The Tower is almost always a positive card for me. This may have to do with my personality, but I also think it has to do with the nature of existence.
It's an old, worn cliché that "The only constant is change." Nothing in our universe is static or solid. This can be a scary reality to confront. And the thing that most of us least want to admit is not solid or real is the self. The realization "This mind is not mine; this body is not mine; this life is not mine. Nothing is 'mine,'" can be very hard to swallow. To see this is to admit the level to which we do not have control or power over what we think or how we act. So much of our thinking and responses to life are driven by effects of past conditioning which have crystallized into unconscious processes and automatic reactions. The groundless feeling of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but a set of systems in states of constant flux is deeply disconcerting. Some Buddhist teachers refer to this feeling as "groundlessness." Like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoons, who suddenly looks down, sees he's not standing on solid ground... and falls.
We fall, and scramble, and go through pain when life threatens the structures to which we cling for our sense of identity, solidity, and stability. This reaction arises from a fundamental conflict between our desires and the nature of reality. The only way we will ever stop creating unnecessary suffering for ourselves is to learn to align ourselves with the natural rhythms of the universe. The most basic way of doing this is working to overcome the tyranny of ego and our ever-present desire for things to be other than they are. The dumb animal of ego fights to assert its solidity, to secure and arm itself, when there is no solidity, and no way to prevent the natural processes of change, decay and death. And the Tower represents a moment in which the effort we've made to secure ourselves against reality completely blows apart. Certainly, this is a painful moment. But it is also a moment of clear seeing. The Tower and the Star share an important relationship; the Star reflects what it's like after the Tower moment. The night is fresh, silent, cool, and clear. There is hope, freshness, and new inspiration. The freedom, flow, and ease of the Star card is impossible to experience without the demolishing of all of the structures of belief and habit we've built to shield ourselves against frightening or unpleasant aspects of reality.
Any time the Tower card comes up for me, especially as an outcome card, I prepare to see through some delusion or belief that has kept me trapped behind cold, restrictive stone walls for too long. And the secret is that whether or not one suffers through a Tower experience is a matter of personal choice. Look at the Star card. Usually, this star figure is naked. Totally vulnerable. Being totally naked, totally stripped of all one's defenses, totally vulnerable to the world can feel incredibly frightening. If we fear our vulnerability, if we fear being exposed, Tower experiences are going to suck for us. It's going to feel as if the universe is punishing us, when what's really happening is that we're being given the incredible gift of the chance to become free. And whether or not Tower experiences help bring us to freedom has to do with how we respond to them. If we respond to the destruction of the Tower by scrambling to cobble the pieces back together again, we're perpetuating the cycle. If we refuse to build and put on a new piece of armor to cover what was exposed, we are that much more free and open.
Certainly, it's harder to interpret the Tower in a position that signifies a trait rather than a process or event. The way I would see it is that this new strength could be the willingness to strip oneself utterly naked (spiritually, that is
) and see all of one's old beliefs, comfortable habits, and life structures for what they are: ultimately empty of any solid reality. The strength of the Tower is the ultimate strength, the willingness to let the universe continue to flay away layer after layer. This takes guts, and there's no way around the pain and rawness of it. But the suffering is optional.
In
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa says,
The problem is that we tend to seek an easy and painless answer. But this kind of solution does not apply to the spiritual path, which many of us should not have begun at all. Once we commit ourselves to the spiritual path, it is very painful and we are in for it. We have committed ourselves to the pain of exposing ourselves, of taking off our clothes, our skin, nerves, heart, brains, until we are exposed to the universe. Nothing will be left. It will be terrible, excruciating, but that is the way it is.
The spiritual path is not all rainbows and puppies and happiness and ease. To really develop spiritually takes self-discipline and the willingness to face one's deepest fears, and go through the pain of self-revelation and having all the ego's toys jerked away. This is universal. If you are currently pushing into the realm of spiritual inquiry, I would take the Tower as a new strength as a very positive sign, one that shows that you have the resilience to walk through the fires of spiritual discipline, if you so choose to do so.
