Tag: zeitgeist

Today’s Tarot: Hanging Around

Public Domain

In Carl Sagan’s fiction work Contact, Ellie Arroway is a scientist involved with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intellence (which is a real thing.) In it, at one point, she considers not only the vast distances between Earth and other potential homes to intelligent, communicative life, but also the role that time inherently plays. Obviously, it take a heckuva long time, even at the speed of light, for one side of message to get from there to here and vice versa. What if there is also a vast difference in lifespan and local experience of time. A few days to us is a lifetime to a fruit fly, and many generations to a germ. As she was driving she noticed crack or bumps in the road at fairly regular intervals. What if, she wondered, the pulses in a signal came so slowly, so widely spaced that we didn’t even notice the signal, with each blip of the message just being dismissed as an anomaly.

Makes me wonder if the universe isn’t really teeming with intelligent, communicative, technological life but each at such widely disparate time scales, that nobody can connect with anybody so that everybody thinks they are the only ones…but that something for another time.

The same phenomenon can happen when it comes to our interaction with Tarot, or any form of esoteric guidance, even pure intuition. Sometimes the whole idea gradually unspools over days, weeks or months until finally the last piece falls into place. If we miss a piece, the message goes on until finally the “ah-ha” happens.

A single card daily meditation practice is an excellent way to get a feel for this among many other things. Not only do you get a specific read of the energy for that specific day, you can see patterns emerge over the course of days, weeks, even years. My personal example of that is the strong presence of pentacle cards during the first part of the pandemic and the evolving intuitive images of the U.S. map with all the little tornadoes and the hurricane on the horizon that both reflected the overwhelming cultural zeitgeist energies that were so strong during 2019 & 2020.

What say you empaths? Has the cultural and environmental energies stopped ringing your bell quite so hard? I think that is the impetus behind the speckled stone image. Boundaries are firmer, individual concerns are at the fore and the existential political crisis (at least locally here in the US has dropped into the background somewhat.)

Today’s card connects to yesterday’s Four of Swords card which connected to previous readings. There is a continued thread of change & rest themed energies.

The Hanged man connotes stagnation, but this energy hasn’t been hanging around long enough to take on that interpretation. Hanged Man can also mean surrender, changing your way of looking at things – it can take on exactly the wait, don’t push, change what you are doing, rejuvenate, and contemplate energies we’ve been seeing. My hunch is that this kind of energy is going to be around for a while since we’ve seen it in a multi-day pattern like this. Astrology might ascribe this to some planet in retrograde or something. I don’t know anything much about astrology, so I attribute this to a yin phase, a time of quiet, of taking in, minor adjustments. It is a time of plugging in to recharge in whatever metaphoric sense you want to give the phrase.

If there is a message specific to today, I sense “patience.” Not everything unfolds at the pace we want or expect. There are reasons patience is considerd one of the great treasures of Taoism. Just like messages from aliens, life unfolds at its own natural pace, not according to our wishes.

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson via brainyquote.com

“I kinda like it in here. It’s private.”

Mythbusters was on TV. I needed that.

One of my many, many favorite moments from the show is the time when Jamie was wearing a silver fire suit. You couldn’t see see him through the face mask at all, only hear him deadpanning “I kinda like it in here. It’s private.”

Here is why that moment comes to mind:

If you work with energy, intuition or do professional readings there are times when you need a mental fire suit.

If you want a real deal, deep dive, time tested and reliable resource on the topic, go get yourself a copy of “Psychic Protection” by Ted Andrews. It is far and away the best resource I’ve ever read about healthy psychic work, bar none. But for the purposes of our little blog post, there are two basic concepts I want to focus on: Empathic sensitivity and Zeitgeist sensitivity or energy resonance.

As I understand it, empaths feel other people’s emotions as if they were their own. The boundary between their own true feelings and the feelings of other people is often thin, blurry, or difficult to find. Very sensitive empaths regulate this through proximity. They know (or can learn) their boundaries and respect their limits. When emotional levels become too intense or overwhelming they exit the situation. Highly sensitive empaths are careful where and how they engage with crowded environments like bars or shopping malls for example. I know of two very skilled, very wise, very kind psychic readers who are selective about where they go and how long they stay in busy public places. It’s not in any way the product of anxiety or agoraphobia. It’s pure self care. It takes time, experience and a great deal of self awareness for these high vibration folks to learn where their boundaries are and how to manage them.

For those of us who are generally energy sensitive, but not emotionally empathic, it is quite a bit easier to see that boundary between our own emotions and general environmental energies. I like to think of it as zeitgeist sensitivity or energy resonance separate from any empathic process.

Zeitgeist means the general mood of a time or a cultural phenomenon. In my experience, this is the energy we tap into when we post a general reading for a blog or on social media without a specific individual in mind. The cultural mood of the time, the zeitgeist, is the general-public parallel with the higher self, spirit guides or divine that we sense in an individual Tarot session.

In times of great emergency like the current pandemic, the cultural energy is so strong, so ubiquitous, and so pervasive that the lines become blurred even for those of us who are not usually empathic. It is helpful to think of this like resonance from physics. Think of the tuned bells in a hand bell choir. If you strike a tuning fork and hold it very close, a bell tuned to that some note could in theory vibrate along with it. If our intuition is sensitive to cultural zeitgeists then we can resonate with that environmental energy. The general zeitgeist, through resonance, rings our bell too.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a giant bell-ringer for everyone. I worry for our very empathic friends. There is very real danger, illness, grief, and hardship out there. I can’t imagine any sane person who is NOT experiencing SOME level of adjustment. Imagine feeling the real things we are all facing, plus the emotions of others on top of it all. For those of us lucky enough to be safe and well at the moment, it still might be a good idea to get our mental fire suit out.

In order to do our best readings for our clients, and to maintain our own psychic / spiritual health, I think it is important for all sensitives, intuitives, Tarot readers and the like to take care of their emotional boundaries in a time like this. It is important to know what is your own, inner, real, valid, valuable, genuine emotions and what is the outside world ringing your bell.

Intention, as always, is everything. Finding your emotional boundaries and putting on your fire suit can be as simple as visualizing. Imagine yourself surrounded by white or golden light. When I was in my teens, before I was at a place in life where I could quit, I would sit in the more toxic Sunday services at my parent’s church and visualize myself wearing an orange hazmat suit. It helped. Now I have a whole variety of energy protecting, boundary fortifying, zeitgeist clarifying tools: black tourmaline, discreet pentacles and sigils, aura clearing aromatherapy spray, visualizations and more. Yes, it is all full-throttle woo woo but it has value. It helps me understand my emotions with greater clarity, it helps me understand the outer situation, and helps me keep logic and reason close at hand. That makes it worth it, no matter how woo-woo it might seem to some folks. It may take some trial and error, but you can find your fire suit too. I encourage you to find the things that help you see what is your emotion (so you can honor it) and what is the outside world pinging your boundary lines (so you can put that information to good use.) If you aren’t sure, try a little visualization and active imagination. Imagine yourself wearing a protective fire suit that keeps out any vibe not coming from your own true heart. The suit doesn’t cut you off from the world. You still feel the heat of it all. The suit lets you know that you aren’t the one on fire.