Archives: Cards

"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) 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.

Journaling and oracle consultation can be empowering and developmental. The unconscious person usually requires tragic shocks to learn and to punctuate his stagnant equilibrium. But the conscious person can learn through the subtle shocks provided by oracles, dreams, synchronicities and intuitions. Never underestimate journal writing as a powerful practice and form of inner journey. Among many other benefits, writing in a journal helps to strengthen a central witness personality which reduces inner fragmentation and unconscious compulsion. It gives you perspective on present issues with which you are emotionally entangled, and reviewing old journals allows you to learn from history rather than endlessly repeating it. A journal is also an imaginal space, an inner theater in which you can dialogue with subpersonalities like your inner child, record dreams, and give expression to things bubbling up from the unconscious. Objectifying inner chaos by recording what you are feeling, thinking and experiencing in a journal can be deeply therapeutic. Giving form to whatever flickers into your imagination can provide insight and openings into the creative. Writing skills automatically improve when employed in the service of self-expression rather than under compulsion from the outside. Receiving this card indicates that this is a propitious time to journal, to consult the Zap Oracle, the I Ching, and other oracles, to record and interpret your dreams and to derive lessons from any shocks you might receive.

The difference between a powerful mutant and a disempowered one has much to do with their hierarchy of psychic functions. The mind and the ego are crucial allies, but they need to be, in many cases, in a subordinate relationship to global intuition. The re-empowerment of intuition is directly connected to greater access to psychic abilities.

If we're not wary we can get burned by unworthy temptations, reptilian drives and appetites. Be wary of absorbing toxins of any kind. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on detoxification. "I can resist anything except temptation." -- Oscar Wilde Temptations are very, very tempting and that is probably why they are called temptations. It is foolish to underestimate their power. Before you reach for a temptation, ask yourself if you will remember this indulgence well on your deathbed. If you will, then you'd be a fool to pass it up. If you won't, and you keep on reaching for it again and again and again, then you are on the path of a Ring Wraith, withering into a hungry ghost. There are many forces within us: appetites, compulsions, complexes, and sub-personalities, and all of them are reaching for the steering wheel. We each need to develop a strong central witness personality, one capable of observing and overseeing the process without becoming possessed by a compulsion, appetite, or inferior sub-personality. You are surrounded by black magicians -- advertisers, acquaintances, and possibly unseen entities, who tempt you from within and without toward a toxic fate. But you are not just a passive recipient of temptations, you may also be a source of temptation yourself, or its all too willing partner. Don't surrender to anything that is not in accord with your inner truth. Don't do anything that compromises your inner dignity. The I Ching says, "He who seeks nourishment that does not nourish reels from desire to gratification and in gratification craves desire. Mad pursuit of pleasure for the satisfaction of the senses never brings one to the goal. One should never follow this path, for nothing good can come of it." The I Ching does not support compulsive hedonism, but also does not support excessive asceticism and galling privations. It is often confusing as we try to navigate between the tendency to be too hard on ourselves and the tendency to be too easy on ourselves. The I Ching says that in ambiguous cases we should lean toward leniency toward others and discipline with ourselves. "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." -- C.G. Jung What are your addictions? The addictions could be to foods, intoxicants, compulsive sexuality, unworthy companions, grooved patterns of emotional reactivity, fundamentalist/absolutist rigidities of mind, poor quality cultural products -- music, movies, porno, channel surfing, first-person shooter video games, etc. and any sort of habituated, mechanical patterns in your life. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on freeing yourself from addictions. You need to be your own wise alchemist, supervising what is entering your cauldron and where and on whom you bestow its contents. "First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you." -- Rob Gilbert Addiction always means that you have enslaved yourself, like a Ring Wraith, to some outside object, some Precious. You need to cast the Precious into the Cracks of Doom and regain your magically empowered inner wholeness. (See: Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom -- Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring) We are easily enslaved by addictions that are ruled by the reptilian part of our brain. Almost everyone has to do battle with this aspect of human nature. No matter how many setbacks and reversals you experience, keep struggling to free yourself from that which would enslave you and drain your life energy. In the words of the old Chinese saying, "There is no harm in falling down, only in not picking yourself up again." Depending on the position of the card it may also refer to someone you are connected to who is addicted. It is rarely appropriate to lifeguard other people. Often the best you can do for an obsessed/addicted person is to lovingly withdraw energy from them while they are in a state of eclipse. If possible, think of them when they are at their best, but extend trust only when they earn it. For more on how to relate to others according to the principles of the I Ching see: A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler. According to some evolutionary biologists, marsupials, like kangaroos, are limited in their possible evolution because they lack the corpus callosum -- the dense bundle of neurons connecting the two hemispheres vital to superior intra-brain communication. These evolutionary biologists further speculate that Homo sapiens may also have a brain communication problem and that it could lead to our extinction. We have very poor communication between our cerebral cortex, our center of higher thinking, and our brain stem, the reptile brain that governs appetites and aggression. Anyone that has tried to break a physical addiction discovers how tough it is to get these parts to work together. Headline news is largely variations on the theme of higher thinking being impotent to restrain territorial aggression and other reptilian drives. But there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the philosophy of neurological materialists and fatalistic observers of human history. As William James said, "All that is necessary to disprove the notion that all crows are black is one white crow." If any human being has ever resolved this problem, then the possibility is open for you not to be ruled by your reptilian aspects. Free will is more rare and more fragile than some presume, but you have a choice. Become a white crow. Some quotes on addiction: "Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." -- George Carlin "Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity." -- Saint Augustine "Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare." -- John Dryden, English poet, dramatist and critic (1631-1700) "People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within." -- Ramona L. Anderson "In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country." -- Aldous Huxley "All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot." -- Henry Ward Beecher "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in." -- C.S. Lewis "What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely." -- Franklin P. Jones "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." -- P.J. O'Rourke "Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones." -- Stephen R. Covey "Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel "Habits? The only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction." -- Juliene Ber "Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- Frank Outlaw "Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits." -- Friedrich Nietzsche "The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half." -- Fydor Doestoevsky "Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves." -- Unknown "It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters." -- Roger L'Estrange "I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing." -- Willliam S. Burroughs "Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell." -- Unknown "Habit: The shackles of the free." -- Ambrose Bierce "WE [MOI], AS A GROUP, DO NOT RECOMMEND...VERILY, WE REPUDIATE ANY ANIMAL / MINERAL / VEGETABLE / SYNTHETIC SUBSTANCE, VEHICLE and/or PROCEDURE WHICH MIGHT TEND TO REDUCE THE BODY, MIND OR SPIRIT OF ANY INDIVIDUAL (any true individual) TO A STATE OF SUB-AWARNESS OR INSENSITIVITY ... that is to say WE ARE HERE TO TURN YOU LOOSE NOT TURN YOU ON." -- Frank Zappa

This card indicates the presence of parasitism, and morbid, ravenous appetites. This could involve aspects of yourself, or of others (persons, entities). A life that is not driven by meaning, by a core of self development and the will to help others, quickly devolves into the hungry ghost lifestyle where one is forever looking for the next buzz, the next rush, hottie, payout, whatever, to fill the vast, bored, inner emptiness that can never be sated. Be wary of absorbing toxins of any kind. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on detoxification. "I can resist anything except temptation." -- Oscar Wilde Temptations are very, very tempting and that is probably why they are called temptations. It is foolish to underestimate their power. Before you reach for a temptation, ask yourself if you will remember this indulgence well on your deathbed. If you will, then you'd be a fool to pass it up. If you won't, and you keep on reaching for it again and again and again, then you are on the path of a Ring Wraith, withering into a hungry ghost. There are many forces within us: appetites, compulsions, complexes, and sub-personalities, and all of them are reaching for the steering wheel. We each need to develop a strong central witness personality, one capable of observing and overseeing the process without becoming possessed by a compulsion, appetite, or inferior sub-personality. You are surrounded by black magicians -- advertisers, acquaintances, and possibly unseen entities, who tempt you from within and without toward a toxic fate. But you are not just a passive recipient of temptations, you may also be a source of temptation yourself, or its all too willing partner. Don't surrender to anything that is not in accord with your inner truth. Don't do anything that compromises your inner dignity. The I Ching says, "He who seeks nourishment that does not nourish reels from desire to gratification and in gratification craves desire. Mad pursuit of pleasure for the satisfaction of the senses never brings one to the goal. One should never follow this path, for nothing good can come of it." The I Ching does not support compulsive hedonism, but also does not support excessive asceticism and galling privations. It is often confusing as we try to navigate between the tendency to be too hard on ourselves and the tendency to be too easy on ourselves. The I Ching says that in ambiguous cases we should lean toward leniency toward others and discipline with ourselves. "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." -- C.G. Jung What are your addictions? The addictions could be to foods, intoxicants, compulsive sexuality, unworthy companions, grooved patterns of emotional reactivity, fundamentalist/absolutist rigidities of mind, poor quality cultural products -- music, movies, porno, channel surfing, first-person shooter video games, etc. and any sort of habituated, mechanical patterns in your life. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on freeing yourself from addictions. You need to be your own wise alchemist, supervising what is entering your cauldron and where and on whom you bestow its contents. "First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you." -- Rob Gilbert Addiction always means that you have enslaved yourself, like a Ring Wraith, to some outside object, some Precious. You need to cast the Precious into the Cracks of Doom and regain your magically empowered inner wholeness. (See: Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom -- Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring) We are easily enslaved by addictions that are ruled by the reptilian part of our brain. Almost everyone has to do battle with this aspect of human nature. No matter how many setbacks and reversals you experience, keep struggling to free yourself from that which would enslave you and drain your life energy. In the words of the old Chinese saying, "There is no harm in falling down, only in not picking yourself up again." Depending on the position of the card it may also refer to someone you are connected to who is addicted. It is rarely appropriate to lifeguard other people. Often the best you can do for an obsessed/addicted person is to lovingly withdraw energy from them while they are in a state of eclipse. If possible, think of them when they are at their best, but extend trust only when they earn it. For more on how to relate to others according to the principles of the I Ching see: A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler. According to some evolutionary biologists, marsupials, like kangaroos, are limited in their possible evolution because they lack the corpus callosum -- the dense bundle of neurons connecting the two hemispheres vital to superior intra-brain communication. These evolutionary biologists further speculate that Homo sapiens may also have a brain communication problem and that it could lead to our extinction. We have very poor communication between our cerebral cortex, our center of higher thinking, and our brain stem, the reptile brain that governs appetites and aggression. Anyone that has tried to break a physical addiction discovers how tough it is to get these parts to work together. Headline news is largely variations on the theme of higher thinking being impotent to restrain territorial aggression and other reptilian drives. But there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the philosophy of neurological materialists and fatalistic observers of human history. As William James said, "All that is necessary to disprove the notion that all crows are black is one white crow." If any human being has ever resolved this problem, then the possibility is open for you not to be ruled by your reptilian aspects. Free will is more rare and more fragile than some presume, but you have a choice. Become a white crow. Some quotes on addiction: "Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." -- George Carlin "Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity." -- Saint Augustine "Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare." -- John Dryden, English poet, dramatist and critic (1631-1700) "People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within." -- Ramona L. Anderson "In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country." -- Aldous Huxley "All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot." -- Henry Ward Beecher "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in." -- C.S. Lewis "What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely." -- Franklin P. Jones "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." -- P.J. O'Rourke "Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones." -- Stephen R. Covey "Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel "Habits? The only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction." -- Juliene Ber "Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- Frank Outlaw "Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits." -- Friedrich Nietzsche "The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half." -- Fydor Doestoevsky "Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves." -- Unknown "It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters." -- Roger L'Estrange "I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing." -- Willliam S. Burroughs "Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell." -- Unknown "Habit: The shackles of the free." -- Ambrose Bierce "WE [MOI], AS A GROUP, DO NOT RECOMMEND...VERILY, WE REPUDIATE ANY ANIMAL / MINERAL / VEGETABLE / SYNTHETIC SUBSTANCE, VEHICLE and/or PROCEDURE WHICH MIGHT TEND TO REDUCE THE BODY, MIND OR SPIRIT OF ANY INDIVIDUAL (any true individual) TO A STATE OF SUB-AWARNESS OR INSENSITIVITY ... that is to say WE ARE HERE TO TURN YOU LOOSE NOT TURN YOU ON." -- Frank Zappa

We are culturally conditioned to contemplate people, opportunities and states of being from the point of view of immature masculinity: How much money will it make? What's hot? What's not? Is it loaded with enough bells and whistles to spike my blood sugar? t is easy to get so caught up in the bustle of life that we don't take time to reflect on what's really going on. Oracles are meant to be archetypal mirrors of where we are in our lives. Keeping a journal is another great way to reflect on what is happening. As Socrates says, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Wise contemplation involves listening to the quiet, compassionate voices within. A shortcut to wise, feminine contemplation is to ask of each possibility: Will I remember this well on my deathbed?

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]."

When you attempt to reach a new level of knowledge, self-awareness, empowerment, creativity and freedom from past enslavements, addictions and entanglements, you are very likely to encounter threshold guardians, which may take the form of sabotaging characters (within or without) or other adversaries and adversities that test your will, perseverance, and worthiness to advance to the next level. I have often encountered threshold guardians at the start of a valuable journey or life change. I used to regard these encounters as setbacks or hardships, but now I am often able to recognize threshold guardians as signs that I am on the right track. When threshold guardians appear it is a sign that there is treasure beyond the threshold. Summon your will to keep following the path with heart.

Be wary of absorbing toxins of any kind. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on detoxification. "I can resist anything except temptation." -- Oscar Wilde Temptations are very, very tempting and that is probably why they are called temptations. It is foolish to underestimate their power. Before you reach for a temptation, ask yourself if you will remember this indulgence well on your deathbed. If you will, then you'd be a fool to pass it up. If you won't, and you keep on reaching for it again and again and again, then you are on the path of a Ring Wraith, withering into a hungry ghost. There are many forces within us: appetites, compulsions, complexes, and sub-personalities, and all of them are reaching for the steering wheel. We each need to develop a strong central witness personality, one capable of observing and overseeing the process without becoming possessed by a compulsion, appetite, or inferior sub-personality. You are surrounded by black magicians -- advertisers, acquaintances, and possibly unseen entities, who tempt you from within and without toward a toxic fate. But you are not just a passive recipient of temptations, you may also be a source of temptation yourself, or its all too willing partner. Don't surrender to anything that is not in accord with your inner truth. Don't do anything that compromises your inner dignity. The I Ching says, "He who seeks nourishment that does not nourish reels from desire to gratification and in gratification craves desire. Mad pursuit of pleasure for the satisfaction of the senses never brings one to the goal. One should never follow this path, for nothing good can come of it." The I Ching does not support compulsive hedonism, but also does not support excessive asceticism and galling privations. It is often confusing as we try to navigate between the tendency to be too hard on ourselves and the tendency to be too easy on ourselves. The I Ching says that in ambiguous cases we should lean toward leniency toward others and discipline with ourselves. "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." -- C.G. Jung What are your addictions? The addictions could be to foods, intoxicants, compulsive sexuality, unworthy companions, grooved patterns of emotional reactivity, fundamentalist/absolutist rigidities of mind, poor quality cultural products -- music, movies, porno, channel surfing, first-person shooter video games, etc. and any sort of habituated, mechanical patterns in your life. The positive aspect is that this is a propitious time to work on freeing yourself from addictions. You need to be your own wise alchemist, supervising what is entering your cauldron and where and on whom you bestow its contents. "First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you." -- Rob Gilbert Addiction always means that you have enslaved yourself, like a Ring Wraith, to some outside object, some Precious. You need to cast the Precious into the Cracks of Doom and regain your magically empowered inner wholeness. (See: Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom -- Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring) We are easily enslaved by addictions that are ruled by the reptilian part of our brain. Almost everyone has to do battle with this aspect of human nature. No matter how many setbacks and reversals you experience, keep struggling to free yourself from that which would enslave you and drain your life energy. In the words of the old Chinese saying, "There is no harm in falling down, only in not picking yourself up again." Depending on the position of the card it may also refer to someone you are connected to who is addicted. It is rarely appropriate to lifeguard other people. Often the best you can do for an obsessed/addicted person is to lovingly withdraw energy from them while they are in a state of eclipse. If possible, think of them when they are at their best, but extend trust only when they earn it. For more on how to relate to others according to the principles of the I Ching see: A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler. According to some evolutionary biologists, marsupials, like kangaroos, are limited in their possible evolution because they lack the corpus callosum -- the dense bundle of neurons connecting the two hemispheres vital to superior intra-brain communication. These evolutionary biologists further speculate that Homo sapiens may also have a brain communication problem and that it could lead to our extinction. We have very poor communication between our cerebral cortex, our center of higher thinking, and our brain stem, the reptile brain that governs appetites and aggression. Anyone that has tried to break a physical addiction discovers how tough it is to get these parts to work together. Headline news is largely variations on the theme of higher thinking being impotent to restrain territorial aggression and other reptilian drives. But there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the philosophy of neurological materialists and fatalistic observers of human history. As William James said, "All that is necessary to disprove the notion that all crows are black is one white crow." If any human being has ever resolved this problem, then the possibility is open for you not to be ruled by your reptilian aspects. Free will is more rare and more fragile than some presume, but you have a choice. Become a white crow. Some quotes on addiction: "Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." -- George Carlin "Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity." -- Saint Augustine "Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare." -- John Dryden, English poet, dramatist and critic (1631-1700) "People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within." -- Ramona L. Anderson "In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country." -- Aldous Huxley "All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot." -- Henry Ward Beecher "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in." -- C.S. Lewis "What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely." -- Franklin P. Jones "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." -- P.J. O'Rourke "Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones." -- Stephen R. Covey "Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel "Habits? The only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction." -- Juliene Ber "Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- Frank Outlaw "Enduring habits I hate... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits." -- Friedrich Nietzsche "The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half." -- Fydor Doestoevsky "Many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if it's done by nice people like ourselves." -- Unknown "It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters." -- Roger L'Estrange "I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing." -- Willliam S. Burroughs "Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell." -- Unknown "Habit: The shackles of the free." -- Ambrose Bierce "WE [MOI], AS A GROUP, DO NOT RECOMMEND...VERILY, WE REPUDIATE ANY ANIMAL / MINERAL / VEGETABLE / SYNTHETIC SUBSTANCE, VEHICLE and/or PROCEDURE WHICH MIGHT TEND TO REDUCE THE BODY, MIND OR SPIRIT OF ANY INDIVIDUAL (any true individual) TO A STATE OF SUB-AWARNESS OR INSENSITIVITY ... that is to say WE ARE HERE TO TURN YOU LOOSE NOT TURN YOU ON." -- Frank Zappa

Like a fractal, like a hologram, the small part, the microcosm, recapitulates the whole, the macrocosm. You are a microcosm of the multiverse, an organism made by the multiverse that actually works. As you are reading this about sixty trillion cells are working with infinite precision just to sheath your awareness in a corporeal body. If you completely understood yourself you would know more than anybody who has ever lived. By delving within to understand yourself you embark on an inner voyage of discovery that can never be exhausted, and where new vistas are always opening. If you are seeking to understand others, the most powerful way is through greater awareness of yourself. Greater awareness of the other side of your incarnation, your daily journey into the dreamtime, is a powerful inner voyage of discovery. The deeper you travel within the more you connect to the rest of the multiverse of which you are an inextricably woven part.

Open avenues of possibility. The ego has a number of thankless jobs. Principle among them is mediating between the inner and outer world. Since it is responsible for logistics, it is forever troubleshooting, and for this and other reasons it will tend to focus on disaster scenarios and the perceived obstacles to what it considers progress. There are obstacles, but you are also surrounded by open avenues of possibility, and this card indicates that this is a propitious occasion to focus on those. Racecar drivers are trained that if they find they are heading toward the wall they should avoid looking at the wall, but instead look toward where they want to go. This card could also indicate a propitious time to travel.

This is a propitious time for conscious discourse with a spiritual ally. The ally could be a person, an oracle, an entity or your higher self. Most conversation is chatter, small talk, there to keep lines of social connection open with the least substance and thinking possible. If you have a commitment towards consciousness, this type of communication will be inadequate and irritating after a certain point. It is crucial to have spiritual allies with whom challenging, thoughtful discourse is possible. The Socratic dialogue must be guided by intuition as well as thought or it quickly descends into Philosophy 101 amateur hour. Something needs to be at stake in such conversation, and there needs to be explicit and/or implicit permission to give challenging feedback. Such Socratic dialogue does not need to be interpersonal. If you have the capacity for it, the dialogue can be intrapsychic, your mind can dialogue with your higher intuition and these psychic functions can be personified in the imaginal space within. Patanjali, in his yoga aphorisms (which are at least two thousand years old), says "Always, everywhere be talking to people about God." If you take that literally you would become a very tiresome person indeed. What I think he means is that you should talk to other people at the highest level that they are capable of engaging. We should not inflict Socratic dialogue on those who do not meet it halfway. As Aleister Crowley says, "If I tell a man something he is not ready to hear, it is the same as if I have told him a lie."

Despondent angel: Look Up! So often the small abrasions of every day life cause our gaze to gravitate downward, but there are so many things in our lives that are helping to raise up our spirits, but that we do not acknowledge. Look up, and see all the amazing possibilities that being alive is presenting you. The journey of your life would be very boring if darkness were not interwoven into it. The downward gaze is self-referential and internally considering. Raise your gaze through external considering, empathically connecting to what other people are experiencing and feeling. Great horizons open when you will yourself to raise the downward gaze.

Eagles have the best eyesight in nature. They have two foveae or centers of focus that allow them to see both forward and to the side at the same time giving them an angle of vision of about 300 degrees. Also eagles see with a sharpness that is at least four times that of a person with perfect vision. An eagle's eye is sharp, discerning and impersonal. Don't make a significant decision until you have looked at it with eagle's eyes. You cannot afford to make significant decisions while caught in the personal view of he said/she said, emotional entanglement and agitation. A short cut to eagle vision is to ask yourself the centering question: Will I remember this well on my deathbed?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. -- Hamlet, Shakespeare Forces unseen by our waking eyes pull and push us. Some unseen forces may be malevolent or parasitic, while others may be loving, symbiotic and encouraging our development. Other people influence us in ordinary ways, but also magical ways through their unexpressed inner thoughts and fantasies. You are also a magical influence in ways you may not realize, and therefore have an obligation to be aware of the energy and thought forms within that act as magical influences on the collective, and especially on those to whom you are connected by inner ties.