Listen to Your Daddy

The Emperor is primarily concerned with rules and regulations, and discipline. We consider these to be masculine traits, but as usual we shouldn’t get hung up on the sex of the person exhibiting these traits—it could be anyone. It’s really just a way to help us earth walkers to file the information.

I’m going to focus on the discipline part today. Giving up cigarettes (again) this week , as you might guess, has resulted in my daily draws reflecting what is going on in my life. “Well, duh” I hear you say. True, but my intention is to do a reading that will be of benefit to all reading these posts. Yet sometimes strong forces sway the energies one way or t’other. If you haven’t tried it, cigarette withdrawal is a pretty strong force.

It kind of gives me the opportunity to discuss the occasional dichotomy of what we want to do vs. what we should do.  In a perfect world these would be the same thing, but in a dualistic, or even pantheistic world what we should do and what we want to do can sometimes pull us in mutually exclusive directions.

Sometimes the things we want really aren’t all that good for us. This could be for monetary reasons, like maxing out your credit card filling your bathtub with caviar and champagne when you’re on minimum wage. It could be for health reasons, such as wanting to climb the Empire State Building radio tower to take a selfie despite the fact that you don’t have enough of a sense of balance to stand erect on a skateboard. Sometimes it is for reasons of integrity and self-preservation, like wanting to run naked through the streets in the summer evening rain despite the fact that you might catch a cold doing so. Oh, and perhaps have your reputation diminished by the gossiping neighbourhood watch. I’m also pretty sure I’m performing a public service by refraining from doing that last one.

Sometimes we need to listen to the logical part of our brain even when we really don’t want to, which may have something to do with why this card is reversed for me this morning.  It is often easier to do the right thing for others, and then do the easier thing for yourself. In this case, the easy thing would be to keep smoking the fags, the right thing would be to ride out the withdrawal symptoms.  To that end, it would be useful to augment the Emperor with the willpower of the chariot. But mainly, it’s time to listen to daddy, speaking archetypically.