The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

the initiate is truly alive, he always has that sense of dread and it is not because he doesn’t dare. We have learned to survive physically by the senses telling us what is around so that we can act accordingly; for example, if I am a rabbit and five inches away there is a fox, I run away. The acceleration of picking up the message and having to go is what we call excitement. It is life and death, it is sex and survival. Anything that accelerates the senses to make us move is an over-the-top reaction, except when it is for sur vival and to save our skin. Most of us in the western world should not be ‘in excitement’ because we are not living at a time where we have a hunter behind us about to kill us. However, the rest of the world lives on the edge of survival, so we can hold compassion for them. If mass consciousness is still using excitement in creating its own hysterical shows as part of daily life, it is really only because it has not yet grown up, for modern man is very young on the planet in comparison to the millions of years of biological life. Man is like a two or three year old infant still sucking his thumb; this is not a judgment or condemnation, just a statement of fact.

      Using the senses to feel alive comforts us. We can get addicted to the laboratory rather than the research, like an artist who gets addicted to the beauty of the colours, rather than refining his art until he understands that art isn’t necessary. The fact that we need comfort is because we still have the survival aspect in us and so we find other modes besides the natural flight, fight, or rut instincts, to stimulate excitement. The rut in the animal kingdom is not really excitement, though we have described it as such, it is just the mind less push of biologic or organic creativity. This is very relevant in The High Priestess, for we have the two pillars of life that are con stantly mating and that is why they support the temple. When you have the rut in nature, you have the two pillars in action in order to procreate species. We describe it as excitement because mankind has experimented with all the deviations of the sexual act, but in real ity sex is plain and simple and doesn’t have all the bits and pieces, complicating and hiding its true nature. We had to make sensual excitement part of our luggage in order to plunge into the mud of the subconscious and see what is exciting down there, otherwise we would just never have gone for the experience, for who wants to go and get excited on dust? The gift of the senses thus enables us to do the work of purification.

      So The High Priestess puts fear and dread into us. When we real ise that all is mind moving into space, as witnesses we are being used as we have abused; this is what the veil is going to reveal. Biological life has been used from the beginning of time for the purpose of birth ing awareness. We are learning to give our material life in service, as a way through for the higher consciousness. Form is only yesterday’s intent and understanding that needed manifesting, so that through it the great life can recognise itself by us being aware of our reactions. We understand that service is the only thing that we are here to do, so this is our use. Service should not be a means to achieve sainthood or mastery, for in the real energetic life there is nothing else we can be used for. The reality is that we are being used, so we are servants and it is the complete non emotional acceptance of that fait accompli that is the truth. We have to fall in love with the great life beyond the emotional to reach this stage of acceptance. We play lots of games to find out what the experience of being alive feels like from every angle and now we have to put the games away. The High Priestess or Isis knows that she serves the servants of God, who are full of love and compassion and all manner of beautiful things. She serves them because she knows that they can’t pass through that doorway with emotional luggage, so she is there to help them look into their sub conscious emotional needs. The world of God is a world of energy, where love is magnetic and truth is light. In this world of energy, matter is only a way to recognise what the space is made of and to see how beautiful the dance of the energy is. The High Priestess causes dread, because we have to drop all the dreams of childhood; we even have to drop the dreams of the initiate who thinks he is going to help some great God in the sky to save the planet. We really have to die to all that, so that the mind can soar and realise that it is just a spark of light. The message is ‘Just die to everything you aspired to achieve and become, so as to be truly alive’. This is what is meant by the veil tearing, when Jesus was dying on the cross. At this point, Jesus the Soul was pierced by the incoming divine mind, removing any hope of personal glory. The higher mind in the Soul has no other agenda than service to the great life.

      If we have come in front of The High Priestess here, it is because we have surpassed and risen above the little mysteries of life such as science and psychology, which help make us into individuals who can manage life a little bit better. We would have to take several more leaps in consciousness to be in the presence of The High Priest ess. These leaps will reveal the existence of the Soul principle, until eventually we learn to associate with the concept of Soul. Higher intelligence has to be reached though Soul, so aspiration has to be strong enough and high enough, for Soul to come down and mani fest the star of Bethlehem. The star is that part in us where the Soul has reached the higher self and associates with that point of light.

       Figure 1. The Star of Bethlehem. Aligning with the point of light within the Soul.

      When we are in the depth of our despair, we think that no human being has ever suffered as much as us, or ever gone so low. We are very good at holding onto self-pity, but once we finish with self-pity we slowly come up. As we come up we don’t stop at self, because having gone a bit higher, we feel as though we are as Jesus – then we realise we have to come and serve. We come down again quickly because we are happy and eager to serve; beware of the excitement of that!

      The idea is to bring the light down into the subconscious and even if we do it out of pride or weakness, it doesn’t matter, because we are bringing the light in. It is always our own experience and hopefully every time we plunge a little deeper we are gathering a bit more of the mystery.

       Figure 2. ‘As above so below’.

       The movement of the light into the sphere of work. Bringing the wisdom back into the consciousness of humanity, so that it can rise proportionately to its descent, to meet the higher mind of the Soul.

       Figure 3. The star comes down increasingly bringing light into the darkness. Then the light of the star directs and works with the pure instinct of nature.

      The light has met, cleansed, understood and loved whatever it meets with, so it has sublimated the whole of the space. If we come back to a life of crises which sends us into despair and we identify with the despair, then we haven’t stopped getting excited about the experience of the situation, so we are not going to be able to subli mate all the knowledge that we have. To increase our contribution to the realisation of the plan, we must stop focussing on self and stop imprinting through the emotional and intellectual senses. We are useful when we meet the situation and are able to look at it from above with the viewpoint of the star. The star is with us always.

      An intense feeling of despair or joy, would give us the opportu nity to travel with our star (higher mind) to its source in the cellular memory where it is held. Then the light of reality can transmute the personal guilt/victim perception that we have of this specific recur ring emotional/mind-set, into the acceptance of having been used by the light for a rescue job on the subconscious Soul of nature. That is how we ‘redeem’, although actually nothing needs redeeming in the sense of sin. The world was created or ‘deemed’ and all we are doing is revisiting every single little pebble of that creation to name it. We don’t have to own it or carry it on our shoulders, because we can revisit it and be in there completely with truth, to leave it in peace.

      With awareness, we know when we have put ourselves in a dreadful situation, so we don’t make any fuss because we know it will be gone tomorrow; we don’t hold onto it unless we feel self-pity and guilt.

      Any pain that we feel is added onto the original pain. We have to go beyond pain and see from the humble point of view of the fallen Star that there is nothing to it, it is not done to us, it