The Lord of Science appears in a reading when we have passed through a stormy or difficult time, and into the safety of a sheltered harbour, where we can recuperate, and consider the difficulties which have arisen around us.
Often we will have passed through a period of dreadful confusion – and frequently a time of emotional suffering. But this card indicates that, at least for the moment, pressure has eased, and we can try to sort out what we really feel. Frequently we need first to rest until we feel refreshed, but eventually we will be required to assess events and make new decisions for our future.
Because we will find ourselves seeing things more clearly, difficult and demanding decisions will be easier to make. We will find ourselves with a more clear overview of the issues we are facing. And we will be able to make choices which bring us peace of mind and happiness.
Expect to find greater objectivity, clarity and new perspectives as a result of the 6 of Swords. This is a card that indicates a healthy balance between the emotions and the intellect, where we can think through even delicate situations, with detached impartiality.
In Sapiens, he explored our past. In Homo Deus, he looked to our future. Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues.
How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children?
Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today’s most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.
In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari builds on the ideas explored in his previous books, untangling political, technological, social, and existential issues and offering advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in crisis?
Harari’s unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is essential reading.
Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates visual information. Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how data and evidence turn into explanation. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for showing nearly every kind of information, suggests many new designs (including sparklines), and provides analytical tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations (which are seen from both sides: how to produce and how to consume presentations). For alert consumers of presentations, there are chapters on diagnosing evidence corruption and PowerPoint pitches. Beautiful Evidence concludes with two chapters that leave the world of pixel and paper flatland representations – and move onto seeing and thinking in space land, the real-land of three-space and time.
Engagingly written, Unholy Alliance is a comprehensive, popular history of the occult background and roots of the Nazi movement, showing how the ideas of a vast international network of late 19th- and early 20th-century occult groups influenced Nazi ideology. Levenda takes readers through the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, the Thule Gesellschaft – the occult secret society that formed the ideological heart of the early Nazi Party – the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of the Eastern Temple and demonstrates how each influenced Nazi ideology. He also details the expedition to Tibet of the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, comprised of the same SS officers who would later be involved in grisly medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Levenda traces the Nazis’ movements as they continued their activities after the war or morphed into neo-Nazi, skinhead, and satanic groups, such as the Christian Identity and White Aryan Resistance movements. Levenda’s is not only a “major work of investigative reporting,” but also the striking story of the unholy alliance between politics and religion – or politics and occultism – that has dominated events in Europe and the Americas since World War I, with all its implications for continuing racial and religious violence in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
What are we? Who are we? Are we just some kind of lucky animal that evolved and are now almost too clever for our own good? Does evolution explain everything? Religion? The Mystical Accord argues that the history of mysticism gives us a consistent pattern to help answer the biggest questions. Spiritual evolution is ignored with the growth of technocratic societies. Mysticism means a number of things as outlined in the book’s Introduction. Mysticism deals with inexplicable, supernatural, metaphysical domains beyond limitations of reason. Mystics deal with spiritual growth and the meaning of life. Mysticism is a vision of an individual, spiritual, inner pilgrimage towards enlightenment and revelation. Being individual does not mean the mystic is outside religious tradition, indeed they often cause and contribute towards it.
Mysticism overlaps with psychology, metaphysics, magic and esoteric studies. History and practice demonstrate a recurrent process with lessons for everybody. When the idea of the spirit, free will and consciousness is under attack, we must reflect on what is at stake. The Mystical Accord suggests that we acknowledge being spiritual beings. We are individual, conscious beings, beneficiaries of pre-existing consciousness. Science has failed to explain the nature and origin of consciousness. From those foundations we see a similar pathway indicated by most spiritual traditions. That involves looking at our self and working to discard what is false, negative and destructive to come to our true self in a process of transcending the ego. True self is closer to our spirit, our original consciousness and allows ‘nexus to the numinous’. Most evolved spiritual traditions promote values such as compassion as the star to follow on this path. Mystical perceptions reflect perennial philosophy and parallel the hero’s journey. It is necessary to comprehend spiritual growth when opposing forces of control seek to diminish the spirit. Science, technology and material prosperity produce undeniable benefits but need to be balanced. They are servants not masters. Hostile to our own spiritual dimension we may sink into a straitjacket of technological servitude. The quiet voice of conscience is often the gift of the mystic.
The Mystical Accord suggests the need for an accord or alignment between our head and our heart in the process of spiritual evolution. Mystical traditions suggest that the fruits of the spiritual path pursued in a disciplined way, lead to profound clarity and inner peace, joyous and persistent. We may avoid confronting great existential questions but they never go away. If we look at the pattern of similar mystical observations, we make sense of the outside intellectually and the inner spiritually. Looking at universal experiences of mystics we discern positive messages that help us. The Mystical Accord is a structure superimposed on existing spiritual systems like a transparency that does not seek to disturb them. Many people have lost touch with their own religions. Many never had religion nor even spirituality. The mystical journey exists independently of the outside world but is informed by the experience of others, irrespective of beliefs. It is ignorant to avoid the parallels but silly to ignore the different destinations that spiritual vehicles will bring you. This involves the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric. The person who follows the rules of their religion without an inner transformation will lose much.
The introduction explains the notion of mysticism. However the book is principally written in the form of lines of 17 syllables like modern haikus or contemporary sutras. Spiritual and mystical expression has a long history of short sentences like building bricks. All around the globe, mystics seek to explore their inner world and share it through words or actions.
Clare of Assisi (born Chiara Offreduccio and sometimes spelled Clara, Clair, Claire, Sinclair; 16 July 1194 – 11 August 1253) was an Italiansaint and one of the first followers of Francis of Assisi.[1] She founded the Order of Poor Ladies, a monasticreligious order for women in the Franciscan tradition, and wrote their Rule of Life,[2] the first set of monastic guidelines known to have been written by a woman. Following her death, the order she founded was renamed in her honour as the Order of Saint Clare, commonly referred to today as the Poor Clares. Her feast day is on 11 August.
Biography
Fresco of Saint Clare and sisters of her order, church of San Damiano, Assisi
Clare was born in Assisi during the High Middle Ages, the eldest daughter of Favarone[3] or Favorino Sciffi, Count of Sasso-Rosso and his wife Ortolana. Traditional accounts say that Clare’s father was a wealthy representative of an ancient Roman family, who owned a large palace in Assisi and a castle on the slope of Mount Subasio.[1] Ortolana belonged to the noble family of Fiumi, and was a very devout woman who had undertaken pilgrimages to Rome, Santiago de Compostela and the Holy Land. Later in life, Ortolana entered Clare’s monastery, as did Clare’s sisters, Beatrix and Catarina (who took the name Agnes and was later declared a saint herself).[4]
As a child, Clare was devoted to prayer. Although there is no mention of this in any historical record, it is assumed that Clare was to be married in line with the family tradition. However, as a teen she heard Francis preach during a Lenten service in the church of San Giorgio at Assisi and asked him to help her to live after the manner of the Gospel. On the evening of Palm Sunday, 20 March 1212, she left her father’s house and accompanied by her aunt Bianca and another companion proceeded to the chapel of the Porziuncula to meet Francis. There, her hair was cut, and she exchanged her rich gown for a plain robe and veil.[1]Saint Clare intervenes to save a child from a wolf, in this panel by Giovanni di Paolo, 1455.
Francis placed Clare in the convent of the Benedictinenuns of San Paulo, near Bastia. Her father attempted to force her to return home. She clung to the altar of the church and threw aside her veil to show her cropped hair.[5] She resisted any attempt, professing that she would have no other husband but Jesus Christ.[6] In order to provide the greater solitude Clare desired, a few days later Francis sent her to Sant’ Angelo in Panzo, another monastery of the Benedictine nuns on one of the flanks of Subasio. Clare was soon joined by her sister Catarina, who took the name Agnes. They remained with the Benedictines until a small dwelling was built for them next to the church of San Damiano, which Francis had repaired some years earlier.[1]
Other women joined them, and they were known as the “Poor Ladies of San Damiano”. They lived a simple life of poverty, austerity and seclusion from the world, according to a Rule which Francis gave them as a Second Order (Poor Clares).[5][6]
San Damiano became the centre of Clare’s new religious order, which was known in her lifetime as the “Order of Poor Ladies of San Damiano”. San Damiano is traditionally considered the first house of this order; it may have been affiliated with an existing network of women’s religious houses organised by Hugolino (who later became Pope Gregory IX). Hugolino wanted San Damiano as part of the order he founded because of the prestige of Clare’s monastery.[7] San Damiano emerged as the most important house in the order, and Clare became its undisputed leader. By 1263, just ten years after Clare’s death, the order had become known as the Order of Saint Clare.
In 1228, when Gregory IX offered Clare a dispensation from the vow of strict poverty, she replied: “I need to be absolved from my sins, but not from the obligation of following Christ.”[6] Accordingly, the Pope granted them the Privilegium Pauperitatis — that nobody could oblige them to accept any possession.[6]
Unlike the Franciscan friars, whose members moved around the country to preach, Saint Clare’s sisters lived in enclosure, since an itinerant life was hardly conceivable at the time for women. Their life consisted of manual labour[8] and prayer. The nuns went barefoot, slept on the ground, ate no meat and observed almost complete silence.[5]
For a short period, the order was directed by Francis himself.[9] Then in 1216, Clare accepted the role of abbess of San Damiano. As abbess, Clare had more authority to lead the order than when she was the prioress and required to follow the orders of a priest heading the community.[10] Clare defended her order from the attempts of prelates to impose a rule on them that more closely resembled the Rule of Saint Benedict than Francis’ stricter vows. Clare sought to imitate Francis’ virtues and way of life so much so that she was sometimes titled alter Franciscus, another Francis.[11] She also played a significant role in encouraging and aiding Francis, whom she saw as a spiritual father figure, and she took care of him during his final illness.
After Francis’s death, Clare continued to promote the growth of her order, writing letters to abbesses in other parts of Europe and thwarting every attempt by each successive pope to impose a rule on her order which weakened the radical commitment to corporate poverty she had originally embraced. Clare’s Franciscan theology of joyous poverty in imitation of Christ is evident in the rule she wrote for her community and in her four letters to Agnes of Prague.
As Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II battled Pope Gregory IX for control of Italy during the Crusades era, separately in September 1240 and June 1241, a pair of armies attacked the monastery of San Damiano and the town of Assisi. Both targets were successfully defended as Clare prayed to Christ, present in the Blessed Sacrament.[12]
In her later years, Clare endured a long period of poor health. She died on 11 August 1253 at the age of 59. Her last words are reported to have been, “Blessed be You, O God, for having created me.”[6]
On 9 August 1253, two days before her death, the papal bullSolet annuere of Pope Innocent IV confirmed that Clare’s rule would serve as the governing rule for Clare’s Order of Poor Ladies. Her remains were interred at the chapel of San Giorgio while a church to hold her remains was being constructed. At her funeral, Pope Innocent IV insisted the friars perform the Office for the Virgin Saints as opposed to the Office for the Dead.[13] This move by Pope Innocent ensured that the canonization process for Clare would begin shortly after her funeral. Pope Innocent was cautioned by multiple advisers against having the Office for the Virgin Saints performed at Clare’s funeral.[14] The most vocal of these advisers was Cardinal Raynaldus who would later become Pope Alexander IV, who in two years time would canonize Clare.[15] At Pope Innocent’s request the canonization process for Clare began immediately. While the whole process took two years, the examination of Clare’s miracles took just six days. On 26 September 1255,[16][17]Pope Alexander IV canonized Clare as Saint Clare of Assisi. Construction of the Basilica of Saint Clare was completed in 1260, and on 3 October of that year Clare’s remains were transferred to the newly completed basilica where they were buried beneath the high altar. In further recognition of the saint, Pope Urban IV officially changed the name of the Order of Poor Ladies to the Order of Saint Clare in 1263.
Some 600 years later in 1872, Clare’s relics were transferred to a newly constructed shrine in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Clare, where her relics can still be venerated today.
Clare was canonized on 26 September 1255 by Pope Alexander IV,[16][17] and her feast day was immediately inserted in the General Roman Calendar for celebration on 12 August, the day after her death, as 11 August was already assigned to Saints Tiburtius and Susanna, two 3rd-century Roman martyrs. The celebration was ranked as a Double (as in the Tridentine Calendar) or, in the terminology adopted in 1960, a Third-Class Feast (as in the General Roman Calendar of 1960). The 1969 calendar revision removed the feast of Tiburtius and Susanna from the calendar, finally allowing the memorial of Saint Clare to be celebrated on 11 August, the day of her death.
Construction of the Basilica di Santa Chiara began a year after Clare’s canonization, and her remains were transferred there on 3 October 1260 from the church of St George, also in Assisi. Her bones are now in the crypt at the Basilica, having been rediscovered in 1850.
In art, Clare is often shown carrying a monstrance or pyx, in commemoration of the occasion when she warded away the invading soldiers of Frederick II at the gates of her convent by displaying the Blessed Sacrament and kneeling in prayer.
Pope Pius XII designated Clare as the patron saint of television in 1958 on the basis that when she was too ill to attend Mass, she had reportedly been able to see and hear it on the wall of her room.[18]
There are traditions of bringing offerings of eggs to the Poor Clares for their intercessions for good weather, particularly for weddings.[19] This tradition remains popular in the Philippines, particularly at the Real Monasterio de Santa Clara in Quezon City and in the town of Obando, Bulacan. According to the Filipino essayist Alejandro Roces, the practice arose because of Clare’s name. In Castilianclara refers to an interval of clear weather, and in Spanish, it also refers to the white or albumen of the egg.[20]
Mission Santa Clara, founded by Spanish missionaries in northern California in 1777, has given its name to the university, city, county and valley in which it sits, nicknamed “Silicon Valley” since the 1970s. Southern California’s Santa Clara River is hundreds of miles to the south and gave its name to the nearby city of Santa Clarita. The early California missions were founded by Franciscan Friars, who had a special devotion to Saint Clare. Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, celebrates its Santa Clara Feast Day annually on 12 August, as the feast was celebrated before the 1969 calendar change.
The Lord of Wealth talks not only about material wealth and its appropriate use, but about the inner wealth and resources that we all have. This is a card that teaches us that the harvest we gather in our lives is the end result of all that we have put into living – and more importantly, how we have used the riches at our disposal.
We make our own realities with every thought, every deed, every wish. And when we direct our energies positively we shall arrive – as a perfectly natural consequence – at the Ten of Disks. Of course, if we direct our energies negatively we’ll find ourselves with the Ten of Wands, or the Ten of Swords – neither of which are happy cards!
There is a warning connected to this card though. When we have created sufficient wealth to make ourselves comfortable and contented, if we have a surplus, then we must make that surplus work. We cannot expect energy to flow freely in our lives if we hoard it, and try to hang on to it. This is as pointless as trying to save up the breeze so that it will blow on a stuffy day! There are some things in life you cannot clutch tight in the hand without crushing their value out of them.
If this card comes up in an everyday reading, it re-assures that financial and material matters are proceeding well, and that there is no cause for concern.
If it comes up in a more spiritually based reading, then we need to be applying the underlying principles to our lives – so in this case, we need to be letting our inner wealth show, in order to manifest that into our lives.
Scott H Kellogg This is an overview lecture by Dr. Scott Kellogg – the creator of the Transformational Chairwork Project. This talk will look at ways of using Chairwork to (a) Resolve Inner Conflicts; (b) Heal from Loss and Grief; (c) Cope with Difficult Relationships; (d) Overcome Trauma and Interpersonal Mistreatment; and (f) Engage with the Inner Critic/Challenge Self-Hatred.
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
