First up: our bony friend riding the horse.
Skeletons get a bad rap for being spooky, but in reality, your skeleton is the absolute bare-bones foundation (pun intended) of everything you do. It represents the ultimate physical basis of growth and function. In the world of manifestation, the skeleton is the seed. It’s what’s left when you strip away all the fluff, excuses, and outdated junk.
It’s not here to murder you; it’s here to remind you what you're actually made of.
​The Skeleton: Not a Threat, Just a Really Good Foundation
​

​Now, look at the black banner the skeleton is holding. You’d expect a skull and crossbones, right? Nope. It’s a white flower—specifically, the Mystic Rose (a five-petaled rose famous in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck).
You might recognize this little white flower from other cards—The Fool carries one, and they’re blooming all over The Magician’s garden. Far from being a sign of despair, this rose is basically a giant cosmic “Hang in there, sweetie!” sign.

​If we peek behind the curtain at the mechanics of creation, manifestation boils down to a pretty slick piece of spiritual geometry.
Imagine a simple sacred diagram: Two ovals united as one.

1. The Inner Oval: The central power source radiating raw energy.
2. The 5 Rays: Proceeding from the center are the five fundamental elements of Western occultism--Ether, Fire, Water, Air, and Earth (conveniently mirrored by the 5 petals of our Mystic Rose).
3. The Outer Oval: The space filled by that radiant energy.

In short? Your INNER POWER projects itself into SPACE, weaving forms of energy that construct your entire reality.

​That same raw, underlying force powering the universe is what our skeleton buddy represents. All growth in our world relies on constant shape-shifting.
In the grand, absolute sense, nothing ever really changes. The ultimate, infinite No-Thing remains forever itself throughout every cosmic cycle. But down here in our everyday human experience? Transformation is very real. And for cool new stuff to enter your life, the universe occasionally has to gently (or not-so-gently) dissolve the outworn stuff you've been clinging to.
So, the next time the Death card pops up in a reading, don't panic or start drafting your last will and testament. It isn't taking anything away—it’s just decluttering your life down to its solid, bone-level foundation so your next big dream has room to bloom.

Today marks one year since I decided to take the practice of Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) seriously.
My journey actually began about nine years ago with a very short online course. It was fine, but it barely included any practical examples—if any at all. Naturally, I wanted to dig deeper, but finding solid resources proved difficult. Most available courses treated remote viewing as a broad, generic psychic method rather than focusing on CRV—the structured, military-developed protocol I was looking for.
Eventually, I took pre-recorded courses from two different instructors, only to discover that even within CRV, every teacher brings their own "flavor" to the technique. I ultimately decided to stick with one teacher whose program offered a practical online support group focused on refining session structure.

​Here are my key takeaways and observations from the past year:

• Location & Reach: Almost all established CRV instructors are based in the US or nearby regions. Living in Australia, I couldn’t find a single teacher offering classes aligned with my time zone—locally or online. This suggests the methodology is still remarkably niche globally. Even within my support group, I noticed a few fellow Australians, though we haven't formally connected yet.

 

• Cost: High quality comes at a price, and I understand paying for good instruction. However, if the goal is to spread CRV worldwide and expand human consciousness, these steep price tags create a massive barrier to entry.

• The Structure: When conducting a session, structure is everything. But mastering it is no walk in the park. It took me a long time to truly grasp how the protocol functions and how to navigate each stage effectively.

• Navigation: Once I got comfortable with the structure, I hit another wall: knowing the protocol is one thing, but actually navigating a target to extract useful information is a completely different challenge. Figuring out what move to make next to dig deeper into a target hasn't been easy. To fix this, I’ve started looking for a experienced one-on-one mentor to help me build a clearer strategy. (I’ll let you know how that goes—disaster or success—in an upcoming post!)

• Rigidity & Dogma: To be frank, the community can be quite dogmatic. Many teachers insist that you start from square one with them. While subtle variations exist, if two instructors teach the exact same core methodology, why shouldn't a student be able to learn the basics from one and advance with another?

• Where Is Everyone? Military veterans have been teaching CRV for over 30 years, yet active instructors remain surprisingly rare—even though plenty of people enroll in courses. One instructor even mentioned how difficult it is to find available remote viewers when client requests come in. Are people simply quitting? Sure, CRV requires regular practice, but we're talking 20 to 30 minutes, five times a week—not a full-time job. And the payoff for sharpening your intuitive abilities is immense.

​
While I’ve seen massive personal and professional benefits from incorporating CRV into my life, I genuinely worry about the future of this incredible technique if it remains this gatekept and inaccessible.

​What happens when we close our eyes and let our minds wander? Is imagination just a playground for daydreams, or is it something much more potent?
In the early 20th century, two giant thinkers tackled this exact question from wildly different angles. One was Carl Jung, the legendary pioneer of analytical psychology. The other was Paul Foster Case, a brilliant occultist and master of the Tarot.
While both agreed that the creative imagination is the ultimate bridge to the unseen parts of our minds, how they viewed its mechanics reveals a fascinating clash between psychological exploration and mystical engineering.

For Carl Jung, creative imagination wasn't a tool for making art—it was the fundamental, living language of the human psyche. Jung believed that beneath our everyday thoughts lies a vast reservoir of shared human experience called the collective unconscious. The imagination is the primary highway connecting us to it.
Jung’s philosophy centers on a few radical ideas:
​

• Active Imagination: Jung didn't want people to just passively analyze their dreams; he wanted them to walk right into them. He developed a technique called Active Imagination, where you enter a relaxed, meditative state and intentionally invite the unconscious to express itself. By suspending conscious control, you can have a direct, awake dialogue with your inner fears, desires, and archetypes. Jung famously recorded his own intense, years-long journey using this method in his legendary, beautifully illustrated Red Book.
• The Creative Mind as "Play": Jung famously observed that "the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity." True creativity isn't about rigid logic or discipline. It’s about having the courage to engage in spontaneous, uninhibited exploration. The creative mind plays with the things it loves.
• The Visionary Mode: Jung split creativity into two categories. The psychological mode deals with ordinary human experiences. The visionary mode, however, completely bypasses the everyday mind. It reaches into primordial depths, making the creator a channel for universal, impersonal archetypal forces.
• The Path to Wholeness: Ultimately, Jung saw imagination as an engine for individuation—the lifelong process of becoming your truest, most authentic self. By giving a creative voice to our repressed, dark, or hidden parts (what he called the Shadow), we pull them into the light of conscious awareness, finding true psychological healing.

Turn the page to Paul Foster Case, and the tone shifts from a deep-sea dive into psychology to a precise blueprint for spiritual engineering. Case didn't view creative imagination as a chaotic playground of archetypes, but as a razor-sharp, deductive mental function.
To Case, creative imagination is the precise process of reprogramming the subconscious mind—acting as the ultimate entrance to new life and entirely new worlds. He mapped this out beautifully using the symbolic language of the Tarot:

• The Empress and the Subconscious: In Case's system, The Empress (Key 3) is a direct representation of our subconscious mind. Specifically, she represents the mind's inherent power to generate brand-new combinations from our massive storehouse of remembered experiences.
• The Impregnation Process: Case used the metaphor of spiritual conception to explain how this works. The Magician represents the conscious mind—the active seed or focused thought. When the conscious mind purposefully projects an idea, it "impregnates" the fertile soil of the subconscious (The High Priestess). From that union, The Empress (Creative Imagination) goes to work, taking those old memories and raw experiences, reshaping them, and gestating them into a new reality.
• Strict Deductive Reasoning: Because imagination is a subconscious process, Case argued that it operates under strict deductive logic. It always reasons from the general to the particular. It takes vast, universal spiritual concepts and refines them down into specific, tangible manifestations in your daily life.
• Mental Architecture: This forms the bedrock of Case's teachings on affirmations and Tarot meditation. By intentionally holding positive, highly focused images in your conscious mind, you rewrite the script of the subconscious.

As Case beautifully noted when speaking of The Empress, the rich fertility, calm peace, and ability to order your life aright aren't things you have to desperately struggle to acquire from the outside world. They are your inalienable possessions. It is not just your right, but your duty, to put them to use.
​
The Takeaway: Explorer vs. Architect
The contrast between these two thinkers gives us a beautiful toolkit for our own minds:

​Are you looking to explore the wild, untamed depths of who you are? Take Jung's advice: step away from your intellect, embrace the play instinct, and see what steps out of the fog of your unconscious.
Are you looking to reshape your reality, break old patterns, and step into a new world? Look to Case: use your conscious focus to intentionally plant new seeds, trust the brilliant, combining power of your subconscious Empress, and actively engineer your mind.
Both paths show that our imagination is far more than an escape from reality—it is the very mechanism that shapes it.

​“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” – Rumi
​
Have you ever tried desperately to remember a name, a date, or an inspiring idea, only to find it slipping further away the harder you strain for it?
It’s a frustratingly common experience. In a world that tells us to push harder, hustle, and force solutions, we often apply that same aggressive effort to our own minds. But trying to force inspiration or memory is like shaking a muddy cup of water to make it clear—it only creates more chaos.
According to esoteric teacher Paul Foster Case, the secret to perfect recollection and deep insight isn’t effort at all. It’s silence.
In the Tarot, this wisdom is embodied by the High Priestess. She sits in perfect stillness and passivity, allowing information to rise naturally to the surface of her mind. She reminds us that we don’t always need to go hunting for answers; sometimes, we just need to stop blocking them from coming to us.

The Pillars of the Mind: 5 Laws of How We Connect Thoughts
In traditional imagery, the High Priestess sits between two pillars—one dark, one light. They symbolize the polarity of our conscious and subconscious minds.
To bridge the gap between these two worlds, we have to quiet our nervous systems and enter a calm, receptive state. Case suggested that these pillars represent five natural "Laws of Association" that dictate how our minds store and retrieve information. When we understand them, we can stop fighting our minds and start working with them.

• Similarity: Our minds naturally group similar things together. When we see a pattern in our lives, our brain links it to past, identical patterns.
• Contrast: We understand things by their opposites. We appreciate light because we know darkness; we recognize peace because we have survived chaos.
• Recency: We recall what we’ve experienced most recently with the least effort. Whatever is fresh in our minds sits right at the top.
• Repetition: What we do frequently becomes second nature. This can work against us or for us. If we experience failure a few times and constantly repeat the story of "I am a failure" to ourselves, our subconscious solidifies that identity. Conversely, if we repeatedly practice sitting in stillness and listening to our intuition, that intuitive muscle becomes incredibly sharp and accurate.
• Intensity: We vividly remember experiences that demand our full, emotional attention. This is why childhood memories can feel sharper than what we did yesterday. When we live mindfully and give our full presence to the moment, life stops feeling like a hazy blur.

Moving Beyond the Analytical
You don’t need to be a scholar, a Tarot expert, or a psychologist to benefit from these truths. While the inner workings of the mind can seem complex, the practical application is beautifully simple:

Relax, be still, and observe.
The next time you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected from your inner guidance, try to step away from the analytical, striving mind. Stop forcing the answer. Shift your state of mind by taking a few deep breaths, slowing down your brainwaves, and honoring the natural quiet within you.
Are you ready to quiet the noise and tap into your own deeper wisdom? Start by simply sitting in stillness today—and seeing what rises to the surface.
How do you quiet your mind when your thoughts are racing? Share your favorite ways to find stillness in the comments below!
​