Through the Aeons of Time
the Ancient Ones, the Sages, Scribes
and Poets, have passed down to us for our admiration Words - about the worlds of things and of conscious processes. These
letters, hieroglyphs, formulae and ideas they hung as ornaments arranged on a holiday tree.
This holy tree is the Tree of Life,
or qAbAlA, including the Tarot of Tahuti. From time to time through the ages the Words have changed but the creative processes
being described remains always the same.
These
are the
22 Keys to Consciousness,
presented for our understanding in the
guise of personages, divinely human personalities through whom we can see the elusive obvious which is our Selves.
As we look at them, they have the ability
to form in our minds a thread of Consciousness which we can learn to follow, as Theseus followed his thread of entwined experiences
into the Labarynth. Simply by following it we can follow the evolution of earth and man back through time and then, with
the arrow drawn way back, we find the means to project our Will through into the future.
It is a story of a Universal process of transformations from unity to fragmentation, from meaning to meaninglessness
and then, through to a new unity and new meaning.
We can get to know the genii of the
Paths who come to tell us the secrets of their Paths. By the study of the Keys of the Tarot all of Life becomes more interesting
and increasingly intelligible. Especially clarified becomes our own experience of the fragmentation of humanity itself, that
“alienation” from others which seems to create such anxiety for individuals and such a threat to civilization
in our own time.
The Ancient Ones have preserved for
us a knowledge of a progressive metamorphosis, a generalized or Universal Subconsciousness molding all of Nature and in which
we each play a part.
In each human being there happened a
place and a moment when for the first time one realized that one was separated in the world from all of the rest. It came
around 2 years of age in a moment. a moment with a feeling of something being very wrong. It involved our mothers,
from whom in a moment we were separated, and so was quickly forgotten to our conscious minds. But in the subconsciousness,
it was a major trauma, an event as important as
the Exile from Grace and the Garden.
In our post-industrial age a worship
of individual independance has aggrievated the separation of human beings who are alienated in their self-Consciousness.
During
our Adventure in Consciousness we can, despite illusions of separation, clearly see and feel this, an elusive
obvious, that human beings remain in their subconscious depths,
unchangeably transpersonal,
joined together in something called
Spirit.
It is in this supra-personality of Spirit
that the Ancient Ones saw something like a Divine Word, first creating and then gradually clothing humanity with its Divinity,
so that what was first bespoken in Spirit would be eventually be re-spoken by Man.
The Keys can open new centers of Consciousness
within us, encouraging expansion again to unity and meaning, in an age-old process of Nature — and of the Word.
The Keys to the evolution of Consciousness
can become as a thread which you follow through the maze. with your hand. It leads directly to the Beast in the labyrinth,
and there you must take its head.
The Ways through which your thread
of thought may lead you, through delights and desolations, will be the same thread whereof the Ancient Ones spoke, a
thread fashioned by the love of our other humans who have preceeded us.
We learn to recreate and transform our
Selves as always it has been done, through the Word and through dreams and visions, all communicative tools of Spirit,
for Love, a Being-in One, is a function of communication.
It is an Adventure in Consciousness.
