Modern Day Tarot Play: Know yourself, shape your life

By proper use of the tarot for the purpose of deeper self-reflective enquiry, we can thoroughly examine and judge our words, deeds and actions, and weigh their consequences. This process teaches us to pay more attention, to know our uncultivated selves better, to look inwardly in order to successfully enrich our outer lives. In so doing, we can also recognize and appreciate the moral and noble qualities of our spirit and character, as well as those qualities that aren’t serving us and need to be transcended. In seeing ourselves clearly, we are able to draw back the veil that conceals our destiny.

The tarot also helps us process the conflict we as humans face in the duality of our personal impulses – the material, physical body drawn towards sensual pleasure and the ethereal higher-dimensional body drawn towards the elevated mind and spirit. The tarot helps us recover our truest, purest, most shining expression of being, so we can finally attain the perfect sense of our spirit belonging, or at-one-ment in our physical body. There really is no greater gift we can give ourselves than the use of this ultimate self-realization tool, for, like those who love us, the divinely inspired tarot wants only the very best for us.

With so many possibilities, it is not surprising that in all the years I have been reading and teaching tarot card reading, the one question I am asked again and again by clients and students is: ‘How do you know which interpretation to choose?’ When you look at the various tarot books available, each gives a myriad of options for interpretation, but none a system of how to navigate the labyrinth of possibilities and get transparent, straightforward answers. So this is also a book that addresses this issue.

I have found the reading of tarot cards becomes inefficient when we focus too much on the individual elements of each card. Fragmenting the images in this way only serves to slow our mental processing of the cards’ bigger picture; intuition works twice as quickly as logical analysis, so I have created a book that doesn’t spend pages breaking down the images into their component parts, but synthesizes the information to provide conclusive, resolved and up-to-date statements. When learning tarot, I found clarity, quick referencing and go-to statements far more useful than reams of outdated and impedimental image analysis. Remembering that the figure in the Eight of Cups wears a red cape to denote action, when half the cards in the deck denote some form of action, did not serve to increase my proficiency as a tarot reader. In this book I haven’t shunned symbol analysis completely, but I’ve used it sparingly, and only if relevant or accessible to modern-day conditions.

This is a book for beginners, improvers and those looking to add a level of professionalism to their readings. It works for those who are right-brain dominated, relying on instinct and intuition, and those who are left-brain dominated, with strong logical and reasoning abilities. With the aid of this book you don’t need to be the all-seeing eye to give a profound, accurate and discerning card reading. Jump from amateur straight to professional standard – this fast-track guide will take you quickly and efficiently to the highest level of competence in your tarot readings.

PART I

The Power of Symbols and Imagery (#ub0c4d80c-f186-42aa-a7a2-19f74c624195)

The tarot is a centuries-old tradition that relies on the power of imagery. We tend to remember images better than concepts; we see images around us and our brain responds. The visual aspect of movies, television, picture books and magazines speaks to us on a deep level that doesn’t require the explanation of words alone. The images of the tarot are particularly powerful, being made up of symbols rooted in ancient traditions. The information they carry is deeply embedded in our subconscious mind without us even cognitively realizing it, making the tarot a particularly powerful set of images. Through its triggering of specific unconscious responses, it stretches our cognitive legs, and thus, via this divinely heightened and wider-striding perspective, we can leap all cognitive mind hurdles to access whatever information is needed. The answer to any question is always there, buried in our own mind.

Putting Ourselves in the Picture

A common question people often ask themselves during a difficult, challenging or crisis situation is ‘Why me?’ Knowing the answer to this question can be invaluable to getting ahead and leading a life filled with triumphs, successes and abundance.

To know the exact role our mental processes are playing in our situation is of paramount importance. Our frame of mind can be fertile and expansive, ready to make the best of any new opportunity, or sterile and inhibitive, holding us back from enjoying a fuller and happier life. Which mode of operating is in charge at any given time doesn’t have to be hidden in the deepest recesses of our mind. By using the tarot as a psychological magnifying glass, we can bring a fuller conscious awareness to any inhibiting mental processes and in so doing lift their restrictions and limitations on our life experience.

Tweaking the inner workings of our mind can then help us avoid destructive or toxic fictional narratives. For instance, by addressing any tendencies towards denial, scarcity or poverty, our consciousness can enable us to allow ourselves the experiences of love, wealth, health or fulfilment in our work.

The unrefined mind is like a roughly hewn lump of stone or masonry, which makes for an ineffective building material. To create a balanced, stable block that we can effectively and constructively use for building, we need to work the stone, to chip away at it, to keep perfecting, refining and flattening its rough edges. Only when it is perfectly flat and smooth, devoid of any bumps, lumps and imperfections, will it be ready for use in building a stable structure, a structure that will stand the tests of a lifetime.

The idea that what we put into life we get out can be seen very clearly when we start this process of chipping away at our own mind; for every lump and bump smoothed over in our mind, an equal and opposite reaction occurs in our external environment, so paths and impediments clear and the rocky roads of life become that little bit smoother and more negotiable.

The more we work with the tarot in this way, by viewing our own psychology as the main building contractor for our reality, the more stable our world becomes. Where, on the other hand, there is little awareness or scrutiny of our own psychological construction methods, they become nightmare cowboy builders, destabilizing and eternally patching up the building of our life.

The idea that the inner workings of our own mind should remain largely elusive and enigmatic seems strangely inconsistent with the open-access ideal of the information era. As the world around us becomes increasingly optimized and efficient via computerization and robotics, the mind becomes the optimal nut to crack. Impervious to such updates, it often presents the greatest challenge of them all.

If we allow it to be, the tarot can be our own private and personal detective, uncovering the workings of our own mind. Using this system, we can objectively observe the dialogue between the higher, enquiring and equality-seeking aspect of our mind and the domineering ego aspect that usually prefers to remain anonymous, for to be recognized and labelled would imply that we had conscious awareness of its otherwise hidden power over us. But Modern Day Tarot Play is all about putting ourselves back in the picture: looking at our life with a greater sense of the part we have to play in moulding and shaping it. Rather than being a bystander, passively observing while our ego mind takes us on an unnecessarily bumpy ride, we can awaken and play a more active role creating our life.

If we allow the tarot to honour and serve our higher good by using it to forge a deeper and more honest relationship with ourselves, we will find that we reap the greatest and most profound of its benefits. For the finest thing we can ever offer ourselves is complete truth and honesty; it is only from that stabilized point that we can build a life full of greater meaning, purpose and fulfilment. When our mind begins to focus on transparency and honesty, starting with itself, the rest of our world also comes into a clearer, sharper focus, and this is the magical key to physical and material manifestation.

The more awareness we direct to the fact that our thoughts create our reality, the more control we can take back. When we shuffle the tarot cards and lay out a spread, it will always show what narrative role our own mind is playing in a situation, and how and what it is creating, allowing or attracting. For the tarot works on a ‘like attracts like’ basis, mirroring the workings of our own mind in our external environment.

Cognition versus Intuition

Most people, especially in business, rely wholly on the cognitive part of the brain – the neocortex – to evaluate key or critical situations before they choose how best to proceed. It’s what our modern education system encourages as part of our formative training, and thus, once the foundations are set, like a wind-up automaton, it is often difficult to break or override these behavioural patterns. When decision-making on a day-to-day basis, we can slip into a somnambulist state, sleepwalking through life, following the same pre-programmed coding and producing adequate but not particularly original or transformative results.

The growing epidemic of the ‘automaton mind’ is reflected in our external consensus reality via our increasing reliance on automation robotics, Excel spreadsheets, Data Science and Business Intelligence. While these are powerful tools, they render the internal and inextricable external landscape flat, devoid of the beautifully orchestrated learning curves, the creative glitches and errors fundamental to the way we naturally learn and from which our most unique, original, innovative and inventive thought processes are derived. In the automated landscape there is no room for error, no room for chaos, or for the type of mistakes that give rise to opportunity.

There is a deep irony to what is done in the name of progress having the equal and opposite consensus reaction in the human psyche, and bringing our higher development, due largely to emotional self-reliance, to a complete standstill. It seems now that a gradual refining or perfecting of the character, via myriad accidents, mistakes or errors of judgement, gives a crucial opportunity for the psyche to grow, change and transform, and this is becoming much delayed as we become more dependent on external processing machines and less on our own processing abilities.

The infantilizing devices upon which everyone so heavily relies are replacing the parental and grandparental wisdom that allows, via human fallibility, for us to make mistakes and learn from them. Young minds now profess to ‘know’ not through their own direct experience, but via online prophets’ second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-hand inexperience. Suddenly individual subjectivity is being superseded by indirect objectivity: the antithesis of the magical principle that lies in each and every one of us – the freedom to directly experience the unseen. So the mind is moved ever closer to mundane concerns and levels of operating and away from the unfathomable divine and sacred aspect.

It is ironic that with the rise of all-pervasive modern technologies, the world as augmented by our own direct experience should have become so closed off and shallow. At the same rate as the world is seemingly opening up, the modern cult of mundane, sense-perceived, reductive reality is closing it off, packaging it neatly inside an egoistic, all-knowing box.

When a real-life decision is needed, the information-numbed, automatic data-crunching mind cannot provide a unique, original, radically innovative answer. Only the autonomous intuitive mind can make such leaps into the unknown, and there it waits, quietly ahead of forever-increasing lengths of cognitive ‘real time’, for the latter-day mind to catch up. Sometimes this can take days, or weeks, or months, or years, making this an inefficient and ineffective method of decision-making. Thus the seemingly progressive information era, in terms of human evolution and development, is as impedimental as a tightly plotted farce played by business moguls or politicians instead of trained actors, i.e. sans entertainment or comedy.

Fortunately, the quiet higher clarity or transparency of the intuitive mind has ways and means of making itself heard, both on- and offline. The tarot provides a platform, raising up this objectifying voice so that it might speak and be heard. When it is heard, and uncorrupted by lower, base or unwise motivations or instincts, we can wholly trust it. Both our own and others’ intuitions or gut feelings can be relied on to resolve the trickiest problems or make even the most difficult decisions.

When several options seem equally attractive, perhaps due to too many unseen criteria, the tarot can also help us to make a clear and incisive choice. Making everyday decisions shouldn’t be like fiction, where the mind seeks an entertaining, dramatic and diverting narrative route from A to B; the tarot avoids such unnecessary convolutions and takes us to where we want to be authentically, precisely, directly.

In more important decisions – when we, for example, meet a new love interest or a candidate for a job – our brain begins data-crunching, and decision-making can be delayed and progress impeded due to the need for further information or analysis. The mind, the biggest data-collector in the world, can even remain stuck in a never-ending narrative. The tarot reminds us, by the very ritualistic practice of shuffling the cards, that linear thinking can be predictably circuitous and that it is intuitive leaps that take us into new, exciting, unknown territory.

Whether a life or business decision is successful or not is often down to timing. The tarot is also ideal for showing us not just what and where, but most importantly when the time is right to move or act.

Unfortunately, intuitive or ‘anomalous’ thinking – seeing or creating a connection between seemingly unrelated concepts – is too often disregarded by the conscious cerebral cortex as irrational and nonsensical. When intuition gives the answer at faster-than-light speed, the analytical overlay of the logical mind tries, and often fails, to make sense of it: a series of error messages flashes on our mind screen, making it impossible to progress until we override the errors by finding something physical or external to clear or clarify the intuitive position. Of course, this often doesn’t happen, at least not immediately, so the intuitive information is unconsciously trashed.

The more conscious attention and awareness we give to our mental dynamics, i.e. intuition versus cognition, however, the more we will begin to notice the error messages, and when we catch them in time we can choose to cancel and accept them, rather than allow the unconscious mind to continually trash its greatest resource.

This is how all tarot players are winners: by allowing themselves the time and opportunity to consciously question the validity and authority of their own subtle internal messaging system and then to take advantage of it.

Eventually, as our faith in our mind’s intuitive response becomes stronger, the error messages will become less frequent and less insistent. After using the tarot for some months, we will notice, when observing our mind’s response, how the cognitive dialogue has changed from being bold, capitalized and domineering to medium, lower-case and quiet, even sheepish, following the intuitive dialogue rather than leading our mind, and indeed life, in a not very merry dance.

Intuition, the Next Intelligence

The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, observed that ‘There are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kind of decisions. They are fact-based decisions that overrule the hierarchy. Unfortunately, there’s this whole other set of decisions you can’t boil down to a math problem.’ What he was alluding to was, arguably, the hallmark of Amazon’s success: its capacity to make big decisions based on intuitive hunches.

Some people do retain their competitive positions by utilizing fact-based information and knowledge more effectively than others. But with information now ubiquitous, unregulated and freely accessible via the internet, traditional sources of advantage must dig even deeper. Thus the most successful individuals in the future will be likely to be dualistically smart in their information sourcing, harnessing other innate tools in combination with conditioned responses, pure logic and rational analysis. That is to say, harnessing their lightning-flashes of intuition.

As the fastest, smartest, most reliable and trustworthy aspect of brain functioning, intuition can remove any blocks and get the river running freely and easily once again. With its ability to transform any sphere of human existence, it has to be the next step in human intelligence. And just as the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu’s treatise of military strategy The Art of War is now considered a business classic, so the ancient and equally versatile tradition of tarot card reading, with its unlimited applications, will come to the fore, I believe, as a way of accessing latent intuition.

Windows of Transparency

Symbolic imagery, as noted earlier, is a way of accessing uncharted territories of the mind. Science says we only use 10 per cent of our brain, suggesting if we can only reach them, the unexploited resources of the mind are in plentiful supply. The imagery of the tarot opens the way to them. It is fantastical and of another era. It evokes a sense of the unknown, that which isn’t learned or conditioned and can’t be taught, but can be as individual as we are.

The key principle of the tarot adheres to the Zen Buddhist concept of the Buddha Mind being a beginner’s mind, meaning to know, or to think so, is to close our mind to other possibilities. The superior form of knowing is not to know, which sounds almost Wonderlandesque, but, as Lewis Carroll, and the proverbial ‘mad’ scientist, well understood, there is method in the nonsensical ‘madness’ of the unconscious. The tarot’s arcane and ambiguous visual hooks keep the intuitive and clarity-carving centres of the brain engaged and, like Alice, ever wondering.

To understand the tarot imagery correctly we must analyse it in the same way that a psychotherapist or psychologist would a dream, with every symbolic element of each card being understood as a subconsciously operating aspect of our own psyche. Just as a dream provides pure, unadulterated information in a subtle symbolic and guiding form, the tarot can be equally penetrating, if we are pure and honest with ourselves.

For instance, when we look at a card like the Seven of Swords, which denotes a lone man walking away from his camp carrying more than just his own swords, what connotations does this have for us? What does our mind take from this scene? We can say that the man looks surreptitious, shady, dishonest, covert, hidden, undercover, clandestine, stealthy, veiled in his actions. By applying this to our own psychology, we can understand how our own unconscious psycho-emotional mind works against itself, keeping itself in the dark and operating behind the scenes or remaining hidden from the attention of our own conscious awareness.

Swords denote thoughts, concepts and ideas, so, as the man is depicted carrying the swords of others, this card also shows that he is psychologically carrying the ideas and thoughts of others, which are creating his own self-concept, and a heavy self-concept at that, a concept that works against the idea of en-lightenment, healing and free movement. By carrying around others’ ideas, our figure, an aspect of our own mind, is weighed down and his journey in life impeded.

It’s a fine and privileged day indeed when we can finally rely solely on our own pure, higher-minded thoughts and en-lighten ourselves of the psycho-emotional load we carry, derived from others and supported by our own imaginative mind.

Tarot images are like windows of transparency, illuminating a thousand possible outcomes rather than just the narrow path of ignorance and shadow. They open and build new neural pathways, rather than closing them down via final or absolute words and statements. In this information age, intuitively freed thinking is the proverbial Sword of Truth, cutting through and revealing the stratification of linear thoughts in the over- or underbaked mind, life and the world as microcosms of the wider macrocosmic cake.

The tarot images are evocative, but not prescriptive. In fact they help the mind overcome such entrenched thinking, which is why the interpretive suggestions in this book should be taken as starting points and adapted to your own situation and style of card reading. Let’s look now at how that can be developed.

(#ub0c4d80c-f186-42aa-a7a2-19f74c624195)Tarot Reading

When laying out cards in the particular, traditional order of tarot reading, we go through a ritual, a necessary Zen-like process that calms our analytical and automatized data-crunching mind. Meditatively shuffling, laying and turning the cards helps us to switch off the calculating-ego aspect of the mind and re-engage with an omniscient or at-one-mentality.

The handling, shuffling, laying out and reading of tarot cards provides a precious few moments of personal, private time, without the online world of commerce watching. When the shuffled and selected cards appear in specific positions, each having a particular meaning in itself but also in relation to the other cards present, the linear narrative of the tarot, which speaks to our logical, rational cognitive processes, is reordered, and the symbolic imagery begins speaking, subtly and indirectly, in the language of the subconscious. When addressed in its own language, the subconscious is then free to speak back – to enter into a dialogue with the archetypal figures depicted in the cards. Hence the tarot system is a key to unlocking the deepest part of the inner self as well as providing answers to both sacred and mundane questions.