Joyful Randomness

This is an uncertain time for all of us; no one needs to really be reminded of this, including me. It is one thing to have an area or two fall into the “uncertainty card file”, but when six or seven domains fall unexpectedly into that category, it brings many things into high relief.

All of that as a brief and clumsy segue into the rediscovery that has been in the background for most of my life, and probably wouldn’t have forced its way up if the external circumstances in my life weren’t moving at such a terrifying and exhilarating pace.

A Book In The Mail

A close friend decided that he would mail a book to me, one that was important to him and felt that it would help me in my present circumstances. Have no idea who the author is or what the subject might be, which no doubt let me focus later on my reaction and subsequently share it with you.

I love getting a book in the mail. More specifically, I love the expectation of getting a book in the mail, even if it turns out later that the book itself is not something I enjoy or even find useful. Kind of like the opening of Christmas presents doesn’t equal the anticipation cultivated by the packages or Friday night after work actually being the best part of the weekend.

And of course, when the high point of your day is a trip to the post office, looking forward to their being something besides a bill adds a bit of magic in an otherwise anxious existence.

I will actually be thrilled and disappointed simultaneously when the book arrives because I will no longer we waiting for it. This is also what I love about ordering from Barnes and Noble. Read the rest of this entry »

Freedom From Beliefs

Most of the problems or life situations we come to the Tarot for have to do with all of our beliefs, not the major meta-beliefs, but the millions of little beliefs that motivate and inform our actions that get us into delightfully exhilarating and horrifying traps and experiences. Problems at work scratch up against our beliefs about how the other persons view us, employment changes tug on our beliefs of abundance-whether or not the world has the room to take care of us like everyone else. All day long we are involved in the process of acting according to our beliefs, though most of them are on automatic to the point that they feel like they are out of our control, and to make matters more interesting, many of them may be.

Release

The Tarot, on the other hand, is a great tool to consider which of our circumstances we can side-step, move through, or actually change to our advantage by reassigning meaning to. For example, when job-loss happens and we see a Sun in our future, we can make the simple but reasonable assumption that it was all for the best anyway, that we may have stayed where we were at forever, in order to do the Safe Thing, and can bet that when we look back on the situation later down the road, our relief and insurgence of energy and creativity validates this. We have assigned meaning, because we changed our beliefs. A minor operation compared to some of the manifesting the Tarot (and our spirituality) is involved in, but an important one. Read the rest of this entry »

Information Overload

One of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is thinking of the Tarot as primarily a source of information. Information is nice, but if nothing is done with the information, it quickly becomes another useless pool of stagnant water. One of the reasons we don’t regard the Tarot as a lifestyle or spiritual/evolutionary system, is that we keep getting information from it but we don’t draw inferences from that information.

I am not talking about the mundane information, such as watching for predictive roadblocks or expecting good news. We are pretty good at doing daily spreads and arranging our hours around them. We see a reverse King of Swords in the near future, and with that heads up we may be a little extra present around the boss. We pull a three of cups and look forward to a party. Mundane. Read the rest of this entry »

Creation/Manifestation

Although it is trite to say that things are changing rapidly in our world today, maybe it is only trite because this time it is true in a sense that is unprecedented, and we comfort ourselves by saying it is trite to bring it back down (we think) to a level that we can control (which we can, but maybe not by the usual methods, which are obviously not working very well).

Trite or not, there is a general consensus with people I talk to and people I don’t talk to, that our thinking, beliefs, economics, and generally the way we interface with the world and our place in it, is changing, stretching, contracting and expanding in a way that would have once caused us to think that we were part of a strange animation of some kind. Maybe we still feel that way.

Perfect For The Tarot

Not just because I am biased, which I am, but it is my feeling that the Tarot acts through and points to an underlying system of self-evolution/spirituality that is perfectly suited to handle mass transformation on a global and at the same time, individual level.

Turning away for just a moment (maybe permanently) from the Tarot as a source of information, let’s briefly look at a couple of primary process that any Tarot reader is consistently involved in, sadly only for the purpose of producing a reading. Two incredibly powerful skills to help us during this time are the act of assigning meaning (as opposed to talking ourselves into any spin on events in order to sooth ourselves) and effecting actual change over our external circumstances (as opposed to just making lemonade out of lemons).

When you do a spread for yourself, you are involved in two processes simultaneously. You are assigning meaning to events you can’t control, and at the same time focusing your intention to alter your outcome throughout your day. It is unclear which is which, and that is the way it should be. Imagine if those skills were brought to bear on purpose in your daily life outside of the spread.

Will amplify the exact process in upcoming articles, until then, keep reading….

Meaning Creation

We are meaning-creating beings. Every day, with every experience, we use our brains to extract, configure, stretch, or confirm an underlying meaning that is already in place. When you go to work on Monday, you do so as though you don’t have a choice, because you have the underlying meaning that you have to pay the bills, not be displeasing to your boss, or to further your career. If you work for yourself, you may have the underlying meaning of enjoying your work. You probably don’t think of most of your day as being created by you. Most of us don’t. We create our meaning, initially out of thin air, externalize it, crystallize it, and then feel comfortable out of control because we now believe that structure to be real.

We may hear someone tell us that we create our own reality and feel that there is an over-simplification going on somewhere in the thinking process. But if we follow our reality back far enough, we find for the most part that is entirely true. You start with an idea, something that you would like to do. You get the training, develop the skills, compete with the other people vying for your position, succeed or fail at what you are doing, and move on from there. It starts with pure idea, pure creation, pure inspiration, and then from there, mass amounts of energy and action take place to bring the idea into the external world. That is where it gets tricky. Read the rest of this entry »

More Than A Reading

The Tarot is a source of information. Whether we read for ourselves or someone else, we are uncovering information. This is not a minor thing. When we use the Tarot, we are stimulated by archetypal images and are able to make connections that we may not attain from other systems.

However, the Tarot is much more than that. Every major philosophical and spiritual system has as its external manifestation, a source of information. Whether it is a holy book, recorded statements from a thinker or prophet, or poetic collections of abstract impressions, all major paradigms and systems have a source of information. From there, people take the information and form theories about the underlying metaphysics that are informing the external manifestations. Then begins a process of experimentation; we have the information, what does it say about what is going on behind the scenes?

Strangely, with the Tarot, we stay on the surface and rarely try to describe the underlying metaphysics that make an effective reading possible. We are enthralled with the Tarots ability to be astoundingly accurate in its accuracy and depth. We develop an interesting array of skills that go into being an effective reader. We tap into parts of ourselves and learn to articulate them, demonstrating powerful, earth-shattering human ability and implying an underlying connection between all of us, and then rarely work on a cohesive schema of the metaphysics that make it possible. Read the rest of this entry »