Spiritual awareness begins not when we blindly pledge allegiance to arcane religious dogma but when we finally are led to utter the words, “I Am.”

I Am responsible for my own spirituality and my own spiritual growth.

I Am is a declaration of spiritual freedom. Only with spiritual freedom are we, as individuals, able to achieve our full potential and chart the course of destiny.

Carl G. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, coined the oblique term individuation to describe the spiritual quest allegorized by the tarot. Jung taught that birth is analogous to a photographic negative. The fullness of life must be developed over the years, as well as lived.

As the psychic process of individuation advances, as the photographic negative is developed, the Self assumes form, intelligence and personality. Color and detail is added, as symbolized (above) by the Divine Child’s palette. The frog and butterflies are universal symbols of transformation; the candle, of the essence of being.

In the final analysis, how we develop has as much if not more to do with physics than with religion, although religious metaphor plays an important if intermediate role. Individuation is a completely natural process, although not one we are able to accomplish on our own. We require divine assistance! We require divine assistance to keep us from exiting the train named Destiny at the whistle-stop named religion, as so many do.

The traditional name for this particular tarot card, as noted above, is The Hierophant. Before that, in the Tarot of Marseilles, the card’s title was Le Pape – “The Pope.” In other words, in traditional tarot this archetype always has bowed to the authority of institutionalized dogma and appealed to religious absolutism. A change was necessary and overdue!

The Divine Child refers to that inner voice we all know and recognize as a phenomenon fundamental to our own unique being. This inner voice was once called a homunculus – a “little person” inside the brain. (I added the link just for fun. It’s not particularly relevant.)

Anyway, a more accurate term for this inner voice is clairaudience, meaning inspiration from the spirit world and divine assistance in the form of spirit guides, animal totems, ancestors, nature and the Higher Self.

Chrysalis defines the Higher Self as something exterior, existing predominantly in the Otherworld (as beautifully depicted on the left). The Otherworld, however, is not supernatural, it is an unseen part of this world, as we shall see, so to speak. They are quantumly entangled.

We are all psychic (clairvoyant) and we are all clairaudient to some varying degree whether we realize it or not, just as we are all intuitive. Everyone possesses a Sixth Sense or Third Eye.  As the individuation process evolves toward higher consciousness and enlightenment, our spiritual abilities come sharply into focus.

I mentioned that physics (quantum not classical) explains the thoroughly natural characteristics of these and other spiritual abilities. In metaphysics, we no longer refer to them as paranormal rather as anomalistic psychology.

Let’s draw an analogy between, for example, a material self (little s) on one hand and its spiritual Higher Self on the other to two quantum particles, say protons. Once entangled, they cannot be properly understood independently. They forever remain entangled as a composite whole. The Self, by analogy, becomes an emergent property of Higher Self. Emergence implies that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Amazingly, should you create some vast distance between two entangled protons, which have intrinsic spin – either clockwise or counterclockwise – by placing one proton in your pocket and the other on the opposite side of the universe, and then spin your proton clockwise, the other one will spin counterclockwise. Instantaneously! Accordingly, quantum mechanics can easily account for the “little man in your brain” and assures us that we are, indeed, connected to everything and not alone in the universe.

To our list of intentions in this Novena to Brighid, let us now add “clarity as to the true nature of reality.” And please add your own intentions.

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© Toney Brooks, 2019