Tarot and the Gates of Light

by Mark Horn

  Now you may be thinking, wait a minute, isn’t resolute determination more in the realm of Netzach? And you’d be right. Except that here, this exercise of resolute determination means putting aside all the thoughts, stories, or ego projections that come into your head, separating them from one’s observation of simply what is, free from judgment. It is a Submissive practice of Humility. So when I see the Eight of Swords paired with the Six of Swords—a card that can be seen as a card of the seeker headed toward the far shore of enlightenment—I am reminded of my own Submission to the discipline of addithana as I experienced the waves of strong thoughts and feelings that urged me to get up and leave the meditation hall.

  And for meditators, just as for the people in the boat in the Six of Swords, the waves will come. The water looks placid at first, but the waves always come. And we must use all our boatman’s skill of keeping the boat of our mind Balanced and “stable in resolute determination,” free of ego so that we may reach the other shore.

  This is a message and a practice that I always need to remember as I work through this forty-nine-day path. Because my mind wavers, my determination flags, and I sometime let my ego stories get the better of me. That’s when it’s time to have Compassion for myself—and then start over.

  Day 19: Hod of Tiferet in Assiyah

  The Eight and Six of Pentacles

  _________within_________

  As a gay man, I never expected to be a father. But in the early nineties, through an orthodox Jewish study group, I met a single mother who was in graduate school and working a part-time job. Now, your first question might be, What’s a queer Jewish Buddhist doing in an orthodox Bible study group? It’s a long story. What’s important, though, is that I bonded with the mom’s seven-year-old son immediately: he was a little red-headed kid with glasses who liked to read. And as a redheaded man with glasses who liked to read, I felt a real connection. I could see the mom needed help with childcare, and I needed a child in my life. I hadn’t even known I needed a child; when I came out, I closed the door on the possibility of ever being a father, so I was stunned by how much emotion stepping into a fatherly role brought up.

  And it was a fatherly role; I was at their apartment several nights a week to help him with homework. On weekends I took him to museums, movies, plays, and playgrounds. And because I understood that his mother’s struggle wasn’t only with time but also with money, I began to contribute to the household financially. This brought about a huge change in my life, as I understood for the first time from the inside the pressures that having a family can put on a working parent.

  Up to that point, I had been floating through my career, happy to do what was expected without trying to move up the corporate ladder. I had less responsibility and more free time even if I had less money. But once I became part of a family unit, unorthodox as it was, I began to kick my career into high gear; I wanted to earn enough money to make life easier for them. I had to take care of business in order to take care of other people.

  I was no longer living just for myself. This isn’t news to you if you’re a parent, straight or gay. But it was a new experience for me. And when I see the Eight and Six of Pentacles as Hod of Tiferet in Assiyah, this experience comes to mind.

  Like the man in the Eight of Pentacles, I had to Surrender myself to my work and subsume my ego to climb the corporate ladder in the service of higher goals. And not unlike the merchant in the Six of Pentacles, I had to Balance my life and my income so I could share both in a way that made me part of something larger, rather than playing the role of benefactor that would only serve to create distance and keep me outside.

  I’ve always had mixed feelings about my work in corporate America, but it has been very good to me. And I recognize that the material blessings I receive in reward for my work are blessings that must be shared. It’s why before I became part of this family unit I contributed to a charity that supported children in other countries. And why I continue to give to nonprofits dedicated to helping others. This is one practice of Hod of Tiferet in Assiyah: working not only for myself but also for others. And on this day, I rededicate myself to this practice. How is the dynamic of Hod of Tiferet in Assiyah at work in your life?

  Questions for reflection and contemplation: Day 19

  1. (Wands) Have you ever given yourself to a leader or a cause with your whole Heart? How did it affect your experience of the pressures and issues in your own life? Have you ever had the experience of your pride or ego trying to force Harmony in a situation? What was that experience like? If you recognize your pride or ego threatening Harmony in a group, what can you do to evoke your own Humility to counter it?

  2. (Cups) What beliefs do you hold about your religion that reflect a childish understanding of the Divine? How does that affect your opinions of other religions and spiritual paths? If there is a religion or spiritual path you have judgments about, try to find some sacred teachings in that tradition that are universal and no different from teachings in your own tradition.

  3. (Swords) Think about an idea or opinion you hold that is very fixed—one that you feel so strongly about that you can’t hear the other side. Then try to let go of that opinion—really consider the humanity on the other side of this issue—and write a counterargument to what you believe that would help you see the other point of view, even if it doesn’t change your mind. Ask for advice or guidance about an issue that feels stuck from someone you respect, even if he or she doesn’t hold the same opinions you do.

  4. (Pentacles) How does your work in the world support others or a cause larger than yourself? Does making this contribution or giving this support set up a barrier of feeling superior or does it open you to shared vulnerability and humanity? How does it help you experience the “withness” of greater presence?

  Day 20: Yesod of Tiferet

  Harnessing the Passion in Compassion

  Today is the twentieth day of the Omer, which is two weeks and six days of the Omer.

  Today is the first time during the count that we connect two Sephirot on the middle pillar: Tiferet, the synthesis and dynamic Harmony of Chesed and Gevurah, with Yesod, the synthesis and dynamic tension of Netzach and Hod. Both Yesod and Tiferet mediate the energies directly above them in a bond of mutuality. Tiferet radiates love throughout the body, and Yesod of Tiferet directs that love and Compassion outside, in the desire to Connect. This can be with another person, or it can be expressed as a lust for life.

  Mapped onto the body, this is the connection of the genitals to the heart—the Heart’s desire, experienced as a kind of longing, the passion in Compassion. Emily Dickinson wrote, “The heart wants what it wants.” When the Heart’s truth is expressed in the passion of sexual union, the Connection is so much more than just sexual: it generates a strong Bond of Intimacy.

  Yesod can bring a kind of superglue quality of Bonding to Connection that can result in deep spiritual relationship or lead to an obsessive or addictive affect when it is out of Balance. Tiferet’s true Heart can bring vulnerability in its openness to feeling not only love but also pain. So together they direct the energy of (com)passionate commitment toward Bonding deeply to another in a heart Connection. In a relationship, this is a powerful energy that helps provide a stable Foundation even as outer conditions change. An example that comes to mind are the vows “in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer.”

  When these two Sephirot are connected, one can express spirituality in sexuality. I think about the advice Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z’’l, would give to boys he tutored for their bar mitzvah. First, he would ask, “Do you masturbate?” And after the embarrassed silence and the admission, he would counsel them to take their time and to “let God in.” Rather than divorce the sexual from the spiritual—and deny the body—he understood that damming (and damning) up this energy with shame would make it harder for one to bring a spiritual approach to sexual union with another.

  Of course, when Yesod is out of balance in this pair, we�
��re faced with the problem of promiscuous passion, possibly compulsive sexuality or substance addiction. And a person may make use of the feelings in Tiferet to create the illusion of Connection, but such a person is only interested in personal satisfaction. There can be a narcissistic neediness in Yesod of Tiferet to watch out for. And because of the addictive possibilities in Yesod, it’s important to look at how committing to someone or to a cause out of Love or Compassion can be used to avoid something one needs to look at in oneself—making an outer Connection to avoid the inner Connection. Let’s see how the cards address these issues.

  Day 20: Yesod of Tiferet in Atzilut

  The Nine and Six of Wands

  _________within_________

  One of the ways we hide our hurts is by propping up the ego, and that’s a dynamic I see in the pairing of the Nine and Six of Wands. In the Six of Wands, consider the man on the horse as defending his wounded Heart by achieving greatness to put himself above others—creating a superior exterior. Ah, but underneath we can see the vulnerability and hurt on display in the Nine of Wands. We’ve all known someone who pretends to be above it all, but who really is lonely and hungry for Connection. But you can’t be in a truly Intimate relationship when you’re on a high horse.

  I am familiar with this dynamic in my own life. I have guarded my hurt Heart by masking it with an air of superiority. And I’ve hidden my longing to Connect behind a stockade of past hurts. But this is a self-defeating strategy. The Heart remains guarded, not only to others but also against itself, so that one doesn’t even feel the loneliness and longing to connect. But the desire to Connect doesn’t go away, so even though he is hurt, the man in the Nine of Wands still leaves a narrow breach in his wall of defenses. In fact, the man on the horse in the Six of Wands is surrounded by people who support him; he just manages to keep enough emotional distance by physically (and psychologically) holding himself over them.

  The result can be a relationship that is marked by the inability to share true feelings. And I have a room full of past partners who can attest to my issues in this department. The difference today is that now I can see it, and I hope I’m conscious enough most of the time not to fall prey to this dynamic. But when I’m not, I hope I’ll have a partner who is not afraid to point it out; I just have to be ready to hear and respond appropriately.

  Day 20: Yesod of Tiferet in B’riah

  The Nine and Six of Cups

  _________within_________

  What happens to the generous Heart when it has been wounded? The answer may be in this pairing of the Six and Nine of Cups. In the Six of Cups, one child is offering a cup with a blooming flower to another. (Tarot people read the figure on the left sometimes as an adult, sometimes as another child, and as you can see, depending on the combination of cards and what I’m examining, I’m willing to accept either view.) In the Nine of Cups, a man sits in front of an array of empty cups on a table behind him, his arms crossed over his heart. Both the child with the lily and the seated man are wearing red hats and red hose. It’s almost as if something has happened to squash the generous impulse of the child so that he has grown into a man who has become smug and self-satisfied: he is alone in this image and not sharing the cups, which are empty anyway.

  I also see the Nine of Cups as a man who is greeting his guests at a banquet, and the cups have yet to be filled. However, his position suggests that his attitude toward his guests is one of superiority. Rather than an open Heart of generosity, his Heart is blocked, and his guests must provide him with something, perhaps praise or flattery, before he gets out of the way and orders his servants in to fill the cups so his guests can enjoy them. He uses his wealth to fill the empty cup of his Heart; he is emotionally insecure and thus demands a kind of emotional payoff from his guests.

  In both cards, there is an array of cups that can be read as creating a boundary of some kind. There is the fence of cups in the Six of Cups that runs across the bottom border of the card so that the two children are on the other side of this fence. And in the Nine of Cups, the table on which the nine cups sit runs the width of the card behind the seated man, so that while you may be a guest in his house, he will only let you get so far in.

  In earlier discussions of the Six of Cups, I’ve mentioned how the card can be read as a loss of innocence. So we can consider this pairing as the frustrated desire to Connect through a Heart whose generosity has been blocked by some past hurt or trauma. It’s as though the compassionate generosity of spirit on view in the Six of Cups has morphed into something more self-serving or defensive in the Nine of Cups.

  An old partner of mine once remarked on my habit of giving large parties. And indeed, there was a time in my life when I loved to create crowded get-togethers of the very different kinds of people I knew. But what he said was more about my unconscious motivation. He suggested that I was a “social loner,” by which he meant that I used the crowds of people to Connect with the individuals only superficially. That these parties were a way of surrounding myself with people I liked, but also a way of preventing them from getting too close to me. As you may have noticed by now, I have a habit of finding psychologically astute partners who call me on my stuff. And this pairing of cards reminds me of his observation. Of course, there are many ways one can appear to be fostering Connection with others when in fact one is really distancing oneself. It’s a tendency I have to be on guard for, and perhaps it’s a characteristic you’re familiar with in your life in some way, though I hope not.

  Day 20: Yesod of Tiferet in Yetzirah

  The Nine and Six of Swords

  _________within_________

  Loneliness. Regret. Loss of a loved one in a breakup. Or by death. Guilt. I have experienced all these feelings, and I know they are at their most intense in the middle of the night. So when we come to Yesod in the world of Yetzirah as portrayed in the Nine of Swords, the Connection to another is broken, and our Hearts are broken as well.

  One of the characteristics of waking in the night to fears is that our thinking becomes obsessive; it’s hard to stop thinking negative thoughts in this situation, and our fears multiply. It’s also my experience that when I allow myself to be controlled by the fears and negative projections, it poisons my Relationships. I judge myself with ferocity and can find no Compassion for myself. And my thoughts create the negative reality I’m afraid of in my Relationships with others. This is a place of deep pain, and whether based in reality or out of mental projection, the pain is real. What is the best way to approach this pain?

  Because today is Yesod of Tiferet, the easy answer is with Compassion. But there are traps here as well, and the Six of Swords suggests one of these traps. And this is one of those times when which version of the Waite-Smith deck you have can lead you in very different directions. Because in several of my decks, the far shore in the Six of Swords is colored a kind of gray. The predominant feeling is moving from a more colorful, if difficult, place (the choppy blue waves on the near side of the boat) to a less colorful place (the almost blank expanse of the water on the far side of the boat and the gray land and trees on the far shore). I mentioned in the section for Day 17 how one could see the passage across this body of water as crossing the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. And I find myself remembering the memorial service of my first boyfriend, who was one of the first people to receive a diagnosis of HIV. The service was at the home of his mother, who was a model of efficiency in greeting people and organizing the day. I was an emotional wreck and experienced for the first time the wracking sobs of grief that come when a piece of your heart has been ripped out through such a loss. His mother, seeing how distraught I was, approached me with some advice. “There’s only one way I could get through this,” she said to me. “Xanax.”

  Many doctors will prescribe sedatives of one sort or another for grief, but there are just as many doctors, as well as psychologists and spiritual counselors, who say that sedatives interfere with the grieving process. These medications flatten out the emo
tions and muffle the obsessive thoughts experienced in these crisis moments.

  Because we’re in the suit of swords, this intellectual approach to grieving, one that short-circuits the emotions, is Compassion that is afraid of passion. In our society today, one way we try to short-circuit the grieving process and all its emotions is with drugs, and I’m not talking only about the grief that comes with a loss through death. All kinds of emotional pain are sedated. Mind you, this is not a screed against sedatives or antidepressants; I am simply saying that as a society we are quick to medicate emotions rather than deal with them.

  Let’s look at the people in the cards again. In the Nine of Swords, the person in bed is alone, with their eyes covered. And in the Six of Swords, the passengers in the boat are huddled, hooded, with their eyes down instead of looking ahead. They seem to be within themselves rather than comforting each other. They are together, yet alone. So here we have another clue to the solution for this condition. As the old song by Friend & Lover (written by James Post) goes, “Reach out of the darkness, and you may find a friend.”

  A Heart Connection is the answer to a broken Heart. A Heart Connection can give one the strength to endure the pain of a broken Heart and to see the far shore of grief with hints of color instead of unending gray. The only way out is through.

  We can also look at this card pairing from a twelve-step point of view—with swords as needles, perhaps. The Nine of Swords is very much a card of “hitting bottom.” One way I look at the issue of addiction and compulsive behavior is as a disconnect between Yesod and Tiferet. When they mutually inform each other, the spiritual and the physical, sexual, or generative aspects of ourselves are aligned within and in Relationships with others. When they are disconnected, Yesod is always looking for someplace to pour its Generative energy, and when it’s not informed by Tiferet, the choice can be, to use the Buddhist phrase, unskillful. Alcohol or drugs, sex or gambling—when you hit bottom, whatever form the addiction takes, it isn’t pretty. But hitting bottom means you can now start on your way back up.