TAROT FOR THE WEEK OF 1/20/20
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
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This quote is from a sermon entitled “on self-centeredness delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King in August of 1957. I spent part of Monday reading this sermon and even though it was written over half a century ago I found it to be incredibly relevant. In it Dr. King talks about how self centeredness leads to frustration and unhappiness. He talks about how it leads to a very “sensitive and touchy response to the universe.” Which can cause one to shut down and not be able to face the realities of life, nor the difficult things that life gives us to help us grow. Unchecked, he says, this self-centeredness can cause dilutions of persecutions, and the belief that the universe is against us. I was about expound on this point but I’m fully confident that you can make your own connections to its relevance.
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Enter the king of swords. Sitting high atop a cold mountain the king has come into full mastery of his mental faculties. From this vantage point, sitting on his thrown the king can watch all scenarios play out. What happens if I take this job? What happens if I move to this place? What if I push this button? What if I turn this screw? Perched on the thrown of logic the King has the ability to see and understand many things, but the most important thing for him to understand perhaps is his own role in this narrative. By rising through the ranks to wear the crown the King runs the risk of being right. There is an addiction to this feeling, where he can observe everything but he can forget to observe himself.
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Dr. King offers us a solution to the self-centered trap. He offers us service and meaningful work. He says: “Find some great cause and some great purpose, some loyalty to which you can give yourself and become so absorbed in that something that you give your life to it.” And he goes on to remind us that “all human beings have a desire to belong and to feel significant and important.”
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The King of Swords looks around at his cold judgy mountain top
...He realizes that although he has attained a significant position he is alone. He belongs to nothing, only the path of the mind. His only friends are the two ravens Thought and Memory that peck and claw in the distance, but even they don’t provide much comfort.
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Dr. King goes on to provide another solution for this problem, “You conquer self-centeredness by coming to the point of seeing that you are where you are today because somebody helped you to get there.” BAM! Mic drop. In all fairytales, in all myths, the protagonist is always helped by something else. No one has ever done anything alone. We are a communal species and we succeed through collective work.
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The King of Swords scowls at this and pulls his cloak around him to stave off the chill of his loneliness. He spent so much time trying to get where he was, trying to maintain his power and position, he forgot what he was doing it for. It’s not enough to be right all the time, one needs to be right for the right reasons. While the King was able to detach from the world to gain a better perspective of what was going down, he forgot to let go of his attachment to self. He now realized his own self centeredness and how that’s cut him off from life. He saw that he could move beyond himself into a place of service and meaningful work where he could make a difference instead of just judging others for the way he perceived them through the scrying mirror he held in his palm.
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And this is the super power of Aquarius, the ability to go beyond and gain a perspective of life and the self from the position of a neutral observer. It is from this place that we can really see how life works and begin to truly envision the future. I’ll close with one more quote from Dr. King:
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“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
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