I love watching Criss Angel and when I was younger I loved watching Doug Henning and reading about Houdini. I get amazed at how they plan and master one death-defying escape only to start planning the next even more apparently dangerous one.
“I escaped from a safe, now let’s take the safe and submerge it in water” I believe that there are times in our life when we do the same thing.
We put ourselves into life situations that are somewhat traplike and challenging. Some of us do it in our personal lives and relationships. Others do it in their jobs. We find a way to navigate one set of problems and win free. We acquire life knowledge and a sense of liberation and then…we get ourselves caught up in an even more complex web. Or should I say we weave an even more complex web. On some level we know what we are doing. Oh we can try to blame others, fates, the gods, karma but we put in our lives what we need to help us grow no matter how painful. We are all akin to Anansi, the African Spider trickster god, weaving the tale and occasionally catching ourselves up in it, for how else do we have the impetus to grow?
Richard Bach in his book illusions says:
“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands
You seek problems because you need their gifts”
and we do need the gifts of the problems we set up otherwise we wouldn’t have drawn them into our lives in the first place.
and as we have created the problem, we also have created the solution. It may not be apparent, it may appear as one more thing appearing to attack us just as the sword points seem to be attacking the figure in the Eight of Swords tarot card below, but that same sword point with just a twist can cut through the web that binds us Of course we tend to blind ourselves from seeing the solutions in front of us…..Well I guess it makes life more interesting.
So here’s to Criss, Doug and Harry, they symbolize one of our strongest drives, the drive to liberate ourselves and thus transcend.
