Original mini-post

I asked the cards the following question:

What does the world most need at this moment?

As I was using the hard copy of the cards, I will post this version:

It fell on the west side: quiet.

It’s certainly quiet here, but very late, so I’ll sleep on this and write something about it tomorrow.

Continuation

Ebb is one of the cards I have decided not to write about in detail for the moment, so I will give a quick summary. The card refers to Ebb from the point of view of consciousness - from this perspective, the tide is out. This means that from the point of view of the Unconscious, the tide is in flow mode (high). Quiet is the west (feeling side) mention on this card.

Rainring says that the world needs a rise in the Unconscious, i.e. an increase in contact with the Unconscious, or in the extent to which the Unconscious plays a part in the affairs of our planet. The emotional aspect of this inflow of the Unconscious is described by the mention ‘quiet’.

Does this mean that we need more meditation? That meaning is not excluded, however, there are innumerable schools of meditation, each claiming that through meditation we are going to achieve goodness-knows-what gymnastics of the soul and spiritual self-promotion. The card is NOT buying into all of that.

A much more promising line of enquiry is to reflect on the quantity of noise, and noise pollution, being generated in the world, although my feeling is that this is not exactly the issue either. One aspect of this noise is that of the chatter of the mind. The contents of the blogosphere will serve as a case in point. In this world, you are only as good, as worthy of attention, as your latest post. As far as I can make out, I am typical in spending only a small fraction of my blogging time checking out work that fellow-bloggers have done earlier than the very recent past. The emphasis, in writing blogs, is to keep driving ever onward. The appetite of the fraternity seems to be for an endless conveyor belt of re-stimulation with the new.

Fortunately, this is a tendency, not an exclusive characteristic of the medium. But it is hard to avoid the impression that in a race between quality and quantity, the blogosphere gives the victory to quantity. This, I suggest, is an example of a situation which has moved the cards to recommend ‘quiet’ as the required movement for our world. Perhaps we would all benefit from a general effort to quieten down a little, to post a little less often with a little more thought, meditation, reflection behind what we write.

Nor should we lose sight in all this of the inner-outer dimension. The Unconscious of course represents the world within us; consciousness is the outer world, the daily round of our lives. The cards want a certain amount of disengagement from the outer, and a greater emphasis on our inner world.

This brings us to what I feel to be the core of the matter. To meditate requires slowing down. I feel as though the real issue highlighted by this card is that of the breakneck speed at which everything is happening. In the process, the attention span of the contemporary citizen, for instance, seems to be constantly diminishing. We are losing the ability to give ourselves room, space, leisure to really look at anything. This line of thought is certainly relevant to the Rainring cards themselves. I have noticed that a lot of people are engaging with the cards on the web site in a perfunctory manner, compared to very few who are really investing themselves over a longer term in order to go deeper.

Of course, I am perfectly prepared to hold my hand up and plead guilty to not making the cards accessible enough. As any of you who are following this blog will know, I am making strenuous efforts to remedy that situation right now. But I strongly suspect that I am not the sole author of this problem. My gut feeling is that many, perhaps most of the people accessing the site want a quick fix: they want the cards to have had a noticeable impact on their lives by next Wednesday!

Unfortunately, it’s more complex and subtle than that. I’ve never learnt the cards, but Hacina has, and it took her upwards of two years of steady effort to start to really know her way around them. I hope very much that she will write about this process at some stage, though there is not one standard trajectory fitting for every individual. When we do a reading with the cards, it is a situation in which we sit quietly and focus for half an hour, an hour, even longer sometimes, on one particular issue. The accumulation of this kind of practice extended over weeks, months and years represents a great deal of time spent quietly with oneself. For me, this is the messsage of the cards at this moment in the world. We need to slow down and quieten down, to begin to turn back the tide which seems to require more of everything - more people on Earth, more goods, more activity, more noise, more speed…

I want to take off into the issue of speed at this point, and its psychological implications, because it’s one of my hobby horses, but that takes us into the card Hyper-activity, which is not the one shown here. Instead, let me try to summarise. The recommendation is for us to reinforce the emotional side of our connection with the Unconscious - not to read a hundred books about it, but to try and allow ourselves to feel the unmet need which we all have for inner quietness. I am NOT trying to recommend the adoption of obscure Tibetan practices of walling oneself up for months at a time. I am talking about making time to take a good walk in the park with the dog, doing a bit of gardening, spending more time in nature rather than more money on the High Street; listening sometimes to music which slows us down, rather than the kind which speeds us up; working less and being more; staying in bed and drinking less coffee; turning off the mobile phone or throwing it away altogether.

We are wearing our planet out, and we can’t bin it and buy another one if it ceases to be fit for purpose. We have to calm down this manic rush to the precipice. That, I think, is what the card ‘quiet’ is telling us on the verge of 2008. I hope we can all find the inner resources to participate in moving things back, even if ever so slightly, from the brink.