of view as is possible. If we understand this, we can respect everybody’s point of view, knowing that we are all an expression of the great life.
The Empress is a mighty hermaphrodite – she is Mercury in all its beauty. She is a perfectly receptive intellect. The intellect is the mas culine characteristic of the personality, but because she has rendered it receptive she is represented as feminine. This is why we get the double qualities of masculine and feminine in her. She is the qual ity of mind that becomes the silver thread, linking the divine to the higher intelligence of the initiate as he goes back into life. He can then make sense of the process, redeem it and render it sacred through a pure heart and an open and loving mind. She teaches the human family to recognise its spiritual heritage and to develop wisdom.
The book that The High Priestess was holding is now opened by The Empress. To open that book requires intelligence and wis dom; this is why Number 3, The Empress, represents intelligence. It is the wisdom of application which appears in humans as eternal wisdom, when a state of humility is present. It is that intelligence and wisdom that The Emperor will give to the initiate. The Empress represents Active Intelligence, which pervades the whole of the sys tem and enables it to manifest in its manifold glory.
The High Priestess has to be veiled, for she’s a mystery and therefore she will only address a minority. On the other hand The Empress is available for everybody to see and appeals to all men of goodwill, meaning those who can listen to the message of life. It is here that we start to point our will towards good and God and away from ourselves.
The Empress is mercurial; she is the equivalent of Athena (Greek), or Minerva (Roman). She’s the intellect when it is self-conscious. The initiate has to have a complete understanding of life at the intel lectual level to be able to use all the knowledge that is locked into Active Intelligence or life on this Earth. If the intellect is developed it can then fly and reach the higher mind, so The Empress has a com pletely open, playful mind, obsessed with the love of understanding the energy behind things and the knowledge that truth is universal. In this way the eternal student becomes the eternal teacher. People’s level of perception reflects how much endurance they can bring to bear on coping with the suffering of reality. Most human beings are still cocooned in the mind-set that all they need to do is to be com fortable at home in front of the TV with two nice meals a day, thank you very much!
The intellect, curiosity and open mind of The Empress help to break down the mind-sets where we are stuck in prejudices and pre conceptions. Ultimately she searches for the one universal truth and so she knows that all the little truths along the way are quite useful, even if they aren’t complete.
Her feet being in contact with the Earth brings a grounded qual ity to whatever The Empress has to do. It is only because of this quality that self re-creation can happen, and then it is through her own effort and her love of fusing with the truth that she knows how to re-create. She knows she is only the messenger and not God, so she sees her limitation. The breaking through of the intellectual life is absolutely necessary for the initiate to access the cosmic wisdom, so in her we see the willingness to break through and uplift her mind beyond the control she thought she had over creation; this is why she has wings.
When our intellect is flowing with life, love, discrimination and observation, it is marvelling at its own Active Intelligence and we have to bring it back to terra firma to apply its findings practically. Without the grounding and assimilation, the vision and the knowl edge aren’t used.
The planetary preoccupation of the survival of matter is needed as much as anything else; it is all the same divine process. We tend to open our hearts and feel pain for tiny unimportant things, when we should know that we are here for one job only; yet for that important job we have no time. This is where humanity is. We have to see how much beauty there is on the planet and cherish it all as we would our child; this is the incredible job we have to do. In the next few hundred years we have to de-personalise any hurt that has been done to us. The hurt had to happen in the first place for we had to feel and know it, but now we have to own our part of it so that when we tell people that there is no guilt in humanity, only responsibility, we sound real. Until we are grounded we can’t do that, for without the grounding the vision can’t be used by the Earth as it stays in the higher planes.
Our repeated incarnation is, to a large extent, motivated by the gathering of our experiences; it is through this that we acquire a good solid base of understanding and knowledge. This is what awareness is: we come in, we go through an experiment and then affirm that we already know about that particular one, so we need never go back in and do it again, unless we recognise an addiction to the feeling of unease through the experience. The light that comes in through the ‘déjà-vu’ feeling enables us not to be taken in by any thing degenerative and wasteful.
One of the poignant aspects of transformation can be illustrated by what happens when the butterfly comes out of its chrysalis; for a few minutes it is wet and cannot fly because its wings have to dry. It has had to let go of its protective case and there’s an incredible fragility in that instant, when for a few minutes it is completely at the mercy of any bird or anything that can eat it. This is like baby humanity, completely in danger because it is so new. We are co-crea tors and as such our perception and discrimination has to be right, for God uses us for witnesses. Suddenly we are out there and it is so new and so different, that we might lose our minds because we don’t recognise anything. Sound is so important, for if we are so lost that we don’t recognise the room we are sitting in, sounding our name can re-crystallise our skills and put us on auto-pilot. Our name is the sound that the family group has given us and it is what grounds and cocoons us. We can also sound a special, sacred name such as Mary, Allah, or a mantra. These will carry us through pain, but our name will remind us of our responsibility to the group.
Ultimately we have to let go of the concept of freedom. Like the intellect, freedom is separation because it makes us want to stand apart and be different. However, we do not acquire freedom of mind without knowing what freedom is about. A truly free mind, which is a pure mind, has a connection with the divine via the Soul, so it has learnt freedom in the real sense. If it hasn’t understood that freedom creates separation, it will be a rebellious mind and against the idea of God. To reach God the mind has to fuse with an unknown mind vibration, which is the opposite of separation and is a giving up. Freedom is good in that it pushes us up and gives us our autonomy, but it is not inclusive, it is separative. We have to assimilate, love and transmute all the pride and needs so as to acquire a mind free of fear and separation. This is why we have to learn through endur ance to be really tough, as we could get lost on the way to a more rarefied vibration of the higher mind.
Think of experience as intelligence. An animal doesn’t do an experience; it just lives, whereas we ‘do’ an experience. Eventually we know that no experience or knowledge fulfils, for it is insuffi-cient and lacking, but we really have to do it to find that out, even if someone advises us not to. If we do not do it then we do not under stand. This is why we cannot ever blame the courageous souls who have made all the mistakes, for if we haven’t made the mistakes then we don’t know when to stop. We can only watch in compassion when the experience takes over, for if we know how to stop we must have got lost sometimes before.
If we look at the pattern of an average life, nobody tries to teach a tiny child something by reasoning; rather we do it by distracting and changing the mood of the child. The minute there are some fac ulties of reasoning then the initial teaching
