Journal Date: November 27, 2020
I’m reading Lesson 2 of the “Tarot Interpretation” series, which discusses Keys 2, 9 and 16 that I have just been studying.
In this lesson, reincarnation and our ability to remember our past lives through the use of the subconscious and transliminal states of consciousness is also discussed.
This adds relevance and weight to what I had already been considering about past lives, and how they have created my current experience of reality.
I’ve been wondering:
What if my mom and dad didn’t make me who I am today?
What if instead, in some sense, I caused them?
What if it were true that I chose them, as the perfect people to be my parents?
What if my past thoughts and desires cast my parents in their roles, who then cast me into mine?
It seems hard to imagine.
I mean, why would I ever have willingly chosen this, right?
But my visions of my past life (especially when combined with what I know of my natal chart) make me more inclined to think that this is the case.
“The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Friedrich Nietzsche
So let me just imagine that for a moment…
In my past lives, I suffered greatly from other people’s perceptions of and reactions to me.
I’m told I was punished severely for crimes I never committed.
According to Angelic, and from what I saw on my own, I was trapped in this underground dungeon, held in chains in the dark beneath earth, accused and attacked, humiliated and blamed, tortured and mutilated in the most violent ways.
Here, I was forced to pay not for what I had done, but for how I had been seen.
And maybe it was then that I first betrayed myself, and left my soul behind.
In the face of so much pain, maybe the truth no longer mattered to me so much.
It seems possible that, in terror and desperation, I gave in, and accepted their words as truth.
Maybe I started to believe that I did deserve all that I suffered.
That it was my fault.
That it must be true, that if I had not been so selfish, stubborn and wrong, I never would have ended up there.
Maybe there, beneath the earth, banished from the world, I had started to wish that I had never dared to be me, that I had just hidden myself away, and never been so foolish or proud to attract attention to myself at all.
Maybe I’d wished to go back, to have done things differently, to have promised myself if I had the chance to do it all over I would have hid, I would have been more modest, I wouldn’t ever have provoked anyone to hurt me.
And when the grace of death finally touched me in that hell, maybe all of these fears and traumas and regrets carried on with me into the next life.
This one.
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
–Ecclesiastes 1:9
Maybe this created exactly the upbringing my soul wanted. It desperately wanted to feel safe. And it thought the best way to do that was to stay as small as possible.
Never let anyone see my goodness. Never allow myself to be “too much.”
Hiding.
Living in fear.
Living to please and pacify all others, lest I be captured again, lest I once again bring about my demise due to what was called the sin of my vanity.
Well, it didn’t exactly work.
I wouldn’t really call what happened to me “keeping me safe,” anyway.
But either way, I see what may have been the intention, and I see the results.
I tried my best to beat myself down first. To keep myself humble and small before others, so no one would have any reason to believe I thought myself superior, “too good” or better than anyone.
But the problem was, I could never be small enough.
I could never hide myself so well that no one ever took offense.
In betraying myself, I just recreated the same pattern of betrayal from others.
Maybe this is the lesson I need to learn instead:
You can’t ever control other people, no matter what you do.
You can try all day to please, but some people will find only bad in all of the good you have to offer.
Sometimes, people are committed to their perceptions in such a way that you are almost irrelevant.
Your attempts to prove your “goodness” may only drive some to even further hatred or revenge.
Maybe I need to stop trying to convince people who refuse to be convinced.
Stop making other people’s perceptions the priority.
Maybe I need to let go of my fear and my desire to manage others.
This would probably do more to cause change for me than anything else.
Sign of necessity!
–Friedrich Nietzsche
Supreme star of being! —
That no desire attains,
That no No desecrates,
Eternal Yes of being,
Eternally I am your Yes:
For I love you, O eternity!”
