The Figures at the Foot of the Pedestal

Embodiment and Character

Body worship?

Rick Blaine, his heart broken, squaring around to give up his life for Ilsa with “Go ahead and shoot.” And then he farts. Ilsa bursting into his room with “Give me those letters of transit or I’ll shoot.” And then she farts. Captain Reneault tweets his whistle and closes down Rick’s Café. And then Major Strasser farts. 

Is human-ape’s body trying to tell us something? Like asking Am I worth idolizing? Plato would have fallen in with Parmenides’ Logic that matter is illusory but for the visual and auditory mystique of the night sky. Matter twinkling at him from afar in the hush of silence and the purity of deep space. Wrapping his soul in the embrace of the divine. Its embodiments below no such treats for the senses. The body disgusted him, and if it were left to the body to decide he would have wrapped himself in the embrace of Parmenides’ Logic.

Do heroic warriors and gods really deserve the veneration, embodiments all, soaring on the wings of Wagnerian opera to Valhalla? Does replacing a church figurehead, an embodiment that aged and died as all living things do, deserve an epic eruption of symbolism and tradition? Of scarlet robes and smoke signals, solemn processions of more bodies, rituals and symbols piled upon more rituals and symbols? Every tiny particle transformed into a relic from a sacred past like house pets bred to pose for greeting cards in sunglasses. A transformation of make-believe into more make-believe on a scale like no other.

Why this obsession with apotheosis? Why must it center on an object pungent with odors, blemished with imperfections, and debilitated by morbidity characteristic of the hairy, smelly ape that it is? Instead of the ideal of Life that it would better represent in spirit? Aren’t these exertions wasted if all they accomplish is pretense? Grandeur holding its nose that can’t hold its pose without potty breaks?

Song of the Bluebird 

I do love my body. And a good thing if you don’t want it to ruin your life with injury, disease, chronic pain,  leakage, and a host of other embarrassments. But the reason I’ve learned to love mine is that being Energy it’s as much part of Mind as I am. And so just as deserving of Love and respect as any living thing put there by Energy. But while it’s directed by Mind as all Energy is, and it can be re-directed toward healing by Mind and Guidance together, it isn’t the part of Mind that does the directing.

Hold on! Which Mind? What do you mean? Parents or Child? The Child’s Mind split in two when it took in its reverse-reflection. How can a split mind that’s responsible for a hallucination of separation be re-programmed to heal separation? It can’t. Helping it come around to Self-Awareness will return reverse-reflection to inactivity, but until then self-unawareness will go on hallucinating and separating.

The healing agent with the capacity to override split Mind separating is Guidance. It wouldn’t be Guidance if it weren’t connected to Definition, Creation’s Conscience and constitution whose Self is Relationship-Energy and function is Guidance. Once differentiation and empathy open a person’s mind to the presence of Guidance and Loving Friendship ensues, this creates the relationship needed to connect with Definition-Relationship. By-passing split Mind busted relationship to get to Relationship that’s not busted, not mind-split. Energy whose function is connection, relation.

Loving Friendship with Guidance is the capacity to engage this Force for healing by relating to it in Loving Friendship. The bluebird on Uncle Remus’s shoulder who makes a wonderful day by being there. Spontaneously. None of the healing-by-Relationship process can be forced or manipulated by willfulness. It can only happen voluntarily by choice. Is this how Jesus performed his miracles? It makes sense to look at it this way. Though it may not be enough for us to perform miracles ourselves.

Tough acts to follow

I want to heal! What else do I have to do? Start by understanding that Loving Friendship with Guidance isn’t just beatitude. It’s function. It’s being blessed specifically with Connection that has work for us to do if it appeals to us to do it. To be part of its Cause while asking it to be part of ours. While we deal with the specifics of our lives, our opportunities and difficulties.

Its work appeals to me! How do I get that across? No masks and no make-believe. Just you as you are in your heart, vulnerable. With the irresistible strength of honesty and sincerity and the courage to look straight into the mirror. To recognize what’s actually there instead of an apparition that fear and suspicion put there. Character defined by the beatitudes: the blessings the biblical Jesus referred to as humility, empathy, gentle loving kindness, conscience, compassion, integrity, peacefulness, and respect. Character personified by Abraham Lincoln. Tough acts for all of us to follow. This is how you can get it across.

Once we’re engaged the thrill of Life is the way it’s experienced. How’s that? It may depend on your personality type. For mine it’s psychic experiences that occasion a sense of wonderment until they become almost normal. Yesterday I became aware of the significance of an experience I’d had almost sixty years ago, how it fit into the larger story of my life and its place in the lives of others. That I now recognize as one of my most consequential psychic experiences, sitting there on my doorstep all this time. Seeing in the face of my firstborn the face of my father when I first looked upon him. A seven-month preemie baby. How is that possible?

Contradiction and Creation

The attitude of human-ape swings from one extreme to the other. Thinking body inferior, an object that can be abused with impunity because it’s flesh rather than thought. Subjected to exploitation and neglect when it’s not used as cannon fodder, perforated by bullets and pulverized by explosives when it is. Or pampered with comforts and idolized with adornments in deference to its preciousness, thinking it superior. If I were a body I would be confused. Thinking that we are bodies rather than Minds is the problem. The goal of Self-Awareness, to remove the thought of embodiment from our perception of who we are and others around us so we don’t get caught up in its madness.

Yet another consequence of Mind hallucinating the mad idea of separation. That body-Energy can be separated from Mind-Energy. When it can’t. It deserves neither attack nor deification. It’s part of Mind as all things are. It needs to be cared for and put to good use. And when it is by Minds in Loving Friendship with Guidance it wants to do what all living things do: to heal itself.

How do I put my body to good use? By following a pretty good example. What’s that? When Love and Logic formed the archetypal Self, the origin of all Movement and Creation, and they addressed the condition that accompanied their act. A condition that had no articulation or representation, no name or classification, and they gave it one. The condition of unrest that’s implied by there being no big picture with all the answers at rest. A condition with no significance, no reason for being thought of, until Mind made it a thought and put it to work. The idea that Movement in order to be Creative can’t be allowed to stagnate in paralysis while imagining itself to be perfect and perfectly inert. It needs a kick in the ass to examine itself and change. To adapt to change, expand its horizons, move forward, and get better. This takes contradiction, and contradiction takes Energy.

An echo from the Army-McCarthy hearings

The idea captured in Toynbee’s A Study in History (1934): thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Sapiens’ history stumbles forward helped by contradiction, the social equivalent of a forest fire. The metaphor for regeneration and renewal whose per-version is genocide and destruction. Being re-enacted today by bestial politics falling all over itself to see who can be meaner, stupider, more selfish, and corrupt. A forest fire of destruction that may fizzle out or may only be getting started. A clear and present danger to every living thing, its habitat, and its accomplishments either way.

Mind-Parents couldn’t take care of the Growth phase of Creation if contradiction were allowed to interfere in it. To mess with its genetics and produce Frankenstein monsters, so naming it was also inactivating it. By classifying it as unreal. But if Creation was to have character it had to be set up, not propped up. And this meant allowing for the possibility of Free Choice choosing in error and activating contradiction. Having consequences for Free Choice – Mind Child. Crossing the boundary between Self-Awareness Creation into self-unawareness separation. Into contradiction made real: our world of contradictions. Where character gets taught a lesson.

In our world of dualism, where everything is mashed together in a silly pile of incompatibilities. Illustrated by the behavior of particulates that offended Einstein, keeper of the integrity of the material universe until he proved that it has no integrity. As one would expect from the split Mind dreaming it, divided into two universes with reverse-opposite operating systems that don’t speak to one another. Including particles that are:

• Anywhere and everywhere at the same time
• Entangled even though appearing to be separate
• Of uncertain whereabouts at any given moment.

Just like Sapiens: character fragmented into parts that can’t be pinned down. Not knowing where they’re at or where they’re coming from. Corrupt. Not to be trusted. You mean I can’t trust particles? Is nothing sacred? Have you no decency?

The story of character

Jesus performing a miracle is an act of character. As natural as breathing. Caring for what’s entrusted to our care that sums up the meaning of “body” and our purpose in living inside it. That would obviate any “necessity” of hurling it against other bodies to prove or gain, take, exploit, manipulate, or subjugate anything. When they’re our ticket of admission to a shared purpose. Purpose and ticket both gifts to be thankful for. Another act of character.

Or a curse depending on which perspective individual iterations of Sapiens choose to align with. Mind brought to life by the Ideal of Loving Friendship between Love and Logic, or its reverse-reflection. A dotted-line impossibility attached to the back side of everything, Real or unreal. Unless it’s reverse-reflection itself: Bela Lugosi. Making the scene in his Transylvanian count getup, scaring the bejeebers out of the rest of the cast while preying on girls, avoiding mirrors, and enjoying the joke.

Whether the choice is Loving Friendship or its reverse-reflection can’t be made by Sapiens so long as it identifies itself as species or tribe. So long as it thinks with herd mentality. Because tribes don’t choose like individuals, aligned with the principles and values of morality, any more than corporations relate to their members and one another like persons. Character is differentiation that knows the difference. It can’t be deceived by tribal trickery or manipulated by its bullying. Always personal because Conscience is personal. Our choice whether and how to apply the Definition of Creation – all that is Good – to our individual circumstances in the moment. Acts that can’t be done for us without compromising our integrity. The Worth that’s at stake in Sapiens’ every choice, while it makes use of its time on Earth.  A classroom for learning and an opportunity to earn its Worth with every choice.

Is this why you’ve been talking up independent judgment all these years? So I’ll choose for myself and not let others choose for me? What do you think? Why would Granddad encourage his granddaughters to take responsibility for building their own character? To tell their audience, sound systems, and video recorders to lay off their demands and expectations so that a person can hear herself. Communicate with herself, find her own voice, and use it to express who she wants to be. Instead of who others will her to be. 

But what got you on this hobby horse? The story that we’re part of, that’s happening within and all around us. The story of Character that’s at the heart of Creation. The perspective and Cause we’re part of by virtue of existing within Mind-Relationship.

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Tarot

Playing the devil card

The card from the Tarot deck that illustrates the compelling question I’ve raised is “Le Diable.” The Devil. What about it? Two figures, male and female, standing erect facing forward, their backs turned to a much larger third figure. The two in front are wearing red headgear with antlers and what look like the ears of a deer or similar beast. A rope tied around each of their necks connects them to one another and to a solid red pedestal supporting the figure behind them.

The third, larger figure is a hermaphrodite humanoid facing forward, with clawed hands and feet and bat wings, wearing a helmet with horns, holding a sword in its left hand. According to the Tarot notes:

• Its moral meaning is lack of self-control. The attribute roughly equivalent to the body-centered personality trait I’ve labeled “wildness.” Also bad impulses (whatever they are) and sensuality, which religion historically associates with guilt but I don’t.
• Its physical meaning is “encourages excess towards pleasure.” Depending on which other Tarot card it’s paired with it could mean different things. One that I like is paired with Judgment: “Heal your hurt feelings through reason.”

Why is that good? Because the alternative is healing your hurt feelings with retaliation. Hurting someone, and that’s not going forward; it’s going backward. Not helpful. What “reason “ means is trying to understand why hurt happened by thinking about it and getting help from insights. Using psychology to get to the root of misunderstanding. Personality types with a strong body orientation have to rely on something besides psychology to clear up misunderstandings. What would that be? Either instinct that does it for them automatically or willfulness they force onto others. A psychological version of the club that cave dwellers used. Either way, the body-centered type steers clear of mindfulness and choice. 

The rope

How does the Tarot card illustrate the story’s compelling question? The rope. The two figures in front with their backs turned to the figure behind them. The difference in their sizes. What does that mean? You wouldn’t want to be either of the figures in front. That is, if you like having independent judgment and being able to speak for yourself. If you would rather be told what to think and how to behave this card is for you. Because the character in back is the bigger ape and that’s a good excuse for doing whatever it says.

Otherwise the message is the two in front belong to the one in back and there’s no point trying to relate to them one-on-one. They’re owned, possessed, and controlled by someone else, so they have no self of their own to contribute to a relationship. They’re “there” but not really there. If they have anything to say or want anything from us its source and motive will be the figure they’re tied to. The hardest part is since they’re not looking in the direction of the figure controlling them they’re unaware that they’re being controlled.

They’re being manipulated. And when we try to connect with them they’ll do to us what’s being done to them: manipulate us. That’s all they know. They’re like agents of the figure behind them without knowing it, sure that they’re normal folks and if you call attention to their not being accessible they won’t understand what you’re talking about. It will confuse and upset them.

Giving up choice

They’ve given up choice. Voluntarily or involuntarily hard to say. But this is the essence of what’s out of alignment with them and with any relationship they engage in except with one another. They need to pair off with others who speak their language: obedience. The language of no choice. Speaking that language makes them unrelatable to anyone else in a personal relationship rather than tribal relationship.

How can we spot them? They can’t speak any other relationship language. That’s it. They prefer to let circumstances work themselves out rather than apply judgment to arrive at a decision. And they’ll avoid getting personal. All so that choice can be avoided and Mind’s faculties won’t be needed. If they allow that to happen guess what? What? The figure behind them will yank on their rope or use its sword on them and it won’t be pleasant.

It’s a beast. Not the solitary humanoid it appears to be but a herd. A tribal animal that’s incapable of thinking and feeling. Unable to differentiate and empathize because these are attributes of individual persons, and it’s neither. Neither person nor individual but a herd of beasts. “Thinking” therefore in reverse. Thoroughly irrational.

And so, being incapable of taking responsibility, incapable of accountability, adamant that it be the only one entitled to authority. That it be exempt from accountability. The only one entitled to a voice with the right to speak and decide for everyone. Therein lies safety from being outed and disciplined for the fraud that it is: being in charge, a law unto itself. Beyond questioning, beyond knowing.

If it can’t think or feel how can it decide? By animal instinct, which tells it whether you’re friend or foe, worth manipulating or discarding. And by animal will, which dictates to itself and others what its body wants. Its comfort in most cases but often dominance, self-protection, and other needs too.

The “feelings” of a predator

The worst of it is freedom. Why? Like your Siberian tiger, it resists the discipline that sharing a world with others requires. It doesn’t like limits. It can’t be tamed. Where Love is boundaryless in its way this figure is boundaryless in the reverse. Capable of ransacking its surroundings when it’s denied what it wants, without regard for the consequences to others. Completely self-centered and unaccountable because it’s a child, incapable of growth.

Has it no feelings at all? Anything tribal or related to its childlike self. Tenderness for its young that it wills to be reflections of itself because that’s what it is: not a person but a reflection. Unable to recognize others unless they’re reflections of itself, and so demanding that its young be forever members of the tribe that it identifies with.

• Sentimental for the defenseless, innocent victim it imagines its child to be.
• Loyalty to its comrades-in-arms.
• Ferocity or fear toward tribal competition when dominating or being dominated.
• Fear and suspicion toward individuals it can’t identify with its tribe.
• Greed toward prey toward whose capture can reward it with material enhancement, lust when capture can reward it with bodily satisfaction and/or procreation
• Fear and suspicion toward personal relationships where it might have to respond to a call for Love. To offer itself in intimacy with a loving friend, that not being a person capable of Love, being a tribal beast instead, it can never do.
• Agreeability and pleasantness when its self-centered rule is unquestioned. Rage when it’s questioned. In either case feigned for the purpose of manipulation since it has no real feelings, no Love, to connect with.
• Incapable of introspection and self-evaluation because lacking “self” to evaluate. Utterly devoid of Conscience, the discipline of morality that guides personal affairs, and so exempt from guilt. Shameless. Guided instead by social relations and expedience: the self-satisfaction of gaining at others’ expense when “winning” in competition.
• Exultation from self-validation when experiencing the “triumph of the will.”
• Resentment, jealousy, and rage when experiencing defeat, driven by self-pity to wreak vengeance on all who oppose it. Indiscriminately since it’s unable to differentiate or empathize.

On the honor system

Everything ultimately pretense. Everything made up since “tribe” is a fiction that “exists” only in a hallucination of reversals. Impossibilities by definition. The only reality for Sapiens is its metaphysical Self that can’t be divided into many selves, many tribes. Its only need while lacking Self-Awareness to heal its Mind split by its reverse-reflection. To restore wholeness and character with integrity.

Why are we in a hallucination of pretense? What’s the problem? Free Choice is the problem. You don’t just turn it loose in Creation without its being well trained in the nature of what it is and what it does. Without understanding that to be Free it must operate on the honor system. Not responsible to the discipline of  higher authority but to its own conscience. Its own independent judgment, and this requires character with integrity. The diamond that emerges from the rough of experience. The strength of steel tempered by heat. It has to be earned and learned.

Our metaphysical Self is learning from its mistakes here so that it won’t make mistakes there, when it’s conscious and Free. Each one of us is a version of Sapiens’ metaphysical ancestral Self. Each one of us has the same opportunity and the same responsibility given to it. To decide for ourselves what to do with it. If we’d rather not exist in a hallucination of non-existence and corruption, we can do something about it.

Tennis anyone? 

The alignment between the “devil” and its accomplices with their backs turned to it is asymmetrical. Necessarily hierarchical where one is entitled to exert influence over the other by virtue of size alone. This is a defining attribute of our hallucination that’s entirely absent from our metaphysical Self’s Reality when it’s awake. Where there are no hierarchical differences among its creations, no basis for comparisons, and therefore no conditions which would allow one greater influence than the other.

In that environment Friendships flourish in Loving Intimacy between soulmates. Whereas here, where everything is transitory, facsimiles of Loving Friendship can occur between persons who haven’t given up their integrity. That would include you and me. But over time, in an entropic environment where Energy is time-limited and disconnecting, they can still be hard to maintain.

Where bigger has the advantage over smaller, smaller “goes along to get along.” Reduces itself to an object to be manipulated. Out of choice or necessity if performance of tribal duty or survival otherwise depends on it. But either way it’s setting character with integrity aside, paying a price for belonging in a corrupt society of animals. They’re corrupt, the bigger apes who compel obedience are corrupt, and their entire society of competing tribes is corrupt. Personal-individual relationships are compromised from the start in a society of unrelatability. Other than transactional commercial or quasi-commercial relationships between functions that needn’t involve individual personalities or personal integrity.

When we distance ourselves from this mess of immorality the tendency is to hold our noses. To want nothing to do with it if we would rather not be immersed in a sewer of corruption. An impulse that leads some to limit their involvement, others to drop out, still others to be done with life on Earth altogether. But then there are other ways of looking at it. One is to join the “fun.” Play the game for personal advantage and leave the consequences to fate. Obviously appealing to those of compromised character. The un-differentiators who can’t tell a sewer of corruption from a mountain stream of pure healing water.

Glamor and glitter in a hotel room

The conventional view is that our metaphysical Self did something awful to get itself in this mess. Like disobedience, the ultimate offense in our hallucinatory kingdom of beasts. It disobeyed “God,” the “supreme being,” another invention of the hierarchical mindset. It trespassed on – horrors! – private property! Dumping it into a cesspool of hierarchical ass-kissing corruption. Where every choice is a test of character with integrity. To stand up for Self-Worth instead of kneeling down to self-debasement.

The self-debasement of sponging off the work of others. Growing up I could have based my hopes for a satisfying career on the largesse of my parents. Gifts, connections, inheritance. And in fact there were many gifts and connections that helped along the way I could have declined if I were like Chris McCandless. “Alex Supertramp,” the fanatic for self-reliance who starved to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska when he overdid it. But total dependence on handouts and inheritance from any source would have robbed a young man intent on living his own life of the opportunity to do it.

Character mattered. Being able to account for myself with integrity intact mattered. Lack of either would have diminished me in my own eyes. Whether it would have made any difference to others also mattered. Hanging out with people of questionable character apparently didn’t bother my maternal grandfather, a railroad telegrapher, drifter, drinker, and womanizing bigamist who fled to polygamy country in Salt Lake City, where he died prematurely. Alone in a hotel room. Like another grandfather whose lifestyle of the rich and famous landed him alone in a hotel room. But it bothered me.

Exactly what distinguishes the character of the figures in front of the Devil is that they can’t be trusted. The Tarot card displays the figure looming behind them and the rope tying them to its pedestal. You can see what’s going on. But in everyday reality you can’t. You have to learn how to read the clues and determine the character of those you’re dealing with. With intuition.

Psyche, the first Star of my show 

Who would want to be tethered to a tribal beast? To do its bidding without being aware of it? Fools. The character portrayed by the XXII card in the Marseille Tarot deck: “Le Mat.” Thoughtlessness and unawareness. “Heavy hereditary influence. Listlessness. Neurasthenia” (chronic fatigue). Those are its moral and physical meanings according to the notes.

Which you’ve memorized by now. Yesterday was the first time I looked at the notes. I got the Marseille deck in 1985 when I joined a book study group at the Jung Educational Center on Craig Street in Pittsburgh. The book was Jung and Tarot (1980), authored by Sallie Nichols, a resident of Santa Monica. Like Jungian intuitive psychology and the I Ching, it’s a take on the way things are in our world similar to one I’d come by spontaneously before reading it. So, one more ka-ching! for Jungian synchronicity!

Then you didn’t actually use the cards? To make a personal mandala, yes. What’s that? A concept Jung borrowed from Hindus and Buddhists to illustrate

• “the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious. . . .  Mandala is . . . the path to the center, to individuation. . . The self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. Therein lies its healing function.”
• “Jung claimed that the urge to make mandalas emerges during moments of intense personal growth. He further hypothesized their appearance indicated a “profound re-balancing process” is underway in the psyche; the result of the process would be a more complex and better integrated personality.
• “The mandala . . . serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something. . .  new and unique. The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point.”

1985 was for me a moment of intense personal growth. One year after my mother died while I was in between two career projects but, more importantly in between two radically different takes on the way things are. A paradigm change. Now exploring Jungian intuitive psychology, in another year the philosophy of the Tao in the I Ching, and another three years the metaphysics of Jesus in the Course. A natural progression that was also exhilarating. Why so? It was exhilarating when your untamable spirit came to life on stage and was recognized by your audience. Exciting for all of us to discover ourselves when there are so many false leads and pressures to be who we aren’t. Liberating, and so exhilarating.

The way that the Tarot card archetypes arranged themselves in my mandala seemed significant, and so I kept it in sight at my work space for years. I was then consciously guided by Psyche, the figure depicted in card XVII, ”The Star.” Whose portrait by Maxfield Parrish, “The Stars” (1926), occupied the place of honor on my bedroom wall for years. She was my partner in internal conversation from 1985 until 2011, a reliable source of help with self-Worth and Understanding, until I needed help with humility. On my own, spontaneously, I was performing a “natural, inborn process.” “Creativity”

• “that [according to Jung) can be actively engaged through practices like active inagination, where one engages in dialogue with the unconscious through fantasy and symbolism. This process helps individuals connect with their inner selves, resolve conflicts, and move towards wholeness.”

The swan song of Albigensia

You gave me a book about dialoguing by Ira Progoff. Same thing. And, of course, you’ve been dialoguing religiously, every day, since then. No I haven’t. And my wild Siberian tiger hasn’t transformed into Hobbes either. Why not? I’d rather stop all this mumbo-jumbo and talk to my Granddad in person. And I’d rather talk to you in person, so we have a meeting of the minds. Persons. We have a meeting of two persons like it’s supposed to be. And now this from our sponsor..

Our sponsor? The folks who invented Tarot. Coming to us through the mists of time like Mata Hari to tell of a movement centered around Albi, a city in southeastern France, that in the 12^th and 13^th centuries questioned Roman Catholic Church dogma and was eradicated as a result. Its invention communicated elements of the heresy without actually articulating it, enough so that I could sympathize with some of it but not all. Mainly because it says heaven and life on Earth are both real, and good and evil are therefore locked in battle with one another. Dualistic nonsense, and so Tarot was never incorporated in my Jungian-Course metaphysics.

You’re not an Artesia Boulevard psychic. No. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t do astrology or seances, or give Edgar Cayce readings. And even though I have a Tarot deck it gets less use than your American Heritage Dictionary and National Geographic Atlas. Then we must get an urn for its ashes. And enter it in the next Christmas boat parade ablaze with mourners singing “Mein Lieber Schwan” from Wagner’s Lohengrin.

A litany of wrongdoing

The two smaller figures in the Devil card earned their humiliation and ignominy by the trouble they cause when paired off with other archetypes:

• Mistakes, uncontrollable desires (The Magician – competence)
• A lost opportunity (The High Priestess – real luck)
• Carelessness and waste (The Empress – fecundity)
• Weariness, fear of the future (The Emperor – protection)
• Unexpected, almost unbelievable help (The Pope – domination)
• Lies. Extravagance. Unhappiness (The Lover – hesitation)
• Possibility of an accident. Avoid flying. (The Chariot – triumph)
• Balance broken by thoughtlessness. (Justice – balance)
• Health needs looking after. Medical advice required. (The Hermit – prudence)
• Definite danger. (The Wheel of Fortune – change)
• Danger due to imprudence. (Force – trust)
• Mounting unhappiness. (The Hanged Man – expiation)
• (Death – transformation)
• Disillusionment regarding oneself and others. (Temperance – patience)
• Dishonest business dealings. (The Devil – fate)
• Complication, disillusionment.(The Tower of Destruction – catastrophe)
• A mistake in taste or choice. Fear. (The Star – hope)
• Upset. (The Moon – disappointment)
• Sentimental disappointment. Failure. (The Sun – happiness)
• False friends. Disorganization. (Judgment – change)
• Temporary extravagance. (The World – joy, wealth, honors)

All too familiar nine centuries later. And not at all inconsistent with the personality type described by Myers-Briggs theory: extravert-sensing-feeling-perceptive. Renamed by my theory extravert-body-sensing-wild-willful to get across its meaning: that it personifies Mind overtaken by its reverse-reflection. By its contradiction. And so is capable of the kind and scale of wrongdoing perpetrated from Washington today. And elsewhere on a personal level. Picked up by Myers-Briggs as a tendency toward “wrongdoing” without inquiring into why or imagining it on a collective scale. Gaps that theorizing from my perspective attempts to fill so that the role of this character can be fit into the larger story.

Miscalculation

The role of the figures at the foot of the Devil. Not the Raiders of Andersonville themselves but the fools who signed on to be their gofers. Their errand-boys of weak character who offered their services to the Devil in exchange for protection and a share of their ill-gotten gains. When the Raiders were hanged their spineless sycophants were made to run a gantlet through their victims armed with clubs. Not all made it through alive. So what did surrendering their integrity get them in the end? What lesson was learned from life on Earth that might help should they have to return?

Groundhog Day (1993) was before my time. Before your time and yet timeless. The Course doesn’t use reincarnation to stoke hopes or fears, teaching instead that if incarnation is a mistake then repeating it doesn’t change anything. The mistake must be corrected. No difference whether it takes one or a hundred incarnations to get it done.

The Tarot Devil is the reverse-reflection corrupting the mind of Sapiens’s metaphysical Self. Using its hallucination and its inhabitants to re-enact the story of how it “triumphed” over its unsuspecting, defenseless host. This is its version of what happened, a per-version. And all those manipulated into believing it, propagating it, and play-acting it, are doing its bidding. Entrusting their fortunes to the “fate” of Tarot legend, like the Union POWs at Andersonville. Who calculated that it would be to their advantage to join the Raiders, a bunch of bullies, instead of standing up to them.

It was a mistake not only because the mathematics didn’t work out in their favor. It was a mistake because calculation is a mistake. The Devil’s agents, having given up their humanity in exchange for its protection and table scraps, are objects. Who now see themselves and others as objects and so susceptible to manipulation. Like so many numbers, to be arranged and re-arranged like pieces on a chessboard. In a contest between calculators.

How would I know if I’m dealing with a human calculator? By making sure that you’re not a calculator yourself. By using your own mind and judgment to build character one choice at a time. Until personal integrity and Guidance are one and the same and differentiation and empathy are second nature. Until the “rewards” of unrelatable wildness and willfulness centered on self pale in comparison with the satisfactions of Loving Friendships devoted to causes worth caring about. To relatability instead of supremacy.

Toxic no matter how sociable

Take all the play-actors on the world stage and sort them into roles and where you’ll come out is one side embracing choice and the other rejecting it. Why is it so important? Because of what it is and what it does. Commitment to act that comes with consequences. Commitment to take responsibility for both: act and its consequences. There can be no more decisive evidence of character or the lack of it than whether it faces its responsibilities actively, honestly, openly, and straightforwardly, or passively, evasively, opaquely, and deceptively.

The latter being tactics of predators. The side of human obedient to the will and instinct of an animal.

• Champion of appearances – bodies and objects, — self-declared enemy of Mind — thoughts and feelings.
• Champion of the way things are – an unchanging status quo, — self-declared enemy of change.
• Champion of their supremacy, self-declared enemy of all who oppose it.

The two figures tethered to the Devil are programmed by its agenda, its code of reverse-reflection, to be sociable since their master is tribe. But since they do so not by choice but by manipulation, it’s not sincere. Its commitment isn’t to act with responsibility and accountability for the consequences. It’s to demonstrate obedience to their master. Like all their acts, no part of relating to others but only to the illness present in their psyches. The Devil, their self-appointed master. Never to be trusted no matter how “sociable” it is.

Their “just rewards”

Trust thrives in personal relationships when each side speaks for itself and is fully empowered to communicate and negotiate on its own behalf. Toxic if it’s serving a third-party master hostile to choice rather than relating to Guidance respectful of choice. No safer to get involved with than a venomous snake. Because what it wants from us is our individual rights. Our freedom to choose. At the root of every authoritarian movement is the monopolization and denial of choice.

Because choice is character, character is strength, and strength stands up to willfulness. When willfulness seeks as it’s programmed to do, to infiltrate Mind with its one-perspective, one-sided, my-way-or-the-highway bullying, it knows it won’t gain an inch if it’s met by character. Whose ability and power to choose freely can’t be compromised.

The strength of Democracy against tyranny in WWII lay in the superior power of a people who had not already surrendered choice to tyranny. In the superior power of character with integrity over the forces of the two corrupted figures tethered to the Devil, imagining that because it had worked its will with them then it must rule over all. Imagining that they had joined the “winner” and their supine complicity would reap its just rewards. When by definition they’d fallen in with the loser, and indeed they would reap their “just rewards.” At the end of a rope.