Images of Tarot (Part Two)

When I first came across the Tarot, around forty years ago, readily-accessed information about it was very limited. And the only deck that the majority of people were aware of was the Waite-Smith. Today, things have changed remarkably; and, I venture, for the better. The wealth of info, the abundance of different decks, is amazing. I'm just going to write a few words here about my own impressions of a little that is available today.

First up, we've got the 'historical Tarot decks'. These date back mainly to the 18th and 19th centuries, and issue primarily from France eg the Marseilles decks, or Italy eg the Ancient Italian deck. Like the Waite-Smith Tarot, some of the symbolism and aesthetic has Christian connections. Unlike our 'classic Tarot', however, these are unsullied by the puritan/protestant influence. They come without the censor of richness and abundance getting out his chopping knife first. The figures are gaily
depicted, richly adorned, in colours that sometimes remind more of Veronese than of the gaunt, measured aesthetic of northern Europe. In truth, they seem to partake of the same spirit as that of the Italian Renaissance, the Greco-classical spirit mixed with that of Christianity. Give me the Ancient Italian over the Waite-Smith any day. The main drawback - and it is, for me, a critical one - with these older decks is that the 'pip' cards, ie those minor ones with numbers, are not fully illustrated, but simply come with stylised wands, cups, etc. This does mean that imagination has very little to work with, and interpretation of these minor arcana cards is very limited.

Next comes what is, apparently, the second most popular Tarot after the Waite-Smith. It makes its entrance 100% untainted by Christian undertones, overtones, or anything else. This is hardly surprising since it is the brainchild of Aleister Crowley, brought into full physical manifestation thanks to the fantastic artwork and infinite patience of Lady Frieda Harris. This is the Thoth Tarot. Compared to the Waite-Smith and historical Tarots it is more abstract, more trippy, speaking more of internal realities than beings and happenings in the outer world. In my opinion, its logic is easier to follow, in the sense of being a comprehensive and comprehensible projection of the emanation aspects of the Kabbala. Crowley was openly scornful of the endeavours of A.E. Waite, and got very irritated with his 'there is a special mystery hidden here, which I know about but which I am not at liberty to share with you' habit. Either tell us what you know or shut up, complained Crowley. Otherwise it's just an insidious game of pseudo-mystical one-upmanship. "Here is your criticism, Arthur, straight from the shoulder. Any man that knows Truth and conceals it is a traitor to humanity; any man that doesn't know, and tries to conceal his ignorance by pretending to be a guardian of a secret, is a charlatan. Which is it?" (Crowley, Equinox, vol 1).

I, too, find this aspect of Waite's Tarot annoying, so am with Crowley on this one. The Great Beast made fun of Waite viciously, even publishing an obituary of the fellow while he was still alive. It was entitled 'Dead Waite'. I find this episode both very naughty and completely hilarious. I like the Thoth Tarot. It works well for me, and I find it relatively simple to use. It's one of my two main Tarot decks.

Then there's the rest. Loads of them. Hundreds, literally.

Things have changed remarkably over the forty years since I first became a long-haired, commune-dwelling, reader of Tarot. And, I would say, these changes have been, in general, for the better. The variety of Tarot decks available today is amazing. Some are profound, others frivolous. Some are dark, mysterious, scary even; others come full of light, smiley maybe, at worst sanitised. Anybody with an interest in Tarot nowadays can simply have a good look around ('Aeclectic Tarot' is an online resource with a broad overview) and find what appeals; what speaks to you, that is the most important thing. And only you can know.

Most  of the more worthwhile modern Tarots are based loosely on the root systems of the Waite-Smith or Crowley's Thoth. Some, I feel, have actually outstripped their original inspirations. And this is no great surprise. A lot has happened since Arthur Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were beavering away on their landmark Tarot a century ago. We've had Jung, archetypes, the collective unconscious; synchronicity, transpersonal psychology, psychedelic gnosis; Tantra, Tibetan Buddhism, the release from prison of Eros, Dionysus, sensuality, the recognition of Shadow as a force within and without. Despite the mess of the political world, of the ongoing project of mind control, we're not in such a bad place after all.

To be effective, Tarot requires a blend of intellect/knowledge and intuition to be brought to bear; the masculine and feminine principles working in harmony. A basic grounding in meanings, patterns, and systems is needed, really. At the same time, some of the more modern decks major on intuition: no confidence in your intuition and you will end up bewildered, probably throwing the cards in the bin. In a world still dominated by linear, mechanical notions of reality, this primacy of intuition as a tool for understanding, of making sense, has to be agood thing.

For myself, I have a special liking for some of the darker, fantasy, gothic even, decks. They seem to speak more directly to the archetypal, mythical aspects of being than do more naturalistic decks, or the cardboard cut-outs of Waite-Smith. They do not play safe, but venture towards the periphery of the psyche, where we may feel perturbed by its inhabitants, denizens of the night, teetering on the threshold. Shadow, eros, darkness, are encountered, viewed as portals to the sacred, even. This is a more total language of reality than that spoken by some other 'nice', 'safe' Tarots. That's me. Anybody properly interested in Tarot should follow their own bliss - or, rather, their own nose, their intuition, to discover where the treasure lies for them. Uniquely.

Images:  Top: King of Wands(Clubs) from Ancient Tarot of Lombardy
              Centre: King of Wands from Deviant Moon Tarot
              Bottom: Grumpy ol' King of Wands from Waite-Smith Tarot

Images of Tarot (Part One)

An archetype is an archetype is an archetype. By the time it reaches the realm of planetary human life, however, it's a bit beaten up and bashed around. Or it may find its entrance forbidden altogether by the authors of fabricated reality, thus gaining access only through secret subterranean tunnels of its own construction.

The prime agents of this bullying, bruising, and archetype distortion are culture and religion. These, the founding blocks of 'human civilisation', have their own prior, often unspoken agendas, which encourage and promote certain attitudes and energies, ignore others, and demonise others still. Archetypal life is forced into the synthetic straijackets of officially-sanctioned morality, goals and value systems, incapable of giving free rein to its pure energetic spontaneity.

Even such a clearly archetypal system as Tarot is subject to the twistings and distortions of culture and religion; of 'the age', 'the time'.

Take the Waite-Smith Tarot, the classic Tarot deck; far and away the most popular deck, and often the only one that people know of. It was earlier this year that I purchased a copy of 'Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot'. I'm a real sucker for books with the words 'secret' and 'mystery' in the title: I have an entire bookshelf of such tomes in the living room. At the same time, I find it hilarious: it's not much of a 'secret' if the whole world can read about it with a couple of clicks on Amazon!

Be that as it may. In 'Secrets.......', writers Tali Goodwin and Marcus Katz, two people with lots of experience with Tarot, teach us many things. Description and discussion of the meanings of all 78 cards as interpreted in the Waite-Smith system. Biographical info on Waite and the hitherto under-recognised Pamela Colman Smith. Information on how to read the cards. Most interesting to me, and new at the time, details of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and how Tarot connects up with this system.

This is all good stuff. 'Secrets......' is a substantial, weighty tome, with enough material to keep you going for quite a while. But there's the culture, the religion......

A.E.Waite is the chief mystical intellect and intuitive, providing authoritative inspiration for the deck. It is Pamela Colman Smith who gives the ideas of Waite physical form; she is the artist. The illustrations in the Waite-Smith Tarot are clear, crisp, precise in outline, providing a host of symbolic meanings in the details for those in the know. Endless heady esoteric entertainment for the curious.Waite was a mystic, but a mystic with a Catholic foundation. And it shows. A good deal of symbolic detail comes down from orthodox Christianity, some from more esoteric Christianity, while the entire deck is subtly pervaded with the perfume of the religion. As an illustration, I have included pictures here of the Judgement card, sometimes wisely called 'Aeon' instead. It is the card of renewal, of the phoenix, of the arrival in ones life of the magnificent 'Other', even. The top one (above) is the Waite-Smith depiction. Below there are two more modern manifestations of 'Judgement'. Words from me are superfluous: I leave the reader to make their own judgement.

And the culture, the culture. The Waite-Smith Tarot was given birth a little over a century ago, shortly before the First World War. I get the shivers every time I think about the cultural-religio norms of the first half of the twentieth century. What an era of dead and deadly conventionality, of repression of the life force; what a time at odds with nature and natural instinct, at odds with the body. Shadow, to use a term from Jung, was denied both personally and collectively, to such an extent that it had no choice but to be projected outwards in the form of two awful world wars. My early childhood was spent in the late 1950s, and it quickly became clear to me: a main aim in life was to escape the horror of that unspoken air of repression which pervaded....... everything.

As time goes by, I find myself having increasing respect for those who dared to champion the body, sexuality, the senses in that dark age for the natural world. Nowadays, it's not such a big deal (among some people, at any rate), but then.......  I think of D.H. Lawrence, as prime example, a man with many flaws and who made many errors in his life, from what I can see. But a man who had the courage to go against the flow, come what may, and proclaim the resurrection of the flesh, the divinity of life within a body.

Above all, in the Waite-Smith Tarot, there is the 'high seriousness' of so many of the cards. The figures are sometimes referred to as resembling cartoon cut-outs, but above all they convey the feeling that life, especially spiritual life, is something extremely serious. Take a look, especially, at the Court Cards (King, Queen etc). They are a dour, crusty-looking bunch. Not a lot of laughs to be had on the way to enlightenment, that's for sure.

The cards of the Waite-Smith Tarot reflect too much of the era for me. Apollo has won out over Dionysus; Logos reigns supreme, while Eros has gone missing. Which has suited down to the ground the following generations of 'alternative' people in northern Europe and the USA, where the protestant, puritan heritage has continued to infect the mindscape. We can be 'progressive', 'alternative' without coming out of the comfort zone provided by mentality, rationality, the clarity of Apollo.

With the Waite-Smith Tarot, we can be clear, we can be clever, spotting and interpreting the mystical symbols half-hidden here, there, and everywhere. For me, at least, my 'wholeness' is left hungry, wanting, if I contemplate this version of Tarot alone. This 'number one Tarot' is not the one for me.

To be continued.

Images:  Judgement from Waite-Smith Tarot
              Judgement from Archeon Tarot
              Judgement from Wild Unknown Tarot

And That Is The End Of The News.....

Part One

The moment 'news' becomes a commodity, to be sold on the open market. The moment it becomes subject to the vagaries of profit and loss, to the need to expand circulation in the interests of making money. The moment it then becomes vulnerable to fashioning, shaping, twisting, exaggerating, manipulating, falsifying in order to further the interests of some party or another. From that moment on it ceases to be the least bit trustworthy.

For the first time since I was born, I sense that the mainstream media is really struggling. And since, as a result of the process outlined above, it is primarily the mouthpiece of the Global Cabal, that network of ne'er-do-wells is likewise finding things more difficult than it imagined.

'Global Cabal' is the term I'm using today; there are many others available (some unprintable....). By 'Global Cabal' I mean a certain network of beings - politicians, bankers, other financiers, media moguls, miscellaneous other statesmen and women, members of 'think tanks' and other self-appointed organisations like Bilderberger, Tavistock etc, top level military, transnational organisations such as the EU and the UN. They all share in common the belief that they know best, and take upon themselves the job of telling the rest of the world how to run its affairs. This wish - this need - to impact upon peoples' behaviour progressively trickles down into more and more minute details of our lives: what we can say, think, feel. What jokes we can tell, what we are allowed to discuss, which subjects are acceptable and which form 'hate crimes'. In other words, they are the sponsors of the Thought Police of the modern day and age. All in our own best interests, don't forget.

But they haven't been having things their way. You see, more and more people have stopped listening. They aren't taking notice of the attempted manipulation by terror, fear and hatred that has been the stock-in-trade for the Cabal and its media henchmen over recent decades.

First up, there was Brexit. The majority of mainstream media in Britain was against Brexit. Viciously.
Notions of independence and sovereignty are anathema to the Cabal, which campaigned ceaselessly against Brexit. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, issued warning after dire warning. Leave the EU and we'd all be living in cardboard boxes within weeks. Just like the global warming alarmists, who predicted a bunch of catastrophes that should be upon us by now. But, miracle of miracles, loads of people didn't read the script.

Second, there's Trump. The vast majority of the mainstream media in Britain was completely against Trump, and launched a concerted attack on the fellow. The notion that anybody could even consider voting for such a buffoon was clearly beyond their comprehension. But people did. Quite a lot of people, in fact.

The morning after the US election, I didn't even bother checking the 'news' first thing, so certain was I that the Clinton was going to win. When I eventually had a look at the BBC, I was shocked, surprised. I confess that a sigh of relief passed through my being. What was most amusing was seeing the folk on the BBC trying to report the thing. It's like they were confused, not knowing how to behave or react. This wasn't in the script. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not at all.

For the Global Cabal, Hillary was pretty much the perfect candidate. A fully-fledged member herself, but, it became increasingly apparent, without strongly-held personal opinions on all sorts of stuff. In other words, an ideal vessel through which to channel the aims and objects of the Cabal. Trump, on the other hand, speaks his mind, even if it's not always pretty. He's been in a tight enough corner himself to have been forced to do a bit of homework on the machinations of the Cabal. He won't kowtow so much to the manipulations of political correctness. Not the kind of guy the Cabal wants at all.

I'm not saying that Brexit is a 'good thing'. I'm not saying that Trump is a 'good man' or will be a 'good president'. What I am saying concerns the spirit of plenty of people. The wet dream of the Cabal is that people simply give up the will to live, roll over meekly and do whatever they are told. Their dream is the collective nightmare. Phoney, purposely-created wars, political correctness; cataclysmic, fear-engendering global warming; encouragment to take offence and play the victim: all designed to knock the spirit, the emotional stuffing, out of people. So that the mass of humanity on Planet Earth will finally quietly submit. A few years ago I would have surmised that the scheme was working. Now, a goodly number of folk have woken up to at least one level of the 'matrix from hell'. This cannot but be a good thing.

Part Two

Now, I don't want anybody to cry too much, but this has created a bit of a personal problem. While most of my relatively newfound inspirations, contacts, and buddies will be roughly sympathetic to what I have been writing about, many of my older friends, going back to the 1970s, generally see things differently. What's more, some assume that I will see things in that different way too. They will bewail the demise of Hillary, tear out their hair at the idiocy of so much of the populace in voting for Brexit.

I think these friends haven't cottoned on. Having grown up in a time when the 'left' was closer to the alternative, they haven't realised that things are different now. That what was once 'alternative' has been effectively hijacked, and is now the orthodoxy. The Establishment used to strut around in pin-striped trousers and black hats, but no more. Nowadays it turns up in open-collar shirts and trimmed beards if it's male, or smart-casual, vaguely attractive but within clearly-defined parameters, if it's female. In its upper echelons at any rate, the Global Cabal has no political allegiance. It is shamelessly opportunistic and omnivorous. It will use whatever seems to work for furthering its interests, carrying out its nefarious projects. In the 1950s it was Tory stockbrokers; today it's blokes with 'Friends of the Earth' stickers in the car. The Global Cabal is truly amoral, truly opportunistic. Many people I know don't seem to get that. They can only translate my viewpoint into 'Ian has turned into a rabid narrow-minded fascist pig'. Which only goes to show how much they have been 'had' by Cabal-think.

I have in front of me the Thursday 10th November edition of 'i' newspaper. I have a copy because a neighbour of ours occasionally drops yesterday's edition through the letterbox, in order to keep my wife in touch with what's happening in the world (true story). Contributors to 'i' are, in the main, precisely the kind of people who consider themselves caring, tolerant, and all the other nice virtues. But in reality they can turn nasty easily, and are actually at the beck and call of global totalitarianism. They really don't like the outspoken, thinking-for-himself, take no prisoners and no sacred cows, style of the Trump. The paper is jammed full of vile, noxious, effluent which is really propaganda for the Global Cabal. About how the world is going to go up in flames due to global warming with Trump as president; what a disaster it is that Trump might actually get on with Putin (that's another System psy-op: Putin. He gets most of the bad press that he does simply because he doesn't play the game of one-world global elitism the way he's supposed to); how horrified Cher, Madonna, and Lily Allen are at the election result; racism, sexism, and all the other unmentionable things that are going to go through the roof now that Trump is at the helm. Most serious of all, 'Sturgeon raises fears over racist Trump'. Yes, Nicola, the world is hanging on your every word. Thanks for putting us all right on that one.

What a nasty fantasy world the mainstream has created. It now firmly believes in its own self-manifested nightmares, taking them as real. Less so do more and more 'ordinary' people. Bring on the end of the media mainstream. For me, it can't come a moment too soon.

Images: Top - Mark Carney. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And keep on being afraid. Carney is surely a pupil of the Lord Mandelson School of Dark Arts.
              Below - Tower, from Visconti-Sforza Tarot. A Tower may be collapsing, but what will appear in its place?

      

Tarot in a Joined-Up World

The strange goings-on at the opera outlined in my previous post were presaged by the Tarot. A week before Cosi fan Tutte I had done a reading on Full Moon day, for the waning moon phase to come (ie the following two weeks). Now, sometimes Tarot readings can make some kind of immediate sense, either logically (heaven forbid) or intuitively. At other times they appear as gobbledegook, incoherent collections of cards with no apparent connection to the world of everyday events at all. These are the ones to really look out for: more often than not, the meanings unfold themselves over the following period of time,......... Look back from a vantage point yet to be reached, and all will be revealed. Such was the reading on the full moon of Sunday October 16th 2016.

The reading came overflowing with the feeling and watery world of the suit of cups or chalices. This
in itself is very unusual in Tarot readings that I do. Entering the world of emotion. As 'overall intent' for the forthcoming period came up Seven of Chalices. This is about the area of appearance, illusion. The 'classic' Waite - Smith Tarot shows a conjuror-type guy standing in front of seven cups brimming with phantasmagoria. The Dark Tarot shows a young girl, a newly-wed bride. Her face is painted in youthful pensiveness, disconcerted yet knowing. 'In the realm of imagination....., the bride has learnt the language of death' we are told. There she is, just before or after the day she's been told is the happiest of her life, and she has been confronted with Death. In short, the card is an invitation to investigate the entire world of appearance, maya, reality and unreality. And, it being a chalice card, especially on the level of feeling. What precisely is going on when we 'feel'? Precisely the question I was compelled by circumstance to look straight in the eye halfway through Act One of Cosi fan Tutte.

'What to Release'? - waning moon phase is the time for banishing, releasing, throwing out: Five of Chalices. There is a loss, though something remains. In the Dark Tarot, a young woman of elegance reclines. She has claws for fingernails, and a raven looks on. 'Fingers that do not feel sensations. The fire has gone out, but the raven has not forgotten beauty.' There I am, unable to feel, back at the opera.....

So what's with the Tarot for me? I am certainly not an 'expert'; my knowledge, ability, experience are all very modest. The popular conception of Tarot concerns prediction, particularly, it seems, with regard to career and romance. However, I'm not looking for a job or a girlfriend, so that's not it. More fascinating is the way that the structure of Tarot reflects something of that of the universe. The twenty-two Trumps, major arcana, are really like archetypes, and can be read as such. From Jungians to Michael Tsarion, people will read them as illustrating the journey of the Soul from the beginning to the end of the path, the spiritual path, of life. The minor arcana, on the other hand, the four suits of wands/clubs, chalices/cups, swords, and pentacles/disks, are more descriptions of process. Precisely, they can be mapped onto the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, and communicate the different phases of coming into being of phenomena, from the initial spark in the Aces, to final fixing, total stabilisation, in the Tens. It's a form of emanation theory, of describing how things come to be. As such, I have been fascinated, my life enriched, by this aspect of Tarot. But still that's not the clincher......    

Though a wealth of material about Tarot has been produced by Jungian types since the great man's passing, he was more of an I Ching man himself, In the 'Appendix' section of 'Memories, Dreams, and Reflections' he says the following: "I would sit for hours beneath the hundred-year-old pear tree , the I Ching beside me, practicing the technique by referring the resultant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers. All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged - meaningful connections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to myself." During this period, Jung often threw the I Ching as part of his therapy with patients.

Jung puts pretty well what my own attitude to Tarot is. What he says about the I Ching is relevant to my experience with Tarot: "Time and again I encountered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it)."

This is what Tarot is first and foremost to me. An exercise - experiment if you like - in synchronicity. Or, to use less fancy words: in the joined-up nature of everything. The universe as a magical kaleidoscope rather than as a cosmic pinball machine. It is a way out, to haul yourself out of a purely linear experience of reality - an experience that is partial - and into a more whole, true breathing-in and breathing-out of the totality of life. By setting up conditions where acausal connections, to use Jung's expression, are more likely to arise, you seem to ramp up synchronicity in everyday experience. This is purely logical: use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

To move consciousness beyond exclusively linear time-and-space awareness. This seems part of moving out of 'petty self', into Big Self, Higher Self, the Divine Presence, that Something Bigger with an overarching organising principle, that magnificent multidimensional polyverse, of which we are simultaneously an infinitessimally tiny part and absolutely everything. The error of perception generated by those following Jung was that synchronicity is an occasional event, normally spectacular and soaked in mystery and significance. Whereas the trick is to realise that it is there all the time, and to experience it as such.

More and more people seem to have cottoned on to this of late - at least this is what my reading and personal contacts suggest - and this has to be a good thing. Maybe a shift in general consciousness is actually happening, at least among those who are making the effort to become multidimensionally aware.

Images:  Seven of Cups or Chalices:
             
              Waite - Smith Tarot (top)
              Mystic Dreamer Tarot (bottom)



        

A Visit to the Opera

I'm not what you might call an opera buff. From the entire repertoire there are maybe half a dozen operas that I would conceivably go out of my way to see. Among that select few is 'Cosi Fan Tutte' by Mozart. Though not the composer's most celebrated opera it is, in my view, the one that will most consistently blow you away with its melodic and beautiful music. So when the chance appeared to see it only a half hour's walk from the house, it was an opportunity too good to pass up.

To get things straight. It wasn't the opera directly on stage that my wife and I attended. It was film of the opera, broadcast live throughout the world onto the big screen. This, apparently, is the thing nowadays. Neither was it the actual live performance we saw. It was an 'encore' shown four days after the live event at the Royal Opera House in London. That's what happens when you live in the Highlands of Scotland.

There is indeed a lot to be said for this 'live opera at the cinema' concept. Singers and scenes are seen close up and from a wide variety of angles, giving a more expressive and comprehensive view than is possible if you are attending the live event. There are subtitles, so those whose Italian is rusty (me) or non-existent (my wife) can follow the story easily enough.

We settled into our seats. No popcorn. Down go the lights, and a long but interesting intro ensues. Then the opera. The overture. Rich, clear, sumptuous. I feel nothing in response. Soon the main characters are on stage, and the story begins. It contains many of the silly cliches typical of opera: disguise, mistaken identity, and the rest. Nevertheless, the plot is not completely stupid, involving as it does the claims of two husbands-to-be that their soon-to-be wives are unconditionally faithful, impervious to temptation. A wager is made: will they remain faithful for twenty- four hours while all manner of delight is regaled before them?

The singing is marvellous, the staging magnificent, the music perfect. Yet still I feel nothing. I am not engaged. In fact I feel as if I am witnessing aliens acting out a narrative from a different galaxy. It is all very disconcerting. Betrayal, everlasting love, trickery and deception are the name of the game in 'Cosi Fan Tutte'. You see, these are, I eventually realise, all feelings of people who have a 'self'. Twenty minutes in, I realise this is the crux. I am relating from a position of a person who is no longer a person: who has no self.

By now I am feeling very confused and quite physically ill. My stomach has constricted into a tight ball, a tangled knot, and is giving me considerable pain. This isn't what I signed up for at all. However, instead of feeling a deep calm and tranquility as a result of having left all these self-based feelings behind, I am stricken with a grave sense of wrongness. What have I done to myself? Or, indeed, allowed to pan out, since the practice of no-self is a piece of piss that happens automatically once you are in the habit?

Beginning to realise what has happened, I make an effort to come down into my body, into my feelings, come to my senses. Fortunately, I have not turned into a hard-core no-self robot, and after the interval healthier service is resumed. As we walk home beside the river, I recount my experience to my wife; I think she gets it.

The following day I feel anger and shame. Anger at what I have done to myself. And shame? Well, this is not a familiar feeling these days. It's not a 'nice' feeling at all, is it? But a keen sense of shame at having somehow let myself down. Strayed unconsciously off-track. Once upon a time, in my days of organised Buddhism, these feelings might have been put down to 'resistance' to the process of spiritual growth going on. Or maybe as a reaction from those aspects of myself that aren't into personal development. Nowadays, I think I can distinguish between 'resistance' and 'wrongness'. In fact, they are worlds apart.

It's there in the article by 'John Smith' that I referenced back in September. I just hadn't realised how viscerally true, how central to experience, what he was communicating is. Practice of 'no self' only works properly if your 'reality map' is what he terms 4D (three dimensions of space, plus time) ie the normal, everyday, 'linear' reality we inhabit. If your reality map encompasses multidimensionality in some form or another, then no-self just ain't particularly relevant, or isn't going to work. Go to the opera with a background in the multidimensional nature of the polyverse after a hearty breakfast of no-self, and you end up with stomach cramps and indigestion. Existentially confused.

My afternoon at the opera was in-your-face evidence that John Smith wasn't just writing a theoretical treatise. It's real - dead real, directly felt, and dead serious. Your reality map goes a long way to determining what works or doesn't work in your 'spiritual practice' -  or in your life generally, I suppose. I hadn't really got that berfore.

Those emotions which, in my state of no-self I failed to properly experience, are not, as flatland no-selfies may claim, hindrances, or mere by-products of a faulty perception. No. They are part and parcel of the form and structure of universal existence as it manifests in all its glorious, imperfect, uniqueness in, and through - me. Our feelings and emotions are not just consequences, results, or side effects. All aspects of our being have meaning, purpose, their role to play in the divine unfoldment. Even self-based feelings can be echoes of spirit, of the infinite. Or gateways into communion with the source of creation. This is what my reality map is telling me at the moment.

Whatever the interpretation - and I may be wrong in my unfolding analysis - the entire episode shook me up emotionally. I felt psychically contaminated, poisoned; or as if I had been subjected to some kind of psychic vampirism. A couple of days after the trip to the opera, I contracted a head cold. This then morphed into a migraine - the first of any note for quite a long while - and the past few days have been spent in a strange, dreary hybrid of the two. Which is the main reason it's taken so long to write this little piece!

So I am sorry for having got sidetracked into the arid wastelands of a no-self that does not embrace the magnificent multidimensionality of existence - at least not explicitly. That sees voidness, emptiness, without granting equal weight to the infinite meaning-saturated movements that take place within that empty space. If anybody thinks I've got it all wrong, let me know. In the meantime, it's bye-bye no-self, and back on the rollercoaster of authentic felt experience in all its weird and wonderful forms.

Here's that link again:

www.energygrid.com/spirit/2015/04ap-dimensionalperspectives.html