Joel Rafidi | Here For The Truth: Taroscopes, Tyranny, & Knowing Thyself
Joel Rafidi is an awakened Aussie who is kicking ass against tyranny with powerful podcasts, hard hitting hip hop, and a creative flow that no mandate can stop. As co-host of the excellent new show Here For the Truth, Joel has been making waves in the truth community with hard-hitting sojourns into stuff society is shy to speak about. He also provides coaching services for self-seekers with an approach that integrates Human Design, Taroscopes (by Michael Tsarion), and his own life experience of getting healthy inside and out.
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In this episode
Core themes
From hip hop dreams to self-responsibility
Joel Rafidi traces his path from a Jehovah's Witness upbringing in a Palestinian and Lebanese family to writing a thousand or more songs as a teenager and chasing a hip hop career. When the music stalled in 2015 he describes a dark night of the soul that opened into bliss, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, the Tao Te Ching and a philosophy of pure non-action. He now calls that phase a form of bypassing, and says his real shadow work began when he stopped blaming everyone else and took responsibility for what he was creating, before he returned to releasing music in 2019.
Why spiritual bypassing keeps people stuck
Both men push back on spirituality that asks nothing of you. Chance argues that non-action quietly becomes permission for the world to stay out of balance, and, drawing on Michael Tsarion's work, that any one-size-fits-all philosophy is the death knell of the individual, turning people into a drop in the ocean instead of the ocean itself. Joel says underworld cycles cannot be bypassed, reads the opening cards of the major arcana as the hero's journey through them, and warns against waiting for a savior. His answer is to start sharpening the sword, because, as he puts it, you are your own shaman.
Creativity, flow and the right brain
Chance describes creativity as several rungs on any universal spiritual ladder, arguing that creative plateaus track plateaus in personal development and in cleaning up the body temple. Joel ties this to bioenergy and the idea of the body as the shadow, where ignored blocks leave expression stagnant. Both see the wider culture as heavily left brained, and Chance suggests most people's intuition has been tuned toward self-criticism. Daily practice, he says, retrains the right brain from hindrance into helper, just as Joel finds lyrics arrive constantly once he is in a songwriting zone, and Joel adds that even basic tarot builds symbolic literacy.
How the Taroscopes system works
Joel found Michael Tsarion's Taroscopes after leaving his family's construction business, and says it was his first real contact with astrology. In his account, astrology, numerology, Kabbalah and tarot were designed to work together. He pairs the twelve signs with twelve tarot cards, and links 36 ten-degree constellations he says the Egyptians charted to the 36 numbered minor arcana cards, giving each person a significator. His is the Seven of Cups, which he reads as imagination and poetry with distraction as its shadow. He also walks through Tsarion's personal life chart, the system's handling of precession, and his own Taurus rising.
Symbolic literacy and corrupted archetypes
Joel reads the commandment against graven images as an early war on symbolic literacy, and Chance finds it telling that desert sky god religions reject astrology, which he calls the sky clock. Joel argues that worship began with a sky goddess named Taur, a root he connects to truth, church and tarot, and that solar cult theology grew from a male drive to dominate that, in his view, still shapes society. Chance says the problem cuts both ways: goddess cults had their own excesses, archetypes on both sides have been corrupted, and a purer conversation with them, free of Disney and Marvel versions, is part of the cure.
Quotes
“It's up to you. You are perfectly equipped, you just have to start sharpening the sword, you got to start flexing the muscle, you got to start doing something.”
“If there's any obvious answer to what is the meaning of life, it would be life is the meaning of life. Existence exists perpetually.”
“There's no one-size-fits-all philosophy, man. You are your own shaman, and there's no one else can know for you.”
“Getting to a more pure version of archetypal conversation and symbolic literacy is a big time cure, because most people's archetypes are polluted by Disney slash Marvel productions.”
“These ancient arts, this is the knowledge that actually roots us to the ground. This is what roots us to the earth.”
“My purpose as a practitioner in the Taroscopic system is simply to reconnect you with your living oracle, with your inner oracle.”
“That's a big part of freeing your mind, I think, is to give your mind free time.”
“We spend our entire life just in these cookie cutter boxes trying to copy and emulate everyone else and do things the way other people are doing them.”
Joel Rafidi is an Australian podcaster and coach who co-hosts "Here For The Truth," blending Human Design, tarot-based "taroscopes," and hip-hop artistry in work centered on tyranny, self-knowledge, and creative flow.
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