because the

dialectic

because the

dialectic

the always

turning

first instance

first image

first first

the turning

around

in our

nature

          from the ‘third triad’

          of Tarot Poem: Major Arcana

          ‘Money, women and spiritual work, if you talk about them, they go away,’ according to one of the initiatory spiritual teachers – apparently a stock phrase.

          For the last twenty-five years, my spiritual work has focused in a developing interpretation of the Tarot. Those who have followed the blog have witnessed my struggle with the standard hocus-pocus image that surrounds the Cards, and my own unwillingness to identify with ‘the occult’.

          The problem, of course, is that, culturally, we have hit a dead end. Intellectually, we have now tried to justify this pervasive, essentially absolute death of anything resembling ‘culture’, instead of looking into the absolute uniqueness of the event. But, of course, this reflects the problem of the problem, so to speak. What is required, at this point, is a solution that solves everything.

          Perhaps we could lump the problem under ‘philosophy’ since, historically, philosophy has embraced everything from religion to hygiene. But, of course, contemporary philosophy has gone up into the tower, the tower has fallen into the river and the survivors are now floating out little paper boats with SOS written on the sails in invisible ink.

          To suggest that a comprehensive solution exists is anathema. To suggest that the Cards might contain such a solution is not only absurd, it recommends the proponent for treatment.

          But, today, this is what I would assert.

          The serious historians trace the origin of the Cards to north Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a century after the ‘crusade’ against the gnostic culture of southern France. It becomes increasingly clear that, as vicious as the ‘crusade’ was, it suppressed, but did not destroy, the unique religious understanding.

          When I first started to develop this understanding of the Cards, after I had worked with them for more than a decade, I recognized that their ‘mysticism’ related to the developments in Spain, in both Sufism and Kabbala. But at that time structural reasons suggested to me that the Cards were essentially independent – an important point, since in our present environment dominant occultists had tried to equate the Cards with the kabbalistic ‘tree of life’. At that time, I felt that the Cards presented something simpler and more direct.

          I have called my understanding ‘original’ gnosticism, a viewpoint I had found validated by the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas. My earliest memories establish that while I have always been convinced of God, I have always held the conviction that God is other, essentially ineffable and unattainable.

          Both Thomas and the Cards sustain this view. The core mystical question is human consciousness and human experience. This alone holds the ‘proof’ of things spiritual and religious.

          While there are potentially structural similarities between the Cards and the ‘tree of life’, the fact that Kabbala places godhead within the frame was anathema to me. What allowed me, at the time, to differentiate the two is the tradition that the Fool in the Tarot – one of the twenty-two Major Arcana – is considered as an ‘empty set’ of seven, a fact borne out by the structure of the Cards, since the Fool as seven completes the structural symbolism of the Cards – the religious symbolism of twelve sets of seven. Hence the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana cannot be equated with the twenty-two ‘pathways’ of the ‘tree of life’.

          But now, having completed the basic cycle of my study of the Tarot, I am inclined to the reverse. While I am not a student of Kabbala, I doubt that the Tarot is ‘simpler’ finally, although I am still convinced that it is more direct. But I am also fairly certain that the Tarot is the original and the ‘tree of life’ the derived tradition.

          Apart from the unnumbered Fool, the twenty-one numbered cards of the Major Arcana invite a structure similar to the traditionary presentation of the ‘tree of life’. But here, the three columns consist of the three sets of seven placed in direct parallel.

          But what are defined here are three replications of the process of self-awareness, beginning from the basic awakening into self-awareness of ‘normal’ human consciousness. But, like our ‘everyday’ self-awareness, the structure is not obvious until we have entered into what I have called the ‘endo-reflective’ process, the beginning of ‘mysticism’, the initial ‘deconstruction’ of reflection itself.

          I now have six or seven complete texts directly concerned with the Tarot : that is, texts that I would be prepared to publish, as much as they are developmental, and thus involve more or less significant shifts in interpretation. But the bulk of the work has involved the formal philosophy of reflection – the philosophy philosophy, so to speak : the structural description of reflective consciousness – pertaining primarily to the Minor Arcana. Only a final return to the Major Arcana closes the cycle. And while undoubtedly the subjective reconciliation that it brings me to opens the door to further work, the function of the Tarot as ‘spiritual work’ is now more or less complete.

          Each of the three sets of seven involves a cycle of reflection. The first awakens reflective awareness itself. I have dealt with this issue throughout the blog. I do not pretend that the topic is easy, but a relatively simple or direct presentation is available here. However, the allegory of the figures in this first septet would require an extended excursus. Suffice it to say, the first seven cards explicate the process by which we awaken to ‘the self’. The fact that we have isolated awareness as an object of awareness, takes us immediately beyond the pale of logic, but is nevertheless the grounding absolute of ‘the empirical’. We were not born with this view. We were socialized into it. And while language is not the only symbolic construct that sustains the reflective viewpoint, it is, in itself, the comprehensive basis and comprehensive symbol for that interpretive construct. Every moment of our present waking consciousness is thus not only sustained by this viewpoint, but also involves the cyclical activity of self-awareness, moment by moment.

          Because no logical basis can rationalize or justify the separation that produces self-awareness, we must characterize it as ‘magic’. And thus the Magician both dominates and comprehends the whole understanding of reflection, apart from the Fool. The first cycle of self-awareness concludes with the Chariot, the self directing the vehicle, and hence, in its most ‘primitive’ meaning, the volition.

          But while self, volition and vehicle are the more obvious or immediate consequences of self-awareness, it also brings doubt and guilt, which point to their corollary, a more or less absolute sense of Justice. Because we have failed to rationalize justice, we doubt its basis. But its basis is self-awareness. Self-awareness would not be possible if there were not, in some sense, an absolute image for the human, by which we mirror back into ‘the self’. Self-awareness itself is the ‘proof’ of Justice, not only of the possibility, but of the necessity of an absolute humanform. Since this humanform is therefore also necessarily prior to reflection and language, its expression varies widely. But the core remains absolute.

          The Hermit expresses this ‘figure’ and its boundaries and thresholds. And so on and so forth. Because the second septet is the explication of the first order ‘endo-reflective’ process, the process by which we can ‘disassemble’ reflective awareness, and recognize both cognitively and experientially how reflective understanding emerges. Since the process is necessarily ‘beyond’ logic, it is appropriately ‘mystical’. But since it is the universal ground of our moment-by-moment experience, this ‘mystical’ process is also constantly available and accessible.

          The Hanged Man was perhaps the first point d’appui that seduced me into the Cards. Because a brilliantly deranged street person had first pointed out the structure of the Cards as sets of seven, turning on the empty set of the Fool, I had already set up the table of the Major Arcana, as above. In this arrangement, one need not be overly ‘spiritual’ to recognize some basis not only for a ‘mystical process’, but also for a practice. Even a slightly ‘poetic’ consciousness will insist that the Hanged Man is initiatory. The intimacy and separation of Hanged Man and Death was intriguing at first and ultimately imperative. As I have said, I have always insisted on the essential otherness of God. Death is the only living expression of that fact. And I had already experienced the basis of a spiritual map, albeit in the implicit consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity with respect to the nature of time and light. I understood that ‘spiritual experience’ or ‘initiation’, as such, is not necessarily ‘final’.

          But, of course, until one experiences the Great Death, Temperance seems a strangely mild and deflective outcome.

          The third septet engages this outcome at the level of the Zen understanding that ‘Zen mind is ordinary mind.’ One of the reasons I object to American Zen is because I have heard a respected American Zen teacher insist that this is a technical statement, and not self-evident. Essentially, reflection, once established, cannot be obviated. Sustained states of absorption are possible. But this simply means that one is focused in the pre-reflective ground that continues to underlie reflective consciousness. Sustained absorption apparently obviates much of the inertial or habitual function of self-awareness : that is, the habit pattern of reflection that links cycle to cycle in the reflective sequence, and thus tends to pull us out of the immediate reflective impetus of the moment, the immediate moment of value.

          But where the third septet stands apart from Zen is the compact integration of ‘the moral’ or ‘the ethical’ as a functional aspect of this ‘process’ or ‘state’. Undoubtedly a thorough or ‘grounded’ understanding of Zen would involve this factor. But it is not clear how much of this has entered into the post-classical stream of Ch’an or Zen.

          The reason that I begin this piece with the small concluding verse to the ‘third triad’ of my poetic narrative essay, the Tarot Poem : Major Arcana is because, while the cycle of reflection is the essential basis of the spiritual and religious understanding – of all legitimately empirical exegesis of spirit and religion – it is also, precisely the common basis of all our ‘conscious’ experience. As such, it is the core basis, as well, for the simultaneous processes of inference and analysis which in fact constitute ‘perception’. Within the frame of our present experience, which is reflection, every act of perception involves the dialectical cycle of inference and analysis that transforms an immediate value, immediately experienced, through the corollary or ‘dialectical’ modes of reflection – of ‘mirroring’ in terms of the ‘absolutes’ of humanform – into ‘experience’ as we thus have it.

          Mysticism, at its core, is not different from inference and analysis as they operate in the immediate functions of consciousness. Therefore, ‘dialectic’ is not different from the full expression of this ‘cycle’ of consciousness, as we engage it, moment by moment.