Every reader thinks i am pregnant

trzes

Grizabella said:
Mahafrins said the readers say "you are going to have a baby" OR "you are going to be pregnant".

I presume different readers put their message in different words. And since you need to be pregnant before having a baby anyway (except you are virgin Mary or can afford a Surrogacy) that's pretty much the same.

Grizabella said:
And you're sort of going in circles with what you say here, aren't you? Wrong is wrong, whether they're meaning metaphorically or anything else.

Not sure what you mean by that, so I will try to put my point a bit more precisely: If the OP should become physically pregnant in the near future (that's my understanding of "going to be") then the readings will turn out to be right of course. But as the OP stated that's rather unlikely. In all other cases (including metaphoric pregnancies) the readings are wrong. If we follow the OP's common sense judgment of the situation, then the readings will turn out to be wrong indeed. No circles, no ambiguities here.

Grizabella said:
And I'm always saying readings aren't always "accurate" so you get no argument from me on that.

Can "not accurate" also mean "plain wrong"? Then we don't have any argument here indeed. The readers will (most likely) have fouled up on that reading. Agreed?

Grizabella said:
We're all trying to add some thought to Mahafrins' post to help her understand it, so all our input is valuable. Only time will tell what was right and what wasn't.

That's nicely put, but in fact it's a euphemism for the attempt to make the reading look better than it actually was by assuming things the reader could have meant but in fact never said.

FLizarraga

While I respect everyone's perspective on Tarot reading, I highly doubt that the cards themselves said something as definite as THAT. IMHO, that only means that's the way a Tarot reader read the cards.

By the end of last year, I did a reading for a dear friend of mine. At the time, she was preoccupied with her professional life. I don't recall the specifics of her reading, but I do remember there was a card combination that spoke about wishes come true. I assumed it was about her professional life, and told her as much.

It turns out her professional life hasn't changed much, but she's unexpectedly and hugely pregnant --something she wasn't expecting, wasn't looking for, but just happened anyway. And she's immensely happy about it. (She had a miscarriage a couple of years back and was told she would probably never have a baby.)

My point is that the cards rarely lie, but the reader is fallible. We definitely don't have all the answers, and sometimes we can learn more from our misses than from the times we hit the bullseye. Just my two cents.

trzes said:
The readers said "you are going to be pregnant". Not "you are going to be pregnant in a metaphorical sense" or "the universe wants you to be pregnant". If one of the latter had been the message they would have said so. But they didn't. So they were wrong. Full stop.

What it truly means? My take on that is that tarot readings just aren’t always accurate. Possibly your readers interpreted some of the signals you sent unconsciously in a wrong way (nothing to with the cards) and gave the reading the wrong twist.

I am always amazed when more than 50% of the readings tend to be spot on. 80% are a real miracle. So why not admit that a certain percentage of readings simply are wrong?

mahafrins

OaksWhispering said:
Funny, my mother had her cards read by many different readers from the time I was 7 until I was 13 and they always said she was having a baby. she had her tubes tied after I was born (I'm her second child) and when I was 15 she had to have a hysterectomy. Never did figure out what that pregnancy reading meant.

The same thing happened to me during the spring this year, but that also never happened (was not trying either)

Actually now I'm done typing this out, maybe the cards were trying to alert her about the fibroids in her uterus, not a baby. I myself have issues with ovarian cysts. Hm.

Well so may be it was the cards way to draw attention to your internals. To be honest no thought of it..

mahafrins

Grizabella said:
Mahafrins said the readers say "you are going to have a baby" OR "you are going to be pregnant". And you're sort of going in circles with what you say here, aren't you? Wrong is wrong, whether they're meaning metaphorically or anything else. And I'm always saying readings aren't always "accurate" so you get no argument from me on that.

We're all trying to add some thought to Mahafrins' post to help her understand it, so all our input is valuable. Only time will tell what was right and what wasn't.

This makes perfect sense cause its just helping me understand where the pregnancy/ baby part came on when its not in heart or even mind...

trzes

FLizarraga said:
While I respect everyone's perspective on Tarot reading, I highly doubt that the cards themselves said something as definite as THAT. IMHO, that only means that's the way a Tarot reader read the cards.

I fully agree to that. If I want to judge a reading though it doesn't matter. I can't even stick to what the readers thought the cards were saying, but only to what the readers actually said themselves.

FLizarraga said:
My point is that the cards rarely lie, but the reader is fallible. We definitely don't have all the answers, and sometimes we can learn more from our misses than from the times we hit the bullseye. Just my two cents.

How do we know that the cards are right while the reader isn't? I don't think we learn about that by twisting around the message to make it fit once we know the outcome. That will always work.

You would have to make a carefully designed empirical experiment if you want to distinguish between the message of the cards and the message of the reader. I proposed such a test a while back, but it didn't stir much interest. See this post in this thread.

mahafrins said:
This makes perfect sense cause its just helping me understand where the pregnancy/ baby part came on when its not in heart or even mind...

I take your point that the discussion here was helpful for you.

So I'll modify my above statement a bit. I may matter what the reader has picked up from the querent (not from the cards) but didn't say. IMO what the discussion actually helped to understand is the subconscious communication between you and the readers.

My personal view on this is: the more a tarot reading is about introspection the less it matters what the cards and/or the reading acually said. And I'll admit that reflecting about it afterwards can add helpful insights. But if a reading is predictive then it's dangerous not to accept that predictions tend to be wrong. Trying to make a predictive reading fit ex post is a dangerous mindset in that sense. This also includes regarding a reading as less predictive than it has been meant to be in the first place. And the readings in question actually were predictive.

FLizarraga

trzes said:
How do we know that the cards are right while the reader isn't? I don't think we learn about that by twisting around the message to make it fit once we know the outcome. That will always work.

It's not about twisting around the message, but about going back to the cards and having the outcome clarify them. In the case I spoke about --like in many others-- the outcome fit the cards; it was just not what either querent or reader had in mind at the moment.

And, by the way, you cannot just shoehorn any outcome into a particular combination of cards; the possibilities are limited.

trzes

FLizarraga said:
It's not about twisting around the message, but about going back to the cards and having the outcome clarify them. In the case I spoke about --like in many others-- the outcome fit the cards; it was just not what either querent or reader had in mind at the moment.

I am sorry if “twisting around” sounded somewhat dismissive. I’ll try to put it more neutrally: If I have both a spread and an outcome or situation, then in most cases I will be able to make some sense of it in the way that I can express the outcome or situation in terms of the symbolic language of the images or the proposed card meanings contained in the spread. That may well feel like “clarifying” the message of the spread, but it doesn’t proof much. Maybe you would get that felling with any spread for a given outcome.

People though very often mistake these correspondences between spread and outcome they feel afterwards for evidence that the spread had made any sense in the first place and thus systematically overestimate the predictive abilities of tarot readings.

But evidence for predictive power requires a set of future situations that is clearly defined beforehand. And even if a reader can repeatedly predict better than random it doesn’t imply that the specific layout of cards they got had anything to do with it. Evidence for the latter would require something like my proposed experiment.

FLizarraga said:
And, by the way, you cannot just shoehorn any outcome into a particular combination of cards; the possibilities are limited.

Quite. Although 66 176 477 823 456 000 possible combinations for a celtic spread may look like a big number, that's still less than 7 bytes of information coded in a spread, roughly two sentences if you store them rather efficiently. But that also means that a single spread has to be good for millions of different results.

FLizarraga

trzes said:
I am sorry if “twisting around” sounded somewhat dismissive. I’ll try to put it more neutrally: If I have both a spread and an outcome or situation, then in most cases I will be able to make some sense of it in the way that I can express the outcome or situation in terms of the symbolic language of the images or the proposed card meanings contained in the spread. That may well feel like “clarifying” the message of the spread, but it doesn’t proof much. Maybe you would get that felling with any spread for a given outcome.

People though very often mistake these correspondences between spread and outcome they feel afterwards for evidence that the spread had made any sense in the first place and thus systematically overestimate the predictive abilities of tarot readings.

But evidence for predictive power requires a set of future situations that is clearly defined beforehand. And even if a reader can repeatedly predict better than random it doesn’t imply that the specific layout of cards they got had anything to do with it. Evidence for the latter would require something like my proposed experiment.

Quite. Although 66 176 477 823 456 000 possible combinations for a celtic spread may look like a big number, that's still less than 7 bytes of information coded in a spread, roughly two sentences if you store them rather efficiently. But that also means that a single spread has to be good for millions of different results.

That sounds great. Are you taking into account reading styles? Like, Etteilla, Marseille, RWS, Thoth, Golden Dawn in general, plus pure intuitive reading, not to mention the myriad ways in which they may combine, diverge and/or overlap? And what about all the different decks? For instance, a single card, like the Hierophant, is a very different card for the Pamela Colman Smith deck, the Visconti-Sforza, and, say, the Mary-El.

Are you also taking into account the number of Tarot readers in the whole world, and the fact that none of them reads exactly the same way? You may also want to keep in mind the number of actual querents (let's not even think about the potential ones). Once you include that, how about specific questions? And how about the fact that every single Tarot reading is a highly unique experience that takes place between reader, querent, and deck(s)?

Statistics are useful tools, as long as you recognize their limitations.

trzes

FLizarraga said:
That sounds great. Are you taking into account reading styles? Like, Etteilla, Marseille, RWS, Thoth, Golden Dawn in general, plus pure intuitive reading, not to mention the myriad ways in which they may combine, diverge and/or overlap? And what about all the different decks? For instance, a single card, like the Hierophant, is a very different card for the Pamela Colman Smith deck, the Visconti-Sforza, and, say, the Mary-El.

Are you also taking into account the number of Tarot readers in the whole world, and the fact that none of them reads exactly the same way? You may also want to keep in mind the number of actual querents (let's not even think about the potential ones). Once you include that, how about specific questions? And how about the fact that every single Tarot reading is a highly unique experience that takes place between reader, querent, and deck(s)?

Statistics are useful tools, as long as you recognize their limitations.

Sure, that was basically all I was trying to say. Maybe we were talking cross purpose here.

In a specific reading usually one specific reader shuffles one specific deck. And the result of that only is the actual combination of 9 out of 78 numbers. It is my take on tarot as well, that this is only a tiny fraction of what is going on when reading tarot. And in my book it also is another good point in favour of seeing tarot as an intuitive or introspective tool rather than a tool of divination or fortune telling.

For the actual question of this thread it doesn't matter though how the readers got their insights. My actual point only was to be honest when judging a reading. When a reader picks up a certain mood or energy or whatever from the cards or the querent or elsewhere, then this is only the beginning of the process. The major step is to draw a conclusion from that and put it in words. The words "you are going to be pregnant" are (most likely, the querent will experience it soon) an incorrect prediction. While it may yield some useful information for the querent's introspection to reflect afterwards on how the readers might have picked up her mood or energies correctly, the reading itself doesn't become any more accurate by that.

FLizarraga

trzes said:
Sure, that was basically all I was trying to say. Maybe we were talking cross purpose here.

In a specific reading usually one specific reader shuffles one specific deck. And the result of that only is the actual combination of 9 out of 78 numbers. It is my take on tarot as well, that this is only a tiny fraction of what is going on when reading tarot. And in my book it also is another good point in favour of seeing tarot as an intuitive or introspective tool rather than a tool of divination or fortune telling.

For the actual question of this thread it doesn't matter though how the readers got their insights. My actual point only was to be honest when judging a reading. When a reader picks up a certain mood or energy or whatever from the cards or the querent or elsewhere, then this is only the beginning of the process. The major step is to draw a conclusion from that and put it in words. The words "you are going to be pregnant" are (most likely, the querent will experience it soon) an incorrect prediction. While it may yield some useful information for the querent's introspection to reflect afterwards on how the readers might have picked up her mood or energies correctly, the reading itself doesn't become any more accurate by that.

I'd like to step out of this algebraic mire and point out that no method of divination cannot predict anything with 100% accuracy. They can lay out variables (here we go again), help you see the pattern of a situation, the forces at work, and its possible outcomes. But those forces at work include the hidden, what the querent cannot see.

Therefore, I just don't see why a reader cannot foresee a probable pregnancy in the immediate future of a querent. I once saw clearly in the cards that a friend of mine was going to be fired soon. It was plain as day. (It was a Lenormand reading: Cross + Tower + Scythe. She worked at a Catholic school.) I told her so. She laughed. A few weeks later, it happened. I am pretty sure the decision had been already taken at the time of the reading. She just didn't know.

ETA: I do not in any way condone the particular reading in this thread, which I know nothing about. But, IMHO, such a forecast is indeed withing the realm of possibility.