Reversing Adversity Through Tarot

Our title for this morning's sermon is Reverse Adversity through Tarot.

You will notice we read you from Proverbs chapter number three.

And what is so little realized is that this particular chapter, we didn't read all the verses, is one of the most complete little Qabalistic treatises. And indeed, even the words which which are used in the translation have remained quite close to the actual meanings of Qabalah, the Tree of Life, which you see here and which is more dramatically portrayed on the back wall. Now then, if you will recall the part spoken about relating to the Tree of Life and the mention that understanding and wisdom are the things that have built the heavens and the earth. And if you will remember that wisdom is assigned to the cosmic father, the upper right hand gray sefiroth there, and that understanding is assigned to the cosmic mother, the black sefiroth on the opposite side. In other words, the partners, the ideas of the opposites, the the cosmic feminine negative principle, the cosmic masculine positive principle.

And if you will note that in this Proverbs, it mentions that wisdom and understanding are to be looked for beyond all else.

And then the promise is made that he who truly attains it will have all good in all ways. We need to analyze this rather carefully in order to understand exactly what it means in its esoteric sense, because our greatest problem in life, really, is that we do not know how, or if we do know, we do not seem to understand the importance of working with the reversals of consciousness in order to change the patterns within which we reside.

The tarot key that we put up for this morning, if you notice, is the tarot key which portrays reversal.

Now, one of the great sadnesses that seems to come to aspirants, especially those who have hunted high and low and gone through many schools of training, meaning, the unhappy thing is recognized sooner or later, that no matter how hard we try to hold positive images, something seems to happen. We do not seem to succeed very well, do we? And of course, we get very discouraged, at least for a while, because in practically all the elementary metaphysical schools of thought, we are taught over and over again, we are told, just reverse your image, just hold the positive thought and all will be well. Well, this is more easily said than done though, isn't it? And yet they make it sound as though it can be done, one, two, three. And indeed this is one of the primary reasons that so many aspirants makes the little headway on the path, because after a while they actually get discouraged at least in a part of their nature, and though they cling to the metaphysical thinking because they realize there is truth in it, still on the other hand the way of life, the laughter, the joy, the riches, the fulfillment, these seem to get lost in the shuffle, mainly because subconsciously we have a tendency to become very discouraged.

Now then as you know the Qabalistic school of training tells you honestly always that all these things may be attained but they are not attained as readily or as easily as some schools of thought would tell you and the reasons for this happen to be many of course but we will go into a few of them and try to show how we can utilize these principles more effectively.

And indeed, we must learn how sooner or later.

Now then, as we know, the subconsciousness is the aspect of consciousness which holds the habitual patterns of thinking and feeling. Not only those patterns which we have developed in this incarnation, but the patterns that go way back to God knows when.

And if you recall, we have also told you it isn't important, it isn't at all important to remember past incarnations in order to find the patterns. Because what we do basically is this.

When we are an embryo in the mother's womb, when we are building our physical vehicle, what we do is recapitulate the entire physical evolution.

Of humanity the entire growth process is quickly recapitulated in the mother's womb until it is time to come out with a human form although it is still very small very clumsy it is a human form now then from the time of birth this is what is not usually recognized we recapitulate the psychological evolution of humanity, or shall we say the evolution of consciousness.

We each and every one of us recapitulate this. In our infancy, the recapitulation is in terms of the mass consciousness, of the undifferentiated instinctive aspects of consciousness still. And little by little, as the vehicle develops its centers of attraction to the higher consciousness, to the self-consciousness, to the magnetic currents, the individual evolution of each one of us starts becoming recapitulated at that spot little by little. So that through our childhood and through our adolescence, we invariably recapitulate our own personal evolutionary stream or the evolution of that which we may call our personality.

Now, because of this, all we need to do to understand and discover some of our patterns is to analyze what our tendencies were from the time we were small children which we still have not changed.

Mind you, which we still have not changed because some of the tendencies are part of the race aspect.

But those which we cling to, those which keep coming back over and over again in recurrent cycles, cycles, are those patterns within which our consciousness is still imprisoned. It's stuck, more or less, because it keeps building the same kind of experience for itself over and over and over again, until some of us can become very weary, as we know. And so this kind of analysis is most helpful. However, one has to know how to search and what to search for. And this is where where tarot, of course, is so vital and so important.

Because what we do, even in looking back and trying to analyze and find what our recurrent immaturities have been, we usually actually try to hide from ourselves the true pattern.

And we therefore discover things that aren't so and go ahead working on illusions or non-realities. This is a tendency of consciousness to try to hide from itself its true weaknesses, its true immaturities, in order not to suffer the discomforts of really finding the, shall we say, savage or barbaric or immature aspects of our drives, which still reside in our nature. And the reason for this happens to be we're ashamed, which incidentally in itself hinders us. Because by being ashamed we set up a block we make it less available to our consciousness because whenever we're ashamed we have to hide, do we not? That is one of the reasons that in the entire tarot technique in the lessons you receive at home that you have to work with every single day that is one of the reasons that we keep giving you technique after technique to help you change your identification of self from this personality which is of course an unfinished work to the higher self which is that which is working on the personality growing it so to speak and as we can manage to change our identification as we manage to keep reminding ourselves that it is the self it is the self with a capital S which is growing changing developing this vehicle the personality and remember the personality is more than the body as we do that we become more able to look truth in the face to recognize what's going on deep down underneath and then when we analyze we are able more readily to see the true pattern because we really have more than one pattern but at least we need to work on one at a time and usually we have one main one that needs correction and if you recall again in the reading we gave you from proverbs it mentions there not to be alarmed or to try to run away from the chastening kinds of experience because indeed these are the things which teach us by seeing you understand what kind of experience we are having by hunting for the common denominator for the weakness in our hearts in our souls in our minds which this kind of experience would point to this is the way we can finally discover what it is we need to change and reverse and then again reversing as we mentioned before is not as easy as it sounds it's good work if you can do it now everyone can learn how to do it if they have enough spiritual humility and enough insight to recognize that it's going to take time.

It is in working with the tarot techniques, it is the impact of the archetypal pictorial images upon subconsciousness which gives the stimulation, which gives the awakening awareness, which gives the extra push to help us grab a picture and turn it upside down or inside out, and all growth, all evolution of consciousness is dependent on learning how to reverse the habitual pictures we have held, which are based on illusion, delusion, immaturity, misinterpretation of life experience.

Let's try to give an example or two to show it more readily, and that way it might help us to find within our own hearts what it is we need to search for.

Well, for example, I know someone who has had a pattern. This is a woman. She has had a recurrent pattern all her life. That is, she has consistently fallen in love with married men who were married incompatibly and unhappily. All her life she has had, I would say, at least a dozen such experiences. She's a very lovely human being. Nevertheless, this has been an almost 100%. She's an extreme case. If we give an extreme case, it shows it more clearly. She has consistently recently repeated this pattern. And in the situation then, she has suffered great pain. She has seen that the man has been incompatibly married, that his actual marriage is an unwholesome sort of thing. Nevertheless, there she has been right in the center. She has worked on releasing her beloved from this unwholesome pattern, weaning him away from a disruptive situation this is her kind of this is her description incidentally of the situations which we are giving you and in due time she has managed almost a hundred percent not quite almost to get the man to actually break the situation only she never got the man somebody else did then and then she was off again interesting is it not all right now analysis this particular woman because she has been very strongly educated in modern psychology has had a tendency to hunt for and analyze more in terms of modern modern psychological interpretation which incidentally is a a great mistake because although there's much good in some of the ideas on the whole they can get terribly wild as we think and hope you know well in this particular instance she has felt that the pattern that she has repeated has been this particular thing that she loved her father hated her mother, wanted to take her father away from her mother. But she never outgrew this and therefore she has consistently been taking married men and fathers away from their wives and mothers because of the unhappy marriage that has there been involved. And because the pattern has been consistent, she has has felt that she's never been able to overcome it yet.

But then about two years ago, in discussing this, she found herself in the same situation all over again.

And this time she had been studying tarot. Indeed, she'd gotten quite a little ways, had been very, very faithful in her practices.

And suddenly there it appeared again. Here was a nice married man, lovely, very much in love with her, tied to a wife who really didn't want him or love him, but she needed him for the prestige. She had a position that demanded that she be a happily married woman. That is the wife did. And so there was no marriage at all, just like two strangers living in the house. Nevertheless she would not give this man a divorce. And this student, this aspirant we are telling you about, started off with her usual unselfish happy pattern responses as they usually were at the beginning you know the joy of love I shall save this man and so she proceeded to talk to him and analyze and whatnot and then all of a sudden while she was doing her tarot practices and incidentally we had this little it was in one of her tarot interpretation tableau studies that's in the tarot interpretation course where this key was a central key the reversal idea and all of a sudden while she was meditating she suddenly had a flash of insight and a flash of true realization and she saw that every single one of these husbands were in an unhappy marriage because that's what they wanted they had their need to be miserable or to be martyred or to be mistreated and that her drive to go save them was quite a hopeless thing to begin with they didn't want to be saved we pick what we want whether we we realize it or not. She suddenly realized that all these men had picked this kind of marriage because they wanted this type of thing. They wanted an excuse to either be unhappy or to feel like martyrs, which is again being unhappy, or to be able to justify their inability to give love by showing that after all with this kind of a female how can one etc see these are subtle things so that she saw that first of all she had been rationalizing something always thinking these men want to be saved when they didn't really not in their bottom hearts of course consciously they did we all think consciously that we want out and our great problem is and this is true you see not only of the men that she was thinking about it's true of all of us we consciously think that we want out of certain unhappy limiting situations we think we want out in relation to adversity but something in us does not want release from adversity and that's something in us then clings to the adversity by repeating its pattern over and over again even though consciously we think that we want release you see we are ambivalent we are a house divided because we have not yet brought an integration between our self-conscious and subconscious minds, we have not yet had the glorious experience of the self marrying those two aspects of our being so that they work in harmony like in the lovers, key six.

And so we are usually a house divided. And as long as we are a house divided, one part of us will think we want something and but the underneath part, which is the true driving force, it is the universal substance.

The things we will say and do and think consciously will always feed the pattern.

And even when we think we are doing things to solve our unhappy situation, our what we do not know is as long as we are tied to that subconscious pattern everything we do will be unrealistic based on illusion on misinterpretation and the end result will be going in the same door wherein we were trying to get out from because our conscious minds will not work effectively as long long as the subconscious intention remains adverse as far as happiness, fulfillment, and all good as we think of it happens to be.

So that is one of the reasons, incidentally, that we have what is often called failures. It's because all of us has not been working on it, because we have not yet stirred subconscious conscious recognition to self-consciousness as yet and this is why it's so vital to work and to be prepared to work regularly assiduously in a determined dogged manner in a disciplined continuous manner to find out exactly what ticks and it takes something like the tarot we need help just working on it in an abstract way or just thinking round and round in circles doesn't do it we need help that's why the great masters and adepts have given us this help in these magnificent pictorial images as a device to truly drive into the inner worlds of our own beingness and find out what they're like and then use these same images to to help us to reverse what it is that we discover is a basic causative factor.

Now then, in telling you this story about the aspirant who finally had this realization, this wasn't all of the realization.

She also realized that she had been using the modern psychological interpretation as a rationalization to keep herself from recognizing that in essence she has continuously chosen situations which would not come to fruition because she did not want to have to prove that she can get a man, love him, keep him. She felt insecure emotionally.

And this was her way of rationalizing herself out. You see if you have such tough luck and such bad karma that's what aspirants always like to attribute everything to you know their bad karma yet what is bad karma bad karma is only an immature pattern that we haven't recognized yet it's what we recognize today and work on today that gives gives us tomorrow. And to think of things in terms of bad karma is utterly erroneous. It's merely the unhappy, frustrating situation that is going to drive us to try to find out what it's all about and what to do about it. So it's not bad karma, it's good karma. Without adversity we don't seem to get desperate enough to truly start traveling on the path. But But once we recognize this principle, the point is we do not have to have the at least same degree of adversity. And though no one can eliminate all unhappy experiences, after all, we're all members of the one race and we all participate together in the one life.

What we can do is develop such a centered awareness of who and what we are and what doeth the works through us, that certainly any so-called adverse experiences that come will be able to recognize them and do something about them so quickly that we'll hardly know they were adverse at all.

And these are the tests, too, on the path, naturally.

You know, the master who is in charge of our work from the inner school once told Dr. Case and myself and Mrs. Case that aspirants make a very great mistake in thinking that a master of wisdom functions as a master all the time.

He said that the masters are human beings, just like you and I, that when they are functioning as a master, they are masters. In other words, when they have certain work to do that requires the usage of the powers they have developed and learned how to control. They focus themselves in that, and during those periods, whether it's a job that's going to take an hour or several hours, they are completely channeled in terms of the true insight, realization, guidance, cosmic forces, and so on. But they are also people.

They also have personalities.

And he told us that when they are functioning in their personalities, they have to be just as much on guard as we do, not to let the illusions sweep them away. They have had to learn to use the discipline to continuously remind themselves that this is an illusion, and not to let their emotions get swept in. Because we share as a group as a being we are all don't forget Adam the son of God and we do share these washings and when you consider these washings of consciousness when you consider how immature humanity truly is you must realize that even the masters of wisdom when they are in their personalities get get the impact of these thinking feelings that sweep back and forth. We all live within the same ocean, even though we each have our own little whirlpool or our own bay or our own little garden to cultivate.

We still get the forces flowing from other directions too.

And so they have to keep themselves continuously on guard and one of the great mistakes he told us was that when aspirants have worked very hard on some trait to reverse it and they start succeeding quite well they will often start letting down you see and you cannot do that while you're functioning in the world and it's our need to function in the the world or we wouldn't be here so what occurs when an aspirant lets down no matter how much of certain traits the aspirant has worked on to develop the minute he lets down for a while in will come rushing the old pattern because the old pattern is not that completely transmuted that readily there are tests and tests that come and he who recognizes it and knows it is not going to be in danger of being swept away by currents he's going to know how to recognize it and do something instantly so we need this aid we need this recognition that the transmutation of patterns of adversity have to be worked on continuously this does not mean that we don't go out and enjoy a show or company socials of course we do these are all part of the beauty of life and we should feel we deserve to enjoy these things or God would not have created them we should feel that we need to share it together in fraternal harmony no matter what the human being is or the group happens to be that we need to share this basic underneath love unity by walking or dancing or playing some games yet so many aspirants look down on a little recreation that's another thing you know the master scolded us very much because we worked from early morning until sometimes one and two the next morning continuously we were very much scolded for this and he said that the relaxation is as vital for growth of the soul just as vital as the actual positive work and yet so many aspirants feel guilty if they take a couple three hours off to have a little recreation they figure they should be at it all the time well if If they feel guilty, they'll start hunting for the patterns.

I think they will discover that they keep themselves in a state of martyrdom or unhappiness most of the time because this is a pattern, feeling guilty about any pleasure.

And indeed, this is one of the basic problems with most aspirants, in case you don't know it, is guilt at pleasure.

And then some people love to keep themselves poor financially. They don't know it.

They think they want money and they want security, but let them go out and ask for a job and they'll emanate.

They'll emanate from their subconsciousness everything that's necessary to be told, we don't want you and we don't need you.

He who truly wants security has it.

He who truly wants happiness has it because the pictures that we make don't forget we are the creators of our own lives we and we alone and when we say we remember it's in terms of the self growing the personality as long as the personality is immature naturally whatever pictures it holds are going to be the warped immature pictures and we reap unhappiness but we go on the assumption that anyone who has come to us has at least achieved enough growth maturity so that he has the capacity to recognize the true principles involved has enough discipline to get busy and and work and be willing to keep working so that he is going to truly accomplish that which is necessary in order to reverse the adversity god does not mean for human beings to go through tears and tribulations and wringing of hands lots of people think this means they're spiritual means nothing of the sort all it means is that they need this unhappiness to push them into hunting for the reason for it so they can change it so they can reverse it a human being who feels rich in spirit cannot have financial problems it's impossible that is why the tower works on helping you to develop the feeling of riches and spirit doesn't mean that you're going to be a millionaire that's not being rich that's just having some very extra heavy burdens and responsibilities in administering vast sums of money, food, clothing, shelter, a few luxuries, and in Southern California, without question, a car.

These are the necessities, and we make such a mistake when we think that these necessities must come from the material material universe they don't come from it at all they come from our imaging certainly the material universe is used as a channel but it's our image that brings it our image that which we habitually hold as a thought and feeling about ourselves or our environment or our relationships this is what we experience we create continuously There are those who say kill out desire and stop creating.

Well, anyone who tries it discovers that all that happens is if they manage to bury their desires that they start getting more and more bored.

And this is like a living death.

The Lord of the universe seems to love creation as far as we can tell. There's every evidence of it. Look at all the flowers strewn long for our feet to trot on and if we would step around them instead of stepping on them this preciousness of form and of life if we felt it deeply enough would manifest in our personal lives riches if we feel rich in in consciousness it's impossible for us to ever suffer physical hunger for lack of money or to be homeless impossible so if anyone has financial problems start hunting for why you will feel so poor in spirit work with your tarot and reverse it the tarot will help you to reverse it but you can't just study for half an hour an hour a day you've got to practice it you've got to you've got to put it into operation in your home where you begin where you are in your home with your family where you work with your friends everywhere and anywhere you put this reverse thought into operation and you feed it with emotion and it is not like some people who like to poke a little fun at metaphysical thoughts saying well you deny that you're miserable and presto there's a miracle no in true occultism you recognize the misery and you say this is enough do I really want to stay miserable well your conscious mind will say no but if you're miserable remember your subconscious mind wanted it and so the thing to do is to start switching transmuting that subconscious pattern and how do we do it again we need the tarot to hold to live we need to walk the tarot talk the tarot breathe the tarot and then when we get to that point the tree of life with the tarot together, to integrate, to control these pictures and images. Why should we walk around feeling lonely? If we do, we're manufacturing a picture of not having people around us to love us and understand us and for us to love and understand, aren't we? Why should we walk around feeling lack when there's so much to attract the riches just you can even just sit in your own room and look around at your walls and at your clothes look out your window this is a miracle he who deliberately works on feeling and and expressing the joy of livingness in terms of God lives me.

That's why our prayers are what they are, to help bring that impact ever more fully into your subconsciousness in our services.

He who works on this God lives me, in all its ramifications, manages to find and transmute all those areas in the nature that have been stuck in this rut, this pattern of rejection, of always picking, say, the wrong boyfriend or the wrong husband, or always making sure that we're going to be rejected in our hunt for positions, work, or picking the kind of business partner who's going to betray us. This we do deliberately, from that subconscious pattern level and this is what's so hard to recognize and acknowledge to ourselves never though nevertheless don't forget when we say deliberately what we mean is that we are divided and there is a part of us it isn't that all of us if all of us were that deliberate about it there'd be no hope but you see the higher self and the self-conscious mind have have other ideas and it's because of this that the changes can be made, the transmutations can be affected into that area of our being, that subconsciousness, which has kept projecting and re-projecting our unhappiness, our disappointments, our betrayals, our frustrations, our adversities.

And because we have all the help there is we need to start working assiduously at pouring out from within our own center all the true principles of beingness as taught you in the tarot and the tree of life we have to start practicing joy and love and discrimination let's not forget discrimination discrimination. Sometimes an aspirant reaches a point where living in a very unhappy environment, say, or a frustrating relationship, the aspirant can reach a point where he recognizes the place in his own heart that has attracted it to begin with. Now then, often the question is asked, what shall we do about that? Here is an adversity.

Now if the aspirant still wants to remain miserable subconsciously what the aspirant will usually do and of course it's any anybody does this anyway but what the aspirant is what we're concerned with the aspirant will usually say well this is now my bitter karma I don't want to make any bad karma. So I'll just have to put up with this situation and then they remain, say, with, let's say, an alcoholic husband or an alcoholic wife. In other words, with an individual who really is out to destroy them, subconsciously at least. You know, there are such relationships based on what we call the negative attachment. All right we get a whole lot of noble ideas about responsibility and grin and bear it you know we spirituality and actually all that we have done my darlings is use a spiritual principle to to rationalize weakness and inability to handle the forces of adversity to reverse them.

Because in truth, we do need, first of all, to recognize what it is in us that brought us this kind of situation. That's point number one. Once we realize this, what we need to do is try to change it. In other words change our own expectations and feelings that is start seeing ourselves as children of god with good and glorious gifts of god as our due mind you as our due if we aren't martyrs at heart we will be very willing to see this any mother and father wants wants the child to have all good. And do you think God is any different, for heaven's sakes? Are we so much nicer than God that we will want our children to have all good and God won't want it for us?

Gee, what superiority complexes we can develop then, you see the idea.

So we need to first do something about changing our own expectation and make up our minds we will not be doormats because again this is a need to be mistreated when we permit another human being to speak to us in such a way as to bring an indignity upon us we are breaking a law that other person is immature and has a need to act in that kind of destructive manner but if we permit someone to continuously treat us in a truly destructive manner then we are contributing to the weakness of that individual and we deserve everything we get as we've told you before we certainly do because if you remember just a couple of weeks ago he said if I think it was Voltaire who said if there is anything more reprehensible than a tyrant it's the victim you see in such cases the victim chooses to remain and be tyrannized although the victim in a spiritual thought or at least an occultism will call it by beautiful names that's where we rationalize and fool ourselves so much in order to feed these weaknesses so we need to first do something about changing our expectations about our own beingness we need to see whether this change in ourselves might not change that other person because you see other people will often change their attitudes towards us if we change what we expect they often will and it happens over and over again if the environment or situation has something that is valuable and constructive in the relationship things will will change. But if it doesn't, then it's because that other individual is unable to respond to a positive constructive aspect in a relationship. And in that case, as it is taught in esoteric spiritual work, that after doing everything possible to change the situation, if you cannot and that situation is destructive, it is your responsibility to yourself and the person to leave it if you have first done all the rest but you see this takes discrimination and that's another reason it's so important to work with the tarot because to have love really isn't enough because there are many love without wisdom without understanding without discrimination can become weakness, and God is the pair of opposites forever growing its instruments. Therefore, although love is an essential understanding, wisdom, and discrimination, the knowledge that we are all different degrees of mature and immature, mature, that we all have different tendencies and degrees of tendencies, the understanding that there are some people that are not capable of responding to love. After all, look at the story about Jesus. Everybody wasn't capable of responding to his love. Well, we need to recognize this then. But first, we need to be sure we're not going to use that as another rationalization to keep us from facing our own hearts. And the reward, of course, is truly staggering to the degree that we do see exactly what our real tendencies are, the kind of pictures we've really been holding and work on reversing these pictures. To that degree do we find that life is full of joy, life Life is full of riches.

Life is full of excitement. It's an adventure, and this is what it's meant to be. That's why The Fool starts off the tarot series. He's the great adventurer. Gay.

He carries his experience lightly on his, you know, on a staff over his shoulder and forever going out and growing his consciousness.

This is us. We are the sons and daughters of God. We are truly safe we cannot get lost but we can sure have an awful rough time of it for a while until we start acknowledging who and what we are and start working with it in the deepest richest and fullest measure as we are taught to do so in essence perhaps it might amount to this when we get miserable enough to be tired of being miserable, perhaps this is the time we really get to work and attract something that is actually going to help us get out of it. Till then we might get little temporary reliefs, but we'll usually go up and down, up and down, and find out every five, ten years that we're in the same type of trouble we were in before.

This perhaps from now on we will be able to avoid and really travel the spiral on larger and larger measurements of differentiation which brings us then as we know to a riches that is beyond anything which can be told we can only experience it to know it in the transmutation of this basic expectation, this emotional picturing, which uses the mind also. In the transmutation of that, we discover that ever since time began, we have been the creators. We have been, of course, quite wild in some of our creations, and there are times when we've been surrealists in our artistic endeavors in other words we've gotten some pretty uh awful and amazing effects on our canvases but still in the doing in the doing we've developed ever more ability to control our spiritual muscular structure so to speak and so every sorrow every tear every so-called mistake is more than worth it because it has developed and does develop the ability to handle our thinking-feeling processes more effectively once we've started to truly work on the reversal of adversity in the ways that are effective.