Information Overload

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.

Prophets have given us a lot of information throughout the ages. They pointed to an underlying metaphysics of reality. They gave us descriptions that went against the way we think things are. If we would have seen that information, kept it local or didn’t experiment with the implications, most of the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions and systems would have never developed. In other words, they listened to the information and acted on the underlying principals. They looked at the information as theories to test out, and then, instead of letting it rest there, they tested the theories to see if they held up.

In other words, the information was simply an outline, a description of reality that needed testing. The reason the Tarot isn’t seen as a complete system in and of itself is because we haven’t tested out the reality it points to. We are apparently satisfied with it as an oracle.

That isn’t bad, necessarily, it is just a bit frustrating.

Here are some parameters of the underlying structure of reality that the Tarot points to. It states that we create reality and meaning on a daily basis. It implies that we are all built from the same basic 78 intentions. It implies that we are all manifestations of one personality and in doing so it challenges our entire sense of individuality. It implies that there is an underlying evolutionary stream that unites us all in a very real way as evidence that we are able to do an accurate reading for someone we have never met in person, accomplishing this by reading an aspect of ourselves and then translating the information into another life situation.

There are many more. But the point is that though the Tarot is a source of information that can be used effectively for prediction or meditation, it is much, much more. We should be testing out the parameters of the underlying metaphysics that it describes to us every time we do a spread.