Something in the Twos

In which we examine the Twos in the Tarot, learn how to give ourselves a minute, and come to a better understanding of the nature of sex.

The tension between two things has an energy you can harness to create something new. When two ideas or choices or points of view seem irreconcilable, they often create the most dynamic, and certainly unexpected, third thing: a result, a conclusion possibly, but more often a whole new thing that hasn’t been thought of, a heretofore unknown resolution, a child of the two.

This is the true nature of sexual reproduction. All the Sturm und Drang we attach to it revolves around sexual reproduction’s inherent miraculous nature. Something is born of two that could not be known before because there’s never been anything like it. We can imagine “a child” but we cannot know who a particular child will be.

But we don’t actually have to have sex in order to go through the process of bringing two disparate things into relationship and having their interactions create a new thing. Sex is just the most titillating form this process takes. Learning to see the miraculous nature of the process in the smallest moments of your life can add some spice, reassure that yes the universe is created out of love, and possibily make you a bit leery of a culture intent on turning all things sexual into a profit.

So having two things can become incredibly interesting under the right circumstances. World changing in a literal sense. When we have two different things - two different blazing wills, two different hearts desiring, two different mental constructions, two different physical needs - we have the makings for something new.

Because of the portentous nature of the situation, we will also find a pause of sorts. The Twos in the Tarot show this pause and give us imagery we can contemplate to better recognize the pause and use it to advantage. All the twos have an indecision in them. They are all a moment of pause exterior to the energy building between. The essence of Two is “between”, the energy that is between is created by the existence of two things in relationship.

If you feel so inclined and haven’t done so already, you can pull out the Twos of your favorite deck now. The descriptions below are for the Waite-Smith deck, but you’ll find many deck creators put a pause in their Twos. If you’re not seeing the pause in a particular card, see if you are seeing the turbulence that comes between the pause and the creation of the third thing.

Two of Wands

Two poles of a Tesla coil, the energy snaking and snapping between them, laddering up to Heaven like Jacob with his pants on fire. Have you ever been still on the outside and pulsing inside with desire and want? The Wands, suit of fire, represent the existence of tension between true wills.

We often hear and think of our own wills as being singular always, indomitable, and irresistible. But as with all things, there are times when the will splits, just enough to allow this cool thing to happen, this creation of the new. In the Waite-Smith Tarot, the man stands between his wills looking out to the horizon only he can see.

Two of Cups

In the two of cups, we see two hearts and the space between them. The between that two people make. The purpose of this between is always the creation of love, or the opening of a channel to allow love to flow into the world. It is the filling of a space with love to create the third.

Cups, again and still, are receptacles, receiving the element of water that takes the form of its container. So the two of cups shows us the pause as two individual hearts approach each other. Two different desires turned toward one another.

Two of Swords

Out of all the Twos, the Two of Swords is the most still The tension here is all in the mind, the eyes are closed, inward, the removal of self from the outside world can look like peace, but the tension is there, you can cut it with one of those swords held ready for just that task.

This kind of tension is hard to stay with. It often masks itself in life noise. We prefer the sounds of our everyday lives over the tension shown in this card  because the subtle tension of ideas held tautly, choices and possibilities, leaning to either side of barely perceptible is uncomfortable. So we mask the quiet in the two of swords with traffic and t.v. and people talking around us about everything else. The blindfold allows one the stillness required to sense the underlying tension, which once perception is attuned to it, is clear as a bell.

Two of Disks

The two of pentacles is the most dynamic, but even here the coins are belted together by infinity. The juggling is not a sustainable act and certainly not the end result desired. You can only have a bunch of things in the air for a while until they start crashing down.

There is a fascination created by discs so solid put in rhythmic motion. In the Two we glimpse the underlying energetic nature of matter. The tension of the two pulls, the electron from the proton, keeping the needed space between them to make matter.

Contemplation

The minor Twos in the WS show us four different ways to resolve the tension of a duality. If a Two comes up in a reading and you sense the pause in it is important, try one of the following contemplations. With all contemplations, your goal is really to not have a goal. You are allowing a pause in your thinking and giving yourself the opportunity to receive whatever message awaits you.

Wands: Take a long view. Find a place where you can see to the horizon. Let your eyes relax as you look out as far as you can. Don’t effort, just breathe.


Cups: Look someone in the eye. You may be able to find natural conversations in which you can look someone in the eye without it being weird or aggressive seeming. In our modern world, a surprising number of people find it difficult to look someone in the eye. If it’s too hard, you can simply go to a public space and look at people as they go about their business. Look with compassion. Again, don’t effort. Just breathe.


Swords: Put the blindfold on. It really makes a difference, allowing the muscles around your eyes to relax. In the darkness, breathe in focusing on the sounds around you. Breathe out, focusing on the breathe. Do this until you feel calm, then let the silence settle.


Pentacles: Fascination, focus on myriad movement, preferably movement that glitters. Light on a water surface is always good, but the light and shadow of traffic can be just as effective. Let the movement draw you in until you can feel it in your body.

7 Signs It's Time to Take a Bath

1 - Your sister calls out of the blue and spends ten minutes telling you a mutual friend has been seriously ill before she tells you that he also died.

2 - The world crashes in, all loud and obnoxious. Horns and yells of “bitch!” or the far crueler judgment “nice”, spoken with a vengeful irony. That bicyclist didn’t even realize he ran the stop sign and he almost slams into your car. And your adherence to the rules of the road warrants the condemnation. People always think they have the right of way, shame you for moving through the world as if you deserve it. And you do. You move and get by and stay true to yourself, but it hardens over the loud day.

3 - Other people turn away, keep their distance. You’re not sure if you actually smell, or if they just see the sweat, fresh and clean, from your run, where you pushed yourself that last mile so that your legs tremble and you know they will be sore the next day.

4 - The hotel room has a tub with jets.


5 - The fungus between your toes is so think it spreads your toes. Your shoes don’t even fit anymore. Your socks are lumpy. The feathery strands of orange poke through the argyle. It smells of compost water, the dark brown tea of aging leaves.

6 - The cold seeps into the bones, the muscles are tight and cramped, having forgotten what it means to be touched. The skin slides over the lonely muscle, a shield and a curtain of shame to hide the separation of self and world. In the steamy warmth of the bath, salty as tears and ocean, fragrant of orange blossom and vetiver, the spine uncoils, remembering darkness.

7 - The layer of dust on your eyelids has grown so thick you cannot see your graying hands, cannot see the veins that have become such emboldened roads. Soak it all in the warm, steamy wet and let the drip of humid dreams block out the silence.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity exists in the person, not in the “real” world (whatever that is.) Two things happen all the time. Why do we sometimes go “Whoa! Those two things just happened!”

My theory is that humans are weird and we don’t really need to survive most of the time. We have all this extra time to get in trouble and a neo-cortex that’s only been around for a few million years. Who knows what all it does.

We are apparently wired to supply meaning to just about anything. (E.g. socks!) There’s a part of the brain that supplies a sense of importance to what we experience. The attribution of importance is great for survival: that lion sneaking up is more important than that grazing giraffe. If you drop acid, this part of the brain will fire like crazy and suddenly everything will be super meaningful.

There is also an area of the temporal lobe that when artificially activated creates feelings of “oneness with God”, just like there are areas of the occipital lobe that when artificially activated produce visual hallucinations. It’s only logical to assume that these parts of the brain evolved to respond to real stimuli; we have yet to find an example of a physical body evolving to adapt to something that does not exist. But again, it’s up to us to figure out whether we are hallucinating or not.

So, I have this body and it does this weird thing where it sees two things and goes “whoa! that was awesome” when part of my brain supplies the importance and another part supplies the god-touch. And sometimes this is completely made up and leads me on a merry chase through the illusionary astral. Sometimes it leads to good luck. And once in a great while it does lead up.

Learning the difference is helpful. Learning to find the one you want is magic. But what the heck do I know? All I am certain about right now is that I’m in a body that does certain things that may or may not lead to other things and I get to decide if I like where I’m going but I don’t necessarily know how to change course and anyway, most of the things that are happening to me are really happening to other people.

Oh, and atoms are made of nothing and dreams. I’m apparently quite convinced of that as well.

Curiosity

We start embattled, our identity formed in response to the rapid assault of birth. It starts the journey. We are separate from all others. Such a shock from the womb where in the dark we were the world. And now, alone and distinct with our suits of skin, we fight to breathe, to damn the air with our screams.

One thing. The terror is assuaged by only one thing. There is softness. Soft flesh that soothes and feeds. Kindness. Gentleness. And from that can spring a curiosity of the world.

What is this place to which I have come into being? This ground from which the body forms, and thus gives rise to the terror and the kindess. How then to enjoy division and separation, rather than flee from it.

About That Elephant...

Imagine that you had never seen an elephant and didn't have a word for it. Now imagine that you see one and you have to describe it to other people who also have never seen and don't have a word for it. Imagine that you don't have words for "trunk" and "tusk" either. How would these people respond to your description? Some might believe you. Some might think you're crazy.


Now imagine you meet other people describing something they've seen. They call it something else. They use different words to describe the tusks and the trunk, but slowly you realize that they are in fact describing the same thing.

That is the whole divine world. We all go get a glimpse and come back and talk about it with each other, but we don't have the same words. Slowly, tho, if you look at all the spiritiual systems around the world, you can start to see that we are all seeing the same thing. It's just that we are blind and the elephant is really, really big.

Orion and the Devil

I love that we are made of stardust. We are. We contain elements (like GOLD) that can only be made in supernovas. Yay!

Right now I have this picture of the constellation Orion on my desktop. You can just make out the Horsehead nebula to the right of the first beltloop, and further towards the hunter's knees, the eponymous Orion nebula.

There's Betelguese, at the left shoulder, all orange and sending the light of its own supernova hurtling towards us. It has already exploded, already made its gold, and we are just waiting for the light to arrive, which could happen AT ANY MOMENT - astronomically speaking. And in a billion years, there could be people made out of that star.

It should be known that I come down differently about the Devil's Bargain. That was a great deal. We get to live a whole life in the crazy incarnate state and the garden is just there waiting for us whenever figure out how to get back to it. Of course, the Devil had to make it seem like a rip off, had to pose as a snake in the grass, otherwise we would have suspected some trickery. It's just too good to be true!

I say that knowing that my middle-aged back is starting to hurt. I just got my first reading glasses last year. 150 works miracles, but my mother has just gotten 300s so eventually. I have one very close friend and for Christmas there was just my parents and my sister. I have a heartbreak still seeping from the 11 year marriage that fell apart 5 years ago. And through all this I've managed to not write that much, not create very many things, not break into management and also not get horribly addicted to anything, also haven't gone on a rampage, haven't oppressed anyone religiously or otherwise. I have neither had children nor left them on a bus. I have managed a mediocre life. And yet, when I look at Orion, I think there's something amazing echoing through me, through all of us.

To zoom in for the details of Orion go here.

The Hydra And The All-Seeing Eye

A path only reveals itself in the journey. No one knows what it looks like until they’ve traveled it. If we are lucky, we will receive instruction ahead of time telling us what to look for, but usually we don’t recognize either the instruction or the luck and will pass by the obvious landmark many times before realizing that dirt path past the twisty tree is really the way to the castle.

Way back when life was first starting to collect cells, there was a point when organisms started being able to detect light. These organisms - probably a Hydra or “living jelly” - had no eyes, no lenses, no cerebral lobes devoted to interpreting the data of photons. Instead, they had molecules, specifically proteins, within themselves that would agitate when hit with light. In darkness these proteins would go about their business interacting with other molecules the way they were built to do. But when hit with the energy of a photon, these molecules would take in the energy in the light and get energized.

Now the organism had a way to tell the difference between light and dark. But at first, light and dark would have no meaning. The experience of light for the Hydra was not illumination and focus. Objects were not revealed. The original experience of light was simply an excitement in the presence of something unknown.

It might have taken generations for any advantage to come of this. The proteins originally reacted to photons not because they were seeking enlightenment or even a hunting advantage. These proteins were simply following physical laws; their bundled atoms - just energy themselves - absorbed the incoming energy of the photons because they chanced to be arranged in a way that made absorption inevitable. At first, this reaction just existed on its own. It wasn’t tied to any action in the organism. The Hydra didn’t do anything because its proteins got excited by photons.

But eventually, a Hydra did do something in response to the light. It may have taken thousands of generations for a Hydra to link the feeling of light to the feeling of movement by a water flea, but when it finally made that connection, it started catching a lot more fleas…

*****

Scientists have discovered a link between the temporal lobe of the brain (the part behind your ears) and experiences of the divine. People who have temporal lobe seizures often describe feeling deeply connected with every living thing or report that they understand the grand plan of existence. The scientists are, of course, very careful not to make any claims regarding the existence of g*d (whatever that is) although many theorize based on the assumption that g*d doesn’t exist. This leads to some illogical reasoning.

The reasoning goes that because experiences of the divine are triggered by things like seizures and human manipulation, the brain isn’t really experiencing something “real” meaning “outside the brain”. Because some experiences of the divine through temporal lobe activity are caused by means we can easily comprehend, the divine itself - the thing experienced - must be something that exists within the realm of human comprehension.

It is true that we don’t experience the “out there” world directly but always as mediated through our brains. We are awash with radio signals but can only hear the music once we have a radio. And our experience of the signals is affected by how good the radio is. Our bodies are our radio picking up whatever signals they have evolved the capacity to receive.

But we can also experience similar signals that arise from the brain itself. We can remember and dream of visual images even in total darkness. In open brain surgery, patients can be made to feel things on their skin or hear sounds that aren’t there for the rest of the folk in the operating room. Our radio can make its own signals and sometimes it’s hard for us to tell where the signal is coming from just by listening to the song.

Just because we sometimes get signals from the universe within our brains, doesn’t mean that the world “out there” doesn’t exist. We don’t argue that chocolate doesn’t exist just because we can make someone on an operating table taste it by zapping their brain. And so, if we have a whole section of our brain that seems to perk up around experiences of the divine, we could in fact argue that there very well could be something out there for us to sense.

Imagine what those early Hydra would have said if they could think and reflect upon their new ability to sense light. Imagine they could talk to other life forms that didn’t have the ability yet. What could our light sensing forebears say about light when all they could do was feel a sense of excitement about something they could not yet imagine even existed?

“I feel something, I’m not sure what it is, but every now and then I get the strangest sensation. There will be stretches of time when certain parts of myself are excited, I can feel a movement within me.”

And how would the unseeing sponge respond?

“How can you feel a movement within you from something outside? You're delusional. You cannot prove light exists. Why should I consider light as even possible when I have no proof that it exists? Stop talking about light.”