By Sarah Taylor
This is like spiritual triage. You’re being exposed to an awful lot … . I’ve got the big sword swinging.
— Adyashanti
I found this quote today, and not a moment too soon where this week’s reading is concerned. The “big sword” of discernment is asking to be swung in a matter where it seems like there is no escape from an encounter with the shadow — what we have kept a secret from ourselves.
The Devil is nothing if not intense. It represents the material that we are immersed in when we come into relatedness with another. In actuality, what we are doing is looking into a mirror provided by someone else and seeing something about ourselves that we took great pains to consign to the closet — so effectively that we didn’t even know we were doing it.
Where The Lovers is a decision made in Eden (the light of consciousness), The Devil is a (simultaneous) contract signed in the underworld. We are held bondage by the chains we have placed around our own necks. In The Devil, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves in our ‘demonic’ glory. We find something we have ‘cast out’; we take a courageous step towards the possibility of embodying the disowned — even if it feels like the step wasn’t ours, that it came out of nowhere.
So what do we do with something that may feel chaotic, or painful? How do we go through the fires that lick at our souls?
We become fire. We turn to the Page of Wands, who is birthed from the very element of fire.