2004, The Fool 0

In order to make use of the major arcana as a method of self-discovery, it is necessary to spend time reflecting on what each of the twenty-two cards represent. Once you can visualize the card clearly, meditate deeply upon [the image] by holding it in your awareness and disregarding any extraneous thoughts. Next, imagine that the frame around the image is the frame of a door, and that you are looking out onto the scene in front of you. Then step through the door and become part of the scene. Notice how at this point events may take on a life of their own, as in a dream. Allow the scene to unfold and see what happens.

- David Fontana, "The Language of Symbols"

I didn't have a deck of my own then, but The Language of Symbols had a full page picture of the Fool from the Marseilles deck, and I started with that.



I propped my feet up on the pillows to keep me awake during the meditation, which meant I faced this enormous oil painting of impressionist blue seraphs on one wall of my room. I closed my eyes and remembered the card. It had these sort of aged tea-stained colors, and as the meditation told me to I walked right into it in my mind. The Marseilles Fool character stood still, so I let my attention wander past him into a field (that still looked like the woodcut) and then... I don't remember.

I "woke up" paralyzed, for the first time without fear because there were cats all over me (I knew those cats in waking life, too... the several strays that I used to bring up to my room.) I could see them, but couldn't move. One wide-eyed skinny tabby put its nose to mine and miaowed as if to say, "Are you all right??" I could feel her tiny paws on my shoulder. I also felt my feet on somebody's hair, and my head under somebody's feet... the world around me seemed an awful lot rounder, somehow, like I could feel the downstairs of the house curving in on itself. I seemed to be doing a backward arch while at the same time laying flat down. The impressionist angels, unlike most things in my sleep paralysis line of vision, were a comforting sight.

I thought came to me that maybe now I could astrally project to the "real world"... but how to get out? There were no vibrations or anything, not even a rapid heartbeat like last time. Well, internet OBE tutorials said to "just do it," so I sat up.

And took my body with me. I still had to fight the paralysis, but it was much less difficult than before. Go figure, the one time that I wanted my physical body to stay paralyzed... "Hmph," I said to the flat, catless room, and the painted angels.


Fontana also wrote that we shouldn't "worry whether you are talking to an image that has objective reality or simply to an aspect of your own unconscious. In all work with symbols, results come only if we cease to plague ourselves with the need for logical explanations. The image is simply there, existing in its own dimension. Let it do the work for you."