Saturday, June 13, 2015

Strength: A Musical Journey through the Major Arcana of the Tarot



Number: 8
Symbol: Octagon
Sound/Music reference: Octave
Quote:  “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” -  Albert Einstein 

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." -- Bill Cosby

“Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I don't claim responsibility and don't hold any great truck with.”- David Gilmour of  Pink Floyd  
    
Song: Eight Days a Week, The Beatles
Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9.
A few summers ago, I pulled some Oracle cards to kill some time while waiting for Cheap Trick to come on stage, and several were numbered with an eight…8, 28, 38, 48 etc… I thought it unusual to see that many eights in a spread, but what did it mean?

When the band took their places, the drummer had on a shirt that at first glance resembled the number eight. I thought it was an odd synchronistic event, and when he came closer, I realized there were two black 45 rpm records stacked on top of each other (they represent music) to give the illusion of the number 8. I wondered, “Okay, drummer boy, what are you telling me through the law of synchronicity?  What do I need to know about the number eight and how it’s related to music?” I put my hand to my head and did a little Winnie the Pooh imitation, and said, “Think…Think….Think.” Aha! Eight = Octave- the tone that is eight full tones above or below a given note.

But what did I need to know about the octave? I wound up writing an entire chapter on the significance of the number eight, but to give you the Reader’s Digest version, the answer is…reincarnation and eternity.

Infinite Infinities
Yikes. Are you ready for all this? The number 8 is actually a vertical infinity sign. The symbol is like two circles, entwining one another with no beginning or end, or eternity. Two sound waves overlapping one another create the infinity symbol as well. Sound can connect us with the infinite because it is infinite. In the Tarot, the infinity symbol represents a balance of forces, and appears above the head of the woman in the eighth card, Strength.

This is connected to reincarnation because the night of my awakening, I wondered why legions of rock music fans were still so passionate about their favorite bands. Why were some of us as enthralled as when we were teenagers? I asked what I thought was a benign question, but in an instant, I heard, “Group Soul Reincarnation,” and my body felt as if I’d touched a live 100,000 volt wire. Energy surged through me, and somehow I knew I wrote a book about this clue and that it had a significant impact on the people of my generation. It was so profound, so life altering, that for months afterwards I walked around in this intense state of bliss, grinning like the Cheshire cat wherever I went.

Reincarnation, like chakras and all this other woo-woo stuff, is just big piles of cow poop, right? Well, that’s what your ego will tell you, and my ego tried to ram it down my throat over and over again during my journey. But day by day I discovered more and more evidence that maybe this wasn’t temporary insanity. Maybe I was being led to important hidden clues about rock music and numbers and reincarnation for a specific reason.

Reincarnation and the Spiral
Here’s why. Some metaphysical leaders use a spiral to describe the basis of reincarnation. Our souls come back many times in the attempt to evolve, expand and heal.  Our souls, which I believe are waves of vibration, carry our karma so that energetically we can repeat our “past” in order to transcend it (aka, heal our baggage): to move up an octave so to speak along the spiral.

What is an octave?  It is a repeat of the same note but at a higher vibration. Supposedly, when we heal ourselves “now,” we heal all of our past selves as well as our future selves in other lifetimes. Because we repeat similar emotional patterns lifetime after lifetime*, we are being given an opportunity to heal our past and move up an octave on the spiral, to a higher vibration. Perhaps this is why I was given the clue that group soul reincarnation and rock music were connected.  I wondered if rock bands play music which drew the souls who resonate with their sound together in order to heal trauma from our childhoods, which in turn is possibly a repatterning of previous lifetimes. 

There’s a bit more info is below under TERMS, but that’s all I can squeeze into today’s post without having your head engage in spontaneous combustion.

Sound/Musical reference: Octave
There is another important connection to the octave in science. Early chemists noted that chemical groups repeated every eight elements. It was named the octave rule, and compared to a musical scale. Music and the physical world correspond once again. 

Numbers are archetypes and carry inherent meaning for us. Sound and music are numbers expressed as vibration. Eight is the number of periodic renewal, and like the octave, constantly seeking a higher vibration. Can you intentionally lift your consciousness to a higher vibration with music? What music brings you to a higher octave?

TERMS
*In numerous past life studies either using hypnosis which taps into the subconscious or superconscious, or spontaneous recall, a person often sees similar emotional patterns that are present in their current lifetime in a past life in order to address an area of their lives which needs healing. Most Fools say, “Well, how can our consciousness survive death? How could those memories be real?” Good question. Here’s a possible answer I made up.

Human beings, on their most fundamental level, are packets of quantum energy. According to researchers, since quantum waves also encode information, it’s also as though, on the tiniest level of reality, a memory of the universe for all time is contained in empty space that each of us is always in touch with.**  Energy at the quantum level also suggests, to me, that the waves which make up us Fools could encode our various levels of consciousness.

Are our memories stored as waves, and when we physically die, those memories remain within the matrix of our soul? When you incarnate into your next lifetime, are the memories and emotions tucked neatly away in your subconscious as a wave pattern? Through your soul’s guidance those emotions which need healing begin to once again be expressed in your life’s experience. Until we Fools raise our consciousness, we just keep repeating the same emotional patterns over and over again until we consciously decide to make a different choice and change our minds and hearts toward love and forgiveness of ourselves and others.

Whether you believe the past life recall is possible or just tapping into the collective unconscious or sheer fantasy is up to you. But there is overwhelming research from many different disciplines which are highly suggestive that a soul experiences many lifetimes in order for it to grow and learn.  

** https://www.facebook.com/notes/curran-russell/the-field-the-quest-for-the-secret-force-of-the-universe-by-lynne-mctaggart/645957895465608 From author of the book The Field, by Lynne McTaggart.

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