The Enchanted Tarot

Astrology

Enchantments

Alchemy

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Is Enchantment just a metaphor? Is it merely an emotional state, something pink and fuzzy and delicious perhaps, but nothing ultimately substantial or particularly real? The denial or invalidation of the power of enchantment is a block to our awareness of mystical domains. We can only experience what we are willing to acknowledge. There is no enchanted love in a non-enchanted world.

Some scholars believe that the Pyramids in Egypt were built with the aid of sound. The power of sound, both positive and negative, is an under-investigated phenomenon. Sound techniques, including chants, might have been used by ancient builders to break through the limitations of gravity. Some believe that through chanting an anti-gravitational force-field was created, making it possible to lift stones that would otherwise be too heavy to lift.

Fire-walks, where people walk over red-hot coals without burning their feet, are possible in part because many people join together in chanting. Spontaneous enchantment occurs in cases such as a parent’s lifting a car to save a child pinned beneath. There are realms in consciousness in which what we think of as "normal" limitations — physical, psychological, or emotional — simply do not apply. Enchantment is a power belonging to each of us, part of our birthright as children of God. It is not an unnatural power but only an expansion of what we now consider natural. A materialistic worldview is invested in the notion of limits, and enchantment is a space of consciousness in which normal limitations disappear.

The word enchantment includes within itself the word chant. When we chant, our consciousness shifts into a different set of possibilities from the ones now defining our "normal" experience. When we fall in love — with a mate, a child or even an idea — a spontaneous enchantment occurs, a blessing that is ours for as long as we are capable of holding onto it. We are bewitched, in those cases, and we are delighted.

Let’s stay with those words: We are bewitched and we are delighted. The witch in each of us, our natural psychic powers, is simply, at those times, allowed to be. There is a suspension of the routine denial of magic that passes for realism in our modern, disenchanted world. The modern mind has been commandeered by alien mental forces, and they have dissuaded us of our magical powers. Today, at the end of the millennium, we are looking for the enchantment we threw away, many of us even suspecting that we cannot survive much longer without it. Told for centuries that enchanted power was merely the stuff of myth and fairy tales, now we are not so sure. Our strict adherence to rationalism has turned out to be less mental sophistication than collective gullibility, and we are ready to consider that what now passes for truth is in many ways fantasy, and what the world calls fantasy includes a lot of truth.

In A Course In Miracles, light is defined as "understanding". The world as we know it could not stand before the power of a human race that has remembered who we really are and reclaimed our spiritual powers. The investment in our forgetfulness, while in most cases unconscious, is enormous. That is why falling in love, when deep and masterful, is a powerful and revolutionary act. To be delighted is to be awakened. We have been asleep to our spiritual heritage for ages, and our greatest chance of awakening lies in awakening together.

Enchanted romance occurs not in the regions of our worldly thinking, but in another dimension on the dark side of the moon. Some things are seen more clearly in darkness. The word occult means "hidden". Something hidden, in a psychological sense is not negative but merely mysterious, neither seen by the physical eye nor obvious to the rational mind. God hath made both day and night. What is hidden during the day is often magical at night. The dark side of the moon is still a part of the moon

If we want enchantment in our daily lives, we must cultivate its spiritual conditions. We must learn to give and to receive, to appreciate joy and give it to others, to see the magic in ordinary things, and seize the moment like the key to love that it is. Most people, when they first fall in love, are willing enough to fly, to be poetic, to grab the golden ring of infinite possibility. Yet how quickly then, having thus expanded, they constrict again to fit the littleness of the disenchanted world. They prefer dry prose to poetry, and dry prose is death to love. Back on earth after a flight through the sky, the coward at love chooses not to rock the boat of practicality and routine. Little does the coward know that the boat itself is sinking.

The dark side of the moon is not the enemy of sunlight but its esoteric twin. It is the dance floor of an illumined mind. Psychological analysis can never quite pin down its power (Goethe once said, "To analyze is to murder"), for it evades the arrogance of the conscious mind. With our rational understanding we can fly a man to the moon, but getting love to fly can be a harder job. It doesn’t respond to our ego-based assumptions, and there is not scientific formula that can conjure it up or make it soar. Love is a mystery that cannot be approached through will; it responds most generously to humbled souls. In some unexplainable way, it seems to grace us when it’s ready. Our greatest tool for bringing love into our lives is to pray, "Dear God, please prepare me. Open me up and make me new. Destroy the walls that surround my heart".

All joining of hearts is a joining of God; there is no love but God’s. Each love we share is a facet of His Light, in a cosmic diamond as real as anything we can see or feel in the physical world.

Enchantment builds a bridge across time and space, compensating for whatever apparent lack there is in our normal modes of communication. If I’m one with you in the realm of enchantment, yet lack either phone or emotional permission to call you, you might just happen to hear a song on the radio that says to you what I would say if I were at your side.

The song was not played "by accident", and you know it. You feel it. This is the kind of thing that occurs naturally in the presence of love. It is part of a mystical fabric that is woven between those who love and claim enchantment. Our old, mechanistic modes of being are like old airplanes next to the space shuttle, compared to the illumined capacities that spring forth when our hearts are open. These new capacities are not metaphorical; they are very real. They include the ability to fly across time and space (when we love each other enough, we will not need airplanes), communicate across time and space (when we love each other enough, we will no longer need the Internet), and bring peace to all the world (when we love each other enough, we will have no need for war).

Enchanted lovers create a hole in the wall now blocking our view of paradise. The wall will come down in the world, when it crumbles in our hearts.