The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

It is a harmonious value that he vibrates with and can in turn pass on. We have all read books that have moved us, because we recognised truth in them and realised that we are made of that truth and can appropriate it. It doesn’t matter who has written or said these truths, we feel the duty to pass them on because they changed us.

      If we repeat what is read in a book in our own words as we feel it and know it, it will have a hundred times more value than read ing directly from the book, because it will be Soul given, rather than intellectually sent. That is the power of transmutation. An exam ple is a great and beautiful sentence sounded by a poet or master; we take it in and resonate with it in the cave of the heart, so bringing another facet to it and making it more beautiful. Then when it comes through us it is able to touch somebody else. If we find something that resonates in us, it is our duty to bring a specific sound out of that inner resonance. Only when we are ready to see the great truths, will they come and vibrate in us. The will is there in the heart of every atom of life and for a while nobody resonates with its sound, then suddenly some of us do and start sounding, so that somebody else picks it up. This is how more and more sound is created; it is truly bringing the word of God right into every breath of everyday life. Some people might hear us and say; “Yes, that is it, I’m going to start a business at the corner of the street and feed the poor”. They are interpreting that particular sounding in their own way and yet the original great sentence was, ‘I am the bread and I am the life’. They have translated it into something practical and that translation has come from within them, which is why it is important to only follow the esoteric way from within. Silence is golden, but silence without the silver of the intellect doesn’t communicate its peace to the ones who need the vibration of the teaching and the word.

      When we have completely exhausted the experiences of life through seeking and nothing has worked, then we are at the begin ning of the threshold and realise that ‘life is going to do it for us’. If all the exoteric ways weren’t there, we wouldn’t get to the end of that lane, for once we have tried everything and it hasn’t satis-fied us, we can scratch our heads and realise there is something else. When that is done, we can become our own teacher. One of the great beauties of experiencing as much as we can is that event ually we realise that there is no satisfaction and nothing has come out of all the experience. We can go and learn from another book of knowledge and it will just be the same, so eventually we realise that all these things are superficial and that knowledge, pleasure, dogma and using the physical, the form and the intellect, ulti mately gets us nowhere. People, who make the biggest mistakes in an experiential way, can often cut the link with the superficial form more quickly.

      Once all this is seen and it is understood that the value of it is only superficial, we should ask ourselves; “Which law drives life that make us so subservient to what holds the material in place?” Whenever that question is asked, we are then starting on the occult path. The question might not be asked again for another 40 years, or 40 lives, but there is hope because it has been felt and sounded. From that first question the man will not stop searching, even if he takes a lot of holidays in between. He is very much in the dark to start with and just going with his feelings like a blind man, trying to convince himself that what he has done in the past isn’t futile or worthless, so he will say that maybe the past is real life. He has to recognise all his weaknesses, temptations and hates, so he has to start to hate everything that his life has been, as he contrasts it with where he wants to go. He has been in the profane world, the world of the superficiality of matter, form and greed and then he begins to think that there has got to be something else, so he starts looking. He goes deeper and deeper; he starts to hate what is in his mind, seeing it as mediocre and manipulative. All his past and the way he has always lead his life, suddenly looks very gross and ugly and he starts hating what he had previously loved, to the point of losing his Spirit. If we don’t do it like that, we don’t do it properly and we are not good searchers. He will keep on until he gets to the inner door of the temple of Solomon, the Holy of Holies, where only the high priests go. The higher mind reaches the depth of all the experiences of the human heart, where the love/wisdom princess awaits her knights in shining light. This is the wisdom of the initiate who can gaze, look and understand the enigma that is put in front of him.

      The keys cannot be separate, for they work toge ther. The golden key symbolises the life giving esoteric energy and its handle is shaped like an Ankh. This tells us that it is only the inner knowledge of the Soul that gives life. We’re alive if we are in nature and it is there fore the Soul of nature in the world, that sustains biological life, but we are only truly alive as a human being if we are fed by the light of the Soul, which is the inner life. When this is realised, we can knock on the door of the inner temple. We must exhaust the knowl edge of the material world if we do not want to fall back under its influence.

      The power of the initiate is not so much what he can do; it is an inner power and so doesn’t have to manifest in any specific way. Like The High Priestess, the initiate is somebody very dangerous to come near to. This is not because he would harm anybody, but because there is something in his clarity that will bring people in front of themselves. The black sphinx of The High Priestess is doing exactly this, mirroring what the initiate has in him and if he has something to face, that is his enigma. This is ‘Man know thyself’ and if the man doesn’t know himself, the black sphinx is there to show him exactly what it is that he doesn’t know. Knowing ourselves is only being aware of our behaviour, which is driven by our subconscious. It is having a little light down there in the subconscious and always being honest and strong enough to say “I vibrate to that, I react to this and I react to that, so I understand why this happened and why someone might commit a crime, because I have already recognised that in myself”. When we can do that we automatically defuse it and there is no blame, because there is only an act that occurred, which doesn’t need to be repeated. An act is only a movement in time and isn’t permanent. We have all been violators, because we are only repeating the step that nature took to survive, so we need to recognise that and be strong, as it is our work to go through the inner purifying flame. Self-development can cause distress; we can see the word differently, as ‘de-stress’ and stop stressing about it, let the tension go and relax.

      The steel of the sword of truth has to be purified. When we really come in front of our own truth we must have the courage to take the sword, put it into the fire again to be purified and then dip it straight into the water. Things need to be destroyed quite quickly, so that all the impurities in the metal can be burnt out. The more we put the blade into the fire to be beaten into alignment, the stronger the steel becomes. The steel symbolises the spiritual will and the stronger and purer it is, the more the intuition and light can come through it. It is therefore dangerous in everyday life, because when we are going for self-purification, we can get obsessed by it and that can destabilise the instrument mentally, as we bring the shadows up to the surface. We may be too self-obsessed and so fall back into think ing that the world is there for us.

      The work will bring pain, but also elevation and uplift, or rebel lion and fall. Rebellion is the important and necessary first step towards listening to the higher mind, as in its extremes it ignores anything from the outside. We can see an example of this in the rebel lious adolescent who wants to be seen to be the best and the most obnoxious, yet at the same time wants to be loved; that is personal ity. With the rebellious adolescent, we must wait until the silliness has stopped and then help them to comply if they want to be good in society. If the person sees the possibility of rising and yet refuses to work on the inner plane, as they carry on in their rebellion, then they are not at ease in the world. The opportunity for change is there but they do not want to hear the inner call, so they keep on being socially dysfunctional; it is a disorder, or un-ease. Rebellion is a state which makes us hate any outer authority that restricts us, because the Soul is after its own inner guidance and once we have got hold of that, we naturally comply with the laws of the land to show that the work has been done. These two states have the same aim and one comes after the other, so remember not to judge for we all have to fall.

      When the initiate comes in front of The High Priestess her face is blank and unreadable. He will misread her if he thinks she is a brick wall, because that is not the case. She completely ignores him because if she had any expression on her face that said “Come on, I know how you