The Problem with the Like Button

When I was driving to psychic house parties in Connecticut this August, I was grateful for Pandora on my Android. All I had to do was list some bands I like and Pandora kept me entertained with sweet tunes.

When I wasn’t driving, I would take the time to hit the thumbs up or thumbs down button on each song. Pandora learns from my likes and dislikes to play only the music I am most likely to enjoy.

That’s a good thing, right?

Maybe not; sometimes we learn to love a song after some repetition. Sometimes it’s a bit of a spiritual journey to make friends with a particular song. If I could just have hit the thumbs down on it, I would never have made the journey or heard the message.

Sometimes we find new meaning in the lyrics of the overplayed songs that bore us.  Sometimes we grow into a musical style we didn’t like before. The two bands who have brought me the most joy over the past thirty-five years were both bands I didn’t like at first.

The same thing is true with online friends. Most of us populate our social media accounts with friends who like what we like, and believe what we believe. If someone posts an opinion with which we don’t agree, it’s perfectly acceptable to simply unfriend them. We never have to deal with the fact that someone we know and respect feels differently about something than we do. One glance at our Facebook wall and we feel secure, knowing that we will never be confronted with an opinion different from our own.

The thing is, our opinions are supposed to change and evolve as we get older. It’s called “growth.”

The recent trend is that when we change the way we view a political, spiritual or societal issue, our evolution makes us a “flip-flopper,” or a “hypocrite” rather than a mature person who has consciously changed their way of thinking. When we reach out to compromise with others who have different views, others may see us as weak.
Exposure to people who have different ideas is what keeps us open and thinking.  Compromise is what keeps communities functioning.

Our various “like” buttons limit our exposure to anything that might challenge our current opinions or cause us to question ourselves, stretch or grow in any way. We may even wonder if it is actually possible to like and enjoy someone who holds beliefs that are different from our own!

I treasure my friends who are different than I am. I am interested in their opinions, even if they don’t match my own. It concerns me that this suddenly feels like a radical notion.

It’s good to try a food you think you don’t like, or listen to a band you’ve never cared for. It’s good to hear an opinion that differs from your own. It won’t kill you, and it might make you stretch you a little.

Symbols in Tarot and in Life

More and more it seems that Americans condense their concerns into simple symbols, the cover of the Rolling Stone or a hooded sweatshirt, for instance.

Twitter teaches us to say it all in one hundred and forty characters or less.

No one seems to have the time or ability to read the whole story and make a thoughtful judgment about anything.

From a tarot perspective, this trend toward symbols-over-substance is interesting.

Tarot uses symbols – pictures and archetypes – to tell stories.

We look at the pictures and they lead us to a place where we can fill in the blanks. We can find the details once we see the symbols.

What’s happening in our greater culture seems to be the opposite of that. We accept the symbols and dig no deeper to find truth.

Could tarot help us reverse this trend?

Now more than ever tarot is making an appearance in daily life and pop culture. Elite fashions houses are basing lines of clothing and perfume on tarot. Designers are participating in tarot art projects. Even members of Catholicism are embracing the game of tarot, although not its spiritual message.

As tarot becomes a reference for the masses instead of simply a tool of the esoteric occult we may have an opportunity to shift the pop culture consciousness from the superficial to the truly significant.

If we can teach ourselves and each other to look deeper, as tarot teaches us to do, what difference might that make in our society?

Would the dreck of the 24-hour news cycle cease to captivate us?

Would marketers have to show us the facts instead of simply inciting our emotions to make a sale?

Would we be able to discuss the difficulties in our country in terms of deeper realities rather than surface appearances and slogans?

Perhaps no one understands the importance of symbolism more than tarotists do. But we also know that the symbol itself is not the whole of the information.

Symbols lead us to find the truth. They are not themselves the truth.

Perhaps the more we are able to bring tarot to the public eye and enlist the curious in its study, the more we will become the country we need to be; a society of thinkers and problem solvers.

Thinking and problem solving is what tarot teaches us to do. Tarot also teaches us to communicate and to be objective.

The poster child and the rallying point serve to get out attention. The tarot card does much the same. When we look within and beyond the initial symbol we have the opportunity to create healing in ourselves and in our greater community.

The Power of Words

This year's elections have been very focused on the words candidates say. Obama's "You didn't build that" became the focus of the GOP convention. Romney's "binders full of women" is only one of many gaffes that make us wonder if politicians are simply misspeaking under pressure as we all do, or if their slips are more, shall we say, Freudian.

More and more the focus of political rhetoric seems to be less about policy and intent, and more about the actual words candidates choose.

I have always been fascinated by words, and the power they hold. In a tarot reading, the proper choice of words is critical. I know what I see, but if I couldn't say what I see in a way that shares my vision with my client the reading would have very little value.

As a child I was told to tell bullies that "Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me." Now, social media gives bullies so much power that it seems the words they choose are contributing to the suicides of their victims.

As a young adult, I worked for a very progressive organization. Long before work-place sensitivity training was mandatory in many companies we would attend a workshop called "Words that Hurt People." Back then, it was suggested that calling grown women "girls" was hurtful. Racial slurs were hurtful. I am sure there would have been a whole section on using the word "illegal" as a noun.

As I began to study energy healing and metaphysics, I learned that words have magickal power. Chants, incantations, prayers, invocations and sacred words all carry power. Speaking sacred words with intention can cause healing and transformation.

Flashing back on the concept of words that hurt people, I begin to wonder if hateful words are more than "politically incorrect." I wonder if hateful words do energetic damage in the same way that sacred words create healing.

Where do words get their power? When musicians use the "n" word in their lyrics, do they disempower that word's ability to cause them harm? Do we ourselves imbue words with positivity or negativity?

The Bible has something to say about the spiritual nature of words. The gospel of John begins with these profound words: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." Nowadays evangelists suggest that the "word" was a reference to the Bible as the literal word of God. To me, this makes no sense because the gospel was written long before what is now known as the Holy Bible was assembled. So then, what is this "word" that is in fact "God"? Could this be simply another reference to the sacred power of words?

Leonard Bernstein wrote a song popularized by Pete Seeger called "Words, Words, Words." The lyrics speak about our power to change the world with words.

"Words, words, words
On cracked old pages
How much of truth remains?
If my mind could understand them,
And if my life pronounced them,
Would not this world be changed?"

Some people will say that discussing the power of words is silly. To them, it is all about semantics. Whether you refer to someone as an "Illegal" or an "undocumented worker," or a "woman" or a "girl" doesn't really matter, they say. It all means the same thing.

I disagree. Each word has its own energy. The energy between "girl" and "woman" differs greatly.

So many spiritual cultures across the planet use words, tones and utterances in a holy way. If those utterances matter, perhaps every utterance matters.

So what happens when we speak a word in anger? What happens when we simply misspeak? We are all human. Part of being human is saying things we don't mean, and saying things we regret. But if we strive to be aware of the energy we send into the world, and strive to be responsible for the words we say, we will spread more healing than hurt.

On both a political level and a spiritual level words do have power. What a wonderful gift we all have; the ability to use our words to create our world.

Sex, Power and the Page of Wands

In his Madonna-like quest to reinvent himself, Mr. Universe became “The Terminator,” and then “The Governator.”  Now he’s “The Sperminator.”  Maria is handling the crisis with her usual grace, while yet another celebrity politician is in disgrace.

We have had so many celebrity politicians that I think we need a cute name for them.  Can we call them polebrities, or maybe celebticians?  It started with entertainers who used their celebrity status to cross into politics, like George Murphy and Ronald Reagan.  There was Sony Bono, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now we have politicians who are celebticians primarily because of their demeanor, like Barack Obama.

Even Bill Clinton, playing his saxophone at his own televised inauguration party twenty years ago, was trying to work the celebrity angle.  He had a sex scandal too.

The thing that gets me about Arnold’s recent revelation is that his affair was with the hired help.  How tacky!  How cliché!  Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.  They are based on real actions of real people.

Also in the news, a very wealthy European celebtician is languishing at Riker’s Island on rape charges.  His accuser was his hotel maid.  The question is not whether they had sex, but whether it was consensual.  Could a paltry housekeeper ever be in a position of consenting, or not consenting, to a man so powerful?

Why do wealthy, powerful men pick on the most powerless women?  Monica Lewinsky herself was a lowly intern before Bill made her a weird kind of celebrity.  The cliché of banging the secretary, the intern or the housekeeper is in and of itself a disturbing elephant in the room.

Our current society imposes a universal code for sexual behavior that may be, in some instances, hard for humans to achieve.  Honesty isn’t good enough.  We have to be monogamous, and straight.  That’s fine for folk who tend that way naturally, but not everyone does.

We also expect our celebrities, and our elected officials, to be role models.  We want them to uphold this potentially unnatural behavioral code.  Then we give them more money, fame and power than any human should have, and wait for the inevitable explosion.

When you can have anything in the world you want, you will always look for something more.  Regular folk ask questions like “How could Tiger Woods be so stupid?”  But it’s not stupidity that drives it.  It’s the taint of having nothing left to want.

I understand all this, and have some real sympathy for all the people in these painfully complex relationships played out on the public stage.

I understand why wealthy men often make bad decisions in their personal relationships.  Here’s what I don’t understand.  Why do they always choose women who aren’t in a position to say no?  And why do we, as a nation, not call these jerks out for what they are really doing, which is old-fashioned misogynistic on-the-job sexual harassment? 

We want our leaders to answer for straying outside their marriages.  I want them to answer for their choices of women with whom they strayed.  In very few cases are these women social or economic equals.  They are nearly always women over whom these men hold power.

I don’t care where Arnold puts his penis.  His marriage is between him and Maria.  I care very much that he made sexual advances on the hired help.  To me, that is simply abuse of power, and abuse of women.

I pulled a tarot card for Arnold, and got the Page of Wands.  Arnold will likely withstand this assault on his character, and be able to reinvent himself again.  I doubt very much that he feels much sense of guilt or wrongdoing, only irritation that he was caught. 

His humor, charm and talent will ultimately carry him through this.  Perhaps the real reason we will forgive him is that no one really cares when a powerful man manipulates a powerless woman.