Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Pagan/mental-freedom

Text File | 1994-10-03 | 22KB | 394 lines

                    TAROT: THE WAY TO FREEDOM

The title of my sermon today is "Tarot: The Way to Freedom", and
we took the text from Matthew 12 in order to show you how when
one knows what has truly been said, that is, when one becomes
truly familiar with the Qabalah, the apparent meaning is not the
true meaning in the Holy Scriptures, nor indeed in any of the
religious writings and teachings down through the ages.  First of
all, let's analyze and ask ourselves, "What is freedom?"
Remember, Jesus, as well as all the great saviours of the world,
of which there have been many -- Jesus did say that one must
follow Him in order to be liberated, and so have also said the
various great adepts down through the ages.

Now, in Qabalah it is very well understood that when one speaks
of the Tree one is speaking of the Way of Return and the Way of
Return is utterly and completely dependent on our liberating
ourselves from the manmade, the man-formed, the man-prisons in
which we have become enslaved, so to speak.  What are these
prisons?  Like we read from the text, in one form of dogma if we
do certain things or do not do certain things, we are considered
evil, and often the different dogmas reverse themselves.

I always love to tell this little story, which is so charming, of
the gentleman who died and went to Hell.  As he was travelling
through Hell on his little site seeing tour he came across a
Roman Catholic priest.  He said, "Why father!  What are you doing
in Hell?"  The father said, "Oh relax, I ate meat on Friday and
now I am eternally doomed."

He walked along some more and came across a Protestant minister
and he said, "Why reverend!  What are you doing in Hell?"  The
minister said, "Oh relax, I played cards."

He clicked his tongue sadly, walked down some more, and came
across a Jewish rabbi.  He said, "Why rabbi!  What are you doing
in Hell?"  The rabbi said, "Alas, alas!  I ate pork and now I am
eternally condemned."

He walked along some more and came across a Christian Science
practitioner, and said "Why sir!  What are you doing in Hell?"
The Christian Science practitioner drew himself up haughtily and
said, "But I am not!"

Here, we have a beautiful indication of the problems that we
face, each and every one of us.  Either we are denying an
actuality because we haven't got the courage to face and
therefore solve certain problems in our own heart, or we have
become so utterly convinced that we are evil, that we are forever
and forever attracting to ourselves the people and the conditions
which are going to keep us miserable, and then we don't know what
is the matter.

The whole Qabalah -- which incidentally you always remember was
the training Jesus received, all the great prophets of the Bible
were taught the esoteric mysteries, the various lessons which we
can understand and utilize from the Holy Scriptures -- can be done
only if we learn to understand what it was they were really
saying, and this unhappy tendency to be so literal when deep
truths can never be communicated in words.  They must always be
interpreted in terms of symbol.  Even modern psychology has, as
we know, finally discovered that the language of the
subconsciousness, the language of the soul, the language of the
emotions, the language of the spirit.  This language is a
language of symbol, and words are symbols for symbols of
something that has occurred.  Words, again, can only deal with
descriptions and interpretations of objective things.  To
directly understand, then, what goes on inside ourselves, and how
to cope with what we discover going on inside ourselves, we need
to learn how to speak the language of our true Selves.  This is
the language of Tarot and Qabalah, well known to all the great
sages and adepts.  The Qabalists down through the ages always
utilized the mystery school training for spiritual development
for freeing humanity from these prisons within which we live and
move and have our being.

Again, let's analyze these prisons a little more carefully and
see how we can perhaps learn to walk with greater dignity,
contentment, serenity, love and joy.  These, remember, are
dependent on our learning how to free ourselves from what we call
our old habit patterns.  In the little story of Matthew the
Pharisees describe as evil one who would dare to do good on the
Sabbath, for example, healing the sick or gathering food.  Don't
we all do the same things in various ways?  If we follow one
faith, we consider everyone else evil who does not adhere to
certain ideas of what it is to be spiritual.

I remember so well how a man was looked down upon by his wife and
children because he insisted upon reading a book on the Sabbath.
He felt the Sabbath was a very good day in which to improve his
mind.  The wife, incidentally, was what we might call an
injustice collector.  What is it to be an injustice collector?
We all have injustices we've collected, and we walk around with
them in our hearts.  These injustices keep us very unhappy, and
they bring us great sorrow.  A little example here, in story
form, will show it a little more clearly, and then perhaps it
will help us find some of these areas within our own heart and
learn how to transmute them.

I remember, many years ago, a young woman was talking to Dr.
Case.  She was apparently under the impression that she was
showing him what a very unhappy childhood she had even though she
did not deserve such a condition.  She said to him, "I lived with
this family who had a daughter.  I boarded there.  The woman in
the family used to tell everyone that she loved me just as much
as she loved her own daughter.  I watched to see, 'Is this really
true?  Does she really love me as much as she loves her own
daughter?'  I kept a careful eye on her and I discovered she took
the cream off the talk of the milk for her own daughter, and I
got the skimmed milk."

Well this sounds like a sad story, it is true.  Yet you will be
surprised when you hear what Dr. Case's reaction was.  He said,
"My God!  How warped!"  Well here we come to the heart of the
matter.  This little girl, even though she was only five or six
years old, was hunting for injustices, her attention was focused
on being mistreated, she was looking for evidence.  When we look
for evidence, we find it.  This is the point.  She was feeding
her soul even at this tender age.  She was feeding her soul with
pictures and experiences of rejection, and incidentally she
gathered them right and left and high and low.  This child's life
was a series of rejections, and yet this was a very lovely child,
she was a very sweet and pangly person, nevertheless she was
utilizing a universal principle in reverse.  She was building
with her emotions, with her expectations.  She was building
unhappy experiences.  She was collecting proof, continuously,
that she was not loveable.

If we look into our own hearts, and examine some of the things we
have thought and felt and done, maybe not once but over and over
again, we may start to discover what it is we truly need to free
ourselves from.  What we need to free ourselves from, basically,
are the habit patterns which have been fed into us not only as
children, not only by the mass mind within which we all live and
move and have our being, but also from our past incarnations.  We
carry our prisons with us, and we can liberate ourselves from our
prisons only as we discover what it is we have been doing with
our creative powers.  Incidentally, this is not as easy as it
sounds.  That is why in the elementary metaphysical teachings --
which are very wonderful and beautiful, and certainly teach deep
truths -- nevertheless, those who follow these basic elementary
teachings do discover that no matter how hard they try to hold
what are considered the more positive states of mind, they do
discover that somehow they keep falling.

I knew someone who had a tremendous illumination one night.  She
had really had a hellish incarnation, and she lived in continuous
fear of practically everything.  She was a very intense
hypochondriac and one night it suddenly dawned on her, it came
with a brilliant flashing blast of lighting, the recognition that
she had been continuously and deliberately feeding these fears
and expectations through a lifetime and had therefore
continuously experienced that which she had been holding.  She
saw this principal so well, she understood it so fully, that she
knew, she thought, that she would never again be guilty of such
misuse of these divine powers.

For a day and a half she did beautifully, and then all of a
sudden she realized, "Ah!  How the mighty have fallen."  Even
though she understood the principal, even though she saw the
cause and effect as straight and true as one could see anything,
what she did not realize was this:  That habit patterns cannot be
broken overnight.

This, of course, is one of the problems with aspirants.  They
feel or think that once they've had an insight or a realization
or an illumination that that is it, but it isn't.  One needs to
put a new habit pattern in place of the old.  One needs to
retrain the responses.  One needs to have enough spiritual
humility to recognize that one is going to fall over and over
again as one develops the spiritual muscles with which to finally
hold the positive state of mind and finally be liberated entirely
from the necessity to keep bringing a certain kind of experience
to oneself over and over again.  Just wanting to hold an opposite
or positive state of mind doesn't usually work for very long,
although it helps a little.  That is why the enlightened adepts
have worked out these series of aids, these symbols, these Tarot
cards, the Tree of Life which is older, perhaps, even than Man,
in order to be able to have something to hang onto that gives a
continuous positive suggestion, that keeps pounding in the
language of the soul upon the prisons to dissipate their
strength, to release the energy into the opposite or positive
factor of what is wanted or desired.

In relation to the injustice collectors, I heard a little girl --
not a little girl, this girl is in her middle-twenties now -- tell
her mother one day as the mother was reminiscing about her child
various experiences, the mother was saying to the child, "Do you
recall so-and-so and so-and-so," and they were all rather
pleasant memories.  The daughter said, "You know mother, it's
very funny, my most acute and intense memories are the injustices
I received from you, and I have very little memory of all these
other things.  When you remind me it comes back to me vaguely."
The mother said, "Is that right, dear?"  She was a very startled
mother, because in this particular instance the child had been
treated unusually well.  This was a very loving and patient
mother.  This was a very indulgent mother.  This was a mother who
saw to it that on birthdays and on Christmas and so on there were
all kinds of goodies, and yet this child was holding the
injustices, or what she interpreted as injustices.  As an example
she said to her mother, "You know, when I was five years old you
told me to take a nap, and I didn't want to take a nap.  You
said, 'Well, just lie down and close your eyes and look at pretty
pictures in your mind, make them up, and that way you will at
least be resting.'"  And so the daughter said, "I woke up and I
realized my mother had tricked me.  She had tricked me."  And she
said, "You know mother, I felt hatred for you.  You had tricked
me, you had lied to me, and I realized that was your intention
all along, that I actually should fall asleep."

Well, can we go back in our minds, can we examine the things we
have collected in the way of injustices?  Then examine the
various experiences we have had through life, and can we then see
how so much of our sorrow, so much of our pain has come because
we have in some strange way felt that we are more important,
perhaps, if we are a tragedy king, or the tragedy queen.  Lot's
of us have done that.  It isn't truly that we do not go through
terrible heartbreak and heartache and desolation.  We do, but
beloved brothers and sisters, we don't have to anymore.  This is
the point.  When we recognize just what it is that we have done,
and what it is that our tendencies are travelling toward, we can,
with the proper training as given in the symbolic usages, we can
with the proper training break these habit patterns.  Indeed, if
we inspire to the Highest, not only can we, but we must come to a
place where we must.  We cannot know reality or experience
reality as long as we are looking out at life through the colors
of our injustice collecting areas of our life.  We just simply
cannot do it because we are unable to see through anything except
the glass that we have colored, and continuously do color.

Now, just recognizing, as we said, some of the patterns we have
made for ourselves, this doesn't do the job.  It sometimes seems
that we have to become desperate enough, and we have to have
brought enough sorrow and heartache and desolation to ourselves
in order to become determined enough to change the pattern.  Here
again, in freeing ourselves we have another element to consider.
This has to do, again, with what the Pharisees felt in the little
story that we told.  You see, one of the reasons that we need to
collect injustices, one of the reasons, though there are several,
has to be that we walk around with guilt complexes because we may
have as Protestants played cards, or Roman Catholics eaten meat
on Friday, or as Jewish followers eaten pork.  These are just
symbolic expressions.  In other words, we have gotten specific
ideas or notions in our heads as to what is good and what is
evil.  Inasmuch as these notions come to us from the man-made
laws, from the misinterpretations of life, we have some very
strange notions about the ideas of what is good or spiritual
behavior and what is bad or evil behavior.

We all carry around in our hearts various emotions which, for
lack of a better term, we might call remorse and we say to
ourselves -- and if we do not say it intellectually, we are saying
it subconsciously and emotionally, because that is the level from
which we project our life experiences, don't you see -- and so we
say to ourselves subconsciously, "I don't really deserve to have
loyal friends, because I did thus and thus," or "I do not really
deserve to be loved, because I have been a bad girl or boy," or
"I don't really deserve to have success, because I have not
really earned it, I have failed in this, and failed in that, and
failed in the other."  These are the things we say to ourselves
emotionally, and we are not consciously aware of it, don't you
see.  And so the result is that we act in such ways so that other
human beings will give us the experiences that will be another
injustice, or another betrayal, or another pain added to the
picture.

Now then, how to overcome this tendency?  Well, again, we need
help and it is working with these symbolic techniques which help
to bring about the change of these reactions and emotions and
responses in our nature.  To free ourselves from guilt, that is,
from remorse, that is, from the need to punish ourselves from
having been whatever it is we consider evil.  In order to do
this, we need to be willing, at least for awhile, to give up our
immediate ideas of what is good and what is evil, as Jesus
mentioned in this little story.   To do good on the Sabbath is
not evil, but to the people of that day and to the people of this
day, it is still an evil.

There are many things that we do which we consider bad because we
have been trained to respond that way without even being aware of
it.  We look out at other people and we see them doing all sorts
of things which make us click our tongues, love to talk about it
against them, and those of us who are very self-deceived will
even shake our heads sadly and say "poor things, I'd hate to have
their karma."  You see, what it is we are doing is projecting a
punishment from our own awareness to somebody else, and we are
projecting a condemnation of their act.  Now this does not mean
that we must not be able to evaluate other human beings, but
there is a great difference in evaluation with understanding and
acceptance, and evaluation with condemnation, even where we kid
ourselves that we are being objective and/or compassionate.  You
see, as long as we need to build unhappy experiences for
ourselves, because we are still in the prisons and we wouldn't
consciously remember most of them, because we are still in the
prisons of the things we think and feel have been bad, that is
bad action on our part.  As long as we're in that we're going to
be condemning ourselves and therefore we will always project it
out and we will feel that way about others and we will accept it
back to ourselves.

Again, there is a friend I have who always said to herself and to
everyone else, "I love humanity.  I love humanity and I live only
to serve humanity."  So she went out to serve and discovered that
not only were the people unwilling to be served, but that they
responded in ways which made her use certain terms which are not
repeatable.  She had a terrible shock.  She was disillusioned
with humanity, disillusioned entirely.  From having been the sort
of person, or she thought she was this sort of person, who loved
humanity and wanted to serve humanity and she used to say "I
trust everybody," from this she became a misogynist, and went the
complete reverse saying, "the one thing that I'm ashamed is that
I belong to the human race.  The human race is vicious, the human
race is evil, the human race is self-centered, selfish, brutal
and cruel."  I will not tell you just what this poor soul has
been doing with her own immediate personal life because whatever
we think and feel and project, and especially with such emotions,
our own lives take it on, we compel on the subconscious level, we
compel other people to treat us in terms of our attitude toward
them from the subconscious level.

This woman we just told you about had a friend who saw things a
little differently.  This other friend always used to say, "You
know, I really don't trust people at all, but somehow, somewhere
down in them every person has a spark of goodness, and so I
wouldn't be so foolish as to expose myself to the weaknesses that
I know everyone has, because as Kalil said, 'every human being is
like a bridge, where if you put enough weight on it, it's going
to crack.'"  Therefore every human being has a place where he or
she is just going to break down under the impact of temptation
and this is the measure of the strength of that soul.  At some
point every soul will crack under the proper stimulus.  This is
the point.  Therefore, like Kalil Gibrahn has said, the murdered
is not guiltless of his own murder, the one who is robbed is not
guiltless of the fact that he has been stolen from, because
inasmuch as it has happened to us, there's something in our
natures which has invited it, and furthermore, inasmuch as
someone else had the compulsion to act in a certain way toward
us, it's because that was the point or the breaking area of
bridge of that individual toward ourselves.

The friend of the misogynist said, "Inasmuch as humanity is
really an immature child, just an evolving child, wouldn't it be
foolish for me to expect a two year-old to walk without falling,
or a three year-old to eat without splashing food all over
everything, or a ten year-old to be able to clean the house in
perfect manner?"  Because she understood this, this person who
said she did not trust people actually trusted them more, and
incidentally received a great deal more love from them.  Why?
Because she was willing to see reality.

We here come to the Christian Science practitioner of my story,
you see, who said, "But I'm not!"  I mean, he just wasn't there.
In the same way, the willingness to see people as they are does
not mean that we condemn them; it means that we've actually
learned how to see ourselves a little bit better than we did, and
we know that we're all children walking together.  As we have
enough spiritual humility to recognize that we are immature
children, but children of God, walking the way toward freedom, we
accept our little weaknesses and by accepting them, because we
acknowledge that we are not yet perfected, we make it possible
for ourselves to change our environment much more readily.  The
moment we truly accept ourselves, but with the intention of
helping ourselves grow, we then also are projecting the same
thing to our husbands and our wives, our friends, our business
associates, our relatives.  We are projecting it there, and we
are subconsciously compelling them to love and accept us, and the
reason we can do it when we find the way is because more and more
we stop requiring the mistreatment, we stop needing to be an
injustice collector, because we figure we do not need to punish
ourselves anymore.

Life is quite capable of growing us, and we can grow with far
less pain, we can grow with beauty, we can dance through life
experiences on the whole when we learn how to utilize the
messages that have been given to us in their true interpretations
by the scriptures, by all the holy writings of the ages, by
utilizing the specific training that is necessary in order to
reach into our hearts and forgive ourselves and others -- for
incidentally things that really don't require forgiveness at all,
because most of the things we think have been evil are in
ourselves, except for very few exceptions haven't been that at
all, a child is not evil if it throws a tantrum, it's just a
child.  Knowing oneself as a child of God which the Tarot
techniques definitely help us to experience and know directly --
knowing ourselves as a child of God makes all the difference in
the world.  It stops us from the necessity to keep building
frustration, unhappiness, condemnation, misery, bitterness and
the like, and develop enough a truly loving nature instead of the
make believe love that so many of us are prone to.

In my Thursday night classes I will give very specific techniques
for Tarot usage to help reach into these areas of our souls and
transmute them closer to the heart's desire into the freedom that
is our heritage, of course which we are all marching in any case.