“The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.”
― Aleister Crowley
In my junior year of high school I learned that once I understood how a system worked then I could get away with a lot more. The prep school I attended had scheduling rules for everything and everyone knew where they had to be at any given time. Because I showed myself to be skilled mathematically they wanted to ease me into the more advanced class so they gave me a choice. I could go to the easier class third period and have a study period right after or I could go to the advanced class fourth period and have a study period first. I chose to tell the third period Math teacher I was going to the fourth period Math and the fourth period teacher I was going to third and gave myself two study halls. That worked well for three months. I hadn’t come up with a contingency plan for what happened when the time came to turn in my grades and they talked with each other. After my suspension I still ended up with an A in Math for the year.
In any system the better we know the rules and more importantly their reason for existing in the first place, the easier it is to shape them for our benefit. In the tarot, once you learn the meanings of the cards and how they balance each other out, you can break away from the established meanings and see the complete reading as a gestalt of forces balancing each other out. This doesn’t work quite as well until you learn meanings and placements of the cards.
When dealing with people you have to learn the niceties of manners and social protocols of whatever social group you find yourself in before you can play fast and loose. Then if you do it in the right way, you are a hero. If you do it awkwardly you end up the buffoon. In my life I have done both.
Within ourselves, we have our own set of rules and occasionally we come across one we didn’t know we had, usually when someone we know and trusted inadvertently breaks it. The better we know ourselves, the better we can learn how to handle it when our rules get stepped on and the better able we are to edit the rule book.
Blessings, G
Staring at the Ceiling by G A Rosenberg 