Tarot - The Way To Mental 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 because first of all let's analyze and and ask ourselves, what is freedom?

And remember, Jesus, as well as all the great saviors 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 man-made, the man-formed, the man-prisoned, in which we have become a scum.

So to speak. And what are these prisons? Well, like we read from the text, in one form of dogma, if we do certain things or do not do certain things, we're considered evil. And often the different dogmas reverse themselves. I always love to tell the little story, which which is so charming, of the gentleman who died and went to hell. And as he was traveling through hell on his little sightseeing tour, he came across a Roman Catholic priest.

And he said, Why, Father, what are you doing in hell? And the father said, Oh, alas, I ate meat on Friday, and now I am eternally doomed.

So he walked along some more and came across a Protestant minister. And he said, why reverend, what are you doing in hell? And the minister said, oh alas, I played cards. He clicked his tongue sadly, walked down some more, and came across the Jewish rabbi. And he said, why rabbi, what are you doing in hell? The rabbi said, alas, alas, I ate pork, and now I am eternally condemned. So he walked along some more and came across the Christian Science Practitioner and said, why sir, what are you doing in hell? And the Christian Science Practitioner drew himself up haughtily and said, but I am not. And here we have a beautiful indication of the problems that we face, each and every one of us. Because 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 Holy Qabalah which incidentally we'll 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 communicated in terms of symbol. Because 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 And words are symbols for symbols of something that has occurred.

And 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 in the mystery school training for spiritual development, for freeing humanity from these prisons within which we live and move and have our being. Now 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 and these remember are dependent on our learning how to free ourselves from what we call our old habit patterns. Like in the little story in Matthew, the Pharisees described as evil one who would dare to do good on the Sabbath. Like, for example, healing the sick or or gathering food.

And don't we all do the same thing 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. And the wife incidentally was what we might call an injustice collector. Now what is it to be an injustice collector. You see, we all have injustices we've collected, and we walk around with them in our hearts. And 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 hearts and learn how to transmute them. I remember many years ago a young woman was talking to Dr. Case and she was apparently under the impression that she was showing him what a very unhappy childhood she had even though she did did not deserve such a condition.

And she said to him, I lived with this family who had, they had a daughter. I boarded there. And the woman in the family used to tell everyone that she loved me just as much as she loved her own daughter.

And so I watched to see, is this really true? Does she really love me as much as she loves her own daughter and so I kept a careful eye on her she said and I discovered she took the cream off the top of the milk for her own daughter and I got the skimmed milk well this is a set sounds like a sad story it is true and yet you will be surprised if you You hear what Dr. Case's reaction was. He said, my God, how warped.

Why? Well, here we come to the heart of the matter. Because this little girl, even though she was only five or six years old, was hunting for injustices. Her attention was focused on being mistreated. Mistreated. She was looking for evidence. And when we look for evidence, we find it. This is the point. So that 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. And this child's life was a series of rejections.

And yet, this was a very lovely child. She was a very sweet and kindly 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 lovable. And if we look into our own hearts and examine some of the things we have thought and felt and done, maybe not 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. And 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 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 lights of like lightning, the recognition that she had been continuously and deliberately feeding these fears and expectations through a lifetime and had therefore continuously experienced that which he had been holding and she saw this principle 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. Because even though she understood the principle, 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. And 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.

Because 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 muscle 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. And 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 the series of aids, the symbols, the tarot cards, the tree of life, which is older perhaps even than man, in order to be able to have something to hang on to 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. Now in relation to the injustice collectors, I heard a little girl tell her, not a little girl, this girl is in her middle twenties now, tell her mother one day as the mother was reminiscing about her her child's 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. And 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 and 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 Christmases 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 and you said well just lie down and close your eyes and look at pretty pictures in your mind make them up and that 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 you had, 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 the tragedy kings or the tragedy queen lots of us have done that and it isn't truly that we do not go through 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 traveling towards, we can, with the proper training as given in the symbolic usages we can with the proper training break these habit patterns and indeed if we aspire 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're looking out at life through the colors of our injustice and our imprisoned collecting areas of our life. We just simply cannot do it because we are unable to see to 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 and 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 they're a sephel, happens to be that we walk around with guilt complexes because we may have as Protestants played cards or as Roman Catholics eaten meat on Friday or as Jewish followers eaten pork. These are just symbolic expressions. In In other words, we have gotten specific ideas or notions in our heads as to what is good and what is evil.

And 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 and 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 a level from which we project our life experience 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 the symbolic techniques which helps 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 for having been whatever it is we consider evil. In order to do this, we need to be willing, at least for a while, 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 prick 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 hate to have their karma and 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 Now this does not mean that we must not be able to evaluate other human beings, but there's 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're still in the prisons, and we wouldn't consciously remember most of them, because we're 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 are going to be condemning condemning ourselves and so therefore we will always project it out and we will feel that way about others and we will attract it back to ourselves but again there's 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 not repeatable. She had a terrible shock. She was disillusioned with humanity, disillusioned entirely. And so 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 of 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 and 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 levels we compel other people to treat us in terms of our attitudes towards them from the subconscious level. Now then, this woman we're just telling 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, everybody 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 Kui 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, but at some point every soul will crack under the proper stimulus. This is the point. Therefore, like Khalil Gibran has said, the murdered is not guiltless of his own murder. The one who is robbed is not guiltless of the the fact that he has been stolen from, because inasmuch as it has happened to us, there's something in our nature which has invited it, and furthermore, inasmuch as someone else had the compulsion to act in a certain way towards us, it's because that was the point or the breaking area of the bridge of that individual towards ourselves. So the friend of the misogynist said, in as much 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 a perfect manner and 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 and 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 and 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 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 then to recognize that we are immature children, but children of God, walking the way towards 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. Because the moment we truly accept ourselves, but with the intention of helping ourselves grow, 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 experience on the whole when we learn how to utilize the messages that have been given to us in their true interpretation by the scriptures by all the holy writings of the ages by utilizing the specific 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 in ourselves, except for very few exceptions, haven't been that at all. A child is not evil if it throws a tantrum. That's the child. And 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 stops us from the first from the necessity to keep building frustrations unhappiness condemnations miseries bitterness and the like and develop in us 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 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 and towards which we are all marching in any case.