XVI-The Tower

Well now, its about to go down, isn’t it?

Looks like you missed the bus, man. You had the chance to get yourself into or out of something and you just didn’t take it. The door opened. The Transition beckoned. And you failed to engage. So now you get the Tower.

The Tower isn’t fun. It isn’t nice. It makes the Death card look like the fluffy bunny of Transitions. The Tower is the moment in your life when you have waited too long. The ability to make the change in your preferred fashion has expired, and now you are getting the shortcut. Universe style. Which pretty much means that you better just let go, put those arms up and scream your heart out as Spirit takes you on Mr. Toad’s Ride of Destruction.

Yay, you. Way. To. Go.

I know. Harsh, right? And I don’t mean to be. But I feel pretty comfortable saying all this because, oh lawdy, have I been there. Once you have taken that ride, you never quite forget what it feels like. And you never again quite miss the moment when that bus door opens and the driver asks, “Are you sure?”

Fuck, yeah, man. Ticket for One, please.

Now, the problem is that even if we do get on the bus, we aren’t assured a nicer ride. Tower time is by its very nature taking the path through destruction. It is going to suck. You have the option to take the ride in awareness, with a seat belt and Jesus at the wheel, or you can get hit by the bus and ride on the grill. Up to you. Every single time, it is up to you. I know I’ve learned my lesson.

In my opinion, this Tower experience almost always has to do with an attachment to whatever is going on in your Devil experience. Right? This is the tarot, and it’s job is to show you the mile stones of spiritual evolution. Death, Temperance, Devil, Tower….You are looking at the last clutches of your duality experience trying to keep the veil over your eyes. This is the membrane between real understanding and the abilities that come with that understanding and the hamster wheel of lower energies. Those energies are seductive in a way; they promise the easy road.

Even though we all know the low road is never the easy road. It just looks that way, and sometimes we need the image to be shattered so that clarity can come through. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we just can’t get there. So spirit takes us there. And as we all know, spirit doesn’t much care for our comfort. The Tower serves a distinct purpose in the evolutionary path, and once we move through it, we are much more capable of seeing what and why and how we got there…..and when it is coming down the pipeline. The Tower clears the Devil.

But. And this is a big but. This type of destruction that we are talking about is constructive destruction. It is the destruction of illusion. It is the destruction of damaging habit patterns and traps that we have laid for ourselves. There is no structure left once the Tower rolls through. But you still have all of your pieces. Gods, this is so critical. You aren’t destroyed. The bullshit prison you had made for yourself is destroyed. The Tower always leaves rubble for us to sort through.

And if there is anything you need to pick up, by all means. You are going to have to build again, and perhaps some of those pieces are useful. Perhaps you can polish them up and turn them into gems. You couldn’t do that when they were all tightly packed into a confining structure that didn’t serve.

Now you can. So take heart. It may be a shitty ride, but it won’t kill ya.