0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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Michael Sternbach
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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

Post by Michael Sternbach »

CharlotteKAT wrote: 09 Jul 2017, 06:45 Thanks for posting the link to your blog Michael. Very interesting reading. I don't know much about Daoism, but 'studied' Zen for a while (insofar as you can study an experiential practice). Daoist ideas clearly permeate Zen, and it occurred to me that the Fool also may be considered as having beginners mind, or shoshin? Shin represents heart/mind and best translation I can see for sho is 'flying' or 'soaring'. So in this state of shoshin, The Fool is unfettered by preconceptions or conditioning, mind/heart residing in that pure free place of complete knowing and unknowing.
Hi Charlotte,

Yes, Daoist ideas clearly permeate Zen, as the latter was created in China (where it is called "Chan") as a blend of Daoism and Buddhism. I "studied" Zen both in my home country with a Buddhist monk and during a one-year stay in Japan.

I agree with you that the concept of having beginner's mind is very much in keeping with The Fool. And you have explained it very nicely. :)

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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Krishnamurti wrote an interesting account of what it's like to live in the moment seeing everything as if for the first time - http://www.jkrishnamurti.com/krishnamur ... d=70595&w=&

The website is odd, "next document" goes to the next page of the diary.

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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It occurs to me that the people who got the most fun out of all the religions were the guys that started them, spent their lives having inspirations or revelations, thought of the answers as they were asked. Not the intellectual followers that came after and built up the detail in an effort to make it all consistent. Even less so the believers just trying to understand and follow that. Crowley obviously had massive wide ranging knowledge backing up his flashes of illumination, but it's very difficult for someone from a different background to follow up his references and see what he was thinking of - a completely different process and experience. It's the same with my own small efforts - I enjoyed the flashes of inspiration and shocks of seeing unexpected correlations, but the rest of you probably can't make head nor tail of it - and I'm more likely to go on and do something new rather than keep referring back to it. My question therefore is whether it's actually better to study someone else's work or jump in with both feet and do your own thing :mrgreen: .

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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Your Serpent Wand avatar Michael - I had thought of that as a Magician thing but just noticed it on the Fool card. My guidebook doesn't mention it so how does it fit in here?

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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2dogs wrote: 11 Jul 2017, 14:39 It occurs to me that the people who got the most fun out of all the religions were the guys that started them, spent their lives having inspirations or revelations, thought of the answers as they were asked. Not the intellectual followers that came after and built up the detail in an effort to make it all consistent. Even less so the believers just trying to understand and follow that. Crowley obviously had massive wide ranging knowledge backing up his flashes of illumination, but it's very difficult for someone from a different background to follow up his references and see what he was thinking of - a completely different process and experience. It's the same with my own small efforts - I enjoyed the flashes of inspiration and shocks of seeing unexpected correlations, but the rest of you probably can't make head nor tail of it - and I'm more likely to go on and do something new rather than keep referring back to it. My question therefore is whether it's actually better to study someone else's work or jump in with both feet and do your own thing :mrgreen: .
That depends on who you ask - The Fool or The Emperor? Personally, I like to take in all available information and let my subconscious mind mess with it, then see what it comes up with. :mrgreen:

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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2dogs wrote: 11 Jul 2017, 14:42 Your Serpent Wand avatar Michael - I had thought of that as a Magician thing but just noticed it on the Fool card. My guidebook doesn't mention it so how does it fit in here?
The Serpent Wand or Caducaeus is equivalent to the three major nadis that are channeling the vital force through the body - the sushumna (spinal channel) entwined with ida (female channel) and pingala (male channel). The various degrees of activation of the vital force (in this context often called kundalini) correspond with the different stages of the wound way that begins and ends with The Fool.

This interpretation is supported by the dove (a symbol for the Holy Spirit) flying along The Fool's "umbilical cord". Moreover, the vital force (prana, chi, pneuma) is generally associated with air, and the Book of Thoth emphasizes the card's attribution to that element: "Note that 'Fool' is derived from 'follis', a wind-bag. Even etymology gives the attribution to Air."

Crowley explains that "the element of air is considered as the father of all manifested existence", and elaborates: "This card is therefore both the father and the mother, in the most abstract form of these ideas. This is not a confusion, but a deliberate identification of the male and the female..." And: "As soon as one has made up one's mind to consider the feminine aspect of things, the masculine element should immediately appear in the same flash of thought to counterbalance it." - Hermes's wand with the solar serpent intertwined with the lunar serpent shows this perfect balance of the masculine and the feminine.

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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Ah, the serpents appear identical but one is solar and one lunar :idea: . Thanks for pointing that out Michael. I'm getting a lot out of this discussion on the Fool, it makes a great deal of "sense" to me. Actually I'm wondering if it's when I've moved on to read about the next card in the past that it's all gone wrong - maybe I should just consider the Fool more deeply. I guess other cards resonate more with different people or maybe times of life. Is it a general thing for people to find some big clue in their life, a ridiculous coincidence they couldn't have put there themselves - like the way the birth chart is set right from the start in astrology (which I didn't get far with)? I used to think I was very logical - I have a degree in Physics and a career in system / database admin on a number of different computer systems - but now am not so sure. I have enough left though to resist megalomaniac fantasy so I'm wondering if "every man and woman is a star" means we all see the world from our own perspective, there is a way in which it all fits together - or even operates - for each of us - but for each of us it's different, perhaps incompatible even? :?:

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

Post by Serpentwand »

I don't know if my nonsense applies to any cards other than the Fool but I used the fact card technique on a few more and posted in the public section of a very quiet pagan forum in the hope of luring in new members. The thread is here - http://www.pagan-heart.net/forum/index.php?topic=3961.0 - but the attached images don't seem to show without logging in :( .

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

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2dogs wrote: 13 Jul 2017, 01:08 Ah, the serpents appear identical but one is solar and one lunar :idea: .
Right. We could also have deduced this on purely Western esoteric grounds, namely by fitting the Caducaeus into the Zodiac - but this leads to a complex astrological topic of its own, so I decided not to go there just now.
Thanks for pointing that out Michael. I'm getting a lot out of this discussion on the Fool, it makes a great deal of "sense" to me. Actually I'm wondering if it's when I've moved on to read about the next card in the past that it's all gone wrong - maybe I should just consider the Fool more deeply.
I always found it funny how Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot shares so much about The Fool and The Magician, whereafter the chapters on the further Trumps contain considerably less useful information - at least that's how I felt. It's still a recommendable book, though...
I guess other cards resonate more with different people or maybe times of life. Is it a general thing for people to find some big clue in their life, a ridiculous coincidence they couldn't have put there themselves - like the way the birth chart is set right from the start in astrology (which I didn't get far with)? I used to think I was very logical - I have a degree in Physics and a career in system / database admin on a number of different computer systems - but now am not so sure. I have enough left though to resist megalomaniac fantasy so I'm wondering if "every man and woman is a star" means we all see the world from our own perspective, there is a way in which it all fits together - or even operates - for each of us - but for each of us it's different, perhaps incompatible even? :?:
As an astrologer, I indeed found that every individual is modeling the world according to the template provided by their own natal chart - solving their own formula, so to speak. However, that chart is always just a snapshot of the sky as it showed itself at the time and place of one's birth. There are obviously all kinds of different individuals with all kinds of different charts - and there are good reasons for that, as, metaphysically speaking, the Universe can only aspire to understand itself adequately by looking at itself from all these different perspectives!

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Re: 0 - The Fool or the Moment of Divine Consciousness

Post by Nemia »

I want to share with you a little tidbit about the Fool that I noticed a long time ago but don't really have an explanation for.

When I trimmed my good old Thoth, my very first deck, many years ago (before I knew that others do the same thing and it's called trimming), I noticed strong synergies between cards. And the strongest of all - between the Fool and Art (Temperance).

Image

You can see the colours and composition are very similar - but where Art is symmetrical, there are asymmetries in the Fool, underlining subtly their meaning and the impression they make on us. Just look at the two.

The similarities are even stronger when you put one card on top of the other, like this:

Image

or like this:

Image

The two cards seem to augment each other.

Now I do have some vague ideas what could make these cards interesting together.

The Fool is associated with Air, Art with Fire. But the Fool is elementary Air, while Art is a zodiac card, associated with the mutable autumn fire of Sagittarius. In the Fool, Earth makes a veiled appearance in the bag of coins; in Art, Water plays an important symbolic role. So in a way, with these two cards, all four Empedoclean elements are brought together - the active elements dominate, the passive elements are brought in to highlight or complement the active ones.

I would have expected the Lovers and Art to fit together ideally (in many ways they do), perhaps also with the Hermit as third mutable zodiac card, and the Fool with the Hanged Man and World, the other elementary atu. But no, Fool and Art make the most obvious visual pair.

I didn't check the Book of Thoth (will do that now) or Frieda Harris' letters about her work on the cards but when I read them last, I didn't notice any hint of an affinity. Maybe it's just an unintentional similarity that just happened while Harris was working.

I call it an elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft) and it's one of the things about the deck that I really love.

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