Tarot in the Spirit of Zen

EPIGRAPH

Life is the game of games, the ultimate game. It has tremendous meaning if you take it as a game and you don’t become serious about it. If you remain simple and innocent, the game is going to impart many things to you.

All these games are like classes at a university. You pass through each class; you learn something. Then you move into another class. So this game of life has to be played very skillfully. If you are not skillful, you will miss much that is valuable. To be skillful means to be aware. Bring more awareness into each act of your life, into each step of your being.

—Osho

INTRODUCTION

On Predicting the Future

Freedom can exist only if the future is open. But about an open future there is no possibility of prediction. The man who was so beautiful today may commit a murder tomorrow. Tomorrow is open.

One thing that is very fundamental has to be remembered, and that is that whenever we are doing anything—astrology, future prediction, horoscope readings, palmistry, the I-Ching, tarot—anything that is concerned with the future, it is basically a reading of the unconscious of the person. It has nothing much to do with the future. It has more to do with the past, but because the future is created by the past, it is relevant to the future, too. Because people live like mechanical things, the prediction is possible. If you know the past of the person, unless the person is a buddha, you will be able to predict his future because he is going to repeat it. If he has been an angry person in the past, he is carrying the tendency to be angry; that tendency will have effects in the future.

Ordinarily, an unconscious being goes on repeating his past again and again. It is a wheel-like phenomenon, he repeats it; he cannot do anything else. He cannot bring any new thing into his life, he cannot have a breakthrough. That’s why all these sciences work. If people are more aware, more alert, they won’t work.

You cannot read the horoscope of a buddha, or read his hand, because he is so free of the past and he is so empty in the present that there is nothing to read!

There has been a great misunderstanding between life and time. Time is thought to consist of three tenses: past, present, future—which is wrong. Time consists only of past and future. It is life that consists of the present.

So those who want to live, for them there is no other way than to live this moment. Only the present is existential. The past is simply a collection of memories, and the future is nothing but your imaginations, your dreams.

Reality is here, now. Those who want just to think about life, about living, about love—for them, past and future are perfectly beautiful because they give infinite scope. They can decorate their past, make it as beautiful as they like—although they never lived it; when it was present they were not there. These are just shadows, reflections. They were continuously running, and while running they have seen a few things. They think they have lived. But in the past, only death is the reality, not life. In the future also, only death is the reality, not life.

Those who have missed living in the past—automatically, to substitute for the gap—start dreaming about the future. Their future is only a projection out of the past. Whatever they have missed in the past, they are hoping for in the future; and between the two non-existences is the small, existent moment that is life.

For those who want to live, not to think about it; to love, not to think about it; to be, not to philosophize about it—there is no other alternative. Drink the juices of the present moment, squeeze it totally because it is not going to come back again. Once gone, it is gone forever.

But because of the misunderstanding, which has been almost as old as man—and all the cultures have joined in it—people have made the present part of time. And the present has nothing to do with time. If you are just here in this moment, there is no time. There is immense silence, stillness, no movement; nothing is passing, everything has come to a sudden stop.

The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both sides there are dangers—past and future are the most dangerous words in human language. Between past and future, living in the present is almost like walking on a tightrope—on both sides there is danger. But once you have tasted the juice of the present, you don’t care about dangers. Once you are in tune with life, then nothing matters. And to me, life is all there is.

You can call it God, but that is not a good name because religions have contaminated it. You can call it existence, which is beautiful. But what you call it is not of any consequence. The understanding should be clear that you have only one moment in your hands—the real moment. And again and again you will get that real moment. Either you live it or you leave it unlived.

Most people simply drag themselves from the cradle to the grave without living at all. I have heard a Sufi story about a man, when he died, who suddenly realized, My God, I was alive. Only death, as a contrast, made him aware that for seventy years he had been alive. But life itself had not enriched him.

It is not the fault of life. It is our misunderstanding.

Watchfulness will give you life without even thinking about it, because watchfulness can only be in the present. You can witness only the present. Live totally and live intensely, so that each moment becomes golden, and your whole life becomes a series of golden moments.

THE MAJOR ARCANA

0. The Fool

Life is trial and error; one has to learn through errors.

A fool falls out of a sixth-story window. He is lying on the ground with a big crowd around him. A cop walks over and says, What happened? The fool says, I don’t know. I just got here.

In the old days all great emperors always had one fool in their court. They had many wise men, counselors, ministers and prime ministers, but always one fool. All the intelligent and wise emperors all over the world, in the East and the West, had a court joker, a fool. Why? Because there are things so-called wise men will not be able to understand, that only a foolish man can understand. Because the so-called wise are so foolish that their cunningness and cleverness closes their minds.

A fool is simple—and was needed, because many times the so-called wise would not say something because they were afraid of the emperor. A fool is not afraid of anybody else. He will speak, whatever the consequences. A fool is a man who will not think of the consequences.

Let me explain to you how many types of fools there are.

The first: one who knows not, and knows not that he knows not … the simple fool. Then the second: one who knows not but thinks that he knows … the complex fool, the learned fool. And the third: one who knows that he knows not—the blessed fool.

Everybody is born as a simple fool—that is the meaning of simpleton. Every child is a simple fool. He knows not that he knows not. He has not yet become aware of the possibility of knowing. That is the Christian parable of Adam and Eve. God said to them, Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Before that accident of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they were simple fools. They knew nothing. Of course, they were tremendously happy because when you know not, it is difficult to be unhappy. Unhappiness needs a little training, a little efficiency is needed to create it; unhappiness needs a little technology. You cannot create hell without knowledge. How can you create hell without knowledge?

Adam and Eve were like small children. Every time a child is born, an Adam is born. And he lives for a few years—at the most four years, and that time is becoming less and less every day. He lives in paradise because he knows not how to create misery. He trusts life; he enjoys small things—pebbles on the shore, or seashells. He gathers them as if he has found a treasure. Ordinary colored stones look like Kohinoors. Everything fascinates him—the dewdrops in the morning sun, the stars in the night, the moon, the flowers, the butterflies, everything is a sheer fascination.

But then, by and by, he starts knowing: a butterfly is just a butterfly. A flower is just a flower. There is nothing much in it. He starts knowing the names: this is a rose and that is a lily and that is a marigold and this is a lotus. And by and by those names become barriers. The more he knows, the more he is cut off from life as such. He becomes heady. Now he lives through the head, not through his totality.

That is the meaning of the fall. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. Every child has to eat of the tree of knowledge.

Every child is so simple that he has to become complex—that is part of the growth. So every child moves from simple foolishness toward complex foolishness. There are different degrees of complex foolishness—a few people only graduate from high school, a few people become college graduates, a few become doctors and Ph.D.s—there are degrees. But every child has to taste something of knowledge because the temptation to know is great. Anything that is standing there unknown becomes dangerous, a danger. It has to be known because with knowledge we will be able to cope with it. Without knowledge, how are we going to cope with it? So every child is bound to become knowledgeable.

So the first type of fool, out of necessity, has to become the second type of fool. But from the second, the third may happen or may not happen; there is no necessity. The third is possible only when the second type of foolishness has become a great burden—one has carried knowledge too much, to the extreme. One has become just the head and has lost all sensitivity, all awareness, all livingness; one has become just theories and scriptures and dogmas and words and words whirling around in the mind. One day, if the person is aware, he has to drop all that. Then he becomes the third type of fool—the blessed fool.

Then he attains to a second childhood; again he is a child.

Remember Jesus’ saying, In my kingdom of God only those who are like small children will be welcomed. But remember, he says like small children, he does not say small children. Small children cannot enter; they have to pass through the ways of the world, they have to be poisoned in the world and then they have to clean themselves. That experience is a must. So he does not say small children, he says those who are like small children. That word like is very significant. It means those who are not children, and yet are like children.