The Fork in the Road

At the Two of Swords, you are at a Stand Still, a Stand Down.  Like the Madonna song, you are Frozen; Dead in your Tracks.

In some ways, the Two of Swords is like the center of the Wheel of Fortune, but without understanding.  You are watching the world spin around you and you are choosing to not participate.

The Two of Swords is the result of 2-dimensional thinking, the either-or, the black-or-white, the this-or-that.  You see only two possible outcomes and you either dislike both, or desire both (and are afraid of losing one).  You are actively and consciously not choosing.

The Eight of Swords is more or less the same as the Two of Swords, except by that point, you have blocked all four directions. By then, you feel trapped, imprisoned.  [Notice that the Two of Swords and the Eight of Swords contains the very same blindfolded woman.  At the two, she has choice, but at the eight, she has lost sight of that choice.]

But you are not at the Eight of Swords.  You know that you have other avenues that you can pursue.  You are capable of choosing, you are just actively not choosing.  You don’t feel that you are ready to choose, and you do not feel motivated or guided in either direction.

And it has been a while.

In some ways, it has been a long time coming.  It is like one of those dreams where no matter which path you take, you arrive back at the very same fork.  Each time you return, you sit and ponder a bit longer.  You consider what each side has brought and you see no point in going on.  So you sit; you brew; you curse the mosquitoes and the boredom.

But you are coming to a realization.

The problem is not the fork.  It is not the options provided.  It is not the choosing, the needing to choose or the not choosing.

Look straight ahead at the sign that marks the fork in the road.  Do you know what it says?

It says, “What are you not seeing?”

The blindfolded woman on the Two of Swords, what is she not seeing?

You are being asked to sense without seeing.  What are you not perceiving?  What are you not sensing?  What are you perceiving that you are not paying attention to?

Abraham, through Esther Hicks, says, “Beliefs are just thoughts that you think over and over again.”  And you know that thought is creative, yes?  You also believe that actions speak louder than words, and thus you choose to not act.

You, of course, remember that saying, “Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t”.  And the other saying, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”.

Even when you eliminate the pain, you can still end up in the, “why bother”.  Even if neither path brings pain, if neither path brings joy, what’s the use?

And so you sit and you wait.  You look for a crack in the shield.  You think about every time you’ve been here before and you look for what you did wrong and what you did right.

Each time you arrived, you eventually passed the fork, but alas, you have returned…every time.

Two is in some ways, the most versatile and the most diverse number.  It is the number for this entire realm – thus it is called duality.  Two is so encompassing because by definition, it means everything and its opposite (more accurately written as “every thing and its opposite”).

As soon as there is the one, there is the two.

Yet as soon as there is the three, there are many.

You sit at a fork pondering the path to the left and the path to the right, yet in this time of not choosing, there is the third choice.  “Not choosing” is always a choice, and once there are three options, there are many.

Notice how rarely three occurs in the natural world.  Look at your bodies.  Things come in ones, twos and many.  Even with Poison Ivy, the “leaves three – let it be” plant.  Leaves may appear in groups of three, but there are many more than just three.

Threes represent movement, so once there is three, there will soon be more.

But two, twos can last a long, long time.

Anyway – we digress.  What we really want you to notice is what you have stumbled upon within this Two of Swords time you find yourself in.

Abraham spoke of belief and related it to thought.  Yet there is something else, something more.  There is something which is not thought and which is not feeling.  How many times did you learn something only to have an aha moment much later.  Yet, once you’ve experienced the aha, and then thought about it, you could not arrive at any difference in what you knew before and after the aha.  Why is that?

That is because there is something else beside thought and feeling.  The best we can do until there is a more appropriate word is to say there is knowing.  There is thinking, feeling and knowing.

You, yourself have talked about “knowing with the head” and “knowing with the heart”.  That is because you have begun to get it, begun to understand, begun to know.

“Knowing with your head” is nothing more than thinking and believing.  Since the heart is what you associate with feeling, we would like to offer another organ to associate with knowing.  And you will find this amusing.

“The nose always knows,” echoed Tucan Sam.  “Just follow your nose.”

In this case, we want to call it the knose!

Notice that in every moment, as you look out into the world, your nose is always there in your field of vision, yet you hardly ever notice it.

And in nearly every step you take, you follow your nose.

Knowing (with your nose) does not involving thinking (with your head) or seeing (with your eyes).  It doesn’t even require feeling (with your heart).

The most similar analogy is muscle memory.  Gymnasts must move beyond thinking in order to perform the feats they perform so elegantly.  Linguists must move beyond translating in order to become truly fluent.

You don’t see your nose because you are not looking at your nose.  And you tend to not see what you know, because your entire vision is created from what you know.

What we calling knowing (for this sake of discussion) is that which is, for the most part, unconscious because it is beyond cognizance.

Thinking is merely a means.  Knowing is.
Thinking is a doing.  Knowing is a being.

The path between ignorance and cognizance is just the beginning.

Believing that your world is made up of either-or, black-or-white, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t scenarios are the product of thought – incomplete, immature, duality-based thought.

You don’t just think and feel, you also know.

When there is one, there is two, but when there is three, there are many!

You see life as populated with male and female, but when you find the third gender, you find many more!

So, in 2010, you have begun to see events that have the potential to change life seemingly forever more.  It is not difficult for you to imagine some of the ongoing events as unstoppable with unpleasant consequences.

You have looked around and you say, “It can’t keep going on this way”, and you are not inaccurate.  It can’t keep going on this way, and it won’t.  Yet, it is still not an either-or, damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

The polarization of the two is growing, in some ways, and is dying in other ways.  Once there is three, there are many.

Think about it this way, when two people bond, there is one pair, one relationship.  Yet once there are three people, then there are THREE pairs and MANY relationships.  Each person now has a relationship to each other person, but they also have a relationship to the other two as a pair.  So each person has 2 one-on-one relationships and 1 one-on-two relationship.  Plus, there is the collective relationship.  Each of these is different.  Each of these is unique.

Two is a diverse number, but Three is a complex number and once there are three, there are many.

Spend some time thinking about this and looking for the magic of three to enter where only two are currently seen and allow that to show you the way out of the Two of Swords.