Keep reaching for your dreams and ignore the inner or outer advice of "sensible, reasonable, realistic" subpersonalities and interpersonal advisers. As George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." On the practical level, if you have a big dream, you will usually find that it takes at least two hours of focused work most days to fulfill it. If you are blessed with a dream that is in accord with your True Will, consider this a propitious time to keep reaching for it.

I took this photo on a day when many minor unexpected events kept me from my planned agenda. For example, I went to sleep early, planning to get up early to do some work on the oracle. An unexpected phone call at one o'clock in the morning interrupted my sleep. I interpreted the phone call as a setback and as I allowed frustration and resentment to grow I found I was unable to surrender to sleep. Resisting the unexpected event made it more disruptive and exhausting. After I overcame the insomnia and got up the next morning I allowed other minor unexpected events to bother me. I resented that there wasn't more time and space in the day to do what I had planned on doing. By evening, as I waited for the start of what proved to be an excellent movie, I realized I was agitated and in a state of nervous tension that was the direct result of my fighting with the unexpected and unwanted events of the day. But while I was feeling frustrated at the planned things that didn't happen and the unwanted things that did, several unexpected good things happened. As I recognized this, I had several life-changing realizations.

Usually we think of a realization as a new insight. In this case there was no new insight, but a case of well-known principles suddenly becoming much more real to me. A realization is when a truth, often a well-known truth, becomes real for you. This realization may come years, or even decades, after you have grasped the truth intellectually.

I realized that I harmed myself by fighting with the unexpected, unwanted things that the day had brought. Resisting these divergences, I made them more harmful than they would have been had I accepted them and worked with them more gracefully. But even my resistance was part of the harvest of the day. The resistance and its consequences led to my realizations, and led to the creation of this card. Perceiving the harm that my resistances had created, certain I Ching principles became more real to me — that it is better to be path-oriented rather than goal-oriented, that one should not take gain or loss to heart, and that fear and doubt are where harm enters.

As the sun was setting, I was able to look back on the day with something like end-of-life wisdom. I saw that amongst the frustrations and unwanted events several beautiful, creative and loving things had happened as well, and I was able to reap the unexpected harvest.

"Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life."
— Carl Jung

"You're either with us or against us."
— George W. Bush

One of the greatest life skills and signs of maturity is the ability to live peacefully with ambiguity and ambivalence. The immature ego, however, wants an unequivocal world, and would like to regularize reality into unambiguous categories.

If the world were less ambiguous, it would also be less complex and interesting. Pong is a two dimensional world that is completely unambiguous but also not particularly interesting. Fundamentalists and absolutists of all kinds attempt to sterilize life of all its ambiguity. But at its most fundamental level, even at the quantum mechanical level, there is an uncollapsed wave function aspect of life, an irreducibly ambiguous aspect. Ambiguity is part of the mystery and beauty of life. Ambiguity keeps us on our toes. It can boost our awareness in the same way that when we can't quite make out what someone is saying we start to pay closer attention. With less ambiguity there would be less need for free will, intelligence and discernment.

The most potently ambiguous of all ambiguities we must learn to live with are human relationships. The ego always wants to collapse the wave function of ambiguity and know exactly where it stands with others. We can work our entire lives to understand ourselves and the project will never be quite finished. When we look at others, we always look through a glass darkly. A thousand layers of subjectivity, projection and counter-projection lie between us and a clear view of the other. The human social matrix is not populated by stick figures, but by complex and ambiguous beings. If you can't deal with ambiguity you can't deal with people and you can't deal with life.

Sometimes a situation or a relationship becomes acutely ambiguous. When ambiguity is very high, the uncertainty can make it hard to find your grounding. Paradoxically, high ambiguity has a certain implicit clarity. You can be very clear in such a circumstance that you don't know the answers yet, that ambiguity is too high to make certain decisions, and that it is definitely time to bring your ambiguity navigational abilities and strategies online.

The way to navigate through ambiguous terrain is the way you would drive by headlights on a very foggy night. You don't want to drive too fast or with over-confidence. You drive slowly, cautiously aware that you may not be seeing everything on the road. Similarly, if you are navigating ambiguous terrain between you and the other, slow down, hold back and be cautious. Hot heads lash out at ambiguity and ambivalence and employ tragic magic to collapse the wave function.

The immature ego will try to prematurely collapse the wave function to decide if someone is with us or against us, or whether we are with or against them. But many relationships, including some of the deepest and most soulful (parent/child, romantic soul mates) are intrinsically ambivalent, and may always have for and against aspects. In order to have deep relationships, we need to be able to tolerate both our ambivalence toward the other and the other's ambivalence toward us. If you can't deal with ambivalence in relationships, get a dog or a stuffed animal. If you're not ready for ambiguity and ambivalence, you're not ready for authentic relationship. An unambiguous human relationship is a shallow or misunderstood relationship.

You are better able to navigate the ambiguity of relationships and other situations if you expect uncertainty and are willing to work with it. You can't drive well on a foggy night by pretending it's not foggy. Fogs tend to lift after a time, and so do acute states of ambiguity. If you're not sure how you feel about somebody and/or not sure how they feel about you, give it time. If you don't seek premature closure, feelings will tend to clarify by themselves. You are waiting for a light to appear during the course of events that shows the way through. The light will often take the form of of your global intuition kicking in and saying, "I'm done with this." or "For better or worse this is what I need to do." Sometimes oracles, dreams and synchronicities help with the clarification.

Consider this a propitious time to embrace ambiguity and to apply ambiguity navigational skill.

Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.
— Roger von Oech

"The language I speak must be equivocal, that is, ambiguous, to do justice to psychic nature with its double aspect. I strive consciously and deliberately for ambiguous expressions, because it is superior to unequivocalness and corresponds to
the nature of being" — Carl Jung

The Babylon Matrix suppresses your empowered awakening by convincing you that you are nothing but a particular identity, at a particular age, with such and such amount in your checking account, and the laundry list of worries and so forth. Actually, your real identity is that you are an interdimensional traveler who has arrived from some other dimension at birth and who departs almost every day to another dimension called the dreamtime, a traveler who has a guaranteed portal out of this matrix, the portal called death, and a traveler who interpenetrates with the varied dimensions generated by other human psyches. The life that weighs so heavily on your mind is merely one of myriad timelines. As the boy Jake says in the Dark Tower books, "Go then, there are other worlds than these."

There are times when the anguish and disorder of life seems to predominate in our awareness. Life seems messy and unpleasant, there is the chill of a nameless dread, and we feel ourselves an inadequate, neglectful part of the messy unpleasantness, a flimsy plastic shopping bag overstuffed with worry and unlived life, ready to come apart at the seams.

How can we live with such feelings? Begin by being aware of them from a place of neutral, mindful observation. Anxiety ebbs and flows, rises and falls, it has a lifecycle, and one practice is to observe the lifecycle, see when it is intensifying, when it is peaking, when it is withdrawing or becoming quiescent. Don't fuse and confuse the anxiety with any particular trigger events that seem to bring it forward. Have you felt such a feeling before the present circumstance existed? Almost certainly you have and should, therefore, disentangle the question of anxiety with the worry de jour.

The deepest source of the anxiety may be a sense of unlived life. Rollo May defined anxiety as, "Being asserting itself against non being." Anxiety can be the spiritual version of pain and pain can be life-preserving. There are some people who suffer from a rare neurological disorder where they cannot feel pain. Their lives are constantly in danger, they have to wear gloves and helmets to minimize unconscious injuries, and healthy tissue inevitably is destroyed by lack of sensation. Anxiety should not be medicated into numbness. You may need to be in touch with the part of you that feels constricted and neglected to know where to focus healing and transformation.

In other cases, anxiety may arise like a change in the weather, its source may be inscrutable, and the best way to deal with the anxiety is to engage life and immerse yourself in the best use of your time right now. Monitor the anxiety with mindfulness and notice how well you function despite the anxiety. If you can't function well, downshift into simpler, more mechanical tasks like house cleaning or laundry. Don't let the anxiety paralyze you and make you passive — that only increases the dread. Don't feel anxiety about having anxiety, as so many in our society do. Take constructive action. Just do the best you can today between now and bedtime. If it feels bad enough, stop for a moment and pray for the healing of yourself and all other beings who are similarly afflicted. You are not the only one in this nervous and unsettled world struggling to live with anxiety.

This card draws your attention to the possibility of your unconscious mind manifesting in the external 3D world.

I believe it was Jung who said, "Psychology is destiny." Conflicts in our unconscious may emerge as bodily symptoms, as interpersonal conflicts or various other sorts of parallel phenomena. The psyche is the core level, and what happens there will tend to be reflected in the various layers of manifestation. This parallel linking of layers does not have to be mediated by cause and effect — it can be an acausal connection — what Jung called "synchronicity." The parallelism of inner and outer is also reflected in the alchemical motto, "As above, so below." If this oracle is working, your reading should be an example of your psyche manifesting in the external world where your computer monitor resides. The collective unconscious of the species also manifests in the external world as the unfolding of history. Climate warming, for example, (assuming the CO2 hypothesis) can be seen as the collective unconscious of a species bound to short-term thinking and greedy, naïve will-to-power manifesting (in this case causally)as a symptom in the physical world.

We tend to analyze the external world superficially, mistaking outer symptoms and situations for causes. The cause of what is manifesting in the outer world usually lies in the individual and/or collective psyche.

Be wary of those who approach with hollow intentions. Choose your companions with infinite care. Know the difference between an acquaintance and a friend or spiritual ally. Are you hanging out with people with whom you would trust your life? Life is too short to spend in hollow company when it could be lived with true friends, soulmates, spiritual allies, or creative solitude. Some people approach us with hollow intentions; they seek us for pleasure, manipulation, money, power or just out of impulsive, neurotic chaos. We must be discriminating and set strong boundaries between those who approach with unworthy intentions and ourselves. T.S. Elliot wrote a haunting poem entitled "The Hollow Men." Here are a couple of excerpts:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless…

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley

You are not the first to notice that there are amazing numbers of hollow people. Lacking a strong individual core, hollow folk are inevitably determined by outside conditioning. Hollow folk in the Fifties lived mechanical lives that were perfect 1950s stereotypes. Hollow folk in the Sixties wore bellbottoms, and in the Seventies they went to discos, and so on and so forth. Hollow people are like hungry ghosts who want to be filled up, and that can sometimes make them act like parasites, draining energy from others. It is easy to view such people harshly and with disdain. Compassion and firmness are necessary to negotiate your way amongst the hollow folk. It is crucial to find companions who are not hollow, but it is even more crucial for you not to be hollow, and to be in touch with your own core. The key to becoming hollow is to give your power over to outside objects, people or entities. The more power the external agencies have to capture your attention the more hollow you become. This is what a Ring Wraith is, an obsessed withering addict who is forever seeking the precious.That precious could be the Hottie, a white powder, cash, power, something that glitters out there in the Babylon Matrix, keeping your entranced eyes focused on that bouncing red ball. From the point of view of the hollow folk, you are a character in the drama of their efforts to get the precious — social status, sexual transactions, money, objects, neurotic soap operas, whatever. What would not be a hollow companion would be a spiritual ally, a person with a strong commitment to consciousness, and a loving enthusiasm for helping others to develop. If you seek consciousness, the most crucial thing to look for in a companion is a compatible level of commitment to consciousness and to love. The best way to be attractive to such allies is to strengthen those same qualities in yourself. Depending on the position in which you got this card, and where you are in your process, the warning here could be about interpersonal and/or intrapsychic hollowness.

Bring your masculine and feminine sides together to find your vision. From a neurological point of view, the highest creativity occurs when the right and left hemispheres are working together.

Some people confuse androgyny (an intrapsychic orientation) with bisexuality (an interpersonal orientation) or hermaphrodism (an anatomical/genital anomaly).

Hermaphrodism, as June Singer uses the term, means the confusion of masculine and feminine, an immature pastiche of qualities typical of rock stars and rock star wannabes, costumed adolescents, and also their admirers.

But androgyny is a deep intrapsychic orientation, an integration, a fusion (not a confusion) of your archetypal masculine and feminine aspects. The androgynous person has creative access to the left and the right hemispheres, to critical thinking and intuition.

From the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas:

"Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female [not] be female…then shall you enter [the Kingdom]."