We ended our last essay with this thought: With the right tools and methodology a scientist, or a Guru, might lead an individual to a state of knowing a given thing, but in the end, that individual must grasp that knowing. In my mind it is not really a significantly different thing that one is grasping the vision of just how a black hole works, or the interconnectedness of all things through the guidance of a Brahma.
And it seems to me a good place to really jump into the heart of the matter, no?
It is certainly true that one of the very oldest Questions in human history has been, is reality in fact a composite of separate entities, as it appears we are at a glance, or is there in fact an underlying interconnectedness to all things? Perhaps Ironically it is materialist science that has begun to move towards the ultimate answer to this question, because at an atomic and subatomic level we certainly are part of a larger reality. There really is no really firm border between the atoms that make up my body, and the surrounding air. Even at a courser level the pours of my skin admit air, and allow it to interact with my body. Not as profoundly as what happens in the lungs, but still it happens. Yet at the same time, the borders seem firm enough. I may be at an atomic level nearly empty space, but if I step in front of a truck its not going glide harmlessly though me, and when I dive into a pool the chlorine in the water is not going to flood into my pours and poison my person. The border may not be perfect, but its quite clearly functional. Yet I believe Physics and Meta-Physics are coming together in a very profound way and we will return to the Quantum world before we are done. ;)
But first lets us consider the more mundane world of everyday experience, do we have evidence of an underlying continuity here? I think we do if we just look around a little. Now it is certainly true that our day to day, minute to minute experiences point towards a world of discrete objects, but it is also true that if you dig just a little, you begin to find indications of that underlying connection.
It is not just that we have:
reports of people like Edgar Mitchell who in a moment of insight actually saw and experienced this interconnection at a very profound, direct, and personal level, during his return trip from the moon aboard Apollo 14.
Or a long oral tradition of events like this: During WWII it was fairly common for wives thousands of miles from their husbands to be awoken in the dead of night, KNOWING their man had been injured or killed, and afterwards being proven exactly right!
Or the apparent anomaly of Faith Healers like Echo Bodine, who far from being charlatans, have a established, and verifiable record of genuinely helping people in a way that just should not be possible, according to the materialist Paradigm.
Rather we can say first off that we have all these things, but for me it is my own personal experience as a Tarot Reader that is the most compelling evidence of interconnection. So allow me to share with you the Story of one particularly powerful reading. Now it happens that, A young lady of the Wiccan faith after having become pregnant, had discovered that her partner was not a fellow Wiccan as she had thought, but was instead a confirmed Satanist. She was most distressed about this situation, and requested a reading on a public board. Knowing I was one of the more advanced readers on the board, it took up the request.
After my usual preparations, I pulled a Cup of Relationship spread for her and the child, and received the following cards for the first few positions. Her Partner: 7 of Swords(The Thief), Her Self: Queen of Cups Rx, The Foundation: Lovers Rx, The Recent Past: The Devil Rx. The Core: Kt of Wands, the Bar: 4 of Cups. ... we need not concern ourselves with the details of the rest of the reading for this discussion, but they are elegant, click here if you wish to explore the full detail of this reading. We will however explore the meaning of the cards we before us now.The 7 of Swords typically depicts a thief, and it certainly does in the deck used (the Robin Wood), speaking quite elegantly I thought to her partners deceptive roll in their relationship. While the Queen of Cups Very much speaks to issues of motherhood, Children and maternity. So again the card in play was very elegantly placed. The relationship itself being poisoned by the male partners deceit is beautifully reflected in the Lovers Rx card, and his spirituality being tied to the left hand path by the Devil Rx, the reversal of the card indicating he had not yet seen through the illusions of that twisted spiritual path.
So you see, we are not looking at random cards, but cards that accurately and elegantly describe the situation of the Q in the moment she found herself in at that time. I doubt if I had to pick the cards myself I could have done as elegantly as Innana had to this point, but in the next two cards she clearly eclipses me. You see I might well have chosen the Page of Wands. This would be an elegant card to reflect a new child coming into the world, but when we add the 4 of Cups, speaking to the mothers not really seeing the child as a blessing in that exact moment, the numerology of the two cards together 15 would speak to the devil, and the mothers worst fears. Ah but the knight that's a totally different story. He raises the vibration to 16, the tower. Telling us that whatever the fathers intent, Momma-ki has washed it away with the tides. The Tower of his intent collapses, and Momma-Ki (as she will) has used the opportunity of man and woman coming together to express her own self, and bring new life into the world. The remainder of the cards spoke to the child, and described her a lovely little handful who would delight, and challenge her mother, and is that not the way it should be after all.
But for our purposes let us return to the Elegance of the spread. of course there is a mathematical possibility that just these beautifully elegant cards would come up just in this reading they just happen to fit so exactly. The odds are in fact. 1/78 * 1/77th * 1/76 * 1/75 * 1/74 *1/73 for the first 6 ( or any specific 6 cards) to come up in the first 6 positions of the spread. The Odd are in fact 1/184933148400 of course the skeptical will say that a reader can manipulate any cards that come up into an apparent fit, (which is simply not true.) what I love about this spread is that it is easy to demonstrate to a person with no tarot background just how beautifully elegant these cards, in their specific positions are to this reading, and to a person with a Tarot Background, oh they just sing. And while readings like this cannot prove the interconnectedness of all things, they certainly do to my mind imply it. If their is not some underlying connection between the Reader and the Q, how is it that we as readers time and again see such elegant readings?
Of course the skeptical will of course say we dont, and the debunkers overwhelmingly don't ground their opinions in actual personal experience, but in the dogma that Divination is impossible with-in their fixed paradigm and there-fore cannot work and is a waste of their time. Which is not altogether untrue, because as an experienced reader I do understand the relationship between intent, and the quality of a reading, and if you intend the reading to fail, it most likely will.
Ok so what do we have so far:
I would say this, one that although we all recognize the apparent separateness of each other and the world we are in, it is also true at certain moments of heightened emotion the interconnectedness of things becomes visible. Dr Mitchell's Experience on the Apollo, or the wife of a Pilot crashing in the Pacific being another.
I would also say that for those of us that practice Divination, that simple devices like a Tarot Reading, allow us to set aside our blinders, and touch upon that interconnection as well. In this way I would agree with the Skeptical, that the Tarot is something of a Parlor Trick, but not a trick to bamboozle the naive, but a little slight of hand that allows us to put aside the Bias of our day to day experience, and have a peek at the unseen energetic world that underlines this reality. ;) So while I have not PROVEN the existence of an underlying interconnectedness, and no one can just yet. I do think I have made a reasonable argument that it is a possibility we should consider seriously and not reject because it does not fit the dominant Paradigm.
Fortunately from here we have alot of help, because in the 10,000 years since the last Ice Age, that sliver of time that has seen every civilization and body of knowledge we have access to rise, (and largely fall.) the dominance of our current Paradigm is but a blip in the course of that history. Thinkers of every previous generation, culture and geography have explored this very question, and we have inherited some beautiful answers.
For myself however I am drawn to the Chinese vision of the Chi, both by its simplicity and its elegance. In this view, you and I are Chi, we are just Chi that has condensed for now into these apparent forms, we are Chi, the Tarot Cards, I might use to read for you are Chi, and at its core, Chi is al that apparently separates us, even as it connects us.
Ironically if I where to replace Chi with Electro Magnetic energy in the above paragraph, we now have exactly the situation described by modern physics. You and I and the World we inhabit are light, because everything is energy, a vibration on the electro-magnetic spectrum. We just happen to be rather dense light, by E=MC2 if all the energy that goes into the matter of any given one of us where to suddenly revert back from matter into energy, it would devastate a continent. How that light got to be Matter, I don't really know, I don't know if anyone really does in detail. I know that the energy released by the big bang expanded, as it did space and time expanded. As the universe expanded creating/filling more and more space the universe cooled. For the same reason a balloon would cool if it was expanded, but the amount of heat in its expanding interior remained exactly the same. What I honestly don't understand is why did it transmute into matter, I have never had that really explained to me very well. (Have you? I would love a good answer.) Still it apparently did happen, because I am pecking away at this keyboard just now, and soon you will be reading this web page, and the reality of matter is certainly about the most consistent thing reported by our senses.
And so we have come full circle, we started out with Quantum Physics, and we have arrived at a sort of Electro Magnetic Chi. Which I think is a good place to leave us for now, in our next post, we will begin to consider and investigate this idea of Chi in more detail. :)
Ama tu ANKI, BB.