"Intuition" versus "book learned"

I think it's important to sort out, though, whether you're giving the answer through true intuition or through your own opinion. If your intuition tells you that something is right, that's different from your opinion being that something is right. If the cards tell you through intuition that your sitter is being used and that the relationship won't work out, that's different than if you decide through your own opinion that your sitter is being used and that it's not going to work out. You have to keep yourself and your personal opinion out of the way to allow true intuition to come into play.

Well, today has been sort of "day one" of trying to use more of my intuition on cards and stuff, to see how I can go with people's suggestions. I pulled out a card, and wrote as much about it as I could just based off... the feel of the card, color, element, number, etc. Made a bunch of notes and rambled until it made perfect sense to me. There were flowers in the picture, so I looked up the traditional meanings of those flowers; things like that. It actually really felt like starting out from a "blank slate" because I honestly didn't remember what the card meant! But I ended up writing a page full of what the card seemed to represent and was telling me.

Anyway, I compared what I wrote about the card after a while with what came up in a quick search engine search and... surpringly, I was right on the money.

Needless to say, I'm definetly going to ingore the book more often.

What pops to mind during a reading is what I go with, whether it seems to fit or not, as long as I keep in mind that it's not my opinion that matters, it's what intuition and psychic flashes tell me.

You know, when I first got the New Orleans Voodoo tarot, all I could get was the deck without the book, so I started researching on the internet to try to find out what I could about each of the entities on the cards. I learned so much and had such a great time learning. I think that did me a lot more good than when I actually did get the book that goes with the deck. Researching the symbols and imagery on your cards independently of the tarot information in tarot books and the companion books to the decks is often much more enriching, in my opinion.

tarotreader2007 said:

The problem I think with books is that it tries to make tarot more mathematical as opposed to reading your own intuition.

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Math is all about intuition, though maybe a simpler kind than what many people are thinking of when they think of intuition in tarot. What mathematicians do is (1) study the structure of things, (2) make leaps of intuition about new ways to put things together, and then (3) build a new structure (the proof) to make sure that their leap was correct and to explain it to other people.

What tarot readers do is (1) look at the structures formed by the cards they've laid out, whether their ideas of the meanings of the cards come from just their pictures or from books, (2) make leaps of intuition as what it means in context or all together, and (3) put that intuitive understanding together into a new structure that can be explained the the querant, written down to remember, etc.

But probably what was meant by mathematical was formulaic (watch a chemist disagree.) I would think that what would cause one to be most likely to be formulaic is if one had just one source; a few words for each card and not using any others for example. Inflexibility hinders intuition. People are probably less likely to limit themselves when their only source is pictures though, because most people can come up with more ways of interpreting a picture than they can a few words. But with enough information, you have more varied ways to see the cards, not less. I agree with mollymawk's take on it.

That's extremely interesting, Anyankah. I wouldn't associate mathematics with intuition at all, but that just shows my own ignorance. A college professor once told me that I do have a mathematical mind since I'm a writer. I was having lunch with him and a few other professors and had commented that I don't have a mathematical mind but he disagreed. How interesting. I'm sure you're right.

For me, so much of my life has been dictated by trying to do things the right way: "by the book." So when I came to Tarot, my first thought was: "Man, I just want to make sure I get this right." It didn't take me long to learn that such an attitude would mean I'd miss out on the joys of discovery and exploration that Tarot offers. I haven't quite tossed my books out the window yet (as a writer, that would be a sacrilege to me anyway!). But I find that the more I work with the Tarot, the less I need them. They do come in handy, however, when I can't make heads or tails of what a certain card is doing in a certain position.

vision777 said:

i want to know if anybody here ever started reading tarot with out a book? like you know, you just had the cards and you had " your own meanings to the cards? I m still in the learning process and this is one of the places i come when i need in sight about tarot cards.

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Yes. Unless you count the first reading I ever did, which was ENTIRELY from a book and a total disaster, and put me off reading for 30 years afterwards !

I joined Simone's circles here and began reading from a single card, only using what I actually literally SAW in front of me.

^ I guess that is when having multiple decks gets to be a little more tricky/complicated or just gets to be a big problem?? I don't know for sure since I only have two decks, but that was my instant reaction, though it's not in a bad way! Having to come up with trully mutable meanings for cards in order to fit and suit each new deck, but at the same time keep consistency between say a King of Wands versus a King of Fire.

I suppose that's when intuition and really getting to know your deck are the most important, because while they're essentially the "same card", the personality of the deck and the imagery are usually drastically different. Meanings have to be liable to change depending from deck to deck.

There doesn't have to be consistency. There may even not be when the same card from the same deck shows up on a different day...

Lyric said:

Well, having a basis in what the card is "supposed" to mean is kind of like having a diving board to spring from when you're doing a swan dive. It gives you something to push off from that gives you that little boost upward so that you can "dive" into the subconscious pool of intuition.

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Exactly.