The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

is when the profane world itself will see us as a real danger. If we look at the prophets, most of them were put to death; the same happened to Jesus the Soul. Purity and fearlessness can be taken as an insult by those who, at some stage of their inner work are rebelling against the acceptance of their imperfection. They have so many little points of darkness that they think we are judging and sneering. Even if we give compassion, they will take it as false charity because they cannot read us; we have become an aspect of The High Priestess. They know that there is danger for the personality here and they don’t like it, because it might mean that they have to look at themselves. When they see us, what they are really looking at is themselves, so they are throwing a stone at us, because we come and disturb. The purity of the initiate will stir the profane world.

      The profane is known by everybody; it is the social life, the pro fessional life, the personality, the theatre, the position, the drama.

      The sacred is not recognised by most people, but will be perceived by the ones who are more advanced on the path. This is because they don’t see the social life; they see the face of the inner life, the true reality of the human being. You are looking for the name of that essence – the true you.

      The profane and the sacred will be merged as life.

      The intellect has given us everything it can by the time it has achieved the realisation of its powerlessness; this is the greatest gift from the mother to the son. The intellect is the best thing that nature could give to the son of mind and she says, “I can’t do any more for you now, you are by yourself. I can’t protect you, I can’t explain life, I can’t drive you; you must go and do it by yourself”. How many good mothers would be completely silent and stop ‘supporting’ in the sense of feeding with the intellect? How many mothers would truly know not to give any advice to their children unless they are asked for it? This non-interference is the greatest gift we can give our children. When the intellect has understood that it has to give up and that it is completely powerless, then man can start to grow into the ‘angel’ of his own Soul. Then the Soul is a reflection between divinity and man, so is receptive to God. The light fecunds the Soul, so she attracts the light and it feeds her with knowledge and intui tion. In perceiving the light she is feminine, but when she becomes the intellect and translates, she becomes masculine or active.

      The Black Sphinx is not really frightening; he’s just doing the job of making certain that anything hidden within us must come to the surface. When we meet him, all the thoughts that most of us can not control and all the needs and wants that we have ever accumulated, are going to rise to be dissolved in the light of the Soul. This continues as we come up, until we come to the point of initiation, which is the point of death of the old patterns. Those under currents and chain reactions within us that we think we have no con trol over, will come in front of us and are actual entities. We are talking about ‘abuse and the abuser’ and the sub-personalities; all of these give us an excuse not to own them. We have to know that these are us, we created them and they are not separate from us. What right have we, when we have created these things in ourselves, to say that they belong to someone else! They are all ours and have to be owned. By meeting them and seeing all the things we have done in their names, we can blow them out like soap bubbles to be dissolved in the light. The problem is that we don’t want to recognise them so we create many subtle cover-ups, but they all have to be visited. The re-visiting is happening in this lifetime, but the entities were created over many lifetimes, not because of particular situations, but because it is our job to put a name on nature’s experience, so we have to create situations to exteriorise the feelings.

      We dissolve the problems by completely associating with them; it doesn’t take that long, even if it feels like it. We are not just helping our own individual case, but bursting a huge entity in the world that cries out that it is being used and abused, therefore we are working in the collective. There is a job to be done and it can only be done by the work of completely owning, releasing and transmuting. There can be so much disgust and hate; we must name and see these nega tives, then soothe, love and understand them on behalf of the God we live in. We can’t blame our grandmother for being self-pitying! We can go to her and tell her we love her! The minute we do that she is happy and for five minutes she is free of self-pity; that is a great relief for the world!

      Life is clever; it will put us in front of a karmic pattern that needs looking at and which will be very close to one of our shadows. That is why we have to remember it is in us and is not the other per son’s fault. If we refuse the knowledge from within, we refuse our selves and the God in us and start the work of self-destruction. As we self-destruct all aspects of true spirituality within us will stop. The inner life will die within us if we do not accept our work. If we want the world to do it for us, then we are as nature, destroyed and renewed until the light of awareness gives birth in the cave of the heart once more.

      The big difference between our initiate and the ordinary man is that the ordinary man is taken in by life and is a puppet of life. The initiate knows that he is a channel for releasing spiritual energy on behalf of something greater than himself, so he is not being taken in by the shadows of life. It is like a great river; either we are buffeted like a puppet, or the river is in us and we can let the waters of life flow when it is needed. It carries us and if we think something needs to be done, we will do it automatically.

      ‘Man know thyself’, is what we are doing when we have recog nised everything we have been. We must find ourselves in all the events of our existence and understand the situations, attitudes and reactions. We have made strangers of ourselves because we haven’t wanted to see a lot of the things that have happened to us. Some times we didn’t know whether we liked them or not, so we had to hide those experiences just in case we didn’t like them; this game can go on for a long time. Because we were uncertain whether an experience was good or bad we covered it up and kept playing the game, hoping we would get the answer. We call it confronta tion when we look, but the confrontation only comes from the intel lect, which retains all the virtual experiences that we have lived. The dweller on the threshold fights, because the pain and the drama of the previous experiences feel so real; these are the ones that will be burned by the sulphur, because of the resistance. When we as personalities are resisting and causing problems, we cannot blame things on past lives, for our past experiences were opportunities to wake up and witness. The sphinx will keep staring but will not speak, for a dialogue would be too easy and helpful, so it is up to us to get the message.

      If we know that life is a state of unfolding and no action is defini-tive, then we can meet the dweller or guardian on the threshold and start doing the work of cleansing. By revisiting past situations with the intense awareness of the perception of the Soul, we see them for what they are. Whether we find a manipulating abuser or a manip ulated victim, it matters not, because it is only a part of the great dance and everything can be harmonised.

      An initiation can only happen when the mind comes into the darkness of the flesh of the Soul of nature, to see whether it can receive the star, we don’t get initiation up there in the stars. In the past, every initiation started with a descent underground or a retreat into the desert. It had to be night and it had to be done alone; this is symbolic of the process of the inner work. The mystical star shows the descent of spirit into matter and the ascent back; the deeper it goes down, the higher it will shoot up towards the source, like a firework into the skies.

      The keynote to this card is that, through true will and vision the unfolding of the Soul can happen. The work of descending into the cave has been an act of will and the intelligence of man cannot con tent itself with the intellectual life.

      The wisdom of The High Priestess is the wisdom of Isis, the high sacred science of the initiate and the sacred world. We are talking of the beginning and the end, the lost and found and above all, grace. We are not doing anything from a personal angle, because we are doing it on behalf of our brothers and sisters. It can only be grace because we are not coming back to judge, but to love. There is no judgment or punishment here, only awareness and that is what grace is, to know that whatever the other human being is doing, you are doing it as well and it is all okay, but ‘Shall we stop doing it now? Let’s go in!” The good news is that there is no punishing God; there is only the book of life and