STILL WORKING ON MY PHD

Images from the Smith-Waite 1910 Tarot Deck

I am in my 70th year and am still working on my P.H.D.: Perseverance. Humility. Detachment. 

It seems absurd when I say it, but Tarot cards have helped recently. The deck of illustrated cards is familiar to anyone who ever had a psychic reading. My first exposure occurred in the attic apartment of my first gay lover and his hippy friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was twenty and adrift, after leaving dental school and coming out to my family, who basically told me to bugger off.

My first Tarot card reading, at a wobbly kitchen table, was done by a male witch. Dennis, a proud Satanist leader of a local cult, insisted he was not a warlock, but a gender-bending male witch. His exaggerated facial makeup, which he always wore, discouraged any protest from the doubtful. On the rare occasion when someone ignored the warning of his mascara and rouge, Dennis flashed his fanglike lateral incisors and revealed he has actually a vampire and a witch. Compelling.

I admired Dennis. His flagrant insanity led me to immediately sit and take his Tarot reading with sober attention. The vague memory of it tells me that I was strongly affected. But I cannot remember any of it. All I can recall entails staring into Dennis' intense emerald eyes while being deafened by his huge white parrot who resided on a perch in that kitchen. 

The art of the Tarot cards fascinated me. My collection of various decks, old and new, has long ago been lost or given away. Taking or giving readings has never become a habit. Until now. A talented software company has converted the 1910 Smith-Waite Tarot deck into an app for my Android tablet.

Do I seriously believe in divination with pretty cards on an LED screen? Well, it depends on what you mean by "divination". If you would ask if I believe that the cards are telling me my future, I would laugh. Of course not. 

My traditional five-card, cross-pattern reading simply lays out a random combination of human attributes and occurrences each day. It is based on the ancient zodiac elements of air, water, fire and earth, with a central card representing my integrated self in the center. The software designers have done a wonderful job of consolidating each reading in a summary for examination. They have even added a journaling function. Bravo, tech mystics.

The bottom line is this: The Tarot is based on archetypes and time-worn observations of human nature. The pretty pictures are fish hooks. If you bite, you are pulled into a reflective space wherein you are presented with combinations of the elements of human experience. That's basically it.

How does this help me with working on my PHD? 

My readings consistently indicate potential (perseverance), hubris (humility) and fickle fate (detachment). Perhaps it takes over 50 yrs of studying various spiritual and mental disciplines to simplify a random reading of five-decorated cards in this way. Perhaps not. In any case, each morning's reading sets me on a path of conscious living.

My perseverance has come with living as a gay man in a Roman Catholic part of the world, fighting my own obsessive-compulsive nature, overcoming a desire to give up when diagnosed with terminal AIDS twenty-five years ago, overcoming a desire to give up when diagnosed with anal cancer seventeen years ago, entering a primary relationship with an equally perseverant peer sixteen years ago. 

My humility has come from being a son of dying parents, a hospice nurse during the AIDS epidemic, a psychiatric nurse in state hospitals, a lover (and leaver) of some truly exceptional men, a practitioner of Buddhism, and a recipient of underserved forgiveness and compassion.  

My detachment has come from standing beside death, holding the cooling hands of dead people I have loved, having too much, having too little, wasting my own potential, ignoring the potential of others, and accepting my own inevitable mortality. A wise man, Ram Dass, once told me how to reach peace while working around death: "Fall in love with each and every one, and then learn to let them go." 

Tarot, crystal ball, IChing, whatever. I have experienced most forms of religious and psychic ritual. I have kept a dream book, a journal, an affirmation list. I have read the Dhammapada over and over again with its soothing voice. Yet, I have yet to finish my PHD. And, of course, I never will while I am alive. 

Another wise person, a Buddhist I admired, smiled in that way which is a mingling of pity and contempt when I asked what was the purpose of Buddhist practice. "It is called practice because that is what it is. You are meant to fail. You are meant to learn something. You are meant to try again. That is the point, if there is meant to be one at all."