Free Will and Fate in Tarot - Osho Zen - Existence (I) and Change (X)

Hello all, I am back and settled in after the Body, Mind, Spirit Expo this past weekend at the State Fair grounds.  If you were able to attend, I hope you had a wonderful time.  Today I want to write about Free Will and Fate, two very hot topics in any metaphysical practice and study.  The cards I want to explore are Existence, the number 1 card, and Change, the number 10 card, of the Major Arcana of the Osho Zen Tarot.  In traditional decks these cards are better known as The Magician and The Wheel of Fortune.

 

Life, I would put forth, is a dialectic with a back and forth between Free Will and Fate, but how can that be if Fate is involved.  I would like to present the idea that Fate and Free Will move in and out of one another, taking and giving stage at different times and for different intervals, very much like wave/particle theory regarding energy.  In the above card Existence, we are shown the "smallness" of our place in the vast universe and the "immensity" of our uniqueness.  Nothing else in existence occupies the same "place" or space as you do.  For this reason, Astrology loves twins, triplets, and so on.  How better to show the flexibility of a birth chart than to have 2, 3, or more individuals with same exact birth chart out in the world.  They will not express themselves in the same way because they do not occupy the same space in the universe, nor will they experience the same set of events.  To draw the card of Existence is to remember that you are unique and you have a unique impact on the world, whether it is small (early death after childbirth) or large (Ghandi, Lincoln, King Jr, Mother Teresa).   To exist is to be able to choose, even if the limits of choice are great.

To draw the card of Change is to remind yourself that many events happen outside you that you must choose how you will react or find yourself forced into certain directions because there is only one choice (funny how we forget that when we say, "I have no choice, but to ...", we really mean to say, "I have only one choice and this is it."  I often explain the Change (or Wheel of Fortune) card this way in my seminars.  Imagine that you drove here (as most people do) and you go outside and find your tire is flat.  Fate has stepped in.  You were moving along, with faith, that you would be able to go out to your car get in it and drive away only to find out that now you must react to the unexpected.  How you choose to react is the choice offered by acts of Fate.  And acts of Fate are usually choices we made spiritually to be present in so we can test ourselves.  As the saying goes, "no one gets their character tested when things are going their way."

Over the weekend a new astrologer I met through Facebook provided me with a reading of my Uranus transit in exchange for me reading his Neptune transit.  In his fantastic interpretation of this transit, he had many deeply insightful things to say, not the least of which was to remind me to stay positive and hopeful while presenting some pretty tough knowledge and insight about current and future events.  The globe, and thus everyone personally, is going through a major shift.  I have written about two major aspects of this shift in my blog on transiting planetary Ingress involving all of the outer planets and the recent T-square involving Saturn/Uranus/Pluto.  Big change is happening and more big ... even bigger change is coming, and with these changes there will be a lot of hard work (which will be interpreted by a great many as hardship).  We need this change; the planet needs this change.  What matters most is how we choose to react, and there will be plenty of reactionary action.  

Deep down, I'm an optimist, though it can be hard to see past my Scorpio Ascendant sometimes ;-).  Jupiter and Uranus will both be direct in Aries soon enough and we, as a people, and individually will have the opportunity to choose how to express the expansive/creative energy of these to points moving through Aries.  In many ways we are going to have to deal with the Change card first, as the Present Moment, and Existence as our crossing card, our challenge.  Housing prices are going to continue to drop, services will be cut, taxes will rise, government/bank/corporate corruption will try to keep doing business as usual and all of it will result in a truly "Brave New World" shift.  The question for each of us will be how will we play our role.  Will we move in the direction panic and doom or see these changes as the necessary steps to forge new intentional communities, re-localize our food and services, restart manufacturing, and make healthful behavior changes.  In essence, it will not be changes in technology that "save us," but rather changes in our behavior.  

Understanding the fluid relationship between Free Will and Fate (wave and particle); the quantum"ness" of life helps us be more capable when our times of choice come and more flexible when our limits of choice come.  I hope my work in the world and through this blog reaches the higher vibration of hope even as we move through an impending lower vibration of scarcity, which will really be a true vibration of re-balancing.  Astrology and the Tarot are just the ideal tools to help us move through these powerfully fluctuating times.

As I prepare to leave to pick up the girls from school I have drawn a rather fitting card, which I will write about in my next entry.  I will leave it for you to contemplate: