Waiting in the bardo to be exposed
Mindful suffering as a route to religious ecstasy
Ritual Reflections is a hodgepodge of media, gathered intuitively and offered to you from the bottom of my mercurial heart.
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Tarot tune
A song based on a tarot card, intended for use as guidance, inspiration, or for entertainment purposes.
The Hanged Man
Sacrifice ☆ Release ☆ Inaction ☆ Perspective
I know more than I should know
for someone who’s never even really been here before.
And you know more than you should know
for someone who’s never even really been here before.
the hanged man,
waiting in the bardo to be exposed.
I don’t know who you think you are
you’re someone who’s never even really seen me before.
I just know who you say you are.
You’re someone I’ve never even really seen before.
The hanged man,
waiting in the bardo to be exposed.
So this is how it ends.
How did it begin again?
So, this is where it ends.
Where does it begin again?
The hanged man,
waiting in the bardo to be exposed.
If you enjoyed this week’s tarot tune, you might quite like last week’s Collective Message:
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Theme song
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Quote
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Of his knowledge a man should never boast, rather be sparing of speech when to his house a wiser comes: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes; mother wit is ever a faithful friend.
- From Havamal (Words of the High One)
Ritual reflections
Magical musings, ritual ponderings, and personal stories from my very own heart.
The internal crucifixion: mindful suffering as a route to religious ecstasy
I have a strange obsession with rosaries.
Where this obsession came from, no one can say. I tend to hear my mother’s voice when I think of that whitewashed version of a brown man, covered with scars, carved in silver at the bottom of my cascade of wooden beads.
I used to turn the little figure inside, hiding his suffering face in shame. It’s critical, that mother-voice—taken aback by visceral disgust toward Yeshua’s martyrdom, toward the glorification of his brutal murder at the hands of the state.
I certainly am not primed for any sort of connection with Christian iconography, at least not consciously. And yet, it’s impossible to deny the profound effect the Christian imagination has had on the Western psyche, even in secular realms. Like English and Spanish, it is a shared language, albeit a mythic one. And though it may have ended up that way via some pretty horrific circumstances (i.e. colonialism & genocide), I am neither shocked nor offended that, as the interviewer in this delightful conversation with
and says, “Christianity is having a moment.”I never figured I’d have anything to do with that moment.
Yet here I am, playing with an interesting combination of resistance and bewilderment as I too explore the tradition with more enthusiasm than perhaps any other thus far (Jewish mysticism not being far behind).
It was my mother who first told me what God was when I asked. (It didn’t take me very long after being born to start asking questions like this.) God is in everything, she said, and I took it to heart. I do believe that was the moment I committed, albeit unconsciously, to a mystical path—the path of finding God in the world, of finding divinity in all things.
Even suffering.
I’m not the first to detect the parallels between the myth of Yeshua’s crucifixion and the story of how the Norse god Odin acquired the runes. In fact, I’m ashamed that the verisimilitude of this mythic pattern only struck me fairly recently.
Yeshua is fated to die—not of old age surrounded by loved ones, but in agony amongst those who ridicule him. He’s fated do something even more profoundly, embarrassingly human than just dying—he’s fated to suffer.
I’ve always struggled to make sense of the value of this myth. Then I pulled the Hanged Man card a few days ago while reading the tarot, and something clicked.
The card originally is said to be a depiction of a common form of punishment in medieval Italy, the birthplace of tarot according to most modern historians. Over time, as the tarot gained more esoteric connotations, the Hanged Man card came to be associated with the self-hanging of Father Odhinn.
Odhinn is already a deeply powerful god. He is also perplexingly human-like—he displays jealously toward beings wiser than him and makes some pretty extreme sacrifices in order to surpass them. He ambitiously re-creates the world from the dead body of one of his own brethren. He worries about the well-being of his raven companions and rests with relief every night when they return to him. And he is profoundly disturbed when he discovers the prophecy of Ragnarok—the final battle between all divine beings that ushers in the end of the universe.
Odhinn hangs himself from the World Tree for nine days without food or drink, and upon his death, the runic alphabet is revealed to him. He sacrifices himself to himself, as the myth is often succinctly put. Not unlike the Son of God at all.
The Son of God and the All-Father are both required to suffer in order to embody greater godliness. This goes beyond power, though the myth of Odhinn is commonly interpreted in this way. And it goes beyond salvation, too, though the myth of Yeshua is often reduced to this.
The secret, I think, is that all roads lead to Divine Union—even the roads we wish to avoid.
I suffer a lot. I become attached to people, I take things personally, I avoid my responsibilities when I can get away with it. I am your typical human being, deeply flawed and prone to getting in my own way and accidentally hurting or letting down the people I love. Regardless, I’m passionate about living a virtuous life—which can’t be done without staring directly in the face of one of the most difficult things to accept about life:
It not only contains suffering but seems to depend upon its existence.
Activists, Q-Anoners, materialist science-lovers, and tech bros alike in the dominant culture seem to be motivated by a desire to save the world and eliminate suffering. What many fail to acknowledge is that suffering is an intrinsic quality of existence—it’s not created by systems of oppression or capitalism or immigrants or Biden. The created universe was born of a violent explosion. Animals eat each other. Natural disasters destroy civilizations that don’t end up destroying themselves.
The world can’t be saved from itself.
There has never been a world without war, without tragic death, without senseless violence and meaningless pain. There is absolutely no way to make mass extinction, genocide, and weapons of mass destruction make sense or feel right. But there seems to be no sensible way to either fight against them or build a better world around them without first acknowledging how horrible it feels to live in this kind of world.
I’m also not the first to acknowledge this: the tragedy of existence is a portal to the greatest religious ecstasy. In my experience, there is nothing holier than grief, because grief is the only response we can have to two of the few inevitable things about life:
It will hurt.
It will end.
Nothing else is promised.
For the alchemist, that grief is a portal into surrender. And that surrender is a portal to divinity. And that divinity is a portal into right action—into our sacred human tasks:
Acknowledging the beauty of the created world.
Amplifying the beauty of the created world.
I am not motivated to save the world, but I am motivated to brighten it. To turn eyes towards its beauty. To amplify its beauty so much that for a few moments, it can be louder than the suffering.
A beautiful experience of life is not promised. It is something that must be strived for. Something that happens when we stop running from our suffering and begin to alchemise it.
Which is why, whenever I’m suffering or whenever I witness suffering, I am not motivated to try and fix it.
I am motivated to crack wide open and fall apart in the arms of the Numinous.
To hang on the cross that is my bones.
To sacrifice myself to myself, that I might walk in this world just a bit wiser than I was yesterday.