By Sarah Taylor
Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. What you see reflects your thinking. And your thinking but reflects your choice of what you want to see.
— A Course in Miracles
The reading this week is a short and simple one. If you are looking for liberation from a struggle that, in its current form, will only lead to defeat, then it is time to step on the path of The Fool.
The Five of Wands sits at the centre of the reading, an effective illustration of where a plan made with the best of intentions is experiencing interference for one reason or another.
If you look at the configuration of the wands, it looks like they are coming together to form a pentacle. However, there is strife — a lack of organisation, a lack of clear direction from a single source. All five protagonists are at cross-purposes; there is no meaningful, reasoned collaboration.
What is behind this is hinted at in the Ten of Swords: a thought process, or a belief, or both. At the point of the Ten, this has concretised to such an extent that the pressure it has created has nowhere to go. The figure has no choice other than to surrender to it — or to be surrendered.
The Ten of Swords is a dark night of the soul created by sanskaras, the term in Hinduism for “the imprints left on the subconscious mind by experience in this or previous lives, which then colour all of life, one’s nature, responses, states of mind, etc.” (This is from the Wikipedia entry on “Sanskara”.) Changing our thoughts as a means of changing our experience lies at the heart of many philosophies and spiritual and religious practices, a case in point being the quote from A Course in Miracles that introduces today’s reading.