you can't handle the truth

When 8 out of 11 tarot are major arcana, the story says "it's not personal, it's just fate." Since the major arcana are archetypes, they have an Olympian quality, largely indifferent to the scramblings of the mortal pips or the sort of demigod court cards. As is the case with all archetypes, they manifest in one's personal affairs, but they are dangerous delusions if taken as identical with oneself, other people or situations. As the Greeks would have it, we are mere bread-eaters. 

I'm an odd one when it comes to the mantic arts. A down-to-the-ground skeptic, I also get something out of astrology, tarot and the I Ching. I stop short of massacring birds to read their still writhing guts, but I wanted to do so this morning to the loud ass bird out the window. I threw rocks at it instead and it seems to have gotten the message. 

The fact of the matter is that the process of interacting intuitively with systems of symbols wakes up something in my creative imagination. People always want to know if these old systems are "true" or if they are "real" or whatever else. Of course they're not. Are fairy tales true? Are dreams real? It's like looking at a metaphor and asking if it's literal. The proper response to such questions is, what are you, an idiot? 

I perceive we've lost the capacity for a lot of dream life, waking or sleeping. Which is weird, since I also think many of us are in a sort of constant nightmare of surreality and terror. On social media, I've noticed that many people do not have the capacity to read for nuance, subtext, double meaning, irony, sarcasm or symbol. It is as if people's fear or uncertainty has led them to treat language as a series of blunt, solid objects that mean exactly what they say. But this is a grave error, since language by its inherent nature is metaphor. Nothing ever said means what it says, and nothing can be said that is real or true. Change my mind. 

The old image of language being the finger pointing at the moon, and the person who lacks imagination staring at the finger. 

It gets frustrating enough that it's my middle finger, sometimes. 

Anyway, it's also hilarious. That human beings believe our puny little consciousness is capable of grasping reality. Laughable. We get glimpses that terrify us, and then we instantly erect walls of fear-based certainty. That's the history of religion, but also science, in a nutshell. The smug atheist is as certain as the most benighted superstition-ist. The goal of all of it is certainty. That's our little delusional clam shell. 

Our greatest accomplishments remain metaphor. Quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics, the entire body of our scientific knowledge, our mathematical insights, our technological applications. Metaphor. Never the thing itself. The thing itself still exists, whether we have a way to describe, "explain," or control. Science and mathematics are as much based on unprovable axioms as anything we create. All of our conscious knowledge comes from a ground of postulates, axioms and givens that cannot be proved. All systems are based on assumptions. 

So of course these weirdling old systems of symbols aren't true. Nothing is.