Free your mind and the rest will follow: 8 of Swords

Who's tied herself up with her own thought life, then? Could it be...me??

You've got to hand it to Pamela Colman Smith, if she came up with the concept for this card herself, she deserves to be remembered forever for this card alone. It has to be one my favourites in the deck because its message so blatantly obvious.

There she is, bound and blindfolded and in an impossible situation! She's surrounded by swords! She's all tied up! She can never escape! There's no one to help her, she's doomed.

And yet -- there's a flipping citadel nearly within shouting distance behind her. Her bindings are practically sliding off her. Her blindfold is so askew one wiggle would give her some vision. And that horrible circle of swords is only there on two sides. Yeah, it's a trap all right. A trap made of delusions.

BUT. If she doesn't take some sort of action to take stock of her situation and remove herself from it, when the tide comes in, she could very possibly drown. Drown, even though she was never in any real peril beyond her own imaginings.

Who's to say how she got into this situation? It's pretty hard to blindfold and tie up yourself, so it could well be that whatever delusion she's trapped by was not self-created. Maybe she was taught things that created entrapping thoughts. Maybe she was lied to. Maybe she was gaslighted! Maybe she was fed messages all her life by her own culture that have made her feel disempowered.

People lie. But that doesn't mean we have to drown in their lies. People hold erroneous beliefs. That doesn't mean we have to drown in their erroneous beliefs.

Are you going to try to wriggle free of your programming today? Or keep listening to the bastards who are making you feel crazy, trapped, helpless, disempowered, confused, useless and paralysed with fear? Your choice.