Meditations on the Tarot - Excerpts
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2023 2:59 pm
I am sharing here some very interesting excerpts from Letter 2 of 'Meditations on the Tarot', which images the fourfold convolutions of spiritual reality, which Cleric has also illustrated several times here. I find it really helpful to contemplate the image of the High Priestess in conjunction with the following text (I chose a more colorful and detailed image than the one presented in the book, which could also have drawbacks). We don't need to analyze the image for every detail or to make rigid associations with the words, but can let it work more loosely and fluidly on our heartfelt thinking as a living token of remembrance. That is originally how and why these images came into be-ing through the work of initiates. They were never meant as mere food for the discursive intellect, which is what we normally find in modern commentaries.
The text highlights how higher development consists in working on the attunement of our be-ing across all folds of the spiritual convolution, as a living, organic structure. Clearly that is neglected by many spiritual paths today, such as exoteric religious and 'nondual' mystical approaches. Even if the latter proclaims to work holistically on the body-soul-spirit organism in theory, it fails to do so in practice, which is evident from the sort of thinking (or inclination not to think) which results from it. The lower personality is not redeemed through such a mystical path but abandoned, which ironically only reinforces its tendencies during normal waking life. Inevitably the soul-life fragments and reality is only viewed through the confines of personal feelings and restricted conceptions. There is a lot more detail between these excerpts which can be viewed at the link Federica previously shared. Any if anyone else is inclined to share passages which resonated with their spiritual seeking, please do!
***
As we have pointed out, one becomes conscious of the pure act of intelligence only by means of its reflection. We require an inner mirror in order to be conscious of the pure act or to know “whence it comes or whither it goes”. The breath of the Spirit—or the pure act of intelligence—is certainly an event, but it does not suffice, itself alone, for us to become conscious of it. Con-sciousness (con-science) is the result of two principles—the active, activating principle and the passive, reflecting principle. In order to know from where the breath of the Spirit comes and where it goes, Water is required to reflect it. This is why the conversation of the Master with Nicodemus, to which we have referred, enunciates the absolute condition for the conscious experience of the Divine Spirit—or the Kingdom of God:
"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." (John iii, 5)
“Truly, truly”—the Master refers here twice to “truth” in this mantric (i.e. magical) formula of the reality of consciousness. By these words he states that full consciousness of the truth is the result of “inbreathed” truth and reflected truth. Reintegrated consciousness, which is the Kingdom of God, presupposes two renovations, of a significance comparable to birth, in the two constituent elements of consciousness—active Spirit and reflecting Water. Spirit must become divine Breath in place of arbitrary, personal activity, and Water must become a perfect mirror of the divine Breath instead of being agitated by disturbances of the imagination, passions and personal desires. Reintegrated consciousness must be born of Water and Spirit, after Water has once again become Virginal and Spirit has once again become divine Breath or the Holy Spirit.
...Christian yoga does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two. This is very important for understanding the standpoint which one takes towards the infinitely serious problem of unity and duality. For this problem can open the door to truly divine mysteries and can also close them to us…for ever, perhaps, who knows? Everything Everything depends on its comprehension. We can decide in favour of monism and say to ourselves that there can be only one sole essence, one sole being. Or we can decide—in view of considerable historical and personal experience—in favour of dualism and say to ourselves that there are two principles in the world: good and evil, spirit and matter, and that, entirely incomprehensible though this duality is at root, it must be admitted as an incontestable fact. We can, moreover, decide in favour of a third point of view, namely that of love as the cosmic principle which presupposes duality and postulates its non-substantial but essential unity.
...
"All who came before me are thieves and robbers." (John x, 8)
There is a profound mystery in these words. Indeed, how may they be understood alongside numerous other sayings of the Master referring to Moses, David and other prophets, who were all before him? Now, it is a matter here not of theft and robbery, but of the principle of initiation before and after Jesus Christ. The masters prior to His Coming taught the experience of God at the expense of the personality, which had to be diminished when it was “seized” by God or “immersed” in God. In this sense—in the sense of the diminution or augmentation of the “talent of gold” entrusted to humanity, the personality, which is the “image and likeness of God” (Goethe: Das höchste Gut der Erdenkinder ist doch die Personlichkeit, i.e. “The highest treasure of the children of earth is surely the personality”)—the masters prior to Christ were “thieves and robbers”. They certainly bore testimony to God but the way which they taught and practised was that of depersonalisation, which made them witnesses (“martyrs”) of God. The greatness of Bhagavan, the Buddha, was the high degree of depersonalisation which he attained. The masters of yoga are masters of depersonalisation. The ancient philosophers—those who really lived as “philosophers”—practised depersonalisation. This is the case above all with the Stoics. And this is why all those who have chosen the way of depersonalisation are unable to cry and why they have dry eyes for ever. For it is the personality which cries and which alone is capable of the “gift of tears”.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew v, 4).
Therefore this is one aspect at least (there is also another more profound one, but I do not know if it will be possible to write about it in one of the following Letters) according to which we may say that the mysterious words relating to “thieves and robbers” can become a source of radiant light. When the Gospel speaks of those who came before Jesus Christ, it is not only time which the word “before” designates, but also the grade of initiation—they are thieves and robbers with respect to the personality, since they taught the depersonalisation of the human being. In contrast, the Master also says: “I have come that they (the sheep) may have life, and have it abundantly” (John x, 10); in other words, the Master has come in order to render more living that which is dear to him and which is menaced with dangers, i.e. the sheep as the image of the personality! This appears inconceivable in the presence of the ideal of the personality according to Nietzsche and his “superman” or the great historical personalities such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon…and the “great personalities” of modern times!
No, dear Unknown Friend, possession by the will-to-power or the will-to-glory makes neither the personality nor its greatness. The “sheep” in the language of love of the Master signify neither the “great personality” nor the “little personality”, but simply the individual soul which lives. He wants the soul to live without danger and to have as intensive a life as God has destined for it.
...This, therefore, is all that it seems to me necessary to say on the subject of the problem of two and its significance—the resolution of this problem being the key to the second Arcanum, the High Priestess. For this is the arcanum of the twofoldness underlying consciousness—spontaneous activity and its reflection; it is the arcanum of the transformation of the pure act into representation, of representation into memory pictures, of memory pictures into the word, and of the word into written characters or the book. The High Priestess wears a three-layered tiara and holds an open book. The tiara is laden with precious stones, which suggests the idea that it is by way of three stages that the crystallisation of the pure act descends through the three higher and invisible planes before arriving at the fourth stage—the book. For the problems that the symbol implies are: reflection, memory, word and writing; or, in other words—revelation and tradition, spoken and written; or, to express it in a single word—GNOSIS.
It is concerned with gnosis and not at all with science, since gnosis is exactly what the Card of the High Priestess expresses both in its entirety and in its details, namely the descent of revelation (the pure act or essence reflected by substance) down to the final stage—or “book”. Science, on the contrary, begins with facts (the “characters” of the book of Nature) and ascends from facts to laws and from laws to principles. Gnosis is the reflection of that which is above; science, in contrast, is the interpretation of that which is below. The last stage of gnosis is the world of facts, where it becomes fact itself, i.e. it becomes “book”; the first stage of science is the world of facts which it “reads”, in order to arrive at laws and principles....The essence of pure mysticism is creative activity. One becomes a mystic when one dares to elevate oneself—i.e. “to stand upright”, then even more upright, and ever more upright—beyond all created being as far as the essence of Being, the divine, creative fire. “Concentration without effort” is burning without smoke or crackling fire. On the part of the human being it is the act of daring to aspire to the supreme Reality, and this act is real and effective only when the soul is serene and the body completely relaxed—without smoke and crackling fire...
Now, this transformation of mystical experience into knowledge takes place in stages. The first is the pure reflection or a kind of imaginative repetition of the experience. The second stage is its entrance into memory. The third stage is its assimilation in thought and feeling, in a manner where it becomes a “message” or inner word. The fourth stage, lastly, is reached when it becomes a communicable symbol or “writing”, or “book”—i.e. when it is formulated. The pure reflection of mystical experience is without image and without word. It is purely movement. Here consciousness is moved by the immediate contact with that which transcends it, with the trans-subjective. This experience is as certain as the experience belonging to the sense of touch in the physical world and is, at the same time, as much devoid of form, colour and sound as the sense of touch. For this reason one can compare it with this sense and designate it as “spiritual touch” or “intuition”. ...Just as spiritual touch is the mystical sense, so there is a “gnostic sense”, a “magical sense” and a special “Hermetic-philosophical sense”. Full consciousness of the sacred name YHVH can only be attained by the united experience of these four senses and the practice of four different methods. For the fundamental thesis of Hermetic epistemology (or “gnoseology”) is that “each object of knowledge demands a method of knowledge which is proper to it”. This thesis or rule signifies that one ought never to apply the same method of knowledge on different planes, but only to different objects belonging to the same plane. A crying example of ignorance of this law is “cybernetic psychology”, which wants to explain man and his psychic life by mechanical, material laws.
Each mode of experience and knowledge when pushed to its limit becomes a sense or engenders a special sense. He who dares to aspire to the experience of the unique essence of Being will develop the mystical sense or spiritual touch. If he wants not only to live but also to learn to understand what he lives through, he will develop the gnostic sense. And if he wants to put into practice what he has understood from mystical experience, he will develop the magical sense. If, lastly, he wants all that he has experienced, understood and practised to be not limited to himself and his time, but to become communicable to others and to be transmitted to future generations, he must develop the Hermetic-philosophical sense, and in practising it he will “write his book”.
...The tradition is a living one only when it constitutes a complete organism, when it is the result of the union of mysticism, gnosis, magic and Hermetic philosophy. If this is not so, it decays and dies. And the death of the tradition manifests itself in the degeneration of its constituent elements, which become separated. Then, Hermetic philosophy separated from magic, gnosis and mysticism becomes a parasitic system of autonomous thought which is, truth to tell, a veritable psycho-pathological complex, because it bewitches or enslaves human consciousness and deprives it of its liberty. A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed.
...
Passing on to mysticism which has not given birth to gnosis, magic and Hermetic philosophy—such a mysticism must, sooner or later, necessarily degenerate into “spiritual enjoyment” or “intoxication”. The mystic who wants only the experience of mystical states without understanding them, without drawing practical conclusions from them for life, and without wanting to be useful to others, who forgets everyone and everything in order to enjoy the mystical experience, can be compared to a spiritual drunkard. So tradition can only live—as with all other living organisms—when it is a complete organism of mysticism, gnosis and effective magic, which manifests itself outwardly as Hermetic philosophy. This means to say simply that a tradition cannot live unless the whole human being lives through it, in it, and for it. For the whole human being is at one and the same time a mystic, a gnostic, a magician and a philosopher, i.e. he is religious, contemplative, artistic and intelligent. Everyone believes in something, understands something, is capable of something and thinks something. It is human nature which determines whether a tradition will live or die. And it is also human nature which is capable of giving birth to a complete tradition and keeping it living. Because the four “senses”—mystical, gnostic, magical and philosophical—exist, be it in potentiality or in actuality, in each human being.
Anonymous . Meditations on the Tarot (pp. 42-43). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The text highlights how higher development consists in working on the attunement of our be-ing across all folds of the spiritual convolution, as a living, organic structure. Clearly that is neglected by many spiritual paths today, such as exoteric religious and 'nondual' mystical approaches. Even if the latter proclaims to work holistically on the body-soul-spirit organism in theory, it fails to do so in practice, which is evident from the sort of thinking (or inclination not to think) which results from it. The lower personality is not redeemed through such a mystical path but abandoned, which ironically only reinforces its tendencies during normal waking life. Inevitably the soul-life fragments and reality is only viewed through the confines of personal feelings and restricted conceptions. There is a lot more detail between these excerpts which can be viewed at the link Federica previously shared. Any if anyone else is inclined to share passages which resonated with their spiritual seeking, please do!
***
As we have pointed out, one becomes conscious of the pure act of intelligence only by means of its reflection. We require an inner mirror in order to be conscious of the pure act or to know “whence it comes or whither it goes”. The breath of the Spirit—or the pure act of intelligence—is certainly an event, but it does not suffice, itself alone, for us to become conscious of it. Con-sciousness (con-science) is the result of two principles—the active, activating principle and the passive, reflecting principle. In order to know from where the breath of the Spirit comes and where it goes, Water is required to reflect it. This is why the conversation of the Master with Nicodemus, to which we have referred, enunciates the absolute condition for the conscious experience of the Divine Spirit—or the Kingdom of God:
"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." (John iii, 5)
“Truly, truly”—the Master refers here twice to “truth” in this mantric (i.e. magical) formula of the reality of consciousness. By these words he states that full consciousness of the truth is the result of “inbreathed” truth and reflected truth. Reintegrated consciousness, which is the Kingdom of God, presupposes two renovations, of a significance comparable to birth, in the two constituent elements of consciousness—active Spirit and reflecting Water. Spirit must become divine Breath in place of arbitrary, personal activity, and Water must become a perfect mirror of the divine Breath instead of being agitated by disturbances of the imagination, passions and personal desires. Reintegrated consciousness must be born of Water and Spirit, after Water has once again become Virginal and Spirit has once again become divine Breath or the Holy Spirit.
...Christian yoga does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two. This is very important for understanding the standpoint which one takes towards the infinitely serious problem of unity and duality. For this problem can open the door to truly divine mysteries and can also close them to us…for ever, perhaps, who knows? Everything Everything depends on its comprehension. We can decide in favour of monism and say to ourselves that there can be only one sole essence, one sole being. Or we can decide—in view of considerable historical and personal experience—in favour of dualism and say to ourselves that there are two principles in the world: good and evil, spirit and matter, and that, entirely incomprehensible though this duality is at root, it must be admitted as an incontestable fact. We can, moreover, decide in favour of a third point of view, namely that of love as the cosmic principle which presupposes duality and postulates its non-substantial but essential unity.
...
"All who came before me are thieves and robbers." (John x, 8)
There is a profound mystery in these words. Indeed, how may they be understood alongside numerous other sayings of the Master referring to Moses, David and other prophets, who were all before him? Now, it is a matter here not of theft and robbery, but of the principle of initiation before and after Jesus Christ. The masters prior to His Coming taught the experience of God at the expense of the personality, which had to be diminished when it was “seized” by God or “immersed” in God. In this sense—in the sense of the diminution or augmentation of the “talent of gold” entrusted to humanity, the personality, which is the “image and likeness of God” (Goethe: Das höchste Gut der Erdenkinder ist doch die Personlichkeit, i.e. “The highest treasure of the children of earth is surely the personality”)—the masters prior to Christ were “thieves and robbers”. They certainly bore testimony to God but the way which they taught and practised was that of depersonalisation, which made them witnesses (“martyrs”) of God. The greatness of Bhagavan, the Buddha, was the high degree of depersonalisation which he attained. The masters of yoga are masters of depersonalisation. The ancient philosophers—those who really lived as “philosophers”—practised depersonalisation. This is the case above all with the Stoics. And this is why all those who have chosen the way of depersonalisation are unable to cry and why they have dry eyes for ever. For it is the personality which cries and which alone is capable of the “gift of tears”.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew v, 4).
Therefore this is one aspect at least (there is also another more profound one, but I do not know if it will be possible to write about it in one of the following Letters) according to which we may say that the mysterious words relating to “thieves and robbers” can become a source of radiant light. When the Gospel speaks of those who came before Jesus Christ, it is not only time which the word “before” designates, but also the grade of initiation—they are thieves and robbers with respect to the personality, since they taught the depersonalisation of the human being. In contrast, the Master also says: “I have come that they (the sheep) may have life, and have it abundantly” (John x, 10); in other words, the Master has come in order to render more living that which is dear to him and which is menaced with dangers, i.e. the sheep as the image of the personality! This appears inconceivable in the presence of the ideal of the personality according to Nietzsche and his “superman” or the great historical personalities such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon…and the “great personalities” of modern times!
No, dear Unknown Friend, possession by the will-to-power or the will-to-glory makes neither the personality nor its greatness. The “sheep” in the language of love of the Master signify neither the “great personality” nor the “little personality”, but simply the individual soul which lives. He wants the soul to live without danger and to have as intensive a life as God has destined for it.
...This, therefore, is all that it seems to me necessary to say on the subject of the problem of two and its significance—the resolution of this problem being the key to the second Arcanum, the High Priestess. For this is the arcanum of the twofoldness underlying consciousness—spontaneous activity and its reflection; it is the arcanum of the transformation of the pure act into representation, of representation into memory pictures, of memory pictures into the word, and of the word into written characters or the book. The High Priestess wears a three-layered tiara and holds an open book. The tiara is laden with precious stones, which suggests the idea that it is by way of three stages that the crystallisation of the pure act descends through the three higher and invisible planes before arriving at the fourth stage—the book. For the problems that the symbol implies are: reflection, memory, word and writing; or, in other words—revelation and tradition, spoken and written; or, to express it in a single word—GNOSIS.
It is concerned with gnosis and not at all with science, since gnosis is exactly what the Card of the High Priestess expresses both in its entirety and in its details, namely the descent of revelation (the pure act or essence reflected by substance) down to the final stage—or “book”. Science, on the contrary, begins with facts (the “characters” of the book of Nature) and ascends from facts to laws and from laws to principles. Gnosis is the reflection of that which is above; science, in contrast, is the interpretation of that which is below. The last stage of gnosis is the world of facts, where it becomes fact itself, i.e. it becomes “book”; the first stage of science is the world of facts which it “reads”, in order to arrive at laws and principles....The essence of pure mysticism is creative activity. One becomes a mystic when one dares to elevate oneself—i.e. “to stand upright”, then even more upright, and ever more upright—beyond all created being as far as the essence of Being, the divine, creative fire. “Concentration without effort” is burning without smoke or crackling fire. On the part of the human being it is the act of daring to aspire to the supreme Reality, and this act is real and effective only when the soul is serene and the body completely relaxed—without smoke and crackling fire...
Now, this transformation of mystical experience into knowledge takes place in stages. The first is the pure reflection or a kind of imaginative repetition of the experience. The second stage is its entrance into memory. The third stage is its assimilation in thought and feeling, in a manner where it becomes a “message” or inner word. The fourth stage, lastly, is reached when it becomes a communicable symbol or “writing”, or “book”—i.e. when it is formulated. The pure reflection of mystical experience is without image and without word. It is purely movement. Here consciousness is moved by the immediate contact with that which transcends it, with the trans-subjective. This experience is as certain as the experience belonging to the sense of touch in the physical world and is, at the same time, as much devoid of form, colour and sound as the sense of touch. For this reason one can compare it with this sense and designate it as “spiritual touch” or “intuition”. ...Just as spiritual touch is the mystical sense, so there is a “gnostic sense”, a “magical sense” and a special “Hermetic-philosophical sense”. Full consciousness of the sacred name YHVH can only be attained by the united experience of these four senses and the practice of four different methods. For the fundamental thesis of Hermetic epistemology (or “gnoseology”) is that “each object of knowledge demands a method of knowledge which is proper to it”. This thesis or rule signifies that one ought never to apply the same method of knowledge on different planes, but only to different objects belonging to the same plane. A crying example of ignorance of this law is “cybernetic psychology”, which wants to explain man and his psychic life by mechanical, material laws.
Each mode of experience and knowledge when pushed to its limit becomes a sense or engenders a special sense. He who dares to aspire to the experience of the unique essence of Being will develop the mystical sense or spiritual touch. If he wants not only to live but also to learn to understand what he lives through, he will develop the gnostic sense. And if he wants to put into practice what he has understood from mystical experience, he will develop the magical sense. If, lastly, he wants all that he has experienced, understood and practised to be not limited to himself and his time, but to become communicable to others and to be transmitted to future generations, he must develop the Hermetic-philosophical sense, and in practising it he will “write his book”.
...The tradition is a living one only when it constitutes a complete organism, when it is the result of the union of mysticism, gnosis, magic and Hermetic philosophy. If this is not so, it decays and dies. And the death of the tradition manifests itself in the degeneration of its constituent elements, which become separated. Then, Hermetic philosophy separated from magic, gnosis and mysticism becomes a parasitic system of autonomous thought which is, truth to tell, a veritable psycho-pathological complex, because it bewitches or enslaves human consciousness and deprives it of its liberty. A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed.
...
Passing on to mysticism which has not given birth to gnosis, magic and Hermetic philosophy—such a mysticism must, sooner or later, necessarily degenerate into “spiritual enjoyment” or “intoxication”. The mystic who wants only the experience of mystical states without understanding them, without drawing practical conclusions from them for life, and without wanting to be useful to others, who forgets everyone and everything in order to enjoy the mystical experience, can be compared to a spiritual drunkard. So tradition can only live—as with all other living organisms—when it is a complete organism of mysticism, gnosis and effective magic, which manifests itself outwardly as Hermetic philosophy. This means to say simply that a tradition cannot live unless the whole human being lives through it, in it, and for it. For the whole human being is at one and the same time a mystic, a gnostic, a magician and a philosopher, i.e. he is religious, contemplative, artistic and intelligent. Everyone believes in something, understands something, is capable of something and thinks something. It is human nature which determines whether a tradition will live or die. And it is also human nature which is capable of giving birth to a complete tradition and keeping it living. Because the four “senses”—mystical, gnostic, magical and philosophical—exist, be it in potentiality or in actuality, in each human being.
Anonymous . Meditations on the Tarot (pp. 42-43). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.