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.
