Richard
Of course. It is a feeling, a subjective impression. Perfectly normal (I hope). I feel that a glass of good wine is a "friendly" thing. Although it is merely fermented grape juice, it seems to have an inherent personality.
I actually don't believe tarot works anymore
Of course. It is a feeling, a subjective impression. Perfectly normal (I hope). I feel that a glass of good wine is a "friendly" thing. Although it is merely fermented grape juice, it seems to have an inherent personality.
linnie
I hear what you're saying, lovely Padma... My impression is that the cards, whilst inanimate themselves, hold the energy and impressions of whoever created them. If someone was deeply in touch with the meaning of the card, and had the capacity to imbue the card, through its artwork and overall feel, with that impression, then the card acts as a very strong messenger of the energy behind that impression or understanding.
I know that when I created my deck, the first 59 just flew out of me without much input from myself, but I was in a space where I had asked Spirit to show me a way of acting for the higher good in whatever way came to me. It's my belief that Spirit and I worked together on those cards...
In the last cards, I understood the need to create cards that answered specific questions, and a very wise friend suggested I meditate on relevant themes for the images to come through. I held the concept in my mind and my heart, and asked for the most perfect symbols, and they came.. One even came against my will, and made no sense to me...
So, I totally get that the cards can carry a very real energy... I just believe that the creator drew from that energy (literally), and the reader again loses him/herself in that energy and allows it to act as a springboard for one's inner knowing...
They may be inanimate, and I don't really concern myself with whether they do or don't work, but they are an awesome tool to hone and connect with one's intuition. IMHO
Psychometry exercises show that inanimate objects can be used to connect with the energy associated with that object, through impressions etc... I'd find it more difficult to read with a beer bottle top ... Just mePS my brother used to always say that beer caps would do just as well as cards, and he was right, as well. If you have the intuitive ability to read, you can read anything at all. I have even read a person's sunglasses, gathering the energy of the person from them. So I am not all woo-woo about the tarot. But the decks still seem to have a life of their own, call it what you will.
There are as many ways as there are people
Nemia
Tarot is a tool, tarot cards are cardboard. And decks have a personality of their own because they're art. It's their Gestalt (good old Jung!) - more than just an addition of cardboard, ink and a box. They're creations that we interact with, just like with a work of art. If you've ever stood in a museum and watched people interact with sculptures of humans that are about life size or with other works of art, you know that we as humans relate to art. We also relate to nature. It's called pathetic fallacy - and I've always found that expression too negative, nearly pejorative. If I had to coin the word, I'd call it empathic projection or projective empathy...
It's perfectly possible to KNOW that the sculpture of the Apoxyomenos is just that, a sculpture, and yet to feel a deep connection with it. I greet my favorite stars when they come out in the East again, I stay up at night to say hello to Aldebaran although I know he doesn't really care.
The ability for pathetic fallacy has helped us humans survive by reading what goes on beyond our own selves. Why give names to stars and planets, trees and plants, minerals and even animals? And expressive names at that, names that compare them to other things, thus creating a net of associations between a dragon, snapdragon and the dragon Draco in the sky...
The terminology of art analysis can help us put the finger on WHY the Tarot of Saints seems cool and collected (smooth colour fields, separated by clear contours, colours with high saturation, no shadow areas, unified figurative depiction) while the Secret Tarot looks mysterious and wild (strong impasto, low saturation colours, expressive brushstrokes, lots of shadows, many spots that look nearly abstract), just as you can describe the difference between Poussin's and Rubens' art. Obviously, you can never describe the last "je ne sais quoi" of a work of art; it's visual language and you can never really translate one language into another.
A tarot deck may not be a work of art in the sense a landscape by Turner or the Hoarfrost series by Rauschenberg are, but the esoteric content, a tradition inherent in the Western culture many of us "inherited" or acquired at some point, speaks to us, too. We KNOW the elements, the archetypes, the difference between active and passive, shadow and light, we KNOW what the Sun and the Moon "mean" even before we study them. We KNOW the difference between spring and autumn. Nobody has to explain to us the difference between Taurus and Scorpio.
So I think it's perfectly valid to be aware that the real work is done by the reader AND to interact with the deck as if it had a personality of its own. IMO, pathetic fallacy is just another tool to use.
It's perfectly possible to KNOW that the sculpture of the Apoxyomenos is just that, a sculpture, and yet to feel a deep connection with it. I greet my favorite stars when they come out in the East again, I stay up at night to say hello to Aldebaran although I know he doesn't really care.
The ability for pathetic fallacy has helped us humans survive by reading what goes on beyond our own selves. Why give names to stars and planets, trees and plants, minerals and even animals? And expressive names at that, names that compare them to other things, thus creating a net of associations between a dragon, snapdragon and the dragon Draco in the sky...
The terminology of art analysis can help us put the finger on WHY the Tarot of Saints seems cool and collected (smooth colour fields, separated by clear contours, colours with high saturation, no shadow areas, unified figurative depiction) while the Secret Tarot looks mysterious and wild (strong impasto, low saturation colours, expressive brushstrokes, lots of shadows, many spots that look nearly abstract), just as you can describe the difference between Poussin's and Rubens' art. Obviously, you can never describe the last "je ne sais quoi" of a work of art; it's visual language and you can never really translate one language into another.
A tarot deck may not be a work of art in the sense a landscape by Turner or the Hoarfrost series by Rauschenberg are, but the esoteric content, a tradition inherent in the Western culture many of us "inherited" or acquired at some point, speaks to us, too. We KNOW the elements, the archetypes, the difference between active and passive, shadow and light, we KNOW what the Sun and the Moon "mean" even before we study them. We KNOW the difference between spring and autumn. Nobody has to explain to us the difference between Taurus and Scorpio.
So I think it's perfectly valid to be aware that the real work is done by the reader AND to interact with the deck as if it had a personality of its own. IMO, pathetic fallacy is just another tool to use.
midsummermagic1111
Tarot is not for everyone. I lose faith every so often as I do with God. But I always come back. And that's me. I have felt that before.. like tarot is BS. Then there are time I am knocked on the floor with how real it is. Pair that with the hidden taboo nature of the craft and it may be more sane for some people to walk away. Blessings. No judgement here. (((*.*)))
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
toadwytch
This thread was such food for thought. You guys inspire me constantly to reevaluate they way I approach things. Personally, I do think that tarot is (as many of you have already said) a wonderful tool for exploring our subconscious, whether the cards are entirely random and meaningless or not. It's about the meaning we impose on them. Consciousness in general fascinates me, but I still have trouble distilling my spirituality into a coherent form because I don't talk about it much, so please excuse the length of this. But I've always kind of thought there's a possibility of predicting the future, with tarot or with any other way of tapping into your intuition. I don't think I have the mindset to ever do it, but who knows? Someone could.
It's a wonder we're cognizant at all, but it's a necessary product of being a working system. Our atoms are grouped into cells, which interact with one another in units of organs, tissues, fluids, nerves, enzymes, and bones; living flesh that networks and communicates and adapts. As the complexity of the system increases from the smallest single-celled organism to humanity, a certain amount of coordination within the organism becomes necessary to survive, then awareness of the body’s surroundings, then the ability to analyze those surroundings and extrapolate the data of our senses to make assumptions. Once a lump of matter has begun to gather and process information, it is only a matter of time and survival before it turns its gaze inwards and wonders where it came from. We're more or less clever animals, governed by the little chemicals and electrical impulses racing around our brains, and personally, that's enough of a wonder for me. Basic biology by itself blew my mind, even when I was a kid in high school. Our bodies and brains are detailed and intricate on a level that has to be appreciated part by part, because the scale of it is too much to understand all at once.
Astronomy is kind of like that, too. When you get around to using light to calculate how far away a star is, or how big or how old or how hot, and you look at the numbers you're working with... it takes your breath away. It's all so inconceivably vast. The fact is, we're all the same stuff. We're matter, rocks and plants are matter, nebulae and planets and suns and cosmic debris are matter. And wowza, if a tiny speck like me can type out a (way-too-long-as-always) post like this thinking about my own consciousness just because my bag of blood, bones and skin needs awareness to keep walking around, I can't imagine something like the complex, dancing expanses of the universe doesn't have some sort of soul. Not narrow and focused like ours, but still an undeniable responsiveness that anyone of a spiritual bent has sensed. Like I said, I don't think I or anyone can have all the answers and anyone who claims to is delusional or a liar, but that's how I see things; that's what gives me comfort at night.
I don't believe in any sort of denominational God. If there is a God, it is the awakening of everything there is. If we're just matter, too, we must be one and the same – we simply lack the faculties to understand exactly what it is we are a part of. Eckhart Tolle said, "You are the universe, expressing itself as human for a little while." I love that. We are not reincarnated souls, briefly visiting this fleshly plane in search of some tangible enlightenment; our awareness is universal, not individual, and the only thing preventing us from that understanding is our own severely limited perspective. Our consciousness is a transitory reflection of the whole, a facet of the world in which we exist, and which we are one with by definition. When we die, our bodies will decompose, and the structure that brought us into awareness will disintegrate into dirt and grass and worms again. "You" will be gone, but atoms will always come together again in some new configuration and grant us another fleeting glimpse of the world.
Carl Jung said that "We can predict the future when we understand how the present moment evolved out of the past." It may be an incomprehensible amount of time later, but every atom in our bodies ended up here because of the way the Big Bang happened to fling it across the void. Once we launch a tennis ball into the air, we can calculate and predict its exact path if we know all the physical rules and external factors, like wind; the same goes for the way matter ended up in its present state in the universe. Even our minds, our souls, as we call them, are the product of the physical structure of our brains. A severe neurological injury can permanently change who you are, and how you change depends on what part of the brain is affected. So honestly, I'm not too sure about free will. I think we experience life as if we have free will because we experience time linearly, but our consciousness is strictly a manufactured product of matter, which ended up forming our bodies only because the laws of physics dictated it.
We make the choices we make because our brains are built that way, even if we seem to feel indecision at times. And our brains are built the way they are because of the choices our parents made, based on their own biology that they inherited from their parents. We interact with and are seemingly changed by the people around us, but their path was set by fate, too - they are in our lives because they were born to be, and the ways they affect us are no different than a meteor slamming into a planet; both were set in motion long ago. Nature and nurture are from one and the same source. I think you can trace us all the way back to the beginning of the universe long before the first cell reproduced on Earth, just like you can trace the way the stars coalesce, grow, and die so that the gases they emit can eventually join the matter of a new star. Not sure if I phrased that idea clearly, to be honest.
So long story short, maybe we don't have any choices; we are who we are, we do what we do, and only the universe knows why. The future is set in stone, we just don't know it. We have already decided what to eat for breakfast tomorrow, whether we will seek to better ourselves, who we will or won't marry, how we will die. If tarot could ever predict the future, it's by tapping just a little deeper into the same consciousness we use when asking mundane questions about our material lives, which is just a tiny fragment something much bigger. I don't really know if it's possible, but I wonder sometimes if people have already done it in their own way with their own beliefs. Except for coincidence, it's the only explanation I have for how people occasionally access information that they should not be able to: fleeting glimpses of the future, or IndigoWave's example about feeling the presence of a webcam a ways back.
Tarot soothes me. It shows me what I'm meant to do, and helps me tune out the chemical part of me that thinks constantly so that I can just feel for a little while. And god, I would love it if I could shut down the constant inner monologue long enough to get in tune with that universal consciousness that I think must infuse everything. I've never had a truly spiritual experience, only moments of awe at the size and intricacy of the world we live in. I crave it sometimes.
It's a wonder we're cognizant at all, but it's a necessary product of being a working system. Our atoms are grouped into cells, which interact with one another in units of organs, tissues, fluids, nerves, enzymes, and bones; living flesh that networks and communicates and adapts. As the complexity of the system increases from the smallest single-celled organism to humanity, a certain amount of coordination within the organism becomes necessary to survive, then awareness of the body’s surroundings, then the ability to analyze those surroundings and extrapolate the data of our senses to make assumptions. Once a lump of matter has begun to gather and process information, it is only a matter of time and survival before it turns its gaze inwards and wonders where it came from. We're more or less clever animals, governed by the little chemicals and electrical impulses racing around our brains, and personally, that's enough of a wonder for me. Basic biology by itself blew my mind, even when I was a kid in high school. Our bodies and brains are detailed and intricate on a level that has to be appreciated part by part, because the scale of it is too much to understand all at once.
Astronomy is kind of like that, too. When you get around to using light to calculate how far away a star is, or how big or how old or how hot, and you look at the numbers you're working with... it takes your breath away. It's all so inconceivably vast. The fact is, we're all the same stuff. We're matter, rocks and plants are matter, nebulae and planets and suns and cosmic debris are matter. And wowza, if a tiny speck like me can type out a (way-too-long-as-always) post like this thinking about my own consciousness just because my bag of blood, bones and skin needs awareness to keep walking around, I can't imagine something like the complex, dancing expanses of the universe doesn't have some sort of soul. Not narrow and focused like ours, but still an undeniable responsiveness that anyone of a spiritual bent has sensed. Like I said, I don't think I or anyone can have all the answers and anyone who claims to is delusional or a liar, but that's how I see things; that's what gives me comfort at night.
I don't believe in any sort of denominational God. If there is a God, it is the awakening of everything there is. If we're just matter, too, we must be one and the same – we simply lack the faculties to understand exactly what it is we are a part of. Eckhart Tolle said, "You are the universe, expressing itself as human for a little while." I love that. We are not reincarnated souls, briefly visiting this fleshly plane in search of some tangible enlightenment; our awareness is universal, not individual, and the only thing preventing us from that understanding is our own severely limited perspective. Our consciousness is a transitory reflection of the whole, a facet of the world in which we exist, and which we are one with by definition. When we die, our bodies will decompose, and the structure that brought us into awareness will disintegrate into dirt and grass and worms again. "You" will be gone, but atoms will always come together again in some new configuration and grant us another fleeting glimpse of the world.
Carl Jung said that "We can predict the future when we understand how the present moment evolved out of the past." It may be an incomprehensible amount of time later, but every atom in our bodies ended up here because of the way the Big Bang happened to fling it across the void. Once we launch a tennis ball into the air, we can calculate and predict its exact path if we know all the physical rules and external factors, like wind; the same goes for the way matter ended up in its present state in the universe. Even our minds, our souls, as we call them, are the product of the physical structure of our brains. A severe neurological injury can permanently change who you are, and how you change depends on what part of the brain is affected. So honestly, I'm not too sure about free will. I think we experience life as if we have free will because we experience time linearly, but our consciousness is strictly a manufactured product of matter, which ended up forming our bodies only because the laws of physics dictated it.
We make the choices we make because our brains are built that way, even if we seem to feel indecision at times. And our brains are built the way they are because of the choices our parents made, based on their own biology that they inherited from their parents. We interact with and are seemingly changed by the people around us, but their path was set by fate, too - they are in our lives because they were born to be, and the ways they affect us are no different than a meteor slamming into a planet; both were set in motion long ago. Nature and nurture are from one and the same source. I think you can trace us all the way back to the beginning of the universe long before the first cell reproduced on Earth, just like you can trace the way the stars coalesce, grow, and die so that the gases they emit can eventually join the matter of a new star. Not sure if I phrased that idea clearly, to be honest.
So long story short, maybe we don't have any choices; we are who we are, we do what we do, and only the universe knows why. The future is set in stone, we just don't know it. We have already decided what to eat for breakfast tomorrow, whether we will seek to better ourselves, who we will or won't marry, how we will die. If tarot could ever predict the future, it's by tapping just a little deeper into the same consciousness we use when asking mundane questions about our material lives, which is just a tiny fragment something much bigger. I don't really know if it's possible, but I wonder sometimes if people have already done it in their own way with their own beliefs. Except for coincidence, it's the only explanation I have for how people occasionally access information that they should not be able to: fleeting glimpses of the future, or IndigoWave's example about feeling the presence of a webcam a ways back.
Tarot soothes me. It shows me what I'm meant to do, and helps me tune out the chemical part of me that thinks constantly so that I can just feel for a little while. And god, I would love it if I could shut down the constant inner monologue long enough to get in tune with that universal consciousness that I think must infuse everything. I've never had a truly spiritual experience, only moments of awe at the size and intricacy of the world we live in. I crave it sometimes.
Barleywine
Someone once said irony doesn't translate well to print. Guess it's true. I was alluding to what Richard said so much more precisely, and without the anthropomorphic reference to cards as "advisors."
CharlotteK
I recently did a three card reading for each of my nephews. The oldest one (12) got such a spot on reading, I could not have picked more pertinent cards for him (and what I know of his situation) if I'd laid them all out face up in front of me. He went away astounded and a bit humbled by the direct truths he'd been confronted with. The youngest one (10) drew his cards, and then said to me "But how can these possibly be real? If I shuffled and picked again, I'd get totally different cards!". I just said that probably he would but maybe he wouldn't and anyway, the thing is that these are the cards that he did pick, right now, and this is the story they tell. They didn't pack the same punch, but they raised some ideas. He went away pretty thoughtful.
I'm a mostly rational person and tend to be a bit sceptical but I do believe things exist and happen that we can't see and haven't proved because we aren't advanced enough or simply don't have the capacity to understand. Twelve years of Zen Buddhist practice has pretty much taught me one thing: "I don't know".
Sent from my D6603 using Tapatalk
I'm a mostly rational person and tend to be a bit sceptical but I do believe things exist and happen that we can't see and haven't proved because we aren't advanced enough or simply don't have the capacity to understand. Twelve years of Zen Buddhist practice has pretty much taught me one thing: "I don't know".
Sent from my D6603 using Tapatalk
AprilShowers
I'm not quite in the right place for a new relationship both physically (I'm due to move) and emotionally (I'm over my last breakup but not quite ready to risk another heartache).
Can you imagine how many cards I could pull which could mean something relevant to that scenario? Quite a few.
When the sky is cloudy you come along with your pretty little song
Can you imagine how many cards I could pull which could mean something relevant to that scenario? Quite a few.
When the sky is cloudy you come along with your pretty little song
uraszz
This is such a great thread! I've been reading it 'slowly' for two days so as to not finish it all! I really admire and respect the responses given here, what intelligent articulation this community has. I'm very proud of being apart of it
From the metaphysical to the material, I feel a very big part of this spectrum can benefit from Tarot one way or the other
Metaphysically you can explain how it works with energy, divine wisdom, angels maybe even demons, spirit guides etc. I've heard people say that their hands are "guided by a higher force to choose the correct cards"
Materialistically I think we can explain it with the very old tradition of story-telling, a concept I truly find resonates more with me. We as Tarot readers (or any Diviner) are taking up a very old role that once Shamans used to occupy which is that of the Story-Teller. When we draw cards we start to weave a story based on those cards. The twist with us is that as Readers we are, I guess, more sensitive to the inner-workings of the people we encounter and we pick up on certain things that most miss so we tell the story based upon those subconscious cues. This of course is not always correct (as humans we are flawed) so what we fall upon is the fact that there are a number of ways things work out in every situation, like archetypal story lines (Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker is a good example of this) and what we as the individual experience are variatons of these very basic plotlines in a more modern sense
I hope I didn't jumble all of these out, they were much more coherent in my mind lol
Anyway this is essentially how I approach Divination and I hope, Absynthe, you find what you need. As with everything, Divination is not for everyone and this is completely understandable, I'm just happy that you've committed to it for so long, made up your own mind and made the decision you felt was right for you
I wish you the best of luck!
Sincerely
-uraszz
From the metaphysical to the material, I feel a very big part of this spectrum can benefit from Tarot one way or the other
Metaphysically you can explain how it works with energy, divine wisdom, angels maybe even demons, spirit guides etc. I've heard people say that their hands are "guided by a higher force to choose the correct cards"
Materialistically I think we can explain it with the very old tradition of story-telling, a concept I truly find resonates more with me. We as Tarot readers (or any Diviner) are taking up a very old role that once Shamans used to occupy which is that of the Story-Teller. When we draw cards we start to weave a story based on those cards. The twist with us is that as Readers we are, I guess, more sensitive to the inner-workings of the people we encounter and we pick up on certain things that most miss so we tell the story based upon those subconscious cues. This of course is not always correct (as humans we are flawed) so what we fall upon is the fact that there are a number of ways things work out in every situation, like archetypal story lines (Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker is a good example of this) and what we as the individual experience are variatons of these very basic plotlines in a more modern sense
I hope I didn't jumble all of these out, they were much more coherent in my mind lol
Anyway this is essentially how I approach Divination and I hope, Absynthe, you find what you need. As with everything, Divination is not for everyone and this is completely understandable, I'm just happy that you've committed to it for so long, made up your own mind and made the decision you felt was right for you
I wish you the best of luck!
Sincerely
-uraszz
uraszz
