considered useless is not a reason for despair, but an opportunity. It is the chance to live without interference and to express one's own individuality." If your eclipse is inner (in addition to or instead of situational) the following card texts contain a whole toolbox full of field-tested techniques for emerging from inner eclipse. The first tells you how to deal with psychic entropy and the second is on how to awaken from depression. Dealing with Psychic Entropy Psychic or psychological entropy is a state of mind first written about by Carl Jung and later developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in his concept of Flow. A state of psychic entropy is characterized by anxiety, sadness and boredom and typically includes looping negative thought tapes. Psychic entropy is a state that leaves us hampered in our ability to deal with complex external tasks or useful inner contemplation. We all know what this feels like -- that all too familiar state of being frazzled, fragmented and unraveled, paralyzed by inertia and self-conflict, worried thoughts gnawing our mind like a chew toy. So what can we do about that? One answer is to use such times to do easy mechanical tasks like laundry and dishes that can be done even if your attention is a bit fragmented. Entertaining, not too dense audio books and podcasts on headphones can be a way to fill the chaotic inner space with better quality content. Psychic entropy is more likely to occur in solitude so if there is a positive social interaction available you can try that. Focus on external considering -- on others' needs rather than your own -- as psychic entropy is based on internal considering. Alternatively, you could go all the way in the other direction and sit down in solitude, perhaps with a journal open, and carefully observe, or even record, all the fragmenting thoughts as they loop through your mind and see what subpersonalities they come from and what their issues are. If the state of psychic entropy comes from a general deficit of meaning in your life then see what you can do to increase meaningfulness. Consider Csikszentmihalyi's "5 C's" of a Complex Personality as summarized by Maryam: "The Complex Personality knows how to integrate a variety of experiences into its overall experience, making the dullest moments interesting. Being in Flow leads to Complexity for when you experience Flow, you want to experience more of it and construct your world to pull you irresistibly towards experiences within the Flow. Focus on these to craft your world: 1) Clarity - Know what you want to do in your life every day. Have clarity of goals, listen to feedback and adjust yourself to the feedback you receive from the world. 2) Center – You are in Balance. Your goal is to focus, to know how to avoid distractions, to become at one with what you're doing, with all of your attention under your control. 3) Choice - Knowing there are a variety of possibilities around you, that you're not determined by outside events but have choice and can move within it. Whatever you do, you do "at Choice". 4) Commitment- Care for what you're doing at all times. Remain conscious of what you care about. Commit to it. 5) Challenge - Keep upping your challenges as you master a certain level. Always make life more challenging." See the section on "Dealing with Afflictive Thoughts and Feelings" in A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler for a more thorough discussion. Awakening from Depression Subclinical depression is almost the norm in our society. Many people go through their days burdened, their gaze lowered, suffering under a generalized feeling of oppression. Although it is easy to attribute much of this to fractured, alienated lives, environmental toxins and poor diet, research indicates that the primary causes are negative thought forms, often occurring just beneath conscious awareness, which frame perception negatively so that one lives in a darkened reality tunnel. For example, "Life sucks, and then you die...I never get my fair share...I can't do anything right..." etc. The negative thought forms trigger negative emotions which in turn trigger physiological changes, and the process feeds on itself as a vicious circle. This card indicates that this is a propitious time for you or someone close to you to awaken from depression. There are many ways to go about the awakening, but the will has to be there for recovery to occur. Depression is a yin condition, associated with lowered energy and a murky wateriness. Take deep breaths, stand up straight with good posture and get going, get active, raise fire, the yang principle, by doing stuff! Don't feel like it? Excellent, that is the sure sign of how well getting active will work. Pick tasks that give definite results by putting in the effort -- like cleaning up your home. Shift to a high vitality diet with more live and raw food. Do a fearless moral inventory and ask yourself what you will remember well on your deathbed and prioritize doing that. Depression is often suffering that is neglected and not confronted. For this reason I prefer anguish and the dark night of the soul because these are more dynamic states capable of transformation. Confront what haunts you.

Keep secret work secret. Consciousness work should be shared with the worthy -- spiritual allies that share your commitment to consciousness. Proselytizing indicates an imbalanced psyche with a compulsive need to get others to share the imbalanced belief system. And even if the belief system you would like to offer is sound, remember what Aleister Crowley said, "If I tell a man something he is not ready to hear, it is the same as if I told him a lie." Consciousness work is depotentiated if you spill it out to the unreceptive. When a pick-pocket sees a saint, he sees only his pockets. Consider this a propitious time to keep your pearls to yourself, or to share them only with the most trustworthy spiritual allies. Keep it secret, keep it safe.

Bring your masculine and feminine sides together to find your vision. From a neurological point of view, the highest creativity occurs when the right and left hemispheres are working together. Some people confuse androgyny (an intrapsychic orientation) with bisexuality (an interpersonal orientation) or hermaphrodism (an anatomical/genital anomaly). Hermaphrodism, as June Singer uses the term, means the confusion of masculine and feminine, an immature pastiche of qualities typical of rock stars and rock star wannabes, costumed adolescents, and also their admirers. But androgyny is a deep intrapsychic orientation, an integration, a fusion (not a confusion) of your archetypal masculine and feminine aspects. The androgynous person has creative access to the left and the right hemispheres, to critical thinking and intuition. From the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: "Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female [not] be female...then shall you enter [the Kingdom]."

Avoid meaningless work if possible. Jobs take up too much of your time and life energy to have no intrinsic value besides a means to get you a paycheck. Sometimes you may have to accept such a devil's bargain to survive, but if at all possible find meaningful livelihood. Meaning can, however, be found in humble occupations where you are doing something of benefit to the community, are meeting people, or are doing purely physical work that leaves your mind free or allows you to listen to audio books,etc. Avoid unworthy work that you won't remember well on your deathbed. If this card seems relevant, you may want to use this oracle to do a right livelihood/ money reading (one of the five card spread options at the main oracle menu).

Summon your will to make a major transition. Change is our only true constant. Sometimes change is gradual, in other cases life demands from us a major transition in a compressed period of time. While it is certainly foolish to rush into a major transition, to act before we really know, it can also be foolish to hesitate at the brink when we know that the call for action has already arrived. As both Freud and Jung noted, the human psyche, like all organisms, is essentially conservative in nature. It seeks to maintain its homeostasis, its dialed-in equilibrium, and it resists and fears substantial change. But as the Dylan lyric tells us, "He not busy being born/Is busy dying." This card suggests a time when you need to be busy being born and that may require labor pains, growth pains and metamorphosis. The great transition may involve more inner change, more outward change or various combinations of both depending on your circumstances. Consider this a propitious time to cross the great divide.

"In every cry of every man, In every infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind forged manacles I hear..." -- William Blake, Songs of Innocence INFANT SORROW My mother groaned! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my fathers hands; Striving against my swaddling bands; Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mothers breast. -- William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience The weeping child could not be heard; The weeping parents wept in vain. They stripped him to his little shirt, And bound him in an iron chain. -- William Blake, "A Little Boy Lost," Songs of Innocence and Experience "Dinosauria, We" Born like this Into this As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs As the elevators break As political landscapes dissolve As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree As the oily fish spit out their oily prey As the sun is masked We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes Born into this Walking and living through this Dying because of this Muted because of this Castrated Debauched Disinherited Because of this Fooled by this Used by this Pissed on by this Made crazy and sick by this Made violent Made inhuman By this The heart is blackened The fingers reach for the throat The gun The knife The bomb The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god The fingers reach for the bottle The pill The powder We are born into this sorrowful deadliness We are born into a government 60 years in debt That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt And the banks will burn Money will be useless There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets It will be guns and roving mobs Land will be useless Food will become a diminishing return Nuclear power will be taken over by the many Explosions will continually shake the earth Radiated robot men will stalk each other The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground The sun will not be seen and it will always be night Trees will die All vegetation will die Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men The sea will be poisoned The lakes and rivers will vanish Rain will be the new gold The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition The petering out of supplies The natural effect of general decay And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard Born out of that. The sun still hidden there Awaiting the next chapter. -- Charles Bukowski Sometimes the soul is imprisoned by incarnation in the Babylon Matrix. Sometimes the soul feels imprisoned by incarnation, but the bondage is of its own making. In the first case you need to have the compassion for yourself and others that the world did not have for you. Many forces beyond individual control can imprison the soul -- war, political oppression, economic forces, gender oppression, oppression based on race, religion, sexual orientation or mutant divergence of various sorts. The oppression could be an ailing body that imprisons the soul with its mortal limitations. Not every form of oppression can be reduced to negative thinking or neurotic complex. Only the very sheltered and naive believe that everyone is creating his own reality. On the other hand, very often it is we who imprison our own souls. We give our power over to another, look for wholeness outside of ourselves, reach for bottle, pill or powder. We suffocate within the cocoon of our own illusions. Sometimes we imprison our souls by disowning our essence and betraying our True Will. As Blake says, "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." The desires he means are the desires of our soul, not those of our reptile brain. Consider this a propitious time to have compassion for yourself and others who are imprisoned by external forces of oppression. But if you yourself are the warden of you own soul's imprisonment, consider this a propitious time to throw off the shackles of self-imposed bondage and liberate yourself into life.

Grounding yourself by finding your center. According to the I Ching, you have only one obligation in life -- to get your relationship to yourself right. Do that and your relations to sex, time, money, power, food, body, career, society, the cosmos, etc. will all be as good as outer conditions allow. Omit, distort or neglect any part of your relationship to yourself and all those other relationships are accordingly skewed, diminished or lost. Working toward the empowered stance of inner independence and androgynous inner wholeness makes you as effective as possible in the outer world. For example, if you are a martial artist trying to survive an attack by multiple assailants, your primary responsibility is managing your relationship to your own body and its movement through space and time. Mastering your relationship to your own body gives you the maximum chance of defending yourself from the bodies of the attackers. Any flaws in your relationship to your own body diminish your chances of surviving the attack. Yes, we are all interdependent in many ways, and it can be fascinating and fulfilling to be with others, but we must also be inwardly independent and disentangle our emotional/psychological/spiritual equilibria from the instabilities of the outer world. Find the peace and power of staying inside your circle of influence. The center of your circle of influence is you, especially your psyche, the one sovereign domain where you can be sure of having influence. Unless you are paralyzed, the movements of your body are also within your circle of influence. But even if you are a gifted athlete, the movements of your body must operate within relatively narrow parameters of biomechanical possibility. For example, no matter how much you focus your will, you are not able to run a two-minute mile. Your mind, however, has far, far wider parameters of possibility, and is an incredibly powerful force inside your circle of influence. Outside of your circle of influence, according to Steven Covey, is your circle of concern. The circle of concern is everything you worry about, but many of those things are outside of your ability to take direct action. The circle of influence is what you can take direct action on or affect right now. The most effective people are putting their energy into their circle of influence and not so much into the circle of concern where direct action cannot be taken. The empowered stance of inner independence means that you recognize your inner wholeness and focus on life-affirming engagement within your circle of influence.

The central idea of the I Ching is that we are always cycling through classic patterns of energy and change. Oracle consultations, especially with the I Ching, can be a way of seeing such underlying patterns of energy and change. Another way is self-inquiry -- stripping away the details and asking yourself what essential pattern of energy and change is at play in your life right now? Examples of essential patterns of energy and change: a time to summon your will to bite through a tenacious obstacle and get to the core of what is happening (hexagram #21); a time when darkness has bottomed out and there is a turning point; the beginning of improvement (hexagram #24); a time of simplifying and letting go (#41); a time of expansive progress (#35). This card draws your attention to the possibility of the outer world paralleling the inner world of psyche in ways that cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect. Jung called such acausal connections "synchronicities." In the past these parallelisms were often called "portents" or "omens," and in many cases people projected too much into them. Modern fundamentalist materialists assume they are "coincidences" if they notice them at all. The Taoists saw the paralleling of inner and outer as inevitable and worthy of alert observation. The parallelism of inner and outer is also reflected in the alchemical motto, "As above, so below." If this oracle is working, your reading should be an example of an object in the physical world (your monitor) paralleling the inner world of your psyche.

Bring your masculine and feminine sides together to find your vision. From a neurological point of view, the highest creativity occurs when the right and left hemispheres are working together. Some people confuse androgyny (an intrapsychic orientation) with bisexuality (an interpersonal orientation) or hermaphrodism (an anatomical/genital anomaly). Hermaphrodism, as June Singer uses the term, means the confusion of masculine and feminine, an immature pastiche of qualities typical of rock stars and rock star wannabes, costumed adolescents, and also of the admirers of same. But androgyny is a deep intrapsychic orientation, an integration, a fusion (not a confusion) of your archetypal masculine and feminine aspects. The androgynous person has creative access to the left and the right hemispheres, to critical thinking and intuition. From the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: "Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female [not] be female...then shall you enter [the Kingdom]."

See the patterns of your world. This card draws your attention to the possibility of the outer world paralleling the inner world of psyche in ways that cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect. Jung called such acausal connections "synchronicities." In the past these parallelisms were often called "portents" or "omens," and in many cases people projected too much into them. Modern fundamentalist materialists assume they are "coincidences" if they notice them at all. The Taoists saw the paralleling of inner and outer as inevitable and worthy of alert observation. The parallelism of inner and outer is also reflected in the alchemical motto, "As above, so below." If this oracle is working, your reading should be an example of an object in the physical world (your monitor) paralleling the inner world of your psyche.