TRUMP 16 - THE TOWER
We are passing through the dark night of the soul. We have overcome the Devil and his temptations, and one would think that we are done. But merely overcoming the temptations of physical creation, does not lead us all the way home. No, it's never that simple. For though we have come oh, so incredibly far, we have so far yet to go.
The Tarot cards relay the entire pathway, the entire breath of God, and these final cards unveil the first moments of creation. Remember, we have talked about God pouring out His energy as He creates the world, giving each of us an individual spark of God. We clothe the spark with Will, place it inside of mind, place inside of our desire body, and finally into our physical body.
We are overcoming the temptations of the flesh. We are overcoming the temptations of darkness, and we are turning from the creation to the Creator. Yet, the Tower is in darkness. Let us examine the card.
The Tower stands alone on a very high rock. It has three windows which were previously occupied by two people. Upon the very top of the Tower was a crown. At the moment we see the Tower, several things are happening. First, the lightning bolt is coming from the heavens and has hit the Tower. The crown is flying off. The Tower has burst into flames. The two occupants have jumped from the Tower and are falling to unknown depths below. There is a rain of yods all around the Tower.
What in the world is meant by such symbolism? Why is it here? What could this possibly have to do with our soul and with religion? Well, this is one of those cards that is absolutely stuffed full of imagery.
We will begin with the Tower itself. The Tower stands alone, completely alone. The Tower symbolizes our individual consciousness, for at this point, we are dealing almost exclusively in the realm of mind and thought. The Tower is the structure which we all create--the way we look at the world, the things we think, our perceptions, our religion, our philosophy, our morality, our understanding of the nature of God, perhaps even our secret initiate perceptions, our esoteric reality--all of the truths we have gained from studying the Tarot.
The Tower is our mind. And it, for in fact all of human existence, is a manifestation of mind. This is absolutely essential. Notice that this is a tower. It is not a hill. It is not a mountain. It is a tower. It is built upon a high mountain, but it is a completely, utterly and totally man-made existence. As such, it is a symbol for the mind. Everything that we see in the totality of the human race is a manifestation of our minds. All that we have and all that we are and all that we do is here because of our consciousness as it is placed into our desire and made real with our physical energy.
All of our inventions, from the simplest piece of pottery, to the most sophisticated lasers and computers, are all extensions of the human mind. They are all edifices and towers which we create and sustain by our own thinking. Even an absolutely incomprehensibly huge structure, such as the United States of America, is only a manifestation of mind. The communal thoughts which we have, have created and sustain this thing.
It is impossible to overemphasize this point. Your body is the way it is because of how you think. Are you particularly muscular? Are you a bit flabby? Do you excel at running? Or are you better at long distance endurance? How do you dress? Are you flashy, flamboyant? Conservative? Prudish? Do you wear lots of makeup? Do you splash yourself with huge amounts of cologne? Do you like to have a hairdo that is very carefully quaffed and adjusted to be just so? Have you shaved in the last two years? Do you prefer the all natural look? Your physical appearance is a manifestation of your mind.
Have you had your breasts enlarged? Have you had your tummy flattened? Have you had your eyebrows raised? Have you had surgical implants in your calves to give you a more manly, masculine look? All existence in the human realm is a manifestation of mind.
Now, the message of the Tower is that our mind, left to its own devices, leads us into a realm of immeasurable darkness. Our man-made consciousness leads us into the void. Even if this man-made consciousness is seeking religious truth, there is still immeasurable darkness all around. We cannot perceive truth, if we are constantly fettered with our own preconceptions.
We have had discussions throughout this book regarding Bibliolatry and the false gods which we create for ourselves. So whether our mind is leading us into crass materialism or even creating fanciful notions of the nature of God's truth, the strictly human psyche, the hopelessly human mentality, unless it is touched by the Divine, is, in fact, nothing more than the outer, all encompassing darkness.
Having overcome the Devil, we still have nothing if we are enshrouded in our own conceptions. This is the purpose of the lightning bolt. In our darkness, the light comes in and tells us, "Thus sayeth the Lord." This is the flash of intuition, the flash of recognition, the dawn of consciousness, wherein we finally see absolute total divine light. We are, at this point, using our minds and beginning to radiate with the glow of God's truth. But here, the actual fire of God, the actual light of God, comes in and touches us. It comes like an actual lightning bolt out of the blue, shocking, terrifying almost threatening.
Light has two natures: the nature of illumination and sunshine, and then as that light gets too close to us, the actual all consuming burning fire of lightning. You see life is not always simply pleasant. The religious pathway is not one of gentle illumination and sitting, reading our portals of prayer for the day, delighting in each new tidbit of wisdom that the Lord shines upon us. No, the true religious pathway often involves pain, shock, and the jolt of God's consciousness. We do not always get what we want. But if we truly seek for the Divine, we will get what we need. In the aloneness of our temple which we have created for and to ourselves, in the magnificent structure of our minds which is our crowning achievement, the Divine light will come in like a shocking lightning bolt to begin to illuminate us with actual truth. This is the flash of God's light in the absolute dark night of our soul.
But notice that as that light comes in, the Tower begins to burn. Burning is the fire, the chemical process of transformation. Because you see, the tower will burn, and all of our man-made structures will fall. But as the Bible says, "He whom the Lord loves He chastises and purifies so that all of the impurities will burn off and all that is left is the pure gold of Godhood.”
The Tower will burn, but that burning is not a destruction. It is a transformation. We have dealt with the temptations of the Nihilism involved in the pathway of death as it pertains to the transcendence of ego. No, we are not talking about annihilating your mind. We are not talking about leaving you lobotomized, unable to think, a robot under the mind control of some other despotic tyrant. No, we are talking about the transformation of your mind.
As it says, and as I have quoted it before in Romans 12, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be renewed by the transforming of your mind." As the fire hits the tower, the tower burns. What that fire is doing is releasing the different chemicals. Some of the energy will be released from the wood and rise up into the air. Symbolically, those things which we have placed within us, which are pure, the energies of God and the soul which have been granted to us, which we have condensed to create our Tower of Babel, will be released so that they can flow back into the realm of the pure spirit. Other parts will turn to ash and charcoal. The more base earthly elements will be left to decay back into the earth.
But what is important here is to notice that nothing is ever destroyed, never. Transformation is the only reality. You cannot have anything created. You cannot have anything destroyed. It is only transformed. That is the message of the ages.
What is the meaning of the two figures jumping out of the Tower? They represent our conscious and our subconscious minds. Both of them live inside of the Tower. Just because our subconscious mind is not under our direct conscious control does not mean it doesn't live in the Tower. For it does. Our dream lives are shaped and controlled by our tower. Our preconscious memories and those forces which shape us and cause us to act as we do, whether for good or for bad, are all resident inside of our tower of mind. Therefore, when the lightning bolt of God's revelation strikes our tower, the occupants therein bail out. All of our false thoughts, all of our false dreams and false hopes, all of our misconceptions flee in the face of God's purifying power.
The conscious and subconscious have dived out of the two lower windows. The third and the highest window is known as the “super conscious.” That is the conceptualization of the highest parts of the spirit. This is the realm of will which actually creates and controls the subconscious mind. This is a very high teaching about which few people have knowledge.
All around us we see on the Tower these little yellow squiggles. They are actually yods, the Yod being the first letter of the holy name of God. There are 22 of them, just as there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and there are 22 cards in the Tarot Major Arcana. They are divided into 10 and 12. The symbolism there is so obvious, it needs no comment.
We are talking here of the Tower of Babel. As we each build our towers, we reflect something that we see in the Bible. The Tower of Babel was an attempt on the part of the human race to build a monument to itself so great and so high and so glorious as to actually reach God. Today, what we are attempting to do with our science, our technocracy, our ruling technologies, is to build a tower to God so that we can control all aspects of life and death. We are seeking to control the process of birth through genetic engineering, that we might control who is born, and how, when and what their attributes are. We are also seeking to control the process of death, that we might extend mortal life indefinitely and be able to preserve the human being forever through cryonic freezing. We are freezing certain parts of people so that their genetic make up might be preserved for future posterity.
We are still building the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is not just our physical sciences but also our mental processes. And, God's answer to the Tower of Babel was to send his divine fire to destroy it, to scatter people, and to make their languages diversified. This contains a profound revelation. We call by many names what is truly one. As we overcome the barriers of language, we recognize that we are, and always have been, one family. The barriers of language are temporary illusions which are necessary to keep us from harming ourselves.
So we are talking here in the Tower about awareness, past language. This is an extremely high difficult meditation. When we look at a tree, since we understand the word “tree,” we are incapable of seeing the it without thinking “tree.” The language that we have becomes completely encased within our consciousness, and colors, shapes, clouds and pollutes every experience we have after that.
Part of the power which the Tower is transferring to us is the ability to rise above and beyond the limitations of language, to be able to perceive things as they are in their pure prelinguistic state.
Here, too, is the breath of God, the natural flow. Before I knew the truth, mountains were only mountains, and trees were only trees. Once I began to learn the truth, mountains were no longer mountains, and trees were no longer trees. Once I fully embraced the truth, I recognized that mountains are mountains and trees are trees.
We see a mountain and we call it the word “mountain,” but when we can see it, know it, feel it as it is in its purity, without having to filter through the language and our mental perceptions, then we begin to become free. When we see another human being based upon how they look, we automatically make judgments about them based upon their hair, their dress, their size, their shape, their skin color. We make a whole host of almost instantaneous judgments and assessments of them. The Divine light, which strikes the Tower, seeks to enable us to see people as they are, to love them all unconditionally, to leave the darkness of our solitude, to transform that conscious energy into its original pure state and be able to recognize things as they are.
At this point, we will begin to reflect the Divine name. I am who I am. You are who you are. We will be able to recognize things and people as they are, because they are what they are, instead of as something to be manipulated or controlled or avoided.
As we overcome our human conceptions, we do not erase mind, but we cleanse it. Much like a window, you do not need to shatter the window in order to clean it. Merely get rid of all of its dross. That is what is contained here within the Tower. We are not talking about the elimination of human mind. We are talking about its purification.
Having overcome the Devil, we now find toward the final stages, that our minds become pure and clean--that infinite light eliminates all of our thoughts of our human accomplishments. Our crowning achievements appear to pale as nothing in the light of God's purity. We are now ready for the final stages.
