Reflections on Patrick Valenza´s book: The Deviant Moon Tarot

 

The below images are from the beautiful book on “The Deviant Moon Tarot”, by artist Patrick Valenza.

Look at nature! All nature loafs, while Man alone works for a living!

From: The DruidCraft Tarot

The Fool in the Tarot game is a return to childhood. My concept of The Peter Pan Project builds on this. And this is again connected to philosophy. Poetry, storytelling and philosophy melt together. If we take Wordsworth´s poem, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", we can see how deeply imbued it is with a kind of natural Platonism. The poem begins with the famous lines:

"Meditation as an Art of Life" is about seeing the world as a complete whole and not divided

“Taproot Illustration”, by Jessica Roux

Man is in habit of seeing the things from outside, fragmented. You observe the tree as something separate, you observe your wife or husband, as something separate, the office, the boss – everything in fragments; that is to say: from outside as something cut off.

A Vase of Flowers From Ancient Times

Vase With Flowers On the Window, by Paul Gauguin

I meditate in the early dawn.

A Religious Mind Must Know the Extraordinary Sense of Beauty

You go to the secret valley to sit in peace and ask the philosophical question: What is a religious mind?

The Beauty of Truth and its Subtleties is not in Belief and Dogma

The beauty of truth and its subtleties is like the mist in the old garden. It is not in belief and dogma; it never is where man can find it for there is no path to its beauty; it is not a fixed point, a haven of shelter.

In the final step of meditation, all ideas fall away like leaves in the autumn

Painting by Aert van der Neer

In the final step of meditation, all ideas fall away like leaves in the autumn.

“Everything is New” – Morning Meditation

Alley Of The Dream, by Leonid Afremov 

Every morning you are born out of Hara.

You come from Omphalos, the Navel of the World. You come from the metaphysical time, the enchanted time. 

Primordial Meditation and the Philosophical Diary

You have travelled through a dark forest for a long time. You are a wanderer who are on a quest after the secret of life. You enter an old Inn filled with mystical books. One of them catches your eyes. It is wrapped in leather and covered with dust. You open it. It is filled with blank pages. It is the book of yourself, it is the book with the history of your soul. But you must write it yourself. It is your philosophical diary. 

Mindfulness and the Loss of Philosophy

Today meditation is usually associated with mindfulness, where philosophy, spirituality and religiousness have been reduced to psychology and psychotherapy (just think about how the term "ethically-neutral", in modern mindfulness is seen as something positive). In other words: mindfulness has become a part of what I call the Mythology of Authenticity. 

Meditation is to let the space between thoughts expand in passive listening presence

The instance, which is using the past to preserve the thoughts in a linguistic form, is the inner thinker, who reacts to challenges by dividing, evaluating, comparing.

To finish thoughts, so that they can end and renew themselves, is therefore equivalent with ceasing to preserve them in a linguistic form, which again is equivalent with meditation: that, to let the thoughts rest in longer periods of time, to let the space between them expand in passive listening presence.

It is as simple as that. 

Death is the landscape which meditation enters into

When we speak about life we usually mean life as a continuation-process, where there happens an identification.

When we say life, we often mean I and my house, I and my wife, I and my bank account, I and the experiences I have collected.

To live is therefore a process whereby something is continued in memory, conscious as unconscious, with the multifold struggles of the process, all the quarrels, episodes, experiences. It is all this we call life.

Opposite is standing death, which means, that all this is being brought to an end.

Therefore, we create an opposition, life and death. Life is the known, the perspective we have created on the background of the images of time. Death is the unknown, the landscape that can't be mapped.

This landscape is what meditation enters into.

The meaning of life is to express the human essence

Only meditative-existential you can be in the Now.

The passive listening presence is meditation.

Meditation is to see completely with the heart and the mind; that is to say: with the whole of your essence.

The human essence is therefore meditation.

Meditation is the self-forgetfull openness for, and absorption in life itself.

The meaning of life is therefore to express the human essence.

Human essence is therefore an appearance-form of the Now.

Why? Because the essence in the human life is meditation.

Total existential presence in the Now is meditation.

The essence is therefore one and the same with existence; and this realized oneness is precisely meditation, or the wholeness of the observer and the observed.

Meditation is a downward movement, not an upward movement

Meditation is, as I understand it with reference to Art of Life, a downward movement.

And by the way I believe, that this is a fact concerning all spiritual practice, when practised correct.

At first you release yourself from the personal images, here next from the collective images.

Herewith you give energy and life back to reality and presence.

You can also say it is a foundation of ground connection, a being with weightiness and grounding.

Related article:

The Awakening of Kundalini

Meditative perception consists in, that you fully and totally exist; where you are what you are

Through the understanding of what it is to meditate, the Life Artist perhaps becomes able to obtain a complete perception of life, without any division and separation.

A perception which consists in, that you fully and totally exist; where you are what you are in progress with; where there are no inner spectator, theorist or doubter within you.

Thinking never belongs in the Now

To think is to remove the mind from the Now, the present.

The thinking is therefore the absent.

Only meditative-existential you can be in the Now.

You can say, that meditation is a quality of the Now.

In meditation - the passive listening presence - there therefore doesn´t exist any problems, only facts.

You only understand in the Now – not tomorrow and not yesterday – always in the Now.

In this way understanding is timeless.

You can't understand the next life and next year.

To think is to remove the mind from the Now.

Meditation is not concentration, prayer or worship, and it´s not a method

Instead of thinking you must put meditation.

Meditation is not concentration. Meditation is not prayer. Meditation is not worship. Meditation is not a method.

Meditation is a condition in which you discover yourself as you are, without deception and illusion.

Self-knowledge is not a goal in itself.

Self-knowledge is this, to discover the desire of becoming something.

When you as a Life Artist have examined the many different sides of yourself in activity, you have discovered, that there only is one process, and that is, that you only are interested in becoming something, in continuity.

And this is the will to power.

An openness-variant of meditation implies, that you omit judging yourself or others as good or bad

A so-called openness-variant of meditation implies, that you omit judging yourself or others as good or bad.

You don’t judge.

You wait forming yourself a certain opinion and instead you direct the awareness towards the consequences of what is happening.

You have for example made a mistake, but instead of branding yourself because of what you have made, you examine the consequences of the mistake, and what can be done to reduce the adverse effects.

Don´t think about, what you ”ought” or ”not ought” to do, what is ”right” or ”wrong”, ”just” or ”unjust”.

You rather ought, as well as you can, to concentrate about doing what the situation actual requires, use the existent possibilities and act in a way, which feels natural.

Meditation as an Art of Life is a downward movement, a foundation of ground connection

In Meditation as an Art of Life you first release yourself from the personal images in time, secondly from the collective images in time.

Herewith you give energy and life back to reality and presence.

You can also say that it is a downward movement, a foundation of ground connection, a being with weightiness and grounding.

Meditation is a perception where you are melting into a unified wholeness

To meditate is about seeing the whole thing, everything as a whole; that is to say: where you in self-forgetful openness are allowing the thing to fill you out.

Meditation is a presence of something, which is not hidden.

It is a presence of something evidently, something the individual has a clear understanding of.

It is a presence of something straightforward, a presence in naturalness.

It is a perception where you so to speak become drawn into the thing, and are melting into a unified wholeness, which contains middle, fullness and light.

Usually this happens in a short glimpse, inconspicuous; what you often describe as intuitive cognition.

Suddenly you understand something. There is no causal explanation for it.