Dingydarla

The cards suggest that you could be on the threshold of a healing crisis.  You definitely are on that threshold, but it is not clear whether you will willingly step on through toward healing, or drag your feet and try to pull back from the crisis aspect of it.  In some senses, there really is no way to avoid the process, but you have a choice regarding how easy you make it on yourself.  I’m not being flip or sarcastic when I say that resistance is futile.

Spiritual development that has been ongoing for years, now threatens your emotional equilibrium and the comfort and stability you have found in your home life and family.  Trying to keep the lid on memories, thoughts, and dreams can be only partially successful as your unconscious development becomes more conscious.  Your safest and most productive course would be to embrace change, accept reality (What is, IS.) and seek, through forgiveness and love, to transcend the stuff you have tried to bury.

Ironically, your dread and hesitation are much harder to bear than the “crisis” of change would be.  Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, you are ready for this.  Only some habits of mind are holding you back.  Going ahead will undoubtedly stir things up, disturb the status quo, and require some effort to work through, but doing it willingly and unhesitatingly can give you a head start in that direction. 

As I said, you are ripe for the transition.  One big payoff you could expect down the line is a much greater realization of your personal power.  Spiritually, your connection with Spirit becomes less earth-bound and social (as you mentioned), and becomes more of an inner, personal communion.

Regarding your question about your calling, you would know more than anyone about that.  Look here, for more on this topic.

mbjmom

At first glance, the most obvious thing here is that your spirituality is an integral part of your everyday life.  You have passed through a time of doubt and spiritual isolation, the dark night of the soul, and now your remaining spiritual challenges are related to intellectual conditioning, a few habitual mental reservations, things learned from a teacher, parent or other authority figure(s).

The reservations you feel also extend to your emotional life and intimacy.  You need to express yourself, and need a partner with whom you feel free to be open about your thoughts and feelings.  A lot of unexplored emotional territory can open up for you if you make your needs clear and recognize the opening when it comes.

Half of the cards in this spread are Major Trumps, symbolizing Cosmic matters, “destiny,” things you must deal with for your well-being.  Most of these are on the material/physical plane.  You seek guidance in matters that are rightly open to your own discretion.  Anyone else’s view might not be appropriate for your situation.  What each of us sees is colored by our individual filters.  If you trust your inner guidance, and take the first shaky step toward leaving the past and moving into the unknown, you’ll find that what you need will be supplied.  There is balance between the effort you make and the payoff you receive.

SexyDeathGoddess

Physically, now, you are running on a peak emotional high, and are probably neglecting some of your physical needs such as sleep and nutrition.  If you don’t take care of yourself, you will crash.  Even if you do look after your body’s needs, don’t expect the peak to last.  Peaks don’t last… that’s why we call them peaks.  After a while, you either cycle down toward another upswing and a new peak, or you end up stagnant on a plateau.  Which you do is up to you.  Stagnation happens when you try to hang onto a peak.

This frenetic energy surrounds a new relationship.  It is the best you have had yet, but it still has a scary aspect to it.  The bond has yet to be tested.  You don’t know, can’t know yet because the testing time hasn’t passed, whether the relationship will endure.  You have a lot to do with deciding which way it goes:  about 50% of it depends on your choices and actions.  The emotional distance, reticence, hesitation to commit that you feel, is prudent.  The anxiety is not.  Sure, it will be rough for a time, unsettled and uncertain.  Whichever way it goes from there, you will come through it okay, better, wiser, stronger for the experience.

Aside from all that combined physical/emotional energy, and the doubt and anxiety, the other prominent part of this reading is the spiritual aspect.  It is conspicuous by its absence.  Whatever spiritual focus you have is actually someone else’s, learned and not seriously questioned.  It consists largely of suspicion and unease.  Nothing wrong with that for now.  This isn’t a time for you to be a spiritual seeker.  You are doing what you need to do, and learning what you need to know.

Mammalian biology is the cause in most if not all cases.  Males’ surest mating strategy, to insure passing on their DNA, is to mate with as many different females as possible, so fidelity to only one is unnatural.  For females, the surest strategy is to find the best available male and stick with him, and if a better prospect comes along, the natural mammalian course is to go with him.

For humans, psychology enters into the picture as well.  Insecurity, religious beliefs, or social conditioning might cause someone to try and hang onto an old relationship even though his or her affections have shifted to someone new, and this can be interpreted as “cheating” on the past relationship.  In such a case, the intimate and committed part of the relationship is past, even if one or both members deny it, or if it drags on that way for years.

Boredom and discontent, which are personal matters, are often projected onto a partner, in which case the person who isn’t happy with him- or herself might seek a new partner, and another new one after that, and on and on that way unless and until he or she realizes that the problem lies within.

These and many other individual circumstances account for the fact that serial monogamy is the norm for our species.  

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Following a long hiatus after Xanga’s new terms of use led us to believe that we could not use this site commercially, we received assurance from John that we would not be shut down if we don’t spam to promote our business.  Greyfox was first to get into his groove with some new past life readings.

My work table was so cluttered from months of illness and neglect, that I could not lay out my cards for reality checks or other Tarot spreads.  I wrote a few things, started the series on Esoteric Initiation and the Major Arcana, then a virus ate both of our hard drives, and it all went down the tubes. 

Keeping data files on one drive and system files on another, we had been told, would preserve our data in case of a crash.  This time, we lost everything, and the computer we got back has the same old hardware, with brand new software and none of our old data.  It was disheartening, and a real setback to the Initiation series because I now need to reacquire all the images I intend to use for illustration.

Today, after a decent night’s sleep, in response to an urgent request for a reality check, I was able to shift the clutter aside and lay out some cards.  I completed two readings, have two more pending that had been requested two years ago around the time we began the hiatus, and am awaiting confirmation that those clients are still interested before I do them. 

Reality, anyone?

This is not the place to leave your requests, unless I have read for you before and you know the limitations, disclaimers, etc.  Please click the coyote in the header and go where it leads you.

SexyDeathGoddess

In this life I saw for you, you were a woman born in 1587, in Bretagne, or Brittany, then and now a part of France.  This was right in the middle of the Protestant Reformation, and during the eighth of France’s Wars of Religion, with Catholics fighting Huguenot Protestants.  The Catholic Church went through nine popes during the 25 years after her birth.  Violence, fear, and religious hatreds were strong influences in that culture.

In her teens, she married a smith, and lived on the outskirts of their village.  Their marriage was happy, and they’d had three sons by the time he died, kicked in the head by a horse.  She then supported her small family with herbalism learned from her mother, and got a reputation as a “wise woman.”

The village priest put moves on her, and she succumbed–he was attractive, and she was randy.  He proved to be sadistic, twisted, and often impotent as a lover, so she tried to break it off.

He threatened to denounce her as a witch–this was weighty–Malleus Maleficarum was still de facto law of the land.  In despair, realizing that she was basically done for, as were her children, she brewed up some tasty poison, and fed it to the priest and her kids.  When they went under, she dosed herself and torched her place.

Of the five men, two are in your life now.  The priest is now a male blood relative, older than you.   Her middle son is now a female blood relative, younger than you.

Conclusions, generalities:  The big lesson for that life is forgiveness.  I suspect you still carry resentment towards the priest, and guilt over the sons, need to forgive others and self to attain lasting peace of mind.  Likely conflicted about sex and totally down on organized religion, up on paganism.

In the late 1980s, I was given some past-life regression tapes.  They had been made by Dick Sutphen, and were some of his earliest published series of such tapes.  One of the courses gave me brief overviews of several lives, including my earliest incarnation on this planet and my life of highest spiritual attainment (before the current one).

At the time, I never got around to using all of the tapes I had been given, and after a few, I never did another hypnotic regression.  Within a few months of those first regressions, I had begun spontaneously to recall past-life memories.  For a few months in the summer of 1990, it was easier for me to bring to mind details from past lives than to recall what I had for lunch that day.

In this current life, I have been told that I have a memory that works better than most people’s.  In the short-term memory portions of intelligence tests, I excel.  On two separate occasions, testers have told me I was the only person in their experience who had ever been able to max out the section where one is tasked with repeating sequences of digits forward and backward, beginning with just two, up to a maximum of nine digits. 

My long term memory is pretty good, too.  In writing my memoirs, I have found that the periods in which I moved around a lot are easier to recall in detail than are those times when I stayed in one place for a long time.  Memories from a given place tend to become jumbled in chronology, but it is easy to separate what happened in one place from what happened to me someplace else.

Something similar seems to work in reference to past-life memories.  I can easily separate the events of one life from another, and when something triggers recall of a life that I hadn’t remembered previously, that fact is clear.  There is no tendency to confuse one life with another, and it is fairly easy to order them chronologically.

My life of greatest spiritual development was relatively recent.  In the early twentieth century, I was a rice farmer in Southeast Asia.  That this would be my life of highest spiritual attainment makes good sense to me, because the culture there and then was a Buddhist culture, and Buddhism offers fewer obstacles to spirituality than just about any religion I know.  In my current life, working in the soil or walking in the rain often brings up memories from that time.

The glimpse I got from that first regression tape into my earliest lifetime was brief and strange.  I was a child, about five years old.   A few feet from where I lay, several people whom I knew to be my family were seated around a fire.  It was night, and I lay all alone, rolled up in some kind of rough fur, in the shadows, away from the fire, behind my mother.

I had a fever.  I was shaking, hallucinating, and convulsing as I died.  That death was the first of many from past lives that I have re-experienced in this lifetime.  I think I probably had a normal fear of death before I started remembering all those previous lives and deaths.  I was never, however, phobic about death, and at this time I don’t really know what such a fear would feel like.

At the time of that regression, I learned that the life had occurred on the Eurasian continent, about 25,000 years ago.  Since then, a few other memories of that life have come back to me.  From the time before I became ill, I remember people, work, and play.  The play and work were interrelated.  Throwing sticks and stones were games that developed practical skills.  Games of push and pull and hand-holding human chains seem to have been as much about relating to one another as anything.  We danced… I remember that, and I know that none of the people I knew in that life have been with me in this one.

I have lived hundreds of times.  More than half of those lives ended before I reached the age of twelve.  Only once have I ever lived as long as I have in this lifetime.  That one was about 12,000 years ago, and by the standards of the time I was truly ancient.   I was a revered elder and my people had long depended on me for healing and herbal knowledge.  All my children were already dead, and I had passed along my knowledge to my grown grandson by the time I became physically incapacitated.

We were nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving from mountain caves in summer, down to lowlands in winter.  My last winter was a harsh one, and by the time it ended and the clan started preparing to move, I was unable to stand unassisted.  My grandson prepared a strong sleep tea for me, to take me out gently and painlessly.  It was as easy a death as any I remember.  My last memory is of him stroking my hair and sadly turning away.  Him, I have met again a few times in other lives, and he saved my life once in this one, and gave me the son who is keeping me going now.

Karma, I have learned, is not a simple thing of black and white.  It is a multi-dimensional spectrum of experience as broad as imagination and as deep as emotion.  Thirty to forty years ago, before I started consciously recalling my past lives, I used to concern myself with my karma, thinking about the karmic repercussions of my actions.  I never think of it in that way now.  I just do what I know I must do to remain true to myself and maintain my self-esteem, and my karma takes care of itself.

spinksy

In the life I saw, you were a male, born around the end of the seventeenth century, in London.  I’ll call him, “John.”  This life was one of the saddest I’ve seen, marked by an overwhelming sense of loss, and ending in despair. 

He was the scion of an old family–an ancestor was knighted in the mid-1500s (not a hereditary title, though), and the family went downhill from there.  Third generation only son, the family’s fortunes just sort of petered out.  He spent most of the last of his inheritance on schooling and getting set up as a lawyer–a solicitor as opposed to a barrister.

It was the London of William Hogarth’s time.  He was a hanger-on of that group, similar to the entourage surrounding many of today’s rock stars.  He was shown in the background of some of Hogarth’s prints, but never identified.  He knew Hogarth from school, and their relationship was both personal and professional.  He was Hogarth’s solicitor.

In addition to the loss of family fortune and his disappointed ambitions, he experienced a great emotional trauma when his young wife died giving birth to their first child.  The baby also died, and he felt the loss keenly.

A heavy drinker, he spent a lot of time and energy with negative thoughts–anger at his ancestor for not having managed to get a peerage (which would have been hereditary) and a seat in the House of Lords; envy of his better-known and more talented “friends”; contempt for those he saw as beneath them (no lack of them, though).  He was intelligent, healthy (until he contracted syphilis), and good-looking, though, but never appreciated what he had.  He was too focussed on what he didn’t have, what might have been.

Finally died in his forties, of complications due to syphilis and malnutrition.

If you find yourself at times feeling unaccountably nostalgic, fearful or resentful without good reason, it could be an echo from that experience.  On the other hand, if in this life you are grateful for what you have, and count your blessings, then you learned well the karmic lessons from that life.

by Greyfox
with some editing
and fact-checking by KaiOaty

We all create our own realities, through our actions, choices, and beliefs. Of course, there is some co-creation going on–realities do overlap, particularly when one is dependent on others for mundane stuff like food and shelter. But our worlds, for better or for worse, are pretty much what we choose to make them.

I first saw the useful phrases, “reality bubble” and “reality tunnel” in the works of Robert Anton Wilson. They refer to our created worlds. If yours is a bubble, it is impermeable to logic, and learning or growth is difficult if not impossible.  That’s a dire situation.  A tunnel is bad enough.  It implicitly reminds us, with echoes of “tunnel vision” and “light at the end of the tunnel”, that all beliefs are limiting beliefs.

For instance, in the reality tunnel of an indoctrinated Republican, Bush is a strong and faith-based leader–in my R.T., he is a draft-dodging, lying, all hat no cattle buffoon. In the reality tunnel of a right-wing Christian, gay marriage is an abomination and a threat to the foundations of our society; in my R.T., gay marriage is simply people exercising a civil right that has nothing to do with me.

If you accept, as I do, that “the more you know and the less you believe, the better off you are,” and you have a desire to improve your lot, it follows that the wider your reality tunnel is, and the more inclusive and all-embracing it is, the better off you are.

There are many ways to widen your R.T., many of which are unpleasant in the extreme. The young woman who had her arm bitten off by a shark got her tunnel widened in a hurry, you may be sure. Likewise, cancer survivors, and POWs who are tortured by the enemy and live to tell about it have wider R.T.s than most of us. Dropping acid is another way to accomplish this, as is checking into an ashram for a few years.  But I wish to suggest a fairly simple, quick, and easy way of widening your R.T.–magazines.

To be specific, specialty magazines for folks who are interested in a specialty that does not interest you. Reading these gives you a wonderful glimpse into someone else’s R.T., and hence perforce widens your own. For instance, I once read a magazine for and about horse-lovers, folks who own and care for and ride the critters. They are vitally interested in things I never heard of.  Interesting to me, just to get a glimpse of a world previously unknown to me.

Another time, I read a Christian music magazine–kind of creepy, but still enlightening. Most recently, I read a magazine entitled “Alaska Weddings.” Why people invest so much money and energy into an enterprise that has maybe only a fifty-fifty chance of success is beyond me, but then that was the whole point of reading the thing in the first place.

So the next time you get a chance, pick up a magazine you would ordinarily never dream of reading–discard boxes at local libraries are a great source. If you care nothing about celebrities, read “People”–if you are a male chauvinist, try “Cosmopolitan.” Or a technical mag, like “Aviation Week.” Or “Boston” magazine, if you live in the South. You get the idea. You will even learn something.

…and, KaiOaty here:
 Last time I was at the Wasilla library, someone had donated several magazines published by and for the Coast Guard Auxiliary.  For me, they were everything Greyfox suggests here they might be, and motivational, too.

Esoteric:

Arcane:

Occult:

Initiate:

The
exoteric, out-in-the-open, non-secret use or purpose for Tarot cards is
for divination.  They work quite well for that purpose, and
even in the hands of a novice can produce readings that are impressive
in their accuracy.

Divination is considered by some
to be a low and profane use of the Tarot.  The higher use, the
sacred purpose, of the symbolic system embodied in the Tarot is
initiation.  The 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot are believed to
have originated as murals painted in a Hall of Initiation in ancient
Egypt, to serve as guides along the initiates’
path.

I intend, in a series of posts here, to
symbolically, metaphorically, walk the initiate’s path.  Come
with me if you will.  The deck I will be using throughout is
the I Am One Tarot, Maya Britan’s rendering of the progressed
symbolism channeled in the 1960s by John Cook, first painted by Rosalind
Sharpe, and originally published as The Book of T: New Tarot for the
Aquarian Age.

I will also show examples of other
decks which use the old symbolism, for contrast, and we can discuss how
the symbolism has evolved as we move from Pisces into Aquarius. 
We can discuss any aspects of Tarot and/or initiation that you’d care to bring up. 

The starting point, entry upon the
path:

Arcanum 0 or 22:  The
Fool

For some he has no number, because
he is the beginning and the end.  Others assign #1 to
him, and still others number him #22.  In my deck, he wears
nothing, and all he carries are a bunch of scrolls, one of them opened
and partially read, the others untouched, still to be
revealed.  Under a brilliant sun, he moves from a barren area
of rocks, into a field of growing, blossoming flowers, with the spider
of intuition overhead, guiding him, “spinning the web of
destiny.”

In older
decks, he was called The Fool, and he was often dressed as a
jester.  My first Tarot deck, in 1969, was the Marseilles
deck, above.  [For an informative article tracing origins of
the various versions of that deck, see Hunting the "true" Marseilles
Tarot by Robert Mealing.]   Le
Fou, I learned back then, was a heedless, clueless innocent, driven by his passions and baser
instincts, as symbolized by the animal biting him in the butt
there.  Some artists render it as a cat, some as a dog, and
others in various ways.  The authors of The Book of T gave the
animal two heads, dog and cat, and set it quietly in the foreground, no
longer driving us, but keeping us company and making life
interesting.

Below is the Fool from Aleister
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.  Let me know if you’d like to discuss
the Fool further before we move on to the Magus.  I’m in no
hurry, and it might be fun to compare the ways different artists and
initiates view the Arcana.  What is your favorite
deck?  If it isn’t the Rider-Waite, can you find images from
it online, or scan some in?