Walking Between the Worlds

My path to grace began with a childhood fascination with the Tarot. Without knowing why, I found myself compelling drawn to these evocative images. Over the ensuing years I studied all I could about it, but it wasn't until much later that it truly revealed itself. In 1998 I sat down to write a course on reading Tarot, and discovered that the words appearing on the screen were both achingly familiar and totally unknown to me. I found myself channeling the wisdom of Grace, and it was laying out in my mind the true teaching of the Tarot, which are an extension of the knowledge of the Kabbala. So what has this got to do with anything?

Well, the image you see to the right is one of the many depictions of the lesson of Temperance. In many traditions, this is called the path of enlightenment, what Budha called 'walking between the worlds'. Reaching enlightenment indicates that the person lives both in the world of form and in the world of spirit, or grace. Actually, this is what everyone is doing all the time, we are spirit made flesh, god in creation. However, when we take form we go usually through a process of forgetting our spirit self in order to inhabit our physical self. If we didn't, we would find it very difficult to go from the experience of  unlimited grace and power to the experience of limitation, vulnerability and not-oneness. If we didn't forget, adjusting to this new reality with it's potentials for pain and frustration would be almost impossible.

However, we are not meant to forget forever. Over time our spiritual self gradually and naturally makes itself known, unless this process is interfered with, usually by false religions and socialisation designed to keep us in ignorance of our true being. Continued forgetting is disastrous to our wellbeing, it's like trying to motivate a car after we've run out of petrol, all hard work and frustration. When we have become over identified with a self concept of limitation, life can become hard and meaningless. Life stops being an adventure in form, and becomes a journey in suffering. The opposite is also true - if we are trying to live in the world of spirit and deny the world of form we've missed the point entirely. The trick is living with our awareness in both worlds, deeply centered in the world of spirit but thoroughly and joyfully immersed in our physical reality. Enlightenment is the process of undoing this forgetting and learning to reconcile the two seemingly separate realities. Grace is the mechanism that spirit provides to achieve this.

Of course, the question is how? In the Tarot, Temperance is the final lesson in the path of enlightenment. It is the teaching of En-joy-ing, meaning that we bring joy into everything by having an attitude of meeting all experience with joy. However, coming to this point is a process best learned in stages. In future blogs I'll be talking about the six lessons of grace that precede Temperance, designed to move us naturally to a place where we can greet every moment of life with joyful welcome. For now, you might like to play with the idea that joy is not so much a product of the reality you face, but a result of the attitude with which you face it. It's the decisions I make about what is happening that determine whether my experience is one of suffering or one of exstacy. When I greet each moment as an adventure, an opportunity to experience the wonder of life, I naturally find the good in it and respond from a place of power and creativity.

Grace be with you