by Camelia Elias
In my work with reading cards for people in order to uncover blind spots I often come across this situation: ‘My positive attitude is not aligned with my reality.
Where have I fallen through the cracks?’
Faced with this question I find that most of the time my work is really about dis-enchanting the miserable souls, rather than adding more enchantment to their presupposed awesomeness.
How did we get so far? And why isn’t yelling and stomping our feet on the ground making us feel any better, when we don’t get what we want?
We belong to the awesome tribe, some want to believe, but here’s what I say to folks in all earnest, enticing them to consider their place in the world:
1. You fall for the idea that you’re an awesome god or goddess – which you are not.
In reality, you know it and I know it: You’re no goddess, and there’s nothing divine in yelling that you are one.
Have you thought about what would happen if you started yelling and stomping your feet about being human? Have you tried this desire, to be human, instead of the other one, to be a goddess?
You may say that you’ve tried being human and that you failed at it and therefore you’d like to try a new perspective, but there’s some distance between shifting your perspective and actually embodying what it takes to be divine.
Picture this: Next time you go down the street to meet someone, greet them with these words: ‘Hello, I’m God. I’m awesome’.
Unless this is the kindergarten where kids may play gods as they play houses, it isn’t very likely that you will get away with playing god, let alone being god.
2. You fall for the idea that your desires are yours alone and they are awesome – which they are not.
As some smart folks have remarked, language constitutes our desires. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was adamant in his theories about the fact that language ruins everything.
You think you speak your own language, and formulate your innermost desires into this language? Think again.
Who taught you how to speak? In all likelihood it was your mother. If anything, you speak her language. You probably express tons of her desires without even realizing it.
This you resist on the unconscious plane, which is why you go against your mother’s desire for you to do the right thing, get an education, a job, a house, a spouse, and some children. In that order.
But your act of rebellion hardly contributes to how you figure out what language of desire you speak that is actually all yours.
You fix the mess of not having a language by seeking the company of gods and goddesses who have also rebelled against their mothers. ‘Awesome’ replaces having to know.
Knowing is too much trouble. Awesome is easier.
But as history has shown there’s hardly ever a god or a goddess represented as not knowing. Quite the contrary.
If you want to be a god or a goddess you must be prepared to know things. Just awesome won’t cut it.
People can be very mean to gods. If they figure out you’re not omniscient and have no power, they will have no trouble sending you straight to hell.
An awesome goddess with no one to worship her is no goddess at all.
3. You fall for the idea that you ought to be doing not what you should but what you want – which you cannot.
For once we can agree that you are awesome, but we will never agree that somehow just because you yell and stomp with your feet claiming authenticity and originality for your awesomeness is enough.
If you’re awesome and everyone else is also awesome, then how can we make distinctions between your brilliance and the brilliance of the other stars?
You have to demonstrate your awesomeness. How do you do it?
By avoiding what you ought to do? By doing only what you want to do? Do you even know what that is? In all likelihood you have no idea.
Consider this: even ‘awesome’ is a skill. Have you acquired yours yet? Have you demonstrated it to someone? Claiming divinity is definitely a recognized skill.
Being a god or a goddess requires some proof, some substance. It requires that you’re good at what you’re doing.
You can only do what you want if you know what you’re really good at and can demonstrate it.
Claiming it is not the same as being it.
Gods are judged by their acts and interventions. They work for their awesome names. What work have you performed as a god or goddess that others could benefit from?
Even just declaring that you’re an awesome goddess may require some strong lessons in drama.
Have you mastered the many variations in yelling and stomping your feet yet? There’s already strong competition out there for who is to be master. Who is the biggest and baddest god?
If your claim to divinity is that you have always felt that you are different, not fitting in, and a free soul, think of the zillion of other misfits who also feel exactly the same way.
The earth is populated with originals queuing for worship, demanding worshipping.
4. You fall for the small letter k – which you don’t use.
You’re an avid reader. You thrive on self-help on the internet, and there’s no text out there that’s loud enough for you when it yells at you to embrace your god and goddess within.
You notice also that this text has been shared a zillion times, anything from 1.5 k to some 100 k is good, and you take this as a sure sign of truthfulness. 50 million people can’t be wrong. The most shared text is the most empowering text. You think, without thinking.
But what if the letter k stands for the lowest kommon denominator, for konjoining you and konsecrating you into the kult of kool awesomeness devoid of all karakter?
What do you really understand by this call: ‘We are all one, we are all awesome, and there’s love in the world?’
If you respond with a resounding ‘Hell, yes. Give me more of that krap,’ you have reached the level of divinity that yells a lot and performs nothing.
5. You fall for praise – which is unjustified.
You know just how bad it is when you realize that your soul tolerates no criticism. How can anyone dare to criticize you?
Life is short and you’re awesome. You’ve just read that on the internet.
Many have already discovered this truth that is now shared many times over ever so generously. We are all awesome individuals. There’s no negotiation about that.
You feel entitled to get hysterical every time someone suggests a strategy for surviving that’s not aligned with your innermost soul desires.
You don’t know what these desires are, but you’re convinced they are there and beyond reproach.
You only want to hear how wonderful you are and how creative.
You are a wild thing, and you want to keep it that way.
6. You fall for freedom – which you don’t have.
Discipline? Isn’t that thing for morons? A wild god or goddess needs no discipline. You think. And you are right. But are you sure that you’ve qualified for the role?
A god or a goddess can perform magic and miracles.
When was the last time a spell worked for you? When have you made others accomplish something with your awesome light?
Inspiring others is a real skill, but it does not come from being all over the place.
Focus is the key to everything. Awesome focus is the result of hard discipline. Skills will give you confidence not freedom.
7. You fall for the power of banishing – which you don’t master.
Right now Helen Mirren is hitting the internet with a line turned a meme: ‘Fuck off’, she wishes she could have said in her days as a younger goddess.
This she says now because she can afford it.
Back then, who’s to say? ‘Fuck off’ and ‘fuck it’ are true words of power, but you still need some pretty awesome power of discernment in order to know when it’s appropriate to send someone to hell and when not.
When you banish others for bothering you – maybe you’ve banished me already too – you need to replace their nasty absence with some of your own awesome presence.
It’s the law of physics: Force, counterforce. Contraction, expansion.
You can’t just send someone to fuck off and die and not fill the ensuing void with some of your own goodness. Are you absolutely sure you’ve got what it takes?
Or are you merely reading empowering stuff on the internet again, and mistaking it for the thing itself, for what you are good at?
Spank Yourself Before Others Will Do It
Considering being a god or a goddess begins with acknowledging your humanity first.
One way of honoring your treading on this earth in balance as a human being begins with what even the most enlightened have figured out:
Work. Chop wood and carry water.
There is no before and after enlightenment. There is no before and after god.
There’s only acquiring some skills, doing some honest work, and creating space for others to inhabit.
I see a growing tendency in rejecting critique with this justification: ‘How dare you try to shame me. I’m beyond shame and reproach. This is my life.’
Indeed, this is a valid justification from the point of view of living life such as it was given to you to cherish and behold. Your life with all that it entails.
But from the point of view of living this life among others, this justification won’t hold.
There will always be someone out there who will hold you responsible for all sorts. Whether you like it or not, this accounting has consequences for your precious life.
It is therefore within this space – the space between our lives and those of others whom we share – that we must exercise our discernment.
If you do your own thing in accordance and alignment with what others may also expect of you, then you may soon find that the skills you acquire, starting with the skill of decency, are sought out by others, gods and humans alike.
As a decent human being you will be awesome all the way through when you can demonstrate how your awesomeness is not an empty yell and a stomp, a noisy cliché, or a mode of empowering yourself with the air that blows through the cracks you’ve fallen through.
You don’t start out on a premise of being awesome out of nothing.
Awesomeness is not given at birth. It’s not a birthright. It is an acquired skill.
Now go and get good at something, and who knows, one of these days you may just find out that others, not you, will refer to you as a beautiful god or goddess who walks among us, enriching our lives ever so divinely.
A goddess with solid skills is a goddess whom we trust.
IN CONCLUSION
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About the Author:
CAMELIA ELIAS, PhD, Dr. Phil., is a professor, writer, and cartomancer. Her research interests are in esoteric movements, occult, and folk practices of reading and producing spiritual texts. She blogs at Taroflexions, she is a columnist in cartomancy at Agora/Patheos (since July 22, 2015), and she is the author of a book on divination with the Marseille cards, Marseille Tarot: Towards the Art of Reading and another on principles of magic with cards, The Oracle Travels Light
featured image: Author’s own
Merken
Show Comments (8)
Kimberly
This. This! THIS! Camelia, you have so hit the nail on the head! I have been guilty of this in So Many Ways, and only because I am on my way out of that dark tunnel, can I recognize this was me. I appreciate the grace and candor with which you offer this and hope it goes on to touch many other Awesome Beings ;)
Camelia
Thanks, Kimberly. I’m glad it touched a nerve. Truth is never popular, but when it hits us, we start to live, indeed, truly awesomely.
Sydney
I gotta admit: I don’t like this.
Yes, I know that I’m now going to be bombarded with people telling me that That’s Exactly Why It’s True. No, I don’t care.
I may or may not come to realize some or all of the points later. However, it doesn’t resonate with me. It gives me icky feelings deep inside me. And yes, I can feel deep inside me.
“Awesomeness is not given at birth. It’s not a birthright. It is an acquired skill.” I don’t like this. To me, it smacks of conditional self-love and not being good enough. As a recovering perfectionist, this is something I am very familiar with.
Basically, I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your opinion. I respectfully disagree.
Camelia
Thank you Sydney. Here I’m making this point: If aspiration is not backed up by sensible action, it leads to waste. I like to see how language constitutes our acts, and through our acts our character.
I see what happens when people mistake stubbornness for character, when they insist on using words about their performative acts devoid of the quality that grounds. Character requires a different solidity and robustness than stubbornness.
While I get the importance of changing the metaphors when we lose direction, and hence act upon the desire to go from self-deprecating thinking to awesome, I don’t get the claim to positive thinking if it’s not followed by concrete action.
Does positive thinking by itself ever change anything? Hardly ever. Positive thinking may fool some, but it will not fool the ones who are committed to their humanity.
Compassion for oneself and others is about that, staying committed to sensible action. This means that we must accept our own and others’ value judgements about what we’re doing, without taking offense.
Ronald Herring
I’m not so sure what this is saying half the time, but I feel pretty confident that this is mostly directed at the person who actually wrote the article. Could I be right? Camelia, are there some issues you are not dealing with? I see little purpose in this article beyond self indulgence and the author elevating themselves to the very status of awesome that they so thoroughly denounce. Whenever you write something, you have to ask yourself – why?
Camelia
I wrote this essay in response to what I perceive is often an insult to my basic intelligence, so yes, it’s off putting for many. I find it incredible that people singing their own praises believe that we all, obviously, must think the same. It’s a way of making unnecessary assumptions that waste my time. And if you must know, then yes, I have an issue with wrong assumptions. They downright infuriate me.
Yeshe
Yes! Thank you! The world of the Internet and Facebook and weekend crystal master classes, and life coaches a dime a dozen has created this superficial something, totally lacking any real substance. And no, no one deserves a gold star for opening their eyes in the morning
Camelia
I’m glad you found this useful. Sometimes we’re in denial, and we like it, but for me, the idea is to see right through everything. It’s more honest.