We are provide meaning from all different directions. We usually are of course, from media news, neighbors, and hanging around the water cooler at work. Some sources we assign credibility to more than others, and I suppose some sources are in fact more credible than others. What we don’t seem to pay that much attention to is how much of our experience is interjected, is actually at its core an emotional response to information we are fed, and in fact, is very subjective. This is difficult, because we have the categories of subjective and reality narrowed down to the point that it is simply not that useful.

Another way to say the same thing is that most of what we consider reality is in fact a filter that we have applied to our psyches that carefully screens and informs what our reaction will be according to our intention. Even the most skeptical of us will find and be able to easily observe how much of what we experience as reality is really not that at all, but the emotional jolt that we get from whatever information is filtered through these filters.

Yes, but that doesn’t make it easy to manipulate…

No, not at all, in fact I am not implying that it can or should be manipulated. We rush to find the secret key to changing our reality, to mastering the external events in our lives, whether that is more money, better relationships, or more exciting vocations. And that is how it should be, after all, we live our lives out in the material world, and who doesn’t want the best life here on earth, whatever that means to you. However, whether we can actively change most or all of our external situations, we should go into the battle armed with the actual facts of what that reality is. From there we can be pleasantly surprised at how many options we do have when it comes to facing whatever life situation is giving us difficulty. Conversely, when reality gives us a few happy bumps or sustainable joy, we have a map that can locate how we did that, how we appreciated it, and strive to move our heavily laden filters around in such a way as to allow more of it through.

The Tarot is a master teacher of reality

Off hand, I can think of no other spiritual/emotional system better equipped to reveal the actual metaphysical underpinnings of the matrix  we move through every day. As a Tarot enthusiast and devotee, I am certain that I am biased and have no intention of changing that bias, based on my direct experience of what the Tarot has taught me. More than the day to day information that it gives, and the joy of being able to read for others and thereby help them navigate through some of the obstacles in their lives (helping others, as everyone knows who has authentically tried it, crosses and obliterates that tired line of selfish and selfless), I have found that the Tarot consistently points and redirects me to an underlying sense of spirituality that seems to infinitely satisfy the conditions of how I actually experience my life on earth. There is so much depth to The Stream that the Tarot indicates is there, by virtue of the fact that it works, that it constantly drives me to find ways to join and align myself with that spirituality. To begin to move into the spirituality that the Tarot implies, involves developing the skill of looking at the process that the Tarot moves you through and not so much the information that it gives you. This involves a paradigm shift of some magnitude, as we really have only been taught to look directly at the Tarot and the information it does give in a reading, and that in my mind is sufficiently wonderful as to throw people off of looking at anything else. But once this skill of looking behind the cards is developed, whole vistas open up and the person becomes less concerned about reading the cards correctly, and more enthralled with where the process will take you. Okay Tarot, what do you have for me today?

This of course, will have the additional bonus of increasing your reading abilities a thousand fold, whatever that might mean for you, and if that is all a person wants to do, that is quite fine, but it is also a nice bonus that to get to that you have to receive the other, and that is a gentle gift that the Tarot offers.

Space

The first process implication, and maybe one of the strongest to this day, at least for me, was the identification of how much space we don’t have between the experience itself and the meaning we assign to it. Most of us have none. We see a frown on someone’s face, and that has meaning for us. We get fired, and that has meaning. We have an altercation with the boss at work, or with a friend, and that has meaning. Specifically, we filter the experience through our already in place immovable and seemingly permanent filter that we call our personality, and experience the emotional jolt that moves us into a subsequent reaction, and the collection of all of this activity happens so blindingly fast that we don’t often break it down into its component parts, and simply experience the cycle as reality. This is understandable, and again, there may not be much that we want or can do against it without a great deal of work, and even then we many times try to change our reality without really being aware of our intention, and this leads us most of the time into another version of the same problem. But we should consider breaking this down, whether or not we can change it, if for no other reason than to get to know our internal world. Since most of reality takes place inside of our head, it is worth looking at in other words.

Does that mean that whatever we think about becomes our reality? I think that it is way more complicated than that, and both sides of the story need to be consistently experimented with for all of it to be of practical value. Bad things happen, jobs change, people are sick and die, economic factors influence our choices, and to imply that all of that is inside of our head or under our control is not only impractical, it is condescending and most of the time, aggravating and mean.

So, when we look at the space between the reality of what happened in the external world, and the meaning we assign to it, we are not doing so to imply “and therefore you have control over it” but rather as a chemist would begin to learn the periodic tables. It might not lead to experiments, it is just learning the building blocks according to a theoretical model that the Tarot implies as part of the information that may one day lead to a fuller experience or mastery over this complex set of external events and internal firings that we call reality. That’s all.

The tricky thing with the Tarot is that it forces us into a reverse process and that is hard to understand. In other words, in our daily life, something happens, we assign meaning to it, and then experience it, all at the drop of a hat. With the Tarot, we ask a question, spread the cards, and then scramble to assign meaning to things that we may or may not have experienced. It is the reverse of the process, and this is important to know because it shows that the way that we experience reality in our daily lives is not as set in stone as we might have imagined. It can’t be if we can reverse the process with a simple pack of 78 cards. Right?

Meaning

When we ask a question or make an inquiry, we are focusing on our intention. We are open to how it might look in the spread, and then we make our predictions etc. What if we were as easily able to do that with our lives in general? What if we became aware of the space between the event and the meaning we assigned to it? What if we were able to separate those process into their individual parts, and not let them run on automatic as if we had no control over them? For example, your spouse comes home and sets something that normally would trigger an argument, but it doesn’t because you are used to being curious and controlling the meaning that you assign to the normal triggers? What if instead of knowing for sure what he or she meant by it, you honestly experienced, that just like with a Tarot card, you might be honing in on one possible meaning, but probably not, and you took it in the context of the situation just like you trained yourself to do with a card spread, and assigned other meanings to it? What if instead of your spouse controlling the intention, you already had an intention when it comes to her, and filtered most every kind of contact with her through that filter? What would the results look like now? How much of the relationship is actually experienced through the meaning you assigned, and how much of that is actually subject to your change?

Intention

Of course, treading onto this territory sounds a lot like ignoring reality and putting blinders on, and so at first it is wise not to experiment to often. You may inadvertently use the information to further avoid or displace yourself with whatever you want to call reality, and that is not the goal when you first start to study. Just continue to observe, become increasingly curious, and don’t worry about how much seems to be under your control, and how much seems not to be. Remember, the reality we experience is so individual that rushing to conclusions about it right off will only have the effect of ceasing study, and you need to get a feel for it. So do I, it is a never-ending process. Intention is a powerful filter, and can route most of your experience around your reality in a way that truly feels magical, and this knowledge is perhaps one of the greatest things the Tarot teaches us.

Of course, the Tower teaches us that no matter how good we become at finding, sustaining, and manipulating the meaning we assign to reality, there are truly things that happen in our external world that are out of our control. That is a subject for a different time.

I look forward to your feedback.

Jeff

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.

Intentionally Surprised

Moving further behind the scenes, I realize that it is not the content of the book, what makes me excited is that it is contact from a friend, which ironically will probably make me love the material even if normally it is not something I would pick off of the shelf for myself. Oh come on, you know that is the way it is. When your favorite author starts writing duds, don’t you give his/her latest flop way more attention than you would someone you don’t have that connection with?  What is important is that someone felt that they could offer soothing, sent the intention out in a way that also includes randomness (which is the most important factor in the high art of play) and offered the book as an external manifestation of his intent. The book itself is unimportant.

Which of Course Leads To the Tarot

Nothing that I can think of us displays the randomness of our external events better than the Tarot, and much of the time because of how we are trained, we use the display to try and take the randomness out of it, which may not be the most important use of it for ourselves anyway. It is obvious to me how much we need chance, play, and something in our lives that we cannot control, but much of the time seek and struggle to avoid that randomness in our never-ending quest for surety in all of the wrong places. What we need more of is release from what we think our lives have to look like to provide life energy, when the single greatest source of life energy seems to come up again and again when you let go and let things flow your way. It also seems to come in the same way when we send surprise intentions out to each other in random acts of play.

How this relates specifically to the appearance of the Aces in your daily spread is the subject of an up and coming blog. Thank you for dropping in, if your life is dismally free of surprises and play right now, please do yourself a favor and arrange to let go so that some may come your way. And if you have a similar story I would love to hear it.

Jeff

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.

Spread

When we look at our daily spread, we are viewing a composite and instant picture of a vast moving consciousness that connects us all, and gives a snapshot of what the evolution looks like for us personally. As soon as you see it, of course, frozen in your nine of ten cards (or one), it has moved on. Some of the information will seem like stuff you can do something about, some may indicate hints of what is going to happen to you no matter what, and some may just be commentary. But all of it has to do with your beliefs, and the not-so-subtle message is that it is all there, spread out before you, and you now have some distance from it to decide what to do.

Which Means

Which means that despite whatever message or information a spread gives you, the act of doing a spread day in and day out is teaching you indirectly that the major source of energy and power for transformation is the growing awareness that almost everything in our lives is a behavioral or emotional reaction to a belief, and though we may feel quite justifiably that we are in the vice grips of external circumstances that we have no influence over, it is probably more a matter of what we believe, and by practicing indirectly proven relief and freedom from those beliefs (every time we do a spread) we are increasing our potential ability to transform our outside circumstances in ways we never thought possible. Because the results are also external, we may experience these changes as luck, blessing, or synchronicity.

Spend some time, the next time you do a reading for yourself, to appreciate that no matter what it says to you, you are strengthening the ability to remove yourself from your beliefs, no matter how solid, and this is something that may come in very handy if and when the outside world gives you a roll.

Take good care.

Let me be blunt and get this over with quickly. People do not come to you for advice. Do you really think that people want a reading from you because of what you advise them to do? How could this be?

Most people know what they should do. One of the common reasons people come to a Tarot reader is to find out about their relationship. They want to know whether or not the relationship they are in is going to work, or why it is stuck, or what to do to create a feeling of excitement again. Sometimes they want to know if romance is on the horizon, of if the new person they met is right for them, something like that. So you lay out the cards, get the basic situation, and tell them where the energy needs to be put to move things along in a way that feels good for them. For example, you may see a three of swords in the past and a reversed three of pentacles in the present and tell them that getting over a past heartache is keeping them from doing the work that they need to do to be present with the person they are currently interested in. You may advise them to do the necessary grieving (for whatever reason they are not, according to other cards in other positions) to clear the past that they are hanging onto in order to be present and attentive to the person in question.

They are astounded, of course, at the accuracy of your reading, and they should be. If you are a disciplined and trained Tarot reader, you should expect, because the cards work just like they said they would, that you will produce the effect of blowing your client’s socks off every time you do a reading. But do you think that the advice based on their reading is what they want? Listen, by the time they get to you they already know what to do and don’t need you for that. If a person is withdrawn, and waiting for someone to come into their life, they already know what to do. They already know that they need to get over that part of their personality that keeps them afraid and isolated, and to get back out where there are people, initiate a few contacts, and let other people connect. They already know, if their relationship is constricted and boring, to move energy around in this domain or that, start doing more things, get over the past hurt, or in some cases to let the relationship go because it hasn’t met their needs for an extraordinary amount of time.

Doing a good reading is great. Balancing what to tell them from the reading, offering suggestions intuitively and ethically as to what to do with the reading and what it says, according to your own understanding, is an inevitable part of what is expected. But don’t kid yourself  into thinking that is why people come to you for readings. If we are to believe that people come to us primarily for advice, we have to con ourselves into believing that people follow advice in the first place.

Test this out on your own with your own situation. Isn’t it true that you have a good handle on what you should do in virtually every area of your life, and probably aren’t doing most of it? Maybe you know that you should lose weight, maybe you know that you are dissatisfied with your job, maybe you know that your relationship needs work. Pick an area where there is a deficit. Do you really need outside information as to what you should do to make the situation better? I didn’t think so. Most of the problems that we have are not a matter of now knowing what to do. Most of us don’t listen to that much advice from outside sources anyway, even ones that we admire.

The same is true when you do a reading for someone. Sure, they may be so startled by the accuracy of the reading that they may listen to what you have to say because they figure they should, but most of the time they won’t, and you shouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about that. They come to you for something, don’t they? It really couldn’t be because of what you advise them to do, because none of us really want that, even if we were inclined to listen to it. We should be excited not to have to worry about that anymore, and we should be equally excited to focus on or discover what it is that they come to us for. In other words, we should spend more time giving our clients a better product.

The other concern is that advice of any kind doesn’t come from the Tarot. When we do a spread for someone, we assess what is going on in their lives (mostly according to our memories and our own experience) and then we put together something that we think they should do about it. We give them not only where we think the block is, we can’t help but offer friendly suggestions about how to move through or avoid those blocks. This is fine, but we should realize that has nothing to do with the Tarot, that is what we would do about it, and why do we think that has any application to another person? What if you draw the reversed Hermit in the present position, see that the person is unduly withdrawn. You check around the spread and see a four of cups and further assume that the person is blocked because they are not “out there in the community”? So you encourage the person to re-establish contacts, get out more, and start integrating back socially. What if the person is a serial killer or some other kind of predator? The Tarot will indeed give you an in-depth glance at the client’s situation, but could advice really be something that we can pick up on? When you add to this that most people have a set idea of what they are going to do before they come to you no matter what you say, can we really state that any kind of advice is the main thing the Tarot is meant to be used for?

That is not to say that a few well-placed, open-ended suggestions don’t have a place in working with clients. But that can’t be what people mostly come to us for. Besides, we are not short of sources for advice these days. There are mental health professionals, friends, self-help books, audios, videos, and enough on-line resource to sink a battleship. People already know this, so again, it should dawn on us that they are seeking us for other reasons.

Personally I believe that it is a good possibility that they come to us for a moment of magic in their existence. We are so embalmed by what we think of as the real world, with all of its concerns, stresses, and stimulation that we become entranced by it. We tend to think of it as the only world. We let it take over our lives, take away our sense of wonder, and replace it with a non-stop roller coaster of ever changing economies, job situations, and ever-increasing pace that we have lost the art of cultivating our inner sense of creativity and wonder. More so today, with what most would agree is an increasing sense of uncertainty and rapid change. We lose sight of the wonder and mystery that life has to offer us if we would only stop once in awhile and engage it.

People come to Tarot readers primarily for a reminder and an experience of this mystery. They want proof that it still exists. They want something to be awed about, something that is more powerful than the latest electronic wonder or CGI effect in the latest movie. They have let go of most of their meaningful human connection and want proof of some kind that we are more than a reduction of our parts. We are a race of beings who are connected at the deepest levels, and a good Tarot reading will put a person squarely into the middle of this experience. When someone experiences a good reading, one that comes from a studied, disciplined, reader, they experience a moment of real magic. They experience evidence that the world we have created, this high-paced, over-stimulated, information frenzy that is burning us out and isolating us a break-neck pace, is not all that there is.

People will rarely tell you this though. They will fumble with a question to ask you, even though they probably don’t care about either the question or what you have in terms of advice to offer them. They want you to be right. They want an accurate reading, because they want to feel connected to you. They want that little bit of sparkle in their lives, sparkle that doesn’t come from their IPOD or television or latest innovation in the computer gaming world. They want to be reminded that there is more than the world they are currently burying themselves in. They don’t know what to do with that experience, because they haven’t been told what it means. We don’t generally know what to do past the one-time accurate reading because we haven’t been trained to look at anything else either.

For right now, we have no real choice to give them what they ask for according to what they think the Tarot experiences’ value is. People are trained to believe that you ask a Tarot reader a question because you really don’t know what to do about a particular situation. We are obliged to spread the cards, answer as best we can, and maybe offer a few suggestions. That is all for now until the true experience of the connection offered by the Tarot is more thoroughly explored.

We can, however, start exploring it ourselves. We can examine what it actually is that our clients come to us for. We don’t have to tell them, they can appreciate what we provide for whatever reasons they want. But as we watch what our clients come to us to experience, we will find that it has little to do with information and more about the whole experience itself. As we begin to examine this more honestly and less arrogantly, we will begin to naturally explore ways to enhance the product that people are actually buying from us. This is our obligation, not theirs.

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.

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….

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.

The most powerful substance has to be the internal idea, the energy that formed what was later manifested. It follows logically, doesn’t it, that the one that was the raw material of the other has to be the more substantive? But, we have it exactly backwards. As soon as our internal vision is manifested, we begin to believe that we don’t have control of it anymore, that it is something other than us, or something that we did. Jobs are the common example of this, but we believe this about relationships, health, and meaning in our lives.

We get caught in two basic traps. Having externalized our vision, let’s say for a career, we work at it for several years and then become bored. We have invested a lot into it, maybe have some investment in our work, but we can feel it close in around us. Forgetting that we created it out of the stuff inside of us, we do not believe that we can go to work with the same stuff to change it, to re-create it. A manifested thought form somehow seems more powerful than an un-manifested one, but that simply cannot be true. The manifested dream, because it is visible, crystallized, in front of our face, seems somehow more real than the stuff that it came from. Yet that is not true.

So, we suffer unnecessarily, spend another twenty years doing something we hate because we have to be practical. We have invested in a job, house, relationship, or dream after all, and now that it is manifested we have to stick with it, that is the responsible thing to do. Or so we believe.

It is hard when things go badly. Finances take a turn for the worse, things that once seemed stable and predictable are suddenly in turmoil. The future is uncertain. The economy become scary, and we forget that in our own lives, we created the whole thing in the first place. We become overly invested in our creation, we believe that somehow we are being controlled by it, and it doesn’t seem practical to begin re-creating, to begin using the same energy manipulation and technique that gave us what we are now so afraid to lose.

Spend some time, no matter how scary things seem to you right now, looking back at how you got to the “good times” that you are now clinging to. Didn’t you have a dream, an image charged with emotion and passion, that led you to the right behaviors and circumstances that established your external life in the first place? We are interesting creatures, we are manifesting machines, and yet as soon as we produce the external shell of what we envisioned, we forget the actual process that brought it about in the first place.

If you are in a tumultuous place, scared of the future, your job, or your relationship, it is a sign that you have been running on automatic for a long time, and have come to believe that you don’t have control. You have abandoned the Magician inside of you, although at one point in your life you used that energy to create your present life out of thin air.

If you are currently in the middle of massive, scary, Death Card, kinds of change, it is very difficult to reestablish your connection with the power that you once knew. You may never have established a firm connection to the process in the first place. You may think that taking the time to slow down, breath, and reflecting on what brings about success and manifestation is a waste of time. After all, you are under the gun, and you have to take action. It may not seem practical to begin to look at your beliefs, what you would really like to create, or what direction you may want to go, especially when all of your external circumstances seem to be in an emergent status. But it is the most practical thing to do. It is what is needed to bring everything back into control.

No matter where you are at with your job or whatever is currently unpredictable in your life, follow the chain of events back to the original creative point, and by this I mean specifically that time when you focused on your vision, charged it with intention, energy, and passion, and began to take the initial action to manifest your dream into the external world. Don’t worry about how you are going to get out of your current mess, we will take up that discussion in the next few installments. It is important right now for you to get a handle on the facts, especially if you feel that you are being controlled by the very things you created in the first place. There is a lot of work to do on this end to bring things back to equilibrium, but the first step is to reestablish how you created the whole thing in the first place. Far more than trading action for wish-fulfillment, this is a re-examination of the facts.

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.

It’s Understandable

Tarot readers work hard to be good at what they do. The experience of doing a reading is intoxicating. Maybe we are not looking behind the scenes at the process because what we do focus on is so amazing. This is understandable. If you ever have received a powerful reading, you know that it is an encounter that is not soon forgotten. If you are a skilled reader, you know that creating that encounter is its own reward and there may not be the desire or impulse to look for more.

The Vastness Behind The Tarot

Or maybe underneath the Tarot. In a way, there are two Tarots. There is the reading and the cards themselves. This is the part we are familiar with. In fact, when we think of the Tarot, it is generally all we are familiar with. The underlying current, the metaphysics that create the possibility of doing an dynamic reading, is largely unexplored. What do I mean? Here are some things that the Tarot implies, at least to me. The archetypes, represented by the cards, respond deeply to everyone. No matter how many decks and different representations of these archetypes, they resonate with a continuity and accuracy that demonstrates a foundational sameness with all of us, no matter how unique and colorful the different manifestation of those energies are. In other words, the fact that there are so many varieties of archetypal representations yet an orthodoxy in their meaning, hints at some pretty powerful statements of connection between all of us as humans.

Process Skills

It is exciting when you observe how many interpersonal, reflective, and intuitive skills we have developed in order to produce a good Tarot reading. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, there is a lot that is right about it, and as I have already mentioned, doing a dynamic reading is a worthy and satisfying application of those skills. But we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t also look at the larger picture; the view of what is going on from outside of the arena of the reading itself, and work on applying them to our various life situations. The Tarot points to an underlying perspective and power, a way of interfacing with the world, that is unique in its perspective, as deep as any other philosophical view or system of personal development, and accessible to anyone who wants to pick up a deck.