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This card is called "casting light on your obsessions," not "eradicating obsessions," because properly related to obsessions can lead to creative breakthroughs. Being in the grip of an obsession is like wrestling with an angel. The average person gets pinned to the mat because he doesn't have his obsession, his obsession has him. However, a
mutant with a sufficiently strong commitment to consciousness and the creative muse will force blessings from the angel.
Within the particularities of your personal obsessions are collective obsessions. John is obsessed with Jane, but that is just an individual permutation of the collective romantic obsession, and even that pervasive obsession is a refraction of the even more universal obsession with finding wholeness from the outside. Since your particular obsession is built on collective obsessions — obsessions that have consumed the souls of so many before you — you are wrestling with an entity that may have the psychic force of billions behind it. So, an obsession is like wrestling with an angel, but the angel is not necessarily the pale, slightly anorexic, winged androgyne that Pre-Raphaelites might have you believe. More often, the angel of obsession is like a six-billion-kilo sumo wrestler covered with Vaseline. There is a reason why people talk about being "in the grip of an obsession."
Wrestle out the blessings by shining your brightest lights on the obsession. Force it to be a teacher, not merely a tormentor. Learning about your obsession can teach you things of inestimable value, and what you learn may also help you to help some of those who are similarly afflicted and blessed. At the core of obsessions (if you can get in that deep) are diamonds formed by time, pressure, and heat. At the core of obsessions are archetypes, which all have a light and a dark side. If you're unaware of the archetypes at the core of your obsessions, you will remain lost in deep, ever-twisting rabbit holes without a flashlight or compass.
(see the introduction to archetypes below)
Obsessions are two-faced gods. One face is angelic, and the other demonic. If you shine the right lights on an obsession and learn to relate to it in a life-enhancing way, you see the angelic face. If you let the obsession work in the darkness, however, tragedy is the best you can hope for. Worse than tragedy is that you aren't there anymore — you've been hollowed out and are now one of the many hungry ghost personifications of the collective obsession, a ring wraith searching across wastelands for the Precious or filled with collective psychosis seeking to persecute the other who carries your shadow.
Consider this an auspicious time to summon your will to consciousness and cast light on your obsessions.