Longing for new beginnings?
"The fool thinks he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
William Shakespeare
Spring is a potent time for new beginnings, as you may know. What I didn’t know until a few days ago, is that the vital energy that spring carries is linked to the energy of The Fool. The Fool is a Tarot card representing fresh starts, taking leaps of faith into the unknown, trusting and believing in yourself and following your intuition. It invites us all to embark on a new path, and step into a new beginning, without fear or attachment to the past. I particularly like the image below - from Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck - where the Fool becomes Dionysus, the errant God of wine, fertility, festivity and excess.
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa wrote a wonderful book about tarots, titled THE WAY of TAROT, The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards. They explain the meaning of each card and there’s a paragraph where they imagine what each card would say, if they could speak. What if the fool spoke?
AND IF THE FOOL SPOKE
Did you know that transformation of consciousness is possible at any moment, that you can suddenly change the perception you have of yourself? People sometimes imagine that taking action means triumphing over the Other. What a mistake! If you wish to act in the world, you must explode that perception of the ego that has been imposed and embedded since childhood, and which refuses to change. Expand your boundaries endlessly and without cease. Go into a trance. Let yourself be possessed by a more powerful mind than your own, an impersonal energy. It is not a question of losing consciousness but of allowing the original sacred madness, already within you, to speak. Stop being your own witness, stop observing yourself, be an actor in the pure state, an entity in action. Your memory will cease to record facts, actions, uttered words. You will lose all notion of time. Until now you have been living on the isle of reason, neglecting the other living forces and other energies. The landscape is expanding. Become one with the ocean of the unconscious. You will then know a state of superconsciousness in which there will be no missed action or accident. Space will no longer be a concept; you will become space. You will have no concept of time; you will become the phenomenon as it happens. In this state of extreme presence, every gesture and every action are perfect. You cannot fool yourself; there is no plan or intention. There is only pure action in the eternal present. Do not be afraid of freeing the instinct, no matter how primitive. Going beyond the rational does not mean denying the mental force: be open to the poetry of intuition, to flashes of telepathy, to voices that do not belong to you, to words that come to you from another dimension. Watch them join to the infinite extent of your feelings and to the inexhaustible creative force conferred upon you by sexual energy. No longer look at your body as a past concept but as the vibrating subjective reality of the present. You will see that your body stops heeding the commands of rational concepts and allows itself to be moved by forces belonging to other dimensions, by the Totality of reality. A caged animal moves like rational perception. The free movement of an animal in the forest is comparable to the trance. The animal in a cage must eat at assigned hours. For action to occur, the rational must be given words. The wild animal feeds itself and never has any illusions about its food. The actions of an individual in a trance are not motivated by what he has learned, but by what is.
Another card I like, pulled from the Alice in Wonderland Tarot Deck.
There’s plenty to reflect on in the words above. Whether you resonate with The Fool, Dionysus, or Alice in Wonderland, they all symbolise the inner and outer journey into the unknown. Now is the time to harness this energy… are you ready to take a leap of faith?
I hope you will have a wonderful Easter break.
With love,
Francesca