Endless

Photograph by Mario Pantelic, ShutterStock

Human beings live, sense, and experience infinity but cannot think it without abstractions or images. This is just a part of being human, a limitation or rather a definition of our finitude.

It appeared to me this morning first as the Wheel of Fortune crossed my mind. It's a card in the Major Arcana of many Tarot decks. I've been feeling called to paint and interpret this card for a while now. So when it reappeared in my mind today, I made note that I had to do it.

The Wheel of Fortune is an ambivalent card in the Tarot deck. It's a representative of the "this too shall pass" adage. If you are in a shit phase in your life and you draw it, the card is a reminder of all else that's waiting to pass; if you are in a happy phase in your life and you draw it, well... you won't be feeling too happy. It works in a similar way to the Death card in the deck, as a reminder of inevitable change. However, in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, Wheel of Fortune usually carries in its image a connection for the reader to the world whereas the Death card appears as intimate and personal. So, Wheel of Fortune can work to remind you that though others are enjoying themselves while you are being crushed by the wheel, you can be certain that a time will come when they are the ones trapped under its weight while you are liberated. This is not about revenge or vindictiveness but a simple reminder of the way of the world.

As I sat down to meditate, noise, feelings and thoughts began crowding in. I am to focus on my breath, the feeling of my chest as I breathe, come whatever may into my mind. So, I do and images flash, feelings pierce, and thoughts, neatly language-wrapped drop into my mind. I feel a sense of urgency pass through my body as the thought about infinity and cycles cross my mind but I stay and I breathe, hoping to remember the language-robed revelation.

I don't remember when I first heard the word Moksha. I used to think it meant an ending to all suffering. I used to view death as a liberation, a freedom from everything that was a part of living-- the good and the bad. Initially I equated Moksha with Death. Then when I was in university, one of my friends told me a story from the Upanishads. When she had been young, her aunt used to narrate the story to her. Till this day, I remember fragments from the story, the fact that its structure was complex and fascinating even though I had heard and not read it, and most importantly how it changed my view of Moksha. In the story, Moksha is an awareness of the endless cycle of life and death. It brought with it, to me, a horrible realization that there was an endlessness to life, that even after Death I couldn't be certain of being free. Freedom, if any was to be experienced, was to be found from being aware of the nature of life so that life after life, form after form, you remain a fixed point of consciousness no matter the ravages of Life and Time on your body. I cringed away from this story, trying to make sense of all the additional things it brought up- reincarnation in some way, a continuity in memory, this incredibly expansiveness awareness. My brain felt it would break trying to understand. So I pushed the story far away and stopped trying to make any sense of it. But it stayed with me. My third time coming upon the word Moksha was in my own mind as I started learning how to read Natal charts using Astrology. Similar to Tarot, Astrology too has many schools/ways of readings and the one I happened to chance upon and start with created the birth chart as a circle. As I read some of Stephen Arroyo and Liz Greene's works, I realized that their conceptualization, rather their way of looking was leading me to the same place that the Upanishadic story had. Again, my brain felt close to breaking. So, I stepped away again.

But today as I meditated and the circle appeared before my eyes, I realized I did not have to think. I could see it and it made sense. A circle is not nonsense to any of us. We perceive it. Similarly, we perceive that all around us life is born and dies and we will too. If we are not living as if we are sleeping, we can perceive our mortality in the change of shape in our bodies, the weight of our bones, the strength and frailty that we both seem to carry. We can perceive, without being cognitive scientists, that consciousness exists and we, and many other living beings, appear in this world with it. It all becomes chaotic and cruel when we try to bring in thinking to clear the shape of our perception and fit what we understand into a category that is neat, and in the modern world this is done a lot. Everything imaginable is brought under the radar of thought even though we are more than thinking creatures. Thinking is one of the magnificent facets of being a human being. But so many other things-- our ability to perceive colour, pick up language, feel emotions, our incredible bodies with their ability to breathe without us consciously doing it, to stand and move with however much freedom we can, to speak and articulate-- are equally magnificent and wonderful. Why is there so much insistence on a myopic vision? How have we as a species become so devoid of wonder at the very fact that we exist as we do?

One of the biggest struggles that I have come across in the world is our ability to believe in magic or among those of us who believe in magic/magick, there is the separation between magic and mundane. Magic is categorized or defined as something extraordinary or special on one hand, aberrant or nonsense on the other. Or it is reduced to performance and trickery. It keeps getting removed from its essence which is rooted in the fact that we exist and while existing there are infinite things we can learn, feel, be, and do. The only things that can get in our way are the systems that we live inside-- linguistic, ideological, political, personal-- if we keep seeing ourselves only in relation to them.

I recently found a piece of writing that beautifully captured the sense of wonder and magic that I wish we all would cultivate and I would like to end this set of musings with it:

"A notion: The duality of magick/mundane (sacred/profane) is a meaning-tool we impose onto our experience as limited beings. We require an Other against which we define the magickal! When this dichotomy becomes fossilized and we fully believe there is a mode of existence that isn't explicitly magickal, we are making an epistemological mistake. In doing so, we paradoxically bring something as close to the genuinely mundane as we can into our lives! The pure experience and expression of the magickal occurs when the fragility of this dichotomy is smashed — ALL is divine consciousness.

You may hate it, but the pile of dirty dishes in your sink right now constitutes (and is constituted by) an all-pervading magickal reality. Swirling particles that emit light! Even processes which we label “science" are magick… I think this is why I get so frustrated on Sunday nights… — I SO deeply resist the fact that work on Monday, paperwork, and laundry, are all part of a greater magickal experience. I Refuse to believe it, dammit!

Amended for my own experience, I have seen this pendulum diagram floating around for about two years now. I have no clue who created it, no matter how far back I trace its appearance. I think it speaks to a few important notions regarding magic, experience, etc.

I like to be at that point in the pendulum swing that is on the far left side. Its the point at which meaning literally bursts from nature, and the above notion resonates… Synchronicity unfolds at a rapid rate here. Terence McKenna once critiqued Sartre’s sentiment that “Nature is mute,” by saying “it’s the human who is deaf…” McKenna said, “The legacy of existentialism and the philosophies constellated around it is the belief that there is no attractor, no appetition for completion,” So when I get stuck in the illusion of mundanity, I always recall this and remember that seemingly unmagickal things like the dirty dishes and the pavement are all magical in their own right as building blocks of experience. And once this is realized, the dishes become a much more fascinating task. Like Jack Kornfield said: “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”

Image and writing from Curio_Esoterica