Blindness is the root of all disaster

In a traditional Tarot pack, the card of disaster is depicted as a burning tower struck by lightning bolt. People are falling face first out of the windows. A crown is falling. As a vivid, psychic image, it terrifies. The structures that we build, even the ones that seem invulnerable, can break apart, leaving us exposed, aggrieved and helpless in the ruins.

Often the disasters with the biggest impact in our lives are not the large-scale societal ones, the financial crashes or the pandemics, but the small-scale emotional ones, the traumas of a breakup or falling out with friends or family members. We are social animals, and these invisible, emotional disasters, the ones that leave scarcely a trace in the material world, can take years to heal, influencing our thought-patterns and behaviour, the apparatus of our being. The stereotype of entering a new situation or relationship with old, “emotional baggage” evokes the residue of former disasters, their ghostly whispers in the present.

Because we are imperfect, our lives contain at least a few troubling memories of relations gone wrong.  At their most bestial level, such memories can generate extreme emotions of rage and hate, especially if we feel wronged, as wounded pride, and perhaps even paranoia, seeks a target to strike in self-defence. An eye-for-an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Revenge. For this reason, Buddhists consider the emotion of hate (Dvesha, in Sanskrit) as a form of sensitivity to externalities. It is represented by the image of a serpent, for serpents, when feeling insecure, lash out, regardless of whether the threat is real or imaginary.

One small disaster on the psychic level can lead to a series of disasters. Violence tends to generate more violence, and hate more hate. Even in the case where one party is clearly in the wrong, vengeance rarely achieves more than satisfying a primordial urge to cleanse our territory of hostile entities. Disasters follow disasters. The pains and grievances rack up. Nation-states fall prey to civil war: two individuals enter a perpetual contract of unrest, each party furiously seeking to exonerate themselves, condemn the other.

Blindness is the root of all disaster. If Paris had seen the fall of Troy in the theft of Helen, he might have left her well alone. Regret is an echo of former blindness murmuring in the present. Remorse is self-awareness pointing out a role you might have played in disaster. The captains of the Titanic couldn’t see the iceberg so they ran straight into it. On a minute scale, a lack of self-awareness or awareness of another person or situation can precede disaster. Moliere’s plays are resonant because his protagonists, trapped inside tragic loops of a limited self-awareness, fail to progress, going round in circles, repeating errors. Their travails appeal to us as we are able to laugh and release some of the hidden tension that builds between the way we perceive ourselves and the way the world perceives us.

History’s weighty fragmented dream, pockmarked by injustice and disaster, resembles a sleeping giant that turns violently in its sleep: an insurrection, a civil war, a massacre of innocents, a napalm strike. The prevalence of disaster reveals the infinitely fragile foundations of normality, based on imperfect, negotiated contracts, written by former generations even as they were sleeping.

The trouble with such overwhelming blindness is that each time one peels back a layer of insight, one is often confronted with another layer of blindness, and then another, and another, and so on, as though reality is an infinitely vast onion. As for spiritual insights, some basic flows of wisdom seem to transcend time and place, though the religious images used to express them vary enormously.

Insight is the tentative consolation for disaster. Those moments of anguish can produce a powerful sense of clarity round the way things should be, both in ourselves and the worlds that have failed. After the second world war came a long and unprecedented period of peace and prosperity in Europe. It is no mistake that the Tarot card that follows the tower is the star; a card of healing and listening, of accessing curative levels of the subconscious, of clearing, processing and growing.

Disasters can help us empathise with others. In 1945, the British population voted for Clement Atlee’s landmark series of welfare reforms, leading to the foundation of the National Health Service: free universal healthcare for all citizens.  After years of warfare, British citizens decided to look beyond their stratified and class-oriented society and think of the community as a whole. They wanted to build something better than what came before. Imperialistic, pugnacious Winston Churchill won the war but lost the vote. It is a decisive moment in UK history. In Shakespeare’s play, the Tempest, when describing her vision of a ship in a storm, Miranda remarks: “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!”. Similarly, Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in.” Brokenness produces vision, and suffering, even when seen from afar, compassion.

I personally have made various mistakes throughout my life. Blindness was behind each disaster: a lack of self-awareness, or failure to comprehend the dynamics of a situation or character. Did I need these disasters to see more clearly? It is a difficult and dangerous question to answer. There is a risk of sounding like a dogmatic apologist for the presence of terrible things in the world. In practice, we simply do the best with the cards we have, trying to see more clearly if we can, so happier cards may come, avoiding bad hands.

Turn everything into strength:
Failure, disappointment, disaster.
Transform your weakness into fortitude
So echoes of a sickly past
May shape a lively present.
And let the root of consciousness run deep
And salvage light from ancient heaviness.
Visit the underworld, come up for air, unscathed,
Shedding the pain that failed
To penetrate your core, luminescence.
Healing rays that shine in all directions.
The rough and roguish games of fate
Have ploughed the earth. Now flowers grow.
Abundance. Dropping from your eye.
The drum continues. Oceanic time.