Here is my initial contribution:
2007-05-10: Last night’s class was very meditative as a result of listing the Lord and Ways, the Secrets and the Keys to the Suit of Cups.
I don’t know about you, but it is often the case when I am meditating in a group, especially a group that is considering a topic, my meditation will continue into my dreams as it did last night. What I recall is something of a jumble but I did fix upon an image that, may not convey the entire dream, but will at least anticipate our beginning of consideration of the court cards.
There is a child’s toy, its name I do not know, something like hammer and pegs, where, if you strike the peg, it goes down but several others will go up. Each peg represented one of the court cards, and I was striking them with a hammer: one would go down and two others would pop up, I would knock them down and others would pop up.
Perhaps as we begin to consider the court cards, I will learn that there are other ways to read them besides hitting them with a hammer! But the idea that I think this image most conveys is how intricately interconnected the tarot card meanings are as invitations to the supernal.
(I use the term “supernal” as shorthand for that level of awareness where time and space, self and other, body and energy disappear to emerge as other possibilities for which there are no truly good analogies. So when I use the term supernal here, I am suggesting the deeper contemplative aspects of the tarot, their mystical purport rather than their divinational use).
This whole deeper idea of the tarot as a gateway into the nature of divine knowledge, which is not so much the knowledge of the reality or truth of divinity, but rather beginning to experience things in the world in a way that is in sympathy with the way the divine knows the world.
In this way we have to abandon our human identity and allow the divine identity to possess us. However, the more the divine identity does possess us the more profoundly humble we become in our humanity. We find it easier to feel, to identify with suffering, to truly care and emphasize with all human beings in all conditions at all times.
If we attempt to contain this divine identity as a personal secret we could suffer from serious forms of inflation, a puffing up of ourselves that makes us, egotistical, feeling that we are better than other people and immune from their suffering so that we actually lack the ability to empathize with others, which we feel makes us superior and better than the ordinary jerks in the world.
These meditational states seem so delicate and holy, so fleeting and personal, but if we learn to work the keys, we will notice that what was once delicate and temporary slowly works itself into our ground and becomes the very basis upon which we reach even deeper or higher.
But I digress; I certainly hope I can read the court cards with something other than hammer!
I think it’s possible that others of us in this class are also dreaming the tarot at various times and it might be instructive to all of us if you care to share your dream experience.
I believe paying attention to dreams and doing the dream journaling and dream work and interpretation is one of the key ways that we open ourselves to the deeper meaning of the tarot.
The tree of life does give us a map that will explain some of our experiences to us as they happen in due course, but often our dreams will be where we are given personal insights and make connections that show that we have moved into another aspect of the tree before we’re likely to realize it.
Pretty much like only using a hammer to understand things, when they move from one level to another, the previous levels will not provide us with a clear understanding about the level we are experiencing now. Perhaps I should add a level to my tool bag?
Likewise we need to find ways to make our experience of bliss so stable and understand our experience at a new level and with new twists to meaning of words as Wald intimated we may come to a way to do this through some discipline of meditation that is practiced with some regularity. It’s sort of screws you into one place so that the possibilities of contemplation become more varied and possibilities perpetuate exponentially. I guess a screwdriver would help with the court cards too, so I’ll add that to my tool bag, also.
If I return back to my hammer and peg toy I notice that some of the pegs have slots for a screwdriver, I wonder if that will make a difference?
So many tools and so little time to learn to use them.
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