Books vs. No books

frelkins said:

Except of course that many meanings and methods still widely used by tarot readers were completely invented by a crazed Parisian hairdresser who apparently got tossed out of even a most irregular masonic lodge.

ancient wisdom where?

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Much like the religions of most of the western hemisphere are based on barbaric Bronze age Polytheism... hasn't stopped people for dying for them or building monuments to them.

Scion said:

Short version: you are asking the same question, and because it is based on a fallacy, it cannot be answered.

How many fish is an umbrella?

Scion

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Amen, Scion. As you know , I am TRYING to do some reading up on my own right now (and coming screaming to you for help !) - but it has nothing to do with how I read, and I HONESTLY think it won't affect that, either. I think the fish/umbrella analogy is the best yet. I have been reading books for years. I have been reading cards for a lot less years. I don't think the one has affected the other much, if at all. I truly don't. What HAS affected my card reading has been LIFE. And you can't read that.

As long as what you do broadens your knowledge or view and doesn't narrow it , it's all fine i think.
Books is where i started in, kind of a jumpstart for me and still use a lot, now i'm learning more here on at and even try reading with just my thoughts and feelings, so yep i geuss with everything i learned and was born with, i hope

I have just two books one with spreads and one card meanings ,there is a lot of information available on net but i have found the more you look up different meanings the more confused you become ,like other posts probally best to use both and in time with practice your own intuition will take over .sometimes just looking a picture with tell what you need.

Splunge, it sounds like you're talking about fundamentalist religion.

For example: Here's the text of the religion. Early on you learn that God dictated every word of the text so it's inerrant and infallible, and all you have to do is read it and memorise it. Plain as day. Who could doubt it? And you know it's true, because it says it's true right there in the book. Now, you can stop there, but the results tend to be pretty ugly, both for your own mind, and for the way you act in the world. You ossify. And there are plenty of examples of that around.

So let me ask you this: You belong to the religion. When you go to school, or to a tutor, or whatever, you find out that it's pretty unlikely God dictated the text word-for-word. It was sewn together from sacred myths, oral traditions, customs, and folk-tales, and eventually written down and codified by a number of different people. And if you don't speak the language the text was written in originally, chances are its gone through a few translations as well, and maybe this bit got cut off, and that bit got added in just a little, and maybe this part isn't so original, and it sure sounds like that other religion wrote about it, too, and on and on.

Then you learn about some of the history of your religion, and hey - not everyone was a saint. There were bad people who claimed it, too.

The text is still the same, mind, you just know more about it now, where it came from, what people have done with it over the centuries.

Does knowing more about the text invalidate the text? Does it invalidate the religion? Does it make the good things in it less good? Does wrestling with it, and trying to understand what the people who wrote it down were attempting to convey weaken your faith? Do you walk away entirely because the people who wrote it could only convey the meanings in stories instead of, say, physics formulas? Does it become untrue because it isn't entirely factual, or proveable?

Or does it deepen your respect for the people who tried to communicate these revelations to you from so long ago? Do you understand it better now? Are you able to look at it in a more mature light, and not feel like you were lied to, or misled by it? Does it have even more merit now that you realise you can spend your whole life engaged with it on a much deeper level? That there are ambiguities to be considered, that it's not all black-and-white like you learned when you were little? Kind of like real life is now. And maybe, just maybe, it's that path you need to take that leads to communion with the divine.

I think that's what you're asking about tarot. Could be wrong here, but it sounds that way. And you have to admit, tarot's history has been plenty colourful enough to fit the model.

Consider when a child learns to walk. She doesn't think about it, she does it. Well, now wait. She tries to stand. She pulls herself up and she does that about three hundred times maybe more. Then she scoots and crawls, and she stands and falls. She steps out and falls, hundreds of times. All of the times she falls she learns. She has been studying walking. She is researching all the ways to not walk, and learning to walk while she does it!

Is standing walking? No. Is crawling walking? No. Is falling walking? No. But she is studying walking. She didn't say, I read on page 88 that when you apply pressure to the foot and lift the other knee twisting the hip 28 degrees North....

Now. Tarot is not walking, not exactly. But when you look three hundred times at the Two of Cups you are bound to notice things about it, and you'll see it doing things differently in spreads, where does it land, what cards are around it, oh my! What is that little line right there....look at that, I never SAW that before...and you learn something about that Two of Cups every time it pops up.

Then, you read that passage in Milton and what was that line...Oh, yes I read Lon Duquette's book and I remember him saying things about physics and geometry looky there, I think that might be it...They are holding hands in the wedding album and looking at each other in such a way, oh my, that is so Two of Cups!! And so on...the brain pulling and digging out little things that happened in the grocery store, at the wedding ceremony, from the book you read last week by Heinlein, watching the sky and a star falls. And all of it is Studying Tarot.

But like breathing you aren't researching the Process of Breath by Which the Lungs Fill and Empty. No, you are living Tarot. The Universe is researching all the ways we funny little monkeys learn to recognize Mystery. And we think we are having another debate about intuition vs study.

Splungeman said:

How does research and study help you as a Tarot reader? I guess that's my simplified question. And by study I do not mean rote memorization. I mean studying in the sense of a complete education on Tarot. It's history, it's esoteric influences. I'm talking about what Umbrae was referring to with his Qabbalistic texts.

Does this scholarly research in any way help you to be a better Tarot reader? How does it enhance your Tarot practice? It seems like it must, because Umbrae used it as an example of how most of us on this forum are true Tarot readers and scholars and how that gives us an edge on the competition.

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I believe that research, whether it's reading, life experience or in retrospect (oh, that's what that card was talking about!) can only help to make one a better Tarot reader by broadening the base of one's knowledge.

For example, in the Devil card in the Navigators Tarot of the Mystic SEA, there's an image of a billy goat. In the companion book, it mentions that the goat's beard is a symbol for wisdom. Well, I didn't know that until I read it. So now I have another potential meaning for the Devil when I see that card (specifically in that deck, but possibly in other decks too), I have another potential meaning whenever I see a beard and, finally, the tarot also has another card and another image it can show me when it wants me to reach an interpretation of wisdom. I might also have reached that interpretation on my own through my own experiences or in retrospect. How I gained that knowledge isn't as important as the fact that I did gain it and it's one more piece of information that I can use when doing readings.

Another example. I've read up on and begun using Elemental Dignities in my readings. EDs don't necessarily make my readings better or make me a better reader. But they do bring a depth to my readings that wasn't there before. The same would be true of applying Kabbalah, Astrology, Numerology or anything else to my readings.

People learn/process information differently. Some are able to jump right in with a deck they've never seen and be able to use it. Others don't care what the author's intent was for the meaning of the cards and instead apply/develop their own meanings for the cards. And some need to understand the author's meanings for the cards (and if this understanding comes from rote memorization, that's OK) as a means of forming a foundation for using that particular deck, whether or not they stay with that foundation or use it as a springboard to develop their own meanings or to augment the intended meanings with their own meanings. (I'm one who likes to read what the author intended, keep what works for me and add in what I discover as I use the deck.)

The tarot is a dynamic system. If my knowledge of the tarot is restricted to just the basic meanings of the cards, the tarot knows that and shows me the appropriate card(s) to get the intended message across. As my knowledge of the tarot or related disciplines expands, the tarot knows that and also expands the range of cards/images it can show me to get the intended message across. An example of the point I'm trying to make would be colors. Having a 16 color palette available to you allows you to do a lot. But having millions of colors available to you in a palette allows you to do so much more.

Rodney

Rodney

Hi Splungeman...wow what a strange name...what does it mean?
Nope, don't tell me, if you don't tell me I can envision all kinds of things about you that I wouldn't have the pleasure of doing if I knew the possible boring origin of you forum name.

Yup, I understand what you are saying...I'm a psychic reader though, so to many books spoil my psychic broth.

But to say a psychic reader might as well be reading wallpaper patterns...well yes, we could do that, but we could go just as far into study with that too...who's the designer...what kind of original medium did they use...who printed it...distributed it, how much does it cost, where is it sold...is it pre-pasted or glue? Why an apple pattern and not roses? On and on about wallpaper samples.
But if we are doing that we aren't reading...

Will research/learning affect your glorp flow?...Absolutely! As will your everyday experiences...and your past experiences....as will every song you've ever listened to, every book you've ever read..every person you've ever had a conversation with, and every TV/movie you've ever seen.
It all mixes together like one big beautiful bowl of GLORP that you can pull meanings from when you do a reading.....

I think what you're really asking is when is too much, too much...and only your own gut can tell you that...if I'm reading along in some tome and I'm confused or...shaking my head more no that yes...or daydreaming and it's not sinking in...or laughing at the total sillyness of it...well I take those as signs that it's time to close the cover and just go work with the cards....let them teach me my personal symbols, colors, meanings.
Because your own GLORP is better than any you can buy in a jar...

I like that Lark GLORP!!

The funny thing is when I started to read way back in the late 60's early 70s, there were not many books. There was (let's test my memory) RW, Mary Greers Tarot for Yourself, and Eden Gray. At least that was all I could find.

Now I hate being a student, never liked it, never could keep me still long enough to read. So, I just went on blind faith and tellings stories about the cards, and what they meant to me. Never used spreads, didn't know what a Celtic cross was until I picked up Mary's book.

So, having said that, am I not so great a reader? Nope. Would reading the books make me a better reader, nope, I tried that and I found that my journal, and I kept an extensive one, basically corresponded to the books.

But in fact, I was a student. My book was 78 pages twice that if you count reversals. So I studied and wrote down what I felt and found.

I made homemade GLORP!!

Baroli

Scion said:

*sigh*

Actually, Splungeman... if you look at what you just asked, you are literally restating the same question in different terms. Implicit in this is the assumption that some kind of qualitative difference exists between them. You are assuming that there is a distinction/division between these two interconnected components of skill development. If they are interdependent then of course it is the same. Built into this "new" question is the idea that they are different, therefore separate. And my point is that they are not only NOT separate that naming them two separate things is a way of discussing spheres of a single activity. By using the word "Can" you are implying the boolean possibility of a "can't" as a response. And since I don't believe a "can't" is possible for the reasons described in my post above, I extrapolate that the question itself is as meaningless and misguided as ever. I hope that's okay to say. And of course this is only my opinion...

Again, I don't mean to seem grumpy, but calling it "Glorping" and then saying that THAT is different and something distinct from Study does not eliminate this basic (and to my mind) fallacious, pernicious new age assumption of a division that can inevitably be traced to poor vocabulary or sloppy rhetoric.

An easier and more accurate way to discuss it might be to think of these two modes of exploration as theoretical extremes of a spectrum. But even then, there isn't a question to ask because every single human on the planet experiences these things individually and subjectively. It is gnosis and therefore un-articulable. So the only thing to do is recount personal experience that will resonate in differing degrees with people based on their functional similarities to you. So not a discussion but shared memoir. Which is perfectly valid, if slightly self-involved way of exploring a topic.

Short version: you are asking the same question, and because it is based on a fallacy, it cannot be answered.

How many fish is an umbrella?

Scion

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How many fish is an umbrella? I thought that was common knowledge.

I feel like I clearly lack the mental dexterity (and vocabulary) necessary to in any way respond to the above post without looking like a neanderthal by comparison. All I can say is that I *think* I disagree with you. I'm not sure. I don't think I've ever had anything I've ever written so thoroughly dissected, analyzed, and decimated. I am out of my league here. You were going after the usage of the word "can" for heaven's sake! I can't compete with that! Not that I was really trying to compete...

I will abandon this question because raising it has only seemed to make me look like an idiot (I have experience in that field...so the feeling is not new). I mean idiot in the best way of course...as in one who is humbled. Perhaps I did merely use different words to regurgitate an old debate, but I didn't (and still don't) believe that to be the case. And I think I got some responses that provided a little insight into what I was getting at...so I'm satisfied in that regard. Feeling more battered and bruised (mentally) than I was expecting, but hey...I'm probably the better for it...right? Right?

But hey! I do have one bone to pick before I log out tonight! I thought using a silly word like 'glorp' was perfectly reasonable given the negative response to using the word 'intuition'! I had no intention of launching into a semantics debate, so I decided to just make something up. Plus "glorp" is more fun to say than "intuition" or "psychic". Say it right now! Say it repeatedly! See?! SEE?!

*bursts into tears and slinks away to find some Nyquil and a bed*