Some thoughts on the nature of Card Reading//

I just wonder whether this is right forum...? =_=

Whatever

The nature of reading. (It sounds so magnificent! >_<)

I think most of you tarot readers (not necessalily tarot, however... )

would think Reading as Having a Council.

That is to say, most of you would use it to know yourself better or to find other aspects of some incidents. etc etc.
(Hmm I do not think I expressed the idea well, but I can't write it otherwise lol)

That is also to say, most of you would not use it to get very specific information of future, and would not see Reading as "fortune telling".

There's likely little "Sinister" ideas - Reading Tarot is safe and fun.

Sure I do not know much tarot readers, so my thought of "most" reader's inclination is just a guesswork - but that's not important part so let us just assume such readers exist

Till very recent time, I agreed of such notions.

But lately, a curious thought just arised

Some of you would have heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

That is to say, we can't know both position and momentum of an electron exactly at the same time : when we try to find one of those two properties of the electron, our trying would alter another property, thus unabling us to know both at the same time.
(There's more subtle and deeper interpretation of that Principle, but those explanations is beyond me lol)

and there's another scientific stuff,

Cat in the box Experiment.
(There's another official name for this experiment.. but I just forgot it TT)

Maybe some of you would reject this Expe. as cruel, but please note that is is Virtual, and based on Thought, and is not really done

a cat is imprisoned in a box which is obscure.

and there's also toxic gas enclosed in a bottle.

bottle will be broken Randomly (using isotopes - but that's not important part)

So, the Observer outside would not know whethere the cat is dead or alive.

the Cat is said to be Entangled, and if we open the box and check the cat,

Entanglement would be broken, and we would surely know the state of the cat.

Such notions I listed is that of Physics,

and I do NOT insist that such micro notions Should have something to do with our macro world.

However, it is still interesting to apply those notions to Tarot Reading.

Some of questions readed by Tarot are surely focusing on Future, which is obscure to us.

Then, isn't it possible that we Influence the undetermined future by our act of Reading, as we would alter electron when we try to specify its properties?
Whether it be good or bad would depend on circumstances, and still there would be some modifications.
(The most simple example of this would be -
Mind's subtle changes caused by reading : that would likely alter the future)

And, isn't it also possible that we sometimes "fix" the future, as the state of the cat would be determined whether dead or not at the moment box opened?
There were lots of Possiblities, but by our Observing, those possiblities shrank into one.... and most likely the "fixed" result would have someting to do with the card we drawed.




What do you think?

I myself do not firmly beielive such notions yet...

I didn't think over them much.

Or, is it widely known one? =o=;;;;;;;;;;

Am I just being redundant? lol

The old poison the cat in the box trick, eh? I must admit that I don't entirely get it, because I find it hard to believe that the cat is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box and observes one way or the other. That's how I'm supposed to interperate "entanglement", no? Maybe I'm missing the point...

The point I do get (I think) is that the merely observing something changes it. And, although the the Uncertainty Principle and the dead (or not) cat deal with the present, I can see how you've applied it to divination and fortune telling.

Manjusri - "Then, isn't it possible that we Influence the undetermined future by our act of Reading, as we would alter electron when we try to specify its properties?"

I think so, and I think it's part of that self fulfilling prophesy trap. Yes, there are many (infinite?) possiblilities for an outcome when we ask about the future and we might "fix" the future by drawing a card to represent it. But I think this has more to do with something else, I'm not sure what to call it, than physics.

Let's say you ask me for a reading about the possibility of a promotion at work. I pull a card that I interperate as meaning a promotion is on the way. Depending on how much stock you put in Tarot readers, this card and my interperatation might push you into staying with a company where you were unhappy and unappreciated, when I failed to see the card that pointed to a new company and better potential. Another reader might have caught it. Observation? This is why I'm not much for trying to predict the future anyway.

I'm straying a little, so let me try to get back. Entanglement. Again I don't understand how the the present can be "entangled", just 'cause we can't see the cat don't mean it ain't dead, but I can see how the future might be. It's all very interesting, but sometimes too complicated for me to find the words to dicuss it.

Here's my last nonsensical thought. Is anything ever not being observed? The cat would be aware if it was alive. Thought experiment = koan = riddle = migraine = some crazy Jedi training?

Peace,
April

The title of the experiment is Schroedinger's Cat. You are right in the sense that it has relevance here, but IMHO only in the very limited sense that the tarot gives us information which is very cryptic in nature, and we need it to be validated by actual events. It is necessary to open the box to find out whether the cat is dead. I do a lot of experiments which relate to my prime-number method of divination, but which are unverifiable by normal means (e.g. was I XYZ in a past life?). Similar "party trick" kind of demonstrations have shown that my premonitions/verifications are reasonably accurate, sometimes almost scarily so (see below).

WARNING - THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT TAROT PER SE, BUT STEPS INTO MORE PHILOSOPHICAL/METAPHYSICAL IDEAS ABOUT THE FUTURE.

I had a premonition - not tarot based - that an MP would die round about mid-May. The idea that I caused the MP's death is too freaky and not what I wanted to happen at all. I would never wish someone dead and never want to. Rather I believed that I somehow "saw" the future; I didn't know who or when or how, but I prophesied a death and a death is what I got.

To some extent, yes, we can affect the future by our actions and responses to everyday life (in the idea of promotion at work, we would do anything we could do to make that come about other than just look at cards). However, since the Tarot can predict the future - albeit in a fashion as cryptic as the quatrains of Nostradamus, who deliberately made them obscure so as not to alarm anyone or think he was doing the devil's work - then we can logically assume that the future is fixed, and anything we do is predestined by a higher power.

Otherwise, in a second example, how would my spirit guide have told me quite clearly to keep my eye open for a paper issued a month later, and then on the day in question happen to have me bump into someone reading the newspaper and open at the exact same page that I needed to see? Back in March or so I quite firmly told someone that if I need to hear news, I'll hear it in time to make use of it. I quit reading newspapers or watching TV and got on with my life.

Not only did I hear the one piece of news I needed back then, the way I came into contact with the paper was such that it was a series of "random" events: I went home from a course early because I suddenly felt tired (probably from having to get up earlier than normal); I caught the "right" train and the "right" bus, and sat in the right seat on the bus to see the newspaper I needed to see. In other words a chain of events that was predicted a month earlier but given to me in a cryptic clue that helped me, in a sense, to see the truth of the situation through the veil of lies that the media fabricated. A still earlier prediction showed me the date Thursday, 1 June through a song recorded probably several decades ago, as significant in my journey to the top of the Beanstalk which I have visualised. On June 1 I waited for the ceiling to fall in - metaphorically - bit of an anti-climax; however I've just heard what actually happened and it cut another hole in the spider's web.

Also I spoke to someone who gave me a piece of not-so-great news...and asked for help in dealing with it. Writing the post has shown me more than anything that the spider's web of this particular problem is dissolving. So maybe my positive energies (and writing a letter to the man who wrote the article enclosing my thesis which he validated for me) did contribute to the situation in linear time; but in the grand scheme of things, stepping outside of time, we can see that the whole thing was predestined somewhere or other.

Of course, it is always helpful to tell little porkie pies about the mutability of the future to people who might think that this justifies, say, not trying hard in reality to get that promotion and expecting it just to fall into their lap. "Trust in Allah but tie up your camel" is the operative word (or words) in this case.

Crowqueen said:

Also I spoke to someone who gave me a piece of not-so-great news...and asked for help in dealing with it. Writing the post has shown me more than anything that the spider's web of this particular problem is dissolving. So maybe my positive energies (and writing a letter to the man who wrote the article enclosing my thesis which he validated for me) did contribute to the situation in linear time; but in the grand scheme of things, stepping outside of time, we can see that the whole thing was predestined somewhere or other.

Of course, it is always helpful to tell little porkie pies about the mutability of the future to people who might think that this justifies, say, not trying hard in reality to get that promotion and expecting it just to fall into their lap. "Trust in Allah but tie up your camel" is the operative word (or words) in this case.

Click to expand...

I'm probably straying too much again, but this is why the ideas of fate and destiny just depress me (so refusing to believe makes me feel better). What IS the point of taking any action if the future is predetermined?

If Allah wants me to lose my camel, if it's already been decided, what would be the point of asking the Tarot how to keep my camel safe?

This all reminds me of something I meant to bring up before. How can we tell the difference between, "the cards that come up determine the future" (the effects of observation) and "the future determines what cards come up" (predestination)? Is there a difference?

Peace,
April

April said:

I'm probably straying too much again, but this is why the ideas of fate and destiny just depress me (so refusing to believe makes me feel better). What IS the point of taking any action if the future is predetermined?

If Allah wants me to lose my camel, if it's already been decided, what would be the point of asking the Tarot how to keep my camel safe?

This all reminds me of something I meant to bring up before. How can we tell the difference between, "the cards that come up determine the future" (the effects of observation) and "the future determines what cards come up" (predestination)? Is there a difference?

Peace,
April

Click to expand...

No, no, all to the good. Stray as much as you like! This is what the forum is here for!

I understand your reasoning quite well. A lot of books written by psychics, not just with reference to the tarot, shy away from making blunt statements like I made, because the fear is genuine: that a belief in destiny and fate is often taken the wrong way. But I have had too many experiences now to believe that the future is anything but defined; it is just that our perception of it is very imperfect. Just like the old saying: if I knew next week's lottery numbers I would be living in the Caribbean! That's people's perceptions of psychics: that they must be a fraud because if they really could see the future they would make a lot of money out of it. In fact psychics who have tried this have often had it taken from them in mindshattering ways by spirit and some have even been deprived of their abilities; thus to find out how to use psychic talents, including tarot, responsibly, is the key to developing them in the way they were intended to be used.

The thing is, a lot of people out there don't believe in fate/destiny, at least not any more. Also it is very difficult to divine the future without expending effort or to understand messages even when they occur - even tarot can only hint at the answers using a kind of code - so that keeps us guessing and keeps us acting like normal human beings so that the universe is "shuffled" enough to keep acting and going on.

For example that psychic A reads the future and finds out someone called Bell will be president. Since there is no politician by that name active in the hierarchy at that moment, she assumes that she has misheard the name and that she actually means Ball. Now, five years or so later after a book is published with that prediction in it, a young man called Bell enters Congress and rises through the ranks, such that thirty years afterwards he is in a position to run for President. The psychic was right, but since she heard the name and was unable to attach it to a face, she assumed she'd heard Ball's name instead.

Psychic B, twenty years later, has a very clear dream where she sees Bell, now a probable candidate for President should he choose to run, outside the White House. Thus, she believes that the right Mr. Bell will be President. She is over the moon when Bell is selected by his party as their candidate and storms ahead in the polls. Psychic A passes over into spirit somewhere around this time, so is no longer able to write books of predictions.

Now, say Bell loses the election. OK, the future isn't as determined as we thought. But now, say, the party can't find a decent enough candidate and Bell stands again (similar to what happened with Richard Nixon). In the hiatus period, people are ridiculing Psychic B and the psychic is at a loss to explain to others how she messed up. But then she remembers she had a dream or a premonition or looked into her crystal ball - and spots something she had overlooked - suggesting that Bell would have to try twice, or that he is standing over the (metaphorically) dead body of the colleague who took over from him as the party's hopeful but didn't get on with the public the way Bell did, forcing the party to reselect him for the next election.

In a book I read printed way before that date, someone wrote that "a walk-in" president would win the 2004 US presidential election. OK, so Bush won it, and he had to fight quite hard against Kerry, it wasn't a foregone conclusion even as the results were coming in. BUT "Walk-In" - Bush's middle name is Walker. The clue is cryptic enough to keep us guessing, and thereby keep us acting, and anyway many people involved in politics, particularly in the UK, are usually sceptics or rationalists and don't believe in fate; this is what keeps them going at least. There is no tarot card which specifically relates to the problems of camels and ropes (unless they have published a Middle Eastern theme deck). So the tarot reading with the question: "should I tie up my camel"? will necessarily give us a cryptic enough prediction that it is better in these circumstances to err on the side of caution and tie up the camel.

Similarly the British psychic and tarot-reader Kris Sky remarks that she read one young man who had been feeling under-the-weather and had had scary thoughts about death and dying. Sky read him, and told him unequivocally - as she was used to doing - that unless he chose between one or other of his two girlfriends, he would die. In the end the young man died - not because he wilfully tried to prove her wrong, after all he had been having premonitions of his own death - but because he just couldn't choose which girl to settle down with, and - irony of ironies - had a fatal crash on the way from one to the other on a wet night. There's a twist in this tale: when I read it, I see the young man as tall and having red hair in a kind of mane like a lion's. If you hadn't already guessed (due to my shocking know-nothing-ledge of US politics), the Ball/Bell situation, transplanted to the UK, is remarkably similar to the situation I am in. The dream I had, almost eighteen months ago (shortly after the 2004 US election, where I did get the answer clearly in a dream even though for me it was the "wrong" one, given that I wanted Kerry to win in order to set the ball rolling over here), was of the young man in question and "Bell"; I don't know what Kris Sky's client looked like in real life, but the red-head I see in him is definitely the young upstart that Bell was standing over. To make matters more simple, I had no idea about who the redhead was; I had heard of him but didn't take much notice of him at the time. So of course I overlooked him and poured my energies into "Bell"'s first election campaign as party leader. But I am at a loss to explain to my colleagues why I am not supporting Redhead - who is doing well in the polls at the moment but whose "team" couldn't govern their way out of a paper bag and pose no long-term threat to the current government and whose spokesman was taken to the cleaners on national TV for saying that he supported the government wholeheartedly when the government is slightly less popular than a bag of rotten eggs! The only question is "when?" and, since I am involved in politics myself, "how?", on which the cards remain cryptic to the point of obtuseness.

Thus clues about the future are presented in such a way as to keep us on our toes and on the look-out for ways to work in the world. Lazy people who believe in destiny and fate are one thing, but the world is such nowadays that not many do, believing it to be a way of keeping people in their place. Those who - in the words of someone else about me while I was becoming aware of a talent for predictive tarot - "surf the ways of time" are presented with the information in a deliberately cryptic form in order to allow them to live as normal a normal life as possible.

That's just the way I see it, basing my ideas on a long history (10+ years) of precognitive dreams presented in metaphorical rather than literal form (e.g. me trying to kill a bear which bled over my bed: I had no idea until the actual day it came true that the bear - an archetypal symbol for mothers or maternal issues - represented my mother, and that I was fighting her; the blood turned out to be the ketchup she was eating!; I actually had a clue on the day itself when I bought an oracle deck and had a flash of insight when I turned over one card with a picture of a bear on it).

In fact my frustration comes at having all these cryptic clues but not being able to know when they will come true, thus making me look silly in front of non-psychic/metaphysical/tarot colleagues who treat me in the same way the Ancient Greeks treated Cassandra - for whom being psychic was actually a curse.

Sorry for all this. I did politics and philosophy at university, which might show quite clearly in the above post.

Wow, long passages +.+

Hmm, to April.

Entanglement is *very* complicated phenomena,
(I myself just scarcely understand it)

and can be applied to only minuscule "quantum"s.
(at least, as far as I understand )

the Cat Experiment was just intended to show general ideas,

and my thoughts were also inspired by those general ideas solely,

excluding physics/mathe complications

And I think you got the idea (don't mind cat too much)

Maybe I abused the term, but I just wanted to describe the situation in a single word.

you said,

"Yes, there are many (infinite?) possiblilities for an outcome when we ask about the future and we might "fix" the future by drawing a card to represent it. But I think this has more to do with something else, I'm not sure what to call it, than physics."

I think that was what I meant, "something else"

You raised an example concerning Promotion.

In this case, we could see the cause and effect rather clearly.

But I think in many other cases, relations would be blurred because so many ones are there, so complicated to be spied by our perception...

and moreover, there can be even "Mystical" movings

not linear cause and effect, but mysterious coincidences just happening.

and, that, has something to do with Crowqueen's threads >_<

Thank you for specifying the name of Exp.

and also, your episodes are very rich and interesting... 0.0
(no need for sorry Politics and Phil. What a nice combination )

But, as April said,

:::"the cards that come up determine the future" (the effects of observation) and "the future determines what cards come up" (predestination)::::

(by the way, April, that's a nice point there's difference, yet I just don't know how to distinguish between two)

Maybe your act of divination altered the future... fixing it.
(your prime number systems)

Yet, your premonitions - including death, politics...

do suggest otherwise - already fixed, predestined fate.

(I think there's much difference between deliberate divinations and premonitions which come of its own - that's why I agree with you)


I rather inclined toward alternative... >_<

Yeah, there exists Fate, and when we ask it to tarot, fixed card would appear, and also, the predestined fate can influence our dream, or give premonitions to us.

Yet, the details of fate can be varying - One was destined to be elected, but how much vote he would get, it would vary. (most likely according to his archivement)

One was destined to be dead, but "how" can vary - one can crash with car while stealing someting, or while just strolling around.

That's partly why we can't be lazy just believing in future,
and why April can relax some

(Hmmmm I have a faint feeling that I read similar notions in some books... However.)

There's also undetermined futures - it would be determined by solely our doings when the time come.

Both varying details of destined Fate and undetermined future sometimes can be influenced by deliberate act of Tarot Reading.

Do you like this idea?





Ohhhhh I'm just getting feelings that I wrote so clumsily =_=

But now this is the best I can manage =_-

Maybe I can add some another later

Crowqueen said:

No, no, all to the good. Stray as much as you like! This is what the forum is here for!

Click to expand...

Actually this forum is TALKING TAROT which means that it is for Tarot discussions - so it would be good if we could keep this discussion about tarot.

Thank you

Sulis - co-moderator - Talking Tarot

Hmm, seeing Sulis's post,

Now I just came to wonder more whether my original thread was appropriate here...? -_- =_=

April said:

The old poison the cat in the box trick, eh? I must admit that I don't entirely get it, because I find it hard to believe that the cat is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box and observes one way or the other. That's how I'm supposed to interperate "entanglement", no? Maybe I'm missing the point...

Click to expand...

No, you are exactly getting the point! The thought experiment of Schrodinger's Cat was intended to point out the problems in going from the subatomic to the normal world scale, or as Wikipedia's article puts it:"Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems"

I'm not sure it is much use in helping us to understand how tarot works.

For myself, I believe that tarot works by using the meaning-making, story-telling parts of our brain and not by any metaphysical or quantum-mechanical means. (Try saying that when you're drunk!)