Conscious Human Action

Ace of Swords

“Here I am at the top of the Mountain of human history, closer than ever to the Sky!”

What can we know?

Listen to the questions of a child. Quickening and generating fractal questions out of themselves. The Ace of Swords is the beginning of all questions with a new question. And as this writing unfolds, and as you read along and make it real, I hope you come to question any harden notions you did not know need questioning.

Can we know what?

If I ask in casual conversation whether there such a radical thing as free will, the answer is usually, 'probably not'. Underneath this lies a lie which feeds our current crisis of meaning like a tumorous growth. We answer as if the mind is a manufacturer of illusions subservient to the drive of survival. Beneath the answer ‘probably not' is the conviction that what appears to be free choice is actually compelled from without by organic necessity. Even our social networks are emergent hallucinations from our selfish genes. Even religion is a psychological survival mechanism. So choice within these structures cannot be free. Right?

If that is true, then what? The way we answer important questions structures our capacity to Ask Again. Some of our modern answers blind us to the gaps of knowing that a child naturally wants to fill. This is what The Philosophy of Freedom begins with. That is what I am trying to begin with. Is conscious human action really an illusion? Here, in the 'probably' of 'probably not' is our gap, our hole to see the sky through.

Can we know?

The Ace of Swords is the Beginning Word, it is the renewal of ideas which create the world. But it is difficult to realise reality.

First we must become reacquainted with the part of us which questions,

then we can find the truthful answers.

Oh but then! we find the new question within the answer. The question of what we can do with truth.

First, as we contemplate the Ace, we ask what is this part of us which asks? Oh my love, it is Thinking! You are doing it right now!

This collage is framed between the blades of a sword, what is required is sharp mind and polished consciousness, our pride will suffer wounds, necessarily. Through this effort, the effort of thinking about thinking, we become aware of the opening space between the frame of necessity, of natural law, where we can really claim to be self determined.

What is to know?

I began my collages with the Suit of Cups. I hoped at first for feeling to be the seat of all wisdom, not thinking. (Thinking is tiring! Thinking gets me in trouble!) But water, and then fire, were much easier to contemplate than air. To think about fluid feeling and burning desire is not the same task as Thinking about Thinking. What I have achieved so far in the project has only been a foreword, a practice for the beginning sWord.

“The heart and the mood of the soul do not create motives… Love is no exception… it depends on the idea we form of the loved one. Here too, thought is the father of feeling.”

Across all renderings of the tarot, the imagery of the Suit of Swords is always difficult. In the traditional pictures, the sharpened steel is accompanied with sorrow or struggle, even death. I tried in my own images to remain neutral. This was also very difficult. It is difficult not to fall back on excuses and associations when I examine my thinking process, it is difficult not to shake my head and fall back into a dream, it is difficult not to substitue my own ideas with the premade concepts of our culture or memory, it is also difficult to discover when my ideas are not my own. My conscious human action is so often trapped by the stories I think up, about my biography and who I am. How often I use thinking as a weapon against myself, can I really use it as a means of liberation?… The Ace of Swords precedes all of this difficulty with a question and for now let’s return to the mood of this annunciation.

What is the beginning word?

We are on the top of the mountain, all that we think we know lifts us up into possibility, but the potentiality of the sky weighs upon us with all its Gravity. The levers and weights of ideologies paralyse us in a seemingly ceaseless debate of What To Do, and never Doing, now more than ever at the end of history. In my collage, many pillars of stone are visible but only one is crowned with potential. You are invited onto it by a question.

Is the limitless sky really so Grave? In your “probably not”s you might not yet believe in freedom, but you still believe in chance. Deep in the osseous tissue of our skeleton is a space where hematopoesis works to keep us alive. I want to begin here, I want to stay here, I want to ask: have you ossified into a complex machine? or is there a spirit within?