There Is No "Right Number"

When planning ahead, many of us are trying to save enough money to start a business or for some other major change. But when circumstances beyond our control change quickly, we find ourselves needing to launch that next phase without the "right number" we were hoping for.

So if we have to act now, then we just have to go with what we've got. We may wish we had more, but suddenly we find ourselves hustling to make things work with what we have. Even in a well thought out plan, opportunities or difficulties can present us with costs we had not planned on.

We might find it a bit scary, but not having the "right number" can make us more creative. Having plenty can make a person complacent. Why hurry up and do something if you don't have to?

Every person who starts a new business has some touch and go moments when tight budgeting sharpens focus and causes a person to check out all kinds of wild and off the wall ideas, and can put a person in the position of needing to borrow to meet obligations. It is an invigorating challenge.

Truth is, I think that we are rarely as fully prepared as we would like to be, and so we find ourselves having to launch without our right number, doing our best to make a go of it with what we've got.

The right number may be out of reach when we find ourselves pressed into action, so we proceed with the clear objective in mind of making a profit. And if we did wait until we had plenty to more than offset any difficulty, we may delay getting started forever.

When the world throws us a challenge and we hit the ground running, there is no right number, just working numbers. There are ideals and then there are pragmatic choices. In the absence of the "right numbers" we look at the picture from every angle and look for ways to make it work with whatever numbers we've got.

Walking Between the Worlds

One of the old expressions that is used for a shaman is one who walks between the worlds.

Picture yourself as one who is completely conversant in one world and learning to navigate others.

The shamanic reference is to the worlds of spirit and matter. We also find ourselves balancing between worlds when we are trying to reorganize aspects of ourselves, whether it is starting a new business, changing careers, beginning new relationships, starting a new workout schedule and eating habits.

Any of these tasks can have us balancing between two worlds as we set our course.

That path between the material and spirit worlds is pretty thin. We get glimpses over the fence when people close to us are dying. And as we periodically peek over the fence on either side, we can also see the other places where there are connections between the two worlds.

Walking that path between the worlds gets easier when you know that it is there, and when you know that you are walking it. How many things change, how many decisions get easier, when you know you are on the road?

A Sense of Adventure

For many people, the word adventure conjures up images of climbing mountains, snowboarding in the back country, riding big waves on surfboards, sailing around the world, jumping out of airplanes with parachutes, and other such daring physical feats.

However, not everyone wants to do such things, and so perhaps it is worth considering the many things a person could do that would constitute an adventure for them.

For example, wouldn't many people who create their own business consider it an adventure? What about people who overcome a fear of public speaking and then become known as a speaker or actor? What about the person who writes a book, or paints pictures that hang in art galleries? Or the person who goes back to school later in life and earns a degree or learns new skills to start a new career?

Yes, earlier in my life I hiked fourteeners, crewed on a racing yacht, walked on fire, went on vision quests, drummed all night around campfires and did other such things.

Then I did other things that I thought of as adventures that depart from the vigorous physical model.

I thought of it as an adventure to work in the Renaissance Festival, to be a security guard for the Chicago Cubs baseball team for a season was an adventure, to edit a magazine and write for publications was an adventure. Writing books was an adventure. Teaching was an adventure. Moving across the country and starting my life over again several times, was an adventure. Learning to develop my psychic abilities was an adventure. Learning to be a gardener and herbalist was an adventure. Learning to dance was an adventure. Learning how to be a lover was an adventure.

If we have a sense of adventure about life, we can define it in many ways, all of which enhance our sense of aliveness, joy and excitement.

What are the adventures you have had? What adventures would you like to have?

Destiny, Destination

Destiny lays out maps for us, and by following them, we reach our destinations. It is like looking out over the landscape and feeling drawn to go this way or that. Sometimes when we are lost, we simply get a feeling that we should turn left here, or turn right. We always have free will and we use it every time we make a choice or a decision. The two do not cancel each other out.

When we feel that something is the right thing for us to do, we may not know why until later. That is where we see the panoramic view, rather than the little street or road we are currently driving on.

Destiny is also what gives us a sense of larger purpose in life. Can we look at the larger patterns in our life and see themes that repeat themselves? Do our decisions keep leading us in the same direction? Do we see our smaller movements and decisions fitting together? Do they lead where we think they are leading? Does the map look familiar? Does the terrain look familiar? Can we sense what is ahead?

The Magic of Magic

Most people are fascinated with magic, and one of the most interesting cards in the tarot deck is the Magician, because no other card has gone through such radical transformations between the original decks and the present time. There is a lot of substance here.

The earliest Magician cards depicted a juggler or a stage magician, in other words, an entertainer. A person who lives by his wits, using his slight of hand skills, tell jokes, dazzle audiences with optical illusions. This person is simply using his skills to make a living, using his wits to get by. Not necessarily a metaphysical or spiritual person. Early French cards were named the Bateleur. As a traveling entertainer, he would have more in common with a troubadour than an alchemist.

The Magician as we most commonly perceive him now dates back to the ceremonial magician popularized in the Rider/Waite/Smith deck, where we see a robed figure holding a wand, with the infinity symbol over his head, and on the table before him are the altar tools including the cup, pentacle and sword in addition to the wand he is holding aloft with one hand, while pointing to the ground with the other. His body language suggests the magical incantation, "As above, so below. As within, so without." The ceremonial magician of this tradition is more a descendant of the medieval alchemist or wizard than the entertainer.

A third depiction becoming more common on the Magician card is one that is a shaman, a primal magician dressed in animal skins, antlers, perhaps holding or playing a drum, perhaps with some herbs in the picture. This third type of magician is one who is an intermediary with the spirit world as well as being a ceremonialist.

In all three cases, the Magician can perform feats beyond his appearances. In all three guises, he can accomplish things that ordinary people cannot do. Of course, we can debate about what is ordinary and what abilities we all have. A person who desires to do so can be trained to be a stage magician or a ceremonial magician. Both require dedication and practice.

That is why one of the key words I always associate with the Magician is will. A magician, in any of these aspects, makes things happen.

The genius of this design is how it works in its radical evolution even though it appears to be so very different. In each case, we seek to connect with the supernatural, the realms beyond what we usually see. We want to be amazed. We want to know that life can be more.

This desire for more of life, our willingness to go to great lengths to affect change, is what makes the Magician such a powerful character. The Magician is one who uses his wits plus everything available to him to be able to travel back and forth between the worlds. Whether it is herbs, drums, masks, costumes, smoke and mirrors, decks of cards, mysterious potions, jeweled wands or bouncing balls, the Magician is the guardian at the gateway, the one with the key.

UFOs and Understanding

What if UFOs are simply waiting for us to continue beating each other up in wars and pollution before they swoop down while we are weak? By the time they announce that the are taking over and subdue us with their superior technology, we may feel like the Indians, Africans and aboriginal tribes facing the European armies and armadas. It will be a change so radical that it will be difficult for many of us to attend.

That is one scenario. Perhaps the second one is that we continue our space program and eventually we meet the inhabitants of other planets and make friends with them. Perhaps trade is developed and we become aware of the multitude of other ways of living out there. Our adventure opens our eyes.

Isaac Asimov once said that any technology sufficiently beyond our current capability will appear to be magic. We have a magical world here and now. There are even more out there.

We take time to absorb shocks. Those who grew up when every home did not have their own phone, are now using cell phones. Those who had some of the first black and white TVs with their constantly distorting screens and fuzzy reception now have big flat screens at home as good as the ones in theatres.

People can get as much information out of their laptop as they could out of a reference library. Although this is true, going to the library was an experience. Photo processing places, which were a fixture on our landscape, are now not needed. Video rental stores are getting hollowed out due to the success of online sources of movies. CD sales have been free falling as people download onto digital players. Writing letters used to be an art form, something special when it arrived, put in a drawer for reading again and again at later times. Now we email.

All of this has been radical for us. But what if something like creating a crop circle was done with the flick of a light switch? What if we could understand each other using telepathy, bypassing all language blocks and education deficits?

There is more that I cannot see right now, but these seem to be the two predominant scenarios.

But wait, here is a third. What if we enter a stage of evolution where we all become as gods and goddesses in the great stories?

The war scenario has been dominant because war has always figured heavily in our stories. But what now if new stories arise and become dominant where there is some sort of trade and cultural exchange that melds us?

How would we live through a ginormous change like that? Crop circle photos always prompt me with questions like this, as do photos of Stonehenge, Newgrange, the pyramids of Egypt. People are still trying to retell new versions of the ancient myths as a way of digesting them and reconciling them with what we know and our sense of reality.

What happens when we tell new stories? Do we get closer to understanding?

Chupacabras

The wonderful thing about the chupacabras, the highly unusual mythical dog found in Texas this week, is that it opens our eyes to all the interesting and unusual creatures that also inhabit our world.

Here is a legend come to life. Will bigfoot be next?

Things that we wrote off as impossible suddenly come to life. What other varieties of life will we discover?

Discoveries like this wake up the mind.

Coming Back to Life

Coming back to life has one resonance as the return of spring and the ancient fertility rituals that celebrate this fact of life. Pagans reawakened the earth with dancing singing and sexual pleasure to create sympathetic magic in the fields and gardens, imparting their energy to the reawakening of the earth and inspiring the growth of the spring planting.

The early church overlaid the story of Christ's Resurrection over the old Estara or Ostara rituals to celebrate the idea of his rising from the dead. Of course, for those who can entertain other perspectives and the quirky humor of author Tom Robbins, in Another Roadside Attraction, he spins a tale about how the early disciples snatched the body from the tomb and hid it and then told everyone he rose from the dead, in order to build up the religion around the Christ story. Robbins uses his wit to poke fun at all kinds of ideas in his books.

On another note, there is also a coming back to life that we often need to do after we face a serious setback. A death in the family, a loss of a job, end of a relationship, bankruptcy, or any number of other difficult developments that can set us back in life can sometimes send a person into a withdrawal or retreat from life. A person can get depressed over such things.

To rebound from such things, often a personal ritual is needed to signal to body, mind, spirit and emotions that you are back and ready to be back. Engaging in a symbolic act signals to your self and the universe that you are done with your period of mourning and are ready to spring back into action.

Spring Equinox is the tipping point and the Easter rituals reaffirm this message. Time to bounce back. Time to move from darkness into light. There are all kinds of ways to do this. Love, laughter, music, dance, all kinds of things can work. At this time of year, the symbols of coming back to life are all around us. We just have to activate them.

Imagine Your Future

Taking advantage of this natural cycle of expansion, it is important to be able to imagine our own future.

If we are having difficulty doing that, an adjustment in our plans, or a change of direction may be indicated.

Yes, of course, there may be developments down the road that we are not aware of at this time, but we still can imagine what we would like our life to be like and how things would work.

Our imagination lays out the path that our conscious actions can follow. If we cannot envision ourselves becoming more successful in our chosen field of endeavor, then it may be time to choose a different field.

If we can see ourselves moving toward success, but not seeing how it will be done, then try imagining it from different perspectives and see which way allows a clearer vision of our path.

Our imagination is the blueprint for what we want to build. If we cannot form a picture of it in our mind, how can we possibly go about building it?

When our ancient ancestors painted those pictures of the hunt on the walls of their caves, they were picturing themselves having a successful hunt before going on the hunt. They communicated their desires to spirit and then acted as if their spirits and their bodies were on the same path to a successful hunt.

Way back then, they saw the importance of positive thinking and imagination foreshadowing successful accomplishments. We continue in the same vein as our ancestors. Let us do our hunting magic tonight. What is it you want? What will you do to get it?

Tarot Stories

Among the many varieties of tarot sets, there are those which accompany a strong narrative text. For example, in the Tarot of the Cat People, Karen Kuykendall created a whole world of planets where different tribes of cats lived. In the Legacy of the Divine, Ciro Marchetti imagines a world that survives a cataclysm. Luis Royo is the author of a book of the Third Millennium and a Tarot of the Third Millennium. There is a Decameron Tarot by Giacinto Gaudenzi inspired by the medieval tale of the same name by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Dante Tarot inspired by Dante's Inferno, A Wonderland Tarot inspired by the book Alice in Wonderland and the Fairytale Tarot by Karen Mahony, Alex Ukolov, and Irena Triskova, The Inner Child Tarot by Mark & Isha Lerner and Christopher Guilfoil.

Then there are the sets based on mythology. There is an Arthurian Tarot, Druid Animal Oracle, Medicine Cards, the Mythic Tarot, based on the Greek Myths, Llewelllyn Tarot, based on the Mabinogian of Welsh Myths, Babylonian Tarot, Ancient Egyptian Tarot, Norse Tarot, Kalevala Tarot (Finnish, the Voodoo Tarot, and a variety of Celtic inspired tarot sets.

In each of these cases, plus many more that might be named, We get an opportunity to correlate things that are going on in our own life with other well known stories, and sometimes it is easy to garner wisdom from the well told tales, which in these sets all have dynamic art.

In standard tarot decks without an overriding narrative structure like these, there are sets of symbols and pictures on cards that the reader can fashion into a story. The framework of the standard decks gives the reader much more freedom to improvise, although the structure can also suggest a powerful context and font of wisdom to draw from.

It is your choice how you prefer to work or how you prefer to use them as a meditative device or teaching tool.

In the cases where a deck was created to go along with an existing text, the artists have enlarged the scope of the book by creating a parallel illustrated book to go along with the text to form the equivalent of a text with 78 illustrations.

In standard decks and oracle decks where everything can mix and match randomly and make sense, the storyteller, the reader, is the one who forms order out of chaos.

It is an interesting dynamic either way. We simply have to choose what method we prefer to work with, and some of us switch around for the challenge presented by variety, the chance of the shuffle challenging complacency.

Sweating It Out

I have in the past been in sweats myself, and no one got hurt, no one died. I have led sweats myself, and no one got hurt and no one died. I have also been to firewalks. I have walked on fire and saw many others do it without getting hurt or dying.

I used to lead drumming circles and there were always people who came because they liked the energy and the feel of the circles, but had no training or experience with percussion instruments and drums. And yet, eventually, they all participated.

In each case, I always gave people permission to quit if they did not feel like they could keep up with everyone else. It was always my experience that they would get some value out of it even if they had to withdraw and sit out for the balance of the event.

If they were in a sweat and they said they needed to get out, they were let out so they could get fresh air, water and something to eat. They would sit with the firekeepers. When people were at a firewalk and didn't feel ready to do it, they were encouraged to simply sit on the side and watch other people. There is a lesson for people in that way too.

Drumming circles posed no possibility of physical danger as did a sweat or firewalk, but it was my experience, and I led drumming circles for years, that if you let a person join in when they are ready to join in, or leave when they want to leave that they will get value from the experience, and in most cases, when they felt ready, their energy would blend into the circle beautifully.

I no longer facilitate such events simply because I am focused on other things now.

Tarot readings, tarot teaching and dealing in tarot decks is my public activity right now and that is very rewarding. The daily challenge I set for myself writing on this blog is another.

I do a lot of one-on-one coaching and consultations which I offer in a private setting, and you can read more about those on my website. Some people do great in big workshops and others flourish in the one-on-one environment.

The key to all of these personal development challenges is to know what it is you really want to do and to give yourself permission to quit if you feel that it is time to quit. Focus your attention on what it is you really feel most important to do.

Nobody needs to walk on fire, spend hours in a sweat, climb mountains, go on vision quests, fast in the wilderness, jump out of airplanes, deep sea dive, drink ayahuasca or eat mushrooms. These are all just tactics we use to break through limitations.

We have all kinds of challenges in life and our first task is to decide which ones we need to meet.

For some people letting go of their concerns about not having the most beautiful voice, or not knowing the finer points of music will allow them to listen to others, join in, let their energy flow, experience joy and visionary states. It was said by another drum master that a person who does not know how to drum is one who does not know how to listen.

When I used to teach creative writing, one of the comments I heard often from new students is that they did not know if they could write. But after I told them that they had permission to write whatever they wanted and not to censor themselves, suddenly those very same people were writing good stories. They just had to let themselves go.

For some people, decluttering their own home and office so that they only have what they really want and really use would be a far more cathartic and valuable experience than walking on fire or sitting in a sweat.

There are those who hold onto every souvenir, every scrap of paper, old magazines, old newspapers, clothing that they have not worn in years, equipment from sports they no longer play and will never play again, broken appliances, and other things they have never gotten around to fixing. A person in this situation is really needing some coaching and support in the art of letting go.

For some people, learning to let themselves experience the ecstasy of orgasm on a regular basis would be far more beneficial than walking on fire or sitting through a sweat.

Each of us has different challenges to sweat out. Which one is most important to tackle first? Choose. Now if you want help doing it, ask.