Rhymes With: Kneecap Cobra

The Hanged Man’s Perspective

Life is moving so fast now that I wondered if this post would be outdated by the time I edit it; and surely some new scandal will have taken over the news feeds before it is published in about 36 hours.

But since these seem to be the days of revelations, we need all the perspective we can get and no card in Tarot addresses that like the Hanged Man.

There was a huge scandal several years ago when the man who calls himself John of God, a self-proclaimed new age healer, was charged with and convicted of crimes so awful that he is now in prison for the rest of his life. John of God’s worldwide fanbase of famous people immediately had their press offices release statements expressing sympathy for the victims of his crimes, and pretended they had only met once, maybe twice, in an elevator or backstage at an event.

This was all pre-Pandemic, which was convenient for the New Age Industrial Complex, in the way it has erased most events that happened before the 2020s from our collective memories.

Not convenient? Deepak, who turned up in the JE files enough times  to create an enormous backlash, and incite people into renouncing him and purging their personal libraries of his books and materials. It also gave permission for anyone who ever had a bad interaction with him to recount it on social media.

And don’t we expect people who gain fame, attention, and money to be difficult? Don’t we particularly want our spiritual geniuses to be impatient with lesser mortals, so we are justified in worshiping them? Aren’t they just too precious and sensitive for this incarnation, chakras wide open and sucking up all the disappointing, undisciplined, lackluster efforts of their followers? Look, if the man wants to brand himself and create an empire devoted to our soul expansion, and gets rich in the process, isn’t that compensation for his isolated, elevated consciousness and the loneliness of being completely surrounded by spiritual grade-schoolers?

I don’t know, and nobody does, the full story of the interactions that got Deepak into the JE files (and which he disputes.) I do know that this goes beyond the New Age community and into every industry that has commoditized spiritual growth or religious teaching. And it reaches outside religion; Brigitte Bardot just died and the internet exploded with criticisms of her personal beliefs and opinions, which she’d never shied away from sharing. She was a great beauty and a screen icon; that is dismissed in light of public statements which made people mad.

And I won’t go into Marion Zimmer Bradley, only mention her as an example of an influential author who falls into this category. She made great, great literary art and then, after her death, things were revealed about her life that shook fans to the core. Nobody knows how to read her beautiful work anymore.

My point being, when politicians do these things, we expect it. We are not shocked to find out a politician cheated on a spouse, has a massive addiction issue, or became rich from insider trading or backroom deals. That goes for CEOs and corporate innovators and capitalist mavericks, too. These people don’t work in matters of the soul, or personal development, or art so it doesn’t hurt as much when they disappoint us.

These corporate leaders were never in the business of helping us be better people, as we suspected, no matter what their public mission statements said.

What do we do when our inspirational teachers or artists let us down? What do we do when they are proved to be human? It’s a problem, separating the creation from the creator.

I don’t think we were ever supposed to know as much as we know, now, about other people. We were not built for this. Years ago, if my favorite singer quietly flew across the world to play music for some oligarch’s wedding reception, and got paid a gazillion dollars for a fourteen  minute set and some pictures at (what I would consider) a tacky, vulgar, overblown display of too much money, would I have needed to know this?

Would it have made me woozy and disappointed that the singer who wrote songs which expressed feelings and emotions that felt composed just for me sold out like that? Oh, yeah. Where’s your artistic integrity? Where’s your soul? Ohmygod, the horror. The unconscionable betrayal of my tender feelings.

Yet this happened all the time before the internet, in another lifetime, when we did not have worldwide, 24/7 access to absolutely everything. Singers, movie actors who made TV commercials contractually specified to NOT be aired in the US, famous people paid to show up at events to add luster and celebrity if you could write the big check.

And we didn’t know, and we were happier. And if we didn’t know about Deepak, we’d still be highlighting his text and taking to heart the parts of his work that spoke to us.

Social media and our ability to dial into the entire world anytime we want is a distraction. Who cares what Brigitte Bardot thought about anything? Who cares? Do you randomly go to a stranger’s house and quiz them on their private thoughts and opinions so you can decide whether to get mad or not? Who? Cares?

But when we can get whooped up into anger, outrage, or offense and use that to judge other people, we are neatly saved from having to take that same energy and turn it toward the only life we can influence: our own. It feels like the deluge of negativity is calculated to keep us without a positive focus.

This flood of information and social crafting of opinion; it’s a trickle that becomes a wave, and gathers up whatever is in its path, and sweeps us away from our real work. We spend too much time studying our neighbor’s plot and not tending our own field.

I’m as icked-out as anybody over what is suggested by the material related to Deepak Chopra in the JE files. But I have one of Deepak’s books that I found to be deep, and thoughtful, and moving. It touched me and sent me down some interesting roads of contemplation. I don’t consider the  material flawed, even if Deepak’s personal life turns out to be something I can’t admire.

The world is full of energy and transmission, filled with signals looking for receivers. Some of those receivers will be top notch, and the messages will relay purely and flawlessly. Many are prone to pick up static to one degree or another. Some receivers will be hard to deal with. Some will ultimately burst into flames, because their components are corroded or dysregulated, unable to consistently bring high frequency material through a low capacity medium.

I have yet to find an aspect of the human condition not addressed by the Tarot, and this information overload and obsession with other people’s lives and opinions finds counsel with the Hanged Man.

Like us, he has been unable to escape the onslaught of social media, the digital world, false prophets, liars, greedy bastards, and those invested in negativity as a way of steering the population.

But he hasn’t left the stadium, only the field. The Hanged Man is completely focused on the very events from which he has taken a step back; he has not sought escape, but perspective, in order to better understand how to deal with it. This is the discernment card, the energy that tells us to sift through the avalanche of information in order to find what might be valuable in it.

We can’t do that when we’re in the middle of it, and we are never, ever urged by the Tarot to run mindlessly with the herd just to get relief from the pressure, or for the sake of safety. The Hanged Man knows this. It’s the lesson he’s trying to impart: you don’t have to separate yourself from the world. But you do have to create the appropriate boundaries and filters to separate the positive aspects of any experience from the negativity and distractions that want to steer you off course.