The Fool and The Choice

[dreamoftheiris]

In the northeastern United States, every 17 years, millions of cicadas emerge.

In the morning, as the cicadas rise, they begin singing, one by one. By the afternoon, the air is filled with the rhythmic, pulsing, hypnotic drone of a million cicadas singing in unison. It is a great power, an almost defiant cry that lets the world know that they are here and they will not be stopped.

When you’re near the sound, it almost envelops you completely. And if you listen for long enough, you can hear a sort of celebration. A celebration of the mystery of the One.

What drives a creature, living underground for 17 years, to emerge and face a hostile world, with no possibility of defense, and certain death guaranteed? Why go through all this struggle, pain, and sacrifice?

From a materialist viewpoint, the answer is obvious: To procreate. To dig deeper into this question brings forth another possibility, however. One directly tied to archetypal energies.

The cicada does not understand the concept of “procreate”. It understands very little of its own nature. Yet, from the moment it emerges from the darkness of the underground, the cicada is driven, unceasingly, towards a mystery that it cannot possibly fathom.

It faces insurmountable obstacles, a completely hostile world, and certain death in pursuit of this mystery. Why then does it emerge from its shell and fly out into the unknown world when it’s much safer to remain underground?

Because it understands that growth requires action and standing still is worse than the danger that lies in the unknown.

We understand more than the cicada. But, like the cicada, we must move forward towards a mystery that exceeds our understanding.

To not move forward towards Mystery is to go against Nature.

The cicada’s short time on this Earth appears to us like that of a fool. Likewise for us, our rise and fall, our journey from beginning to end is also the journey of a fool.

The final archetype to explore is known as The Fool or The Choice. According to Robert Wang in the book The Qabalistic Tarot, 

“The FOOL is the androgenous energy which differentiates into the dramatis personae of the other twenty-one keys.”

In other words, the Fool is the beginning and end and is a part of each archetype. It is the heroic avenging fool who experiences a calling, moves into darkness and is ultimately resurrected, beginning the cycle anew.

This is the experience of what we call a “life” for entities in this density. The 360 degree rotation from ignorance, rejection and revelation, spiraling forward into the great unknown.

This archetypal structure can be seen at it’s very foundation as a “spiral” shape and it is interesting that our galaxy, or Logoi, just so happens to be a spiral formation.

Other galaxies, other Logoi, likely structure their archetypal foundation differently. And a clue as to what the experiences of entities in these galaxies could be may be found in how their galaxies are shaped.

The spiral shape may indicate the presence of dynamic tension in the archetypal configuration of a particular logoi. The ultimate goal of this dynamic tension is the creation of what Ra calls the “mind, body, spirit complex”.




Ra explains, “You may fruitfully view each Logos and its design as the Creator experiencing Itself. The seed concept of the significator being a complex introduces two things: firstly, the Creator against Creator in one sub-Logos in what you may call dynamic tension; secondly, the concept of free will, once having been made fuller by its extension into the sub-Logoi known as mind/body/spirit complexes, creates and re-creates and continues to create as a function of its very nature.”

Thus, this archetypal configuration naturally assumes a spiral shape because the spiral represents the process by which an entity can grow by the use of dynamic tension - that is, the tension between two opposing energies, creating a third overarching insight that propels movement forward.

Ra says, “The first Logos to instill what you now see as free will, in the full sense, in its sub-Logoi came to this creation due to contemplation in depth of the concepts or possibilities of conceptualizations of what we have called the significators. The Logos posited the possibility of the mind, the body, and the spirit as being complex.

In order for the significator to be what it is not, it then must be granted the free will of the Creator. This set in motion a quite lengthy, in your terms, series of Logoi improving or distilling this seed thought. The key was the significator becoming a complex.”

What does Ra mean when he speaks of being “complex”?

Ra mentions that “To be complex is to consist of more than one characteristic element or concept.”

Simply put, a self becomes complex by learning. As the self evolves, it is involved more and more in determining the lessons that it wishes to explore. These lessons, when absorbed, make the entity complex.

The concept which enables the ability of an entity to be complex is known as The Choice and is why the Fool is also called The Choice in the Law of One Material. Becoming “complex” can only be done by making a free will choice.

So the addition of the significator completes the spiral shape and leads to the concept of complexity.

In the mind, body, spirit cycles, the Choice is paired with the Significators. Recall that the Significators represent an overall summary of a cycle.

For the Mind, the Significator is the Hierophant and represents, as Crowley wrote, “one who manifests the mystery”.



It is the Higher Mind, that which understands and directs, manifesting the lessons the Lower Mind learns over lifetimes.

The Fool is a part of the Higher Mind which incarnates into physicality. Upon becoming aware of itself, the Fool moves into the Transformation of the Mind which represents the Choice among two paths. The honoring of Nature, the wellspring of the deep mind or the perversion of Her. The Choice to use the resources of the deep mind for service to others or service to self.



For the Body, the Significator is the Hangman and represents the “tuned instrument”, that is, the landscape of the Mind whose soil has been tilled and made fertile, creating a space for the seeds of potential to blossom into fruit. It is the sacrifice of the aims of the individual personality in order to be able to bear greater fruit by allowing the One Infinite to guide you.



The Fool who is “hanged” experiences “death”, the Transformation of the Body. It is not physical death, however, but rather, the “death of the lower will” or the “ego driven personality”.

It is the sacrifice of the aims of the lower for the aims of the Higher. The Choice to willingly be “hanged” and “die” can be seen as “foolish”.





And for the Spirit cycle, the Significator is The Sun, which represents the union of the male and female, the conscious and unconscious. The Choice to be in union results in the rebirth of the Fool.





When we look out into the vast expanse of space and observe other galaxies, there is always the thought about what the experience must be like for someone living in another galaxy.

Though it is impossible to truly understand what the archetypal experience is like in other galaxies, we can try to understand, on some level, what their experience must be like by looking at our own galaxy.

For example, in an elliptical shaped galaxy, the Logos takes on a circular shape.



This is suggestive of the archetypal journey without the key component of our logos which brings forth the “pressure” necessary to have a revelatory insight and thus move into The Choice. This insight is key to the spiral shape because without insight gained from experience, one cannot make a Choice. In a spiral, we see the concept of polarity - that is Positive and Negative paths and the dynamic tension that is necessary to obtain this polarity.

The experience in these logoi may be less “rich” with variety, however, it may also be more peaceful and stable. There would likely be less conflict and more of an awareness of one's Higher nature. Likely, entities in this galaxy do not have a veil between the conscious and unconscious and live in somewhat of an edenic state with no knowledge of “good” or “evil”.

Ra says,

“There were Logoi which chose to set the plan for the activation of mind/body/spirit complexes through each true-color body without recourse to the prior application of free will. It is, to our knowledge, only in an absence of free will that the conditions of which you speak obtain. In such a procession of densities you find an extraordinarily long, as you measure time, third density; likewise, fourth density. Then, as the entities begin to see the Creator, there is a very rapid, as you measure time, procession towards the eighth density. This is due to the fact that one who knows not, cares not.”

“Those Logoi whose creations have been set up without free will have not, in the feeling of those Logoi, given the Creator the quality and variety of experience of Itself as have those Logoi which have incorporated free will as paramount. Thusly you find those Logoi moving through the timeless states at what you would see as a later space/time to choose the free will character when elucidating the foundations of each Logos.”

Ra states further,

“Those, what you would call, early Logoi which chose lack-of-free-will foundations, to all extents with no exceptions, founded Logoi of the service-to-others path. The, shall we say, saga of polarity, its consequences and limits, were unimagined until experienced.”

It’s interesting that Ra mentions polarity as being a “saga” and that the “consequences and limits of polarity were unimagined until experienced”.

For us, in our particular logos, the saga we are immersed in involves “good” vs “evil”, or polarity.

This wasn’t always the case. And it won't be the case forever. Free will makes the experiment richer because the limits of free will are not known until experienced. Thus we have the great tug of war between the negative path and the positive path.

The Fool is the “axis upon which the creation turns” as Ra says. It is the wanderer, the voyager who enters darkness and ultimately comes out the otherside with a new perspective, only to begin the journey again, spiraling forward towards infinity.

Collectively, humanity turns the “axis of creation''. Our collective choices influence the direction of time.

This great tug of war, depicted in the Hindu myth of Amritamanthana, is made through you, the Fool.



To make a choice, every moment, to follow the higher or to follow the lower, influences ultimately time itself. You are the World Axis upon which the creation turns.

Choose wisely.

[flofrog]

That is just lovely, dreamoftheiris, I love the spiritual death of the hangman of course. The perfect spiral and the golden number...

[Nikki]

Dreamoftheiris, That was a very thought provoking post. The showing of the same thing with two different teachings shows that the truth can be seen in many different ways. There are many teachings with the same basic knowledge expressed in different words or thoughts. To self, it shows the love that we as humanity are given to help us on this difficult path. We are all given what we need, we just have to ask for it. This brings to heart, that there is no right or wrong just what or how we choose to experience life in physicality.

[hounsic]

Thank you for sharing very insightful.