Occupation: Mystic

Do you work a straight job?  After thinking about it a bit, i think what defines a straight job is either working for a company or institution where you are not emotionally connected to the product or mission of the group. Or where you are taking instructions from someone who does not respect you or who you dont respect.

My regular readers will be unsurprised to hear me advise that if you are in a straight job, design a path to different employment.  This need not mean you quit this week.  It is likely you will need to figure out how to replace this income and perhaps even the social station the straight job provides.

Premin just visited.  I was thinking about her and her peculiar employment situation.  Technically, she teaches mediation in Puna India for most of the year, and does body work in the west for the summers.  But as i thought more about it, i realized these labels did not capture what she really did.

Mulberrys are unsafe from this mystic

When i offered that i thought she might be a mystic, she agreed this might be an acceptable job description. But what is a mystic?

A mystic is someone who asks you to think of the central question in your life at this moment and then explains to you why that is the wrong question.  This has happened twice to me with Premin in the last couple of months.  I have asked her to do tarot card readings for me, which is something she is quite gifted in.

Osho Tarot Trust card

The first two readings Premin did for me gave me more insight than simply telling me i was asking the wrong question.  And it was clear i was thinking about my future in the wrong framing.

So i pulled back and thought about myself more broadly.  What do i really know about myself?  And what i came up with is that i was an organizer, so the “right” question for me to be asking was: What should i organize next?

You dont flip a tarot card which says “organize a potluck of Twin Oaks neighbors” or “start a new FEC community” or “block shipments of German radwaste coming to  Tennessee“.

Instead the cards (via Premin’s interpretation) suggested that i should consider giving up my big ego identity (central organizer, charismatic player, etc) in my next effort.  It also pointed out that i needed to shift my relationship with exhaustion.