This card isn’t just about personal lovers, but figures heavily with relationships that transform our psyche, and how those changes happen. Change is a one way affair — can you imagine forgetting family, friends, and lovers? The partnerships that have formed in the past have formed complex experiences in your memory. Each time we form new relationships, the mind begins to ‘measure up’, or compare random pieces of information from previous relationships. The relationships may be non-personal; you could have been to college and learned some mathematics, and when you go shopping your mind wanders off into random number crunching, or spotting prime numbers. It’s the brain’s way of saying ‘I’ve found a match’, or that it finds a difference.
All these personal experiences affect us deeply and change us. Because we let people, ideas, places, etc., get close to us, our defences are dropped, and we open to being influenced by someone or something new.
So, the images and feelings we carry with us can project onto our perception of reality and it’s almost like they have a life of their own. As we collect experience these images and feelings will tend to clump together in the mind naturally, and be activated when something similar turns up in our life.
It’s the same with relationships; we will project an awful lot onto other people (that are essentially just like us) until we realise the tricks our own mind plays on us that cause us to evaluate others from our own experience. People are a lot more complex than we perceive, and have a different history and experience of life than we do.
If we attempt to get a grasp of what ‘The Lovers’ mean, then we can keep our guard up to the internal scales that are taken out every time somebody around us does anything upon which we pass judgements. Our attention level soars when we witness something astounding and new, and plummets when we see repetition. You could describe someone as ‘staid’ or ‘stubborn’ — whatever words you might use, look at the comparisons being made.
This comparison is either showing existing behavioural patterns in our self (remember, the mind has to possess the flaw to know the flaw!), or you are seeing the same ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors of judgement’ that we all make on a daily basis. It’s difficult to get a true perspective on anything we see externally as we are not in possession of all the facts.
If we were to take this maniacal voice too far and become perfectionists, we would tear holes in the whole planet because we could run it better. There is a high level of judgement here, which could also be coming from a very limited perspective. It’s very easy to underestimate a person who arrives in our life without seeing their journey and knowing their experiences; This process seems to continue until we start to see people in front of us in a different light, and with an open mind.
How an individual faces this material changes with time. As we learn about human frailty, compassion, love, hate, guilt, sex, past, present, and any life skills, our translation of these ‘mental weddings’ between reality and the information held in our mind will become exquisitely satisfying as we find a balance that suits us. This will temper the chaos within the mind that occurs when meeting new situations in everyday life.
The choices we have around us to learn about our social structure are well defined and established (believe it or not!). We no longer have a fight on our hands to get information; We can look at sociology, psychology, and a host of other human sciences as an excellent way to get a clearer picture of the humanity that surrounds us. That sort of reading will churn up a lot of feelings and thoughts about your own environment. With self-analysis, it is almost as if we are being melted away, mixed up, and chemically changed; homes are being found for all your stray thoughts and feelings as we understand the internal and external triggers and ascend up the ladder of gradual understanding.
It is a liberating feeling when something gets explained, and the brain actually transforms. It gets a new set of options to play with, and the outdated experiences are no longer mentally, or emotionally, referred to. We only have to acknowledge the change and move on, there’s no huge list of things to remember.
This card is a very powerful magnet for human emotion. Imagine the urge we get when we want love — the brain is charged, full of desires, and of course it brings pleasure. The focus of the mind’s eye seeks partnership, marriage, consummation, meeting, union, and all the complexity of whatever the desires are. This is the state before the experience gets taken in and understood by the brain.
Advanced Notes:
The Hebrew letter for this path is Zayin, meaning ‘sword’. This can mean your ability to verbalise your thinking in regards to your experience. Swords usually mean ‘thinking that is invoked’ – the human thinking based off logical conclusions (not the visual imagination).
There’s also something a little darker going on with this card. It’s attached to Binah and this means teaching. The human mind creates opposites if faced with an internal construct. As a preconception enters the mind, a partner to it is created that has equal but opposite power. This means you can possibly see positives and negatives behind everything. Why does this happen? The brain has two hemispheres and likes symmetry; when it sees white it makes black and when it sees dark and sombre moments it can create some sick and twisted humour with no mercy, no manners. You have no control over this until you understand the higher brain functions (but mostly we’ll let it ride and just accept it). The struggles these mirrored images can cause will be touched on over a few cards where they can be understood from many angles.