the wheel of fortune is always about karma?

[Kali Kitty]

If anyone's interested in comparing their associations with mine.. Here's what's in my "Wheel of Fortune" image collection:

The planet Jupiter. Wheels of all kinds. Cogs. The astrological wheel and its signs, being spun by Father Time with his scythe. Lady Fortune, blindfolded. A sphinx. Spinning wheels (invoking the goddesses lachesis, clothos, and atropos - the three "spinning sisters" of mythology). A winged wheel. A mariner wresting the wheel of a ship. A ferris wheel. A wheel with figures all along the points, standing tall atop, falling off at the bottom, clutching the sides, as it turns. "Good Year" car tyres. A plunger. A diver taking the plunge into the big unknown. Smiling faces and figures leaping for joy. Downcast faces and broken dolls. A basket of eggs. A woman twirling eggs. A sign for fresh eggs and broken eggs and a vulture. A magpie. A giraffe and a rat. A tall woman. A dressmakers dummy, cloth and scissors. A cat creeping toward a rat. A cloud of sperms. Monkey, snake, rabbit and tiger. A spider dangling from its fly-catching web. An ant-eater. A flea. A harpy. Question marks. Flowers and vegetables. Spirals. Spiralling clocks. A whirling hourglass. Models of the solar system and changing seasons. A compass. A mirror. A shift key. A yin yang. Fractal spirals. Money. Stars. A swastika of runes. A nuclear power symbol. A recycling symbol. A spinning top. Fingers and hands pointing up and down, touching, clicking, smacking ("gone!") together, praying, holding open and closed. Palmistry images. Film reels unrolling. Halloween trick or treaters. A cornucopia. A trophy. A gift wrapped with a bow. Santa Claus. Aladdin's lamp. Clouds and thunder. Fearful eyes. Blindfolded people. Stooping figures. Grumpy and happy old men and women.
A shopping trolley. A made-up bed. The yellow pages and the iconic walking fingers. Dynamite and bombs. People on the telephone. The phone being ominously hung up. "Call our new number.." cards. Horseshoes. Four leaf clover. Lucky pigs. Snakes and ladders. An escalator. A drainpipe with grimacing face for a "mouth" to spit water out. "Lucky mojo" juice bottles. The back of a woman's coiffured head. A ticket stub. First class airline seats. A chipped teacup. Wishbones. Dice. Playing cards and board games and roulette and hopscotch. Birthday cakes. Birthstones. Black cats. Crossed fingers. Babies in cribs and stork's beaks and baskets with "please take care of me" notes attached. Flipping coins. A magic eight ball. A crystal ball. A safety pin. Bingo cards. A chess pawn. A fire alarm. "You lost!" Death skulls and "drive safely" warnings. Figure outlines at an accident scene and people on stretchers. A woman slipping up. A man on a bicycle that flies helicopter style. And in the shadow, the unnatainable goal: a peace sign.

I think that's what the karma believers want: their nirvana.

But all that stuff up there spoke to me of the wheel of fortune. There's a whole rattle-bag of associations you can make.

Your mileage may vary... :-P (pun intended)

[Zechariah13]

Originally Posted by Kali Kitty

A cloud of sperms.

Really? That's the first time i've ever heard that.

[starrystarrynight]

As Rodney said, no card is always about *whatever*... (Never say always, nothing is absolute(!))

But I can see the wheel as karmic in a way that applies Newton's Third Law: The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. (I looked that up...I have always heard it stated something like: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, but anyway...) Or, as Pamuya said, what goes around, comes around, and I see that idiom played out often when the Wheel shows up in my readings. [If you look at a wheel, you see a center hub with spokes radiating out in all directions from it to form a circle around it. If you think of the hub as the situational act, you can envision that act may have caused a whole lot of different reactions to it, signified by the points to which each spoke radiates. But the act itself does radiate outward to cause some reaction.]

So, I would have to say that while the Wheel can be about karma (as I understand karma to be--which I will admit I have not studied intensively, so my understanding is likely somewhat superficial)--it can also be about a whole lot of other things like forward movement, completion of a cycle (being Key #10), chance, luck, a new car...

Therefore, I think my take would have to be:

the wheel of fortune is always about karma?

Always? No. Sometimes? Yes. Immutable destiny (nothing-you-can-do-to-change-it)? No.

But does the Wheel often signify the need to understand that everything one does has a reaction or consequence?...Yes, it does, IMO.

[Thirteen]

Originally Posted by starrystarrynight

But does the Wheel often signify the need to understand that everything one does has a reaction or consequence?...Yes, it does, IMO.

I think what's missing in this--and why so many of us are cautioning Eliana to avoid assuming it's always destiny or karma or fate with the Wheel, is because it's not alway about "us." We aren't the only souls on this planet. Heck, in some karmic philosophies, the lives of insects matter as much as our do. What they decide affects us as well as them.

We are one planet in a great galaxy--a Wheel, with our solar system at it's rim; a solar system with, again, us spinning around the sun at it's hub. We must go along with this wheel within a greater wheel, going where both are going. And we know that billions of years of things have happened before we ever existed, and these things decided where those wheels are going and how fast they're spinning and all the rest.

Which is to say, we have our own personal lives that we are responsible for. Lives where if we do one thing, there will be opposite and equal reactions. But we can't forget that sometimes what happens to us is not because of us. It's because of other opposite and equal reactions to other things. That ripple or radiating effect that Starry cannily speaks of doesn't put the person asking the question of the cards at it's hub. They're at the rim. So if the boss has a bad day, that may be why he fires you, not because you did anything or it was in your karma. He's the hub, and you feel his reaction to something radiating down to you.

It's important, I think, to remember this about the Wheel, most especially because other tarot cards do discuss "you" and what you're doing, why you're doing it and how you can act to change things. Among the 78 cards there are there are those that will tell you "it's all your fault!" or "given your decisions in life, this was bound to happen;" they may leave you feeling guilty or trapped as well as out of control. The Wheel is among the few cards in the deck that can actually assure you: "don't' feel bad, don't feel guilty, don't feel like you were fated or destined for this. This is because of other forces. You're affected by them, but they're not about you."

Sometimes, when bad or even good things randomly happen to us, we really, really need to hear and know that.

[PAMUYA]

Originally Posted by Thirteen

Sometimes, when bad or even good things randomly happen to us, we really, really need to hear and know that.

This is where you lose me, I believe things don't randomly happen, we will blame the secondary effect, such as the boss firing you because of your delusion that he is having a bad day, but the actual cause of you being fired happened long before this day. His bad day was probably due to the fact that he knew he had to fire you. The Wheel is not random, it goes round and round, we make the same mistakes over and over and yet expect a different outcome. It's when we change our response to an event that will change our future, for the better or worse.

[alesia]

I tend to get the Wheel as stagnation: going round and round, following the same old cycle, but getting nowhere. Of course, this obviously reflects my own issues and what I bring with me into the reading, but I think the larger message is that each card can mean many things. It doesn't have to always be about karma, or stagnation, or destiny, or anything else. The meaning depends on the reading.

[starrystarrynight]

I guess one could argue the Butterfly Effect...in that a seemingly random event such as the way a bug flaps his wings in, say, Africa, could set off a series of meteorologial events that results in a Hurricane forming in the Atlantic Ocean and wreaking havoc on the Eastern seaboard of America. But then, was the flapping of said wings actually random...or were they the effect of some other cause? Maybe the butterfly landed on the rear end of a giraffe whose tail then swatted him into the exact position where flapping his wings would set off another (seemingly random) set of circumstances leading to my roof being blown off in Connecticut. Just musing, of course.... My brain is too old and decrepit to really wrap around such things.

My main point in posting in this thread was to point out my feelings about absolutes. Nothing is ever "always" or "never." There are gray areas to everything, I think. And discussions to be had. And arguments to be made...

[Thirteen]

Originally Posted by PAMUYA

This is where you lose me, I believe things don't randomly happen, we will blame the secondary effect, such as the boss firing you because of your delusion that he is having a bad day, but the actual cause of you being fired happened long before this day. His bad day was probably due to the fact that he knew he had to fire you.

As I made up this fictional boss let me tell you what really, really happened. He had a terrible childhood and was abused by his mother. He hates women. He was given a side-wise promotion and made boss over you and others--meaning he doesn't know any of you personally. Because of the economy, the company has lost money and the CEO, scared and worried, yelled at him to lay off one of his new underlings, reminding him that his job wasn't all that secure either. He doesn't feel any remorse about firing someone, that's business. But he is having a bad day because he's worried about losing his job.

He looks out at his new employees, studies their records. They're all about equal in how well they do their job. But you're a woman, and given the bad mood he's in, he'd rather fire a woman. So. You're right the actual cause of you being fired happened long before this day...but YOU didn't do anything in the past to earn it. And the boss wasn't having a bad day because he knew he had to fire you. He was having a bad day for other reasons, and his firing of you was all because of the "karma," fate, forces, whatever on him. Not on you.

What I'm getting at here is this: Sometimes the other person is at fault and we have to be willing to blame them for their actions, as much as we have to be willing to take the blame for our actions. Maybe this isn't what you were getting at and I'm misunderstanding, but I'm afraid you kinda lost me, in turn, by saying there is no randomness. I'm especially confused by why it's a delusion to think the boss fired you because he had a bad day, rather than that he was having a bad day because he had to fire you. It might be true, but the other way around might be equally true--not a delusion. After all, we don't think that the drunk driver who mows down a woman on the sidewalk decided to get drunk because he knew he had kill someone. Are you sure there's not any such thing as "randomness"? Should we let the driver off the hook because it was the woman's destiny to be killed or she was somehow to blame for her own murder?

I know I'm probably overstating the case, but I really do think it's important to remember that other people have their own fates and karmas and the freedom to take the actions they want to take. And sometimes what happens to us has nothing to do with us. Its all on them. I think it important to remember this because otherwise we might end up blaming the victim. Or staying in a bad situation because we believe we deserve it or have earned it or have to take it--or, that it being our fault, that we can change it...when in fact, we have nothing to do with it. Many a battered woman, spouse of an addict, child of an abusive parents, stays in such relationships because they do think they have something to do with it. Once they place the blame where it belongs, however, they can get out of the relationship and get on with their lives.

This is why I think it's important to remember that there is randomness, and there are other factors to blame...it's not always us. I hope that makes sense.

[Thirteen]

Originally Posted by starrystarrynight

I guess one could argue the Butterfly Effect...in that a seemingly random event such as the way a bug flaps his wings in, say, Africa, could set off a series of meteorologial events that results in a Hurricane forming in the Atlantic Ocean and wreaking havoc on the Eastern seaboard of America.

This is what I define as "randomness" actually. We tend to mistake randomness as no cause, no effect. Something appearing from no where out of nothing. But that's not how science defines it. Science understands that randomness isn't cause free. There's always a cause be it the flap of a butterfly's wing or the echo of your footsteps sending down an avalanche.

What makes it random is that it was't set in motion for a purpose. The snow didn't build up into avalanche proportions in order to bury you. It built up because of global warming which makes for very cold winters which meant more snow than usual which given the angle of the hillside--eroded over millions of years by weather--is now just right for an avalanche. Yes? And if it wasn't your footsteps setting it off, it'd have been the scream of a hawk or the fall of a tree. Anything could set it off...it just happened to be you.

That's why we have words like "luck" and why, I believe, we have cards like the Wheel. To note that sometimes stuff just happens. Not for no reason...but not for a reason that relates to you, personally.

[Zechariah13]

So, Thirteen, could i summarize your entire past 3 posts in the below phrase?

Shit happens.