07-18-2019, 10:50 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-18-2019, 10:52 PM by JustLikeYou.)
kenney Wrote:I am afraid you have read one book of 22 books.
Oh man, that's a lot to slog through. Would you suggest a single book as an entrypoint? As I said earlier, I wasn't impressed with the one on the Tarot, which is why I didn't pursue anything else from the BoL. What in this literature do you find best compliments Ra?
kenney Wrote:It is DON"s choice to approach the tarot in this way, not Ra's. One has to always remain informed of this. As we study LOO we are studying those things that were on Don's mind. What was on his mind exactly? I am not sure, i do know he is holding a brotherhood of light deck of cards. In the early 1980's this is an obscure deck of cards to come across. His questions in reference to the cards are obviously based around one of this group dabbling with those courses and their own studies of the tarot.
While I'm clearly not as familiar with the BoL corpus as you, I knew Carla when she was alive and am still in contact with Jim. I'll ask Jim about this next time I see him, though I do remember both of them saying that they were uniquely impressed by Don's ability to handle the archetype study. It was new to all of them at the time, so they were struggling to stay above water. In fact, you can even see how novice they are in the first couple of questions where Don offers interpretations of the cards. It has all the marks of someone who is looking at these pictures for the first time.
It might also help to know that Don and Carla had been channeling the confederation for years before Ra, and much of the vocabulary and philosophical foundation Ra uses was already in place thanks to these earlier contacts. Remember Ra's words in the very first session: "We hope to offer you a somewhat different slant upon the information which is always and ever the same." Ra understands themselves to be communicating the same basic philosophy as the BoL, the alchemists, the theosophists, etc., etc.
kenney Wrote:answers that are just vague enough to not really answer the question.
Ra's answers are brief and technical. They are sometimes ambiguous and they usually do not make explicit the available subtleties. In my experience, those subtleties really are implicit in Ra's words, but I don't think Ra was one to spoon feed the mysteries of the universe. There are times when Ra does not answer the question, I agree, but there are many more times when the answer is meant to be starting point that gives a direction for you to flesh out the answer on your own---and even these instances are when the genuine answer to the question is that there are lots of ways to go about it, whatever it might be in the instance. Ra's answers are also precise enough that one can submit Ra to a test of internal consistency.
kenney Wrote:So the LOO and the Tarot may more rightly be looked at like "the Tarot through the eyes of Don and Carla with some suggestions from Ra."
This strikes me as overstated. Don was usually helpless with the Tarot. He would make some kind of vague statement about what a picture was supposed to mean and Ra had to come in and correct the errors. The bulk of the information comes from Ra, mostly unbidden. As far as teachers go (and I'm a teacher), Ra is quick to give away answers and generous with the "yes and" response. It's sweet, actually.
I should also note that Jim was more interested in the Tarot than Carla. In many ways, Carla channeled Ra because she loved Don, and not so much for any other reason.
But I do agree that the approach to the Tarot specifically as the mechanisms of the psyche is Don's influence. That was what he saw in them, so that was what Ra pursued. My own work on the archetypes began from that starting point and has been transitioning into a view of them as personas, a feature Ra mentioned but Don never explored.