Five of Swords

The pictorial Five of Swords depicts a pop quiz here at the School of Hard Knocks, education the hard way, with winners and losers, but potentially losers all around in the long term. The teaching seems thus: I’ll teach you a thing or two, or I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. Mental patterns are involuntarily shifted. In the RWS deck, and most of the others, we see the outcome of a confidence game, which, as the name suggests, requires somebody’s confidence to fail them. The winner triumphs at the moment the loser expects to claim his victory. He does this by counting on his mark’s naive assumptions to lead him across that line where exceptions start proving the rule. The card is not about this defeat or failure, but the process that led to this, and what we do afterwards with our fresh, raw, real-world lessons. Ultimately, this is about the confidence we have in our mental constructs of reality, that allows us to move through life more courageously, without being paralyzed by doubt, fear, and mistrust, and how this sometimes will fail us in rude encounters with reality. The energetic force of the Five disturbs the clarity and certainty of the Swords, and the reality of the rocks dulls those razor-sharp edges. The mind sometimes needs to learn to unlearn and to steer well clear of having things all figured out. It’s often a positive learning opportunity for those able to learn and salvage some kind of win-win outcome here. Wisdom from experience can still restore some balance if we can cut our investments in ideas that don’t work. We have to believe that the world is not out to do us harm if we want to get anything positive done. We need to believe in things like natural justice, and a basic goodness in humankind. Trust is a precious currency. But we need these beliefs to bend and bounce a little. The pain that we feel when our expectations are violated is the fault of the expectations. These will betray us if we fail to keep an eye on the reality of things. Many of us start out with some patently ridiculous assumptions that get passed around almost universally as vapid platitudes: god works in mysterious ways, everything happens for a reason, there are no accidents, this is the best of all possible worlds, you karma’s gonna get you, love is all powerful. The game assumes that someone has learned some incorrect lessons in life. With illusions like this, it’s no wonder we get disillusioned. The real world is way beyond morals and ethics: bad guys win, good guys lose, lousy things happen to good people, and cosmic justice is a fantasy. Ten million Native Americans did nothing to deserve their genocide. There is no god with special plans for me and you. If we happen to succeed, it’s not because we were too good, pure, or important for failure or injustice. We just managed to do something right and had a little luck. Mischief and misbehavior, treachery and betrayal, force us to adapt, or just as often, maladapt. We reassess our picture of the world, but too often we only tack on random amendments to the larger illusions we start with. We sometimes need to revamp the whole thing. Mohammed is said to have said: “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first.” This is the right formula to optimize the Five of Swords. We cover more of the bases. The Yijing counterpart is Gua 25, Without Pretense, Innocence, The Unexpected. The natural history of nature, life, mammals and primates has given us a natural ethic and crude intelligence. Without an excess of painful conditioning, this gives us original mind and an instinctive goodness, what we fall back on when we are artless and guileless. We already know how to be true without looking it up in a book. When things are going well, we can proceed as if the world was good. The savage might not always be so noble, but he’s born with the same nature you have, so you know a little of what he might be up to. We reinforce this naturalness culturally with the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the doubt. We give special license and privilege to people of proven goodness, and special stigmas to our degenerates. To let us move still further forward, our reputations precede us. Then we do what we can with the dark side when this is encountered. No matter how kind and sincere we may be, life comes with no guarantee. We have only this from Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and a correlate: probability favors the good and the kind. It’s at least enough to tip the odds a little in favor of goodness and kindness. Oliver’s Law asserts: “Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it.” We likely do not need to worry about running out of surprises, or humbling blows to our egos, or challenges for our many mental defenses. We have new lessons in store, even when we can learn from others’ mistakes. We will have big and shocking plot twists, involuntary new insights, lessons we may not understand for decades to come, and some that will never make sense. It may be all but impossible to maintain any innocence, but we might yet find ways to stay open, and just the right measure of vulnerable.