For
those of you, like my wife, who get free Tomatis by virtue of being in
the business, I want to tell you about a study group we (she) formed
with myself as the Tarot interpreter and Valerie and my sister and
others as participants.
The issue was "why
do most people reach a certain level of attainment when doing Tomatis
therapy, and then quit? Or, more specifically, why do people
develop or evolve to Tarot level 15, and achieve mastery over the
physical world and then quit? Or again, once they have
succeeded in this dog eat dog world, to climb over the other dogs, why
don't people do more Tomatis to get to the
next level of card 16 and and then card 17 of angelic altruism,
i.e. give up your
material posessions and devote your life to the church, to God, to
Humanity etc.
The original clue that
there might be a correlation between the Tomatis stages and the
Developmental sequence of the Tarot was that Card 15 seemed to
correlate
with the 15 days that it took to do Tomatis's first Loop. (The Second
loop being 8 days done a month later, and the third loop being another
8 days done a few months later for a total of 31 days.)
Well. we noticed right away
that this correlation could not be taken too literally because there
are only 21 Major Arcana in the Tarot Cards
and the Tomatis protocal called for 31 days.
Nevertheless, Valerie
had seen enough of her employees, who got Tomatis suddenly get
empowered enough in the first 15 days that they quit their jobs
and went off to get married, attend graduate school, start their
own businesses
in competition with Valerie.
There was a time when
Valerie might have 10 of 15 employees at a time (mostly twentyish women
with college degrees who were waiting for the next great thing to
happen.)
Many times the next great thing did happen after
they did Tomatis for
fifteen days. They were suddenly empowered, and began asking the boss
for a raise, or getting up the nerve to ask their significant other to
marry them, or making up their minds and going on to graduate school,
or setting up their own businesses to do a Tomatis related therapy.
This situation
frequently got out of hand for the boss. Valerie for a while had a
partner who asked her, "can't we give the girls
something like a Tomatis-Lite? " The good news is tha Tomatis
company is now providing such a thing and they call it S0LISTEN". But
Valerie never had the heart to give her employees less than the full
Tomatis and she suffered lawsuits, strikes and other contention from
women who were suddenly empowered.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Disclaimer: Now I am not
exactly calling my wife a saint, nor do I really want her to quit her
job,
but I do allege that for the most part, Valerie's heart is in the
right place. Nor does she blow her own horn enough. (But as her
Webmaster, I see to that.)
Back to the point. Card 15
of the Tarot is signified as the Devil which is one way of looking at
material success and a mastery over the dog eat dog would of business
and competition. Card 16 is the destruction of the tower (Tower of
Babel) which inevitable must fall of be dismantled by you, yourself
with conscious intention, with a view to creating a more perfect
structure where lions play with lambs etc. The more common scenario is
that physical mastery leads to Hubris (Hybris) which eventually brings
on, in the long run, collapse.
Some wit once observed, however, "In the long run, we are all dead",
cautioning, I suppose about worrying TOO much about the long run.
Parenthetically, I
must put Our world, at that time into context. When
I met Valerie, who knew my sister, in 1996, they lived in a world in
Washington DC where half the world
was sending its kids to schools where children were being taught not to
compete, and the other half were trying to understand why their kids
weren't more competitive. Don't ask me. Fuggetaboudit!
Summary: A deck of Tarot
Cards may be looked at as, among other things, a psychology primer
which chronicles Human Development
in a stage by stage manner. For those of us who buy into a
developmental model of human function and dysfunction, the stages of
the Tarot are curious. Curiouser and curiouser, in fact. For those of
you who have already hit .400 and written the great novel, and become
president, and painted the Mona Lisa, you might wonder what comes next.
Alfred A. Tomatis began to spend more and more of his time in
monasteries chanting,
although I believe he still kept his multimillion dollar villa on the
Spanish Riviera, for backup.
Dealing in
generalities and not particulars, I would surmise that there is a time
to move beyond our own aggrandisement and, using Tomatis as a tool,
see, envision and act beyond Card 15. (Set to music, If I ruled the World.)
Bill Kennick
