The Spirit of the Tarot. Claudine Aegerter

with that greater metaphysical God, through faith, love and a complete giving over of his own life. It is the same in religion; at first it used the fear of God, so we had to obey, suffer and offer sacrifices to the gods without understanding the whole picture. It is the same with our children, we don’t explain to a two year old that it is dangerous to cross the road for they won’t understand; we just have to forbid them to cross the road without us. The child won’t understand and it is the same with a lot of peo ple, who believe in God and who haven’t understood the internali-sation process. Internalisation gives us the knowledge that the God we love is the higher vision that we want to reach within ourselves.

      The majority of people still love a God they are afraid of. They fear God’s judgement of their ‘naughtiness’. In time we seek com fort and peace, to soothe the burden, so we follow a religion which offers a more promising Heaven. Religion is an alignment to a school of thought: it is not a need, it is a necessity. A necessity is a law of nature, there to give structure for mass consciousness to face the unavoidable truth about its condition. The way religion is given out or preached will comfort the weak and help the strong to find themselves.

      The Emperor meditates all the time, but is also active. He is not going to ask us to go to a workshop to try to sort out whether we are truthful or not, for if we are not truthful he is going to trip us up. We all have a little bit of that old fear of God in us.

      Look at our life and how it is; would any of the women among us be OK going out without makeup? What we believe people think of the way we look is the first stage of fear. The next stage is what they think of us as friends, lovers, mothers, brothers and colleagues. All of us are watching out for these things, so it is normal for the God of fear to be still quite present among us. It keeps us behaving the way society wants us to behave and it is not a bad thing, as it helps us to learn to control our natural urges; this is the beginning of controlling our physical elementals. The fear of The Emperor is a good thing because it makes us toe the line. The Emperor is mould ing society and our minds to the way we have to go, for we have to respect other people and society, until it becomes natural to do so. We are self-centred to begin with and then eventually our inner higher self emerges.

      The Emperor is looking towards the west and that symbolises death, materiality and Spirit having to go into matter. It is the death of Spirit as it goes into the dark until it can perceive itself as matter. He has to help every single little unit go towards its death, with the aim of letting go of fear, guilt and anything else personal, so that it can go forward and recognise itself as Spirit.

      In Number 3, The Empress is not a feminine principle of genera tion, though we still call her the mother of all, because from her we are going to see the little ones grow up. The Emperor has the author ity of the father so he requires obedience. If the children are going to be loved, forgiven and blessed by The Pope of the Tarot, they first have to show obedience. We are all going to get lost on the way and do all kinds of wayward things; The Emperor will keep presenting us with problems, so that we learn to keep to the straight and nar row path.

      He is the principle of the authority of the word of God incarnate and it is that authority that will lead us to spiritualisation in the 5. We do not have authority over anything or anyone, unless we do it for them and not for ourselves. The problem with authority is that we tend to think that we are the boss who is going to be listened to, but we should know that authority is not exercised for the one who holds it, but for those who are subjected to it. The true shepherd doesn’t keep his sheep safe for himself; he does it for the sake of the sheep. We need to be completely true, connected and selfless, then when we find the quality of The Emperor in us we have to trust it completely.

      Whatever relationship we might have, if we are exercising some thing for self, that relationship is bound to go to destruction, unless we are talking about a higher God. If we seek the love of God for ourselves, we will eventually have to go through trials and tribula tions until we no longer believe in that God anymore; this is the tragedy for many religious people, or people ‘on the path’. If we really understand that we are only a piece of the jig-saw and an instrument and that the God we live in doesn’t care whether we are doing well or not, then we stop expecting something from God. The quicker everybody understands that, the more work can be done on behalf of that energetic being. It is cold and simple, not lovey-dovey. Human love is a most beautiful flower, but it is still an emotion; the love we are talking about when we are talking about the love of God, is truly not an emotion. We give our lives many times on behalf of the love we feel as a human being, until we recognise the reality that what we have called love is based on a need for recognition and protection, so we had better take ourselves out of the drama! The play can go on without us, we are needed somewhere else.

      Human love is truly a sublimation of all the other needs, wants and emotions; it is the opposite of logic and reason. If we truly love a God or a person enough to go beyond ourselves, we are sublimating our emotional body, which is the most beautiful thing. The love of God is truly transpersonal, it has nothing to do with human life; it is about having even given up love for ourselves. The Emperor doesn’t love us in a lovey-dovey way, he doesn’t care about us personally, but what he does care about is that the plan should be re-enacted into humanity.

      The Emperor is completely fixed on the intent and the becoming. He regulates the present, but the present has absolutely no value in itself. The majority of people live strongly in the present, which is the world of nature, survival and the senses. We’re all completely taken in by the form and sensation of what we have been looking at. We can never repeat a sensual experience even if absolutely everything is as it was when we had that experience, because it is transitory. It might be exactly the same time of day, the same col ours, the same people, but we are different. What that teaches us is that sensation is illusory and if we hold onto it and go back for more, we find out where we are and how detached we are from sensation. Are we taken in by sensations? Do we want more of them? Do we keep on going for the same thing? Sensation does feed the mind, so it is very important as a learning process and we repeat the experi ence in order to learn the lesson. However, that can be a nice excuse to keep on doing that same experience forever and it can become addictive, especially when we have understood that the first one can never be repeated. If we have done the experience once and we go “Wow! I want more”, we are going to be looking for it through the senses. Our senses are really only there to help us work on behalf of the God we live in and be a witness, but while we are taken in and play with them, we are not good witnesses. We are just players at best, at worst we are used by the self-destructive elemental forces of nature.

      The minute we have done something and felt it, we can gain the wisdom from that one experience without having to do it again. We just need to take it in, remember all the things that brought us there and then we will certainly go to the very heart of why the God we live in wanted us to have that experience. When we are working at aligning our three bodies of expression with our personality, we have to go and climb that mountain of maya and glamour up to addiction and near self-destruction, so as to let them all go. With the initiate, or disciple on the path, the inner life has to eventually overtake the sensory life. He has to debunk the idea of keeping on doing the experience, so as to know. However, we mustn’t stop the youngsters doing what we have done, for they have to climb up the mountain for themselves.

      When we see a film or read a book several times, we understand different things from it each time, which shows that our perception has changed. It is therefore perception, rather than sensation, that we are associated with. When we are working on aligning we gen erate a lot of emotions because we are disappointed, then we get cross when we don’t get the thing we want, the way we wanted it. We have to find all these feelings in ourselves and name them on behalf of the God we live in. As we explore the experiences we can be taken in by the stimulation of the drama, on the other hand if we internalise the sensation it really can bring back an inner memory, which sheds a lot of light on what is or isn’t true. Often when we are nearly letting things go, we will have loads of these memories coming back and we will start to see them with pity and love, with the knowledge that they have to go. As a rule we should not seek those memories, as they come out of the blue when we are ready to process them.

      The world of sensation is just a by-product of the movement of Spirit in space and is transitory. The whole of our life is a virtual experience,