Modern Day Tarot Play: Know yourself, shape your life

Thorsons

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First published by Thorsons 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Emma Toynbee 2018

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Illustrator: Nica Galvez, under the art direction of the author

Quotations from Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo from Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie © Vicki Mackenzie, 1999, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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Source ISBN: 9780008286002

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Dedication

To my divinely driven mum, whose ever-present, affirmatory and expansive approach subsequently shaped the life of her firstborn grandchild: cradled close and speaking their first words in our tending reader’s hands

Why This Book?

The tarot has traditionally been used as an esoteric tool for divination purposes, but in the modern day it can be so much more. Anyone and everyone can benefit from reading the tarot, from business professionals to stay-at-home parents. We all need help from time to time to navigate the ups and downs of life, whether it comes from friends, partners, family, teachers, therapists, counsellors, life coaches, preachers or a guru. But no matter to whom we look for higher wisdom and guidance, rarely can they match the complete honesty and instant availability of the tarot. A session with a professional life coach or therapist can be invaluable at any time in life, whether we are in a crisis or simply needing some regular time dedicated to our own personal evolution and development. Yet that session can’t always be perfectly aligned with our impulse to seek out reassurance. The tarot is available day and night, at whatever time and place is most convenient for us to absorb its lessons; all we have to be is ready and willing to improve the quality of our thoughts, and subsequently our life.

Tarot pushes the black-hole button in the brain. It prompts the rational mind to relinquish control and instantly grant access to previously inaccessible information – and knowledge empowers. In life and business, the tarot can be a go-to device, taking our mind to places it never would otherwise have entered and enabling us to crack any impedimental imbalances or stalemates and move forward. Tarot is about seeing meaning and connections and finding purpose, but also, now more than ever, reworking the mind so that it functions naturally, organically and healthily. We now know what the information age looks and feels like and are starting to realize the impact the rapid advance of technology can have on our personal lives, business and society. The rapid processing power of computerized devices is becoming a substitute for our own judgement, intuition and deeper understanding through direct experience. In short, the computerized world has many benefits, but has also become a kind of mind-crutch, allowing the cognitive brain to call less and less on the limbic intuitive centre.

One of the effects of the ubiquitous information overload is a sort of analytical paralysis; the sheer amount of information available to us is so overwhelming that we tend to give up the chase and select only the information that confirms a pre-existing condition or belief. It’s time to rise up and reclaim the brain. Rather than being pigeonholed by our usual ‘online’ preferences, we will find that tarot gives our mind a chance to completely refresh itself and avoid getting stuck in automated algorithmic thought ruts.

Tarot is the point when art and science meet, where we can see the workings of the subconscious mind in material reality. I believe that the most profound and modern application of the tarot is as an inner emotional or psychological mind map, showing where and how our current frame of mind is driving our life. When following any map, as we know, even the smallest degree of adjustment to our planned trajectory can take us miles off-course. Using the tarot as a mind map, we are able to backtrack, fast-track and pinpoint how our behavioural responses, reactions or non-reactions can either lead us back to the start or down a new and exciting life path.

All becomes possible with the tarot deck as our mobile future tap, including predicting the outcome of a meeting, how a particularly tricky client, or the markets, will react, and whether a stock or project is worth a punt. We can also be poised and prepared when something is about to have its moment, and foresee financial, business or fashion trends – and so, in a sense, make them. The liquid modern world often requires an ultra-open and fluid response, and tarot reading helps generate new neural pathways and allows us to be continually reassessing and reinventing. In today’s fast-moving and ever-changing world, in this era of quick-fixes and information, the tarot can keep us ahead of the ever-pacier game.

In addition to its honest and transparent approach to problem-solving, when used as a form of pocket guru, wisdom teacher or counsellor, the tarot can help reclaim our misplaced power. We can misplace our power by becoming too reliant on others for our own psycho-emotional care or support. They then become like props or crutches, and we are not given the opportunity to grow and mature through our own self-reliance. Using the tarot as a psycho-emotional map offers us a way of reclaiming any unnecessary drains on our personal power, leading to ever-greater self-esteem and emotional security.

When we are stuck, facing a problem or lacking perspective, the symbolic imagery of the tarot can also stimulate our latent intuition, allowing us to overcome the obstacle of ignorance and reorient ourselves in a positive and constructive direction. Tarot can be used in any unclear situation when there’s a decision to be made or problem to be solved: no valley is too deep and no mountain too high for the divinely inspired. Yet, paradoxically, we need not climb, jump, leap or even fly to the highest ground, for the teleporting tarot-freed mind, which recognizes no such material limitations, can take us there instantaneously. Pure intuition – those anomalous thoughts that drop in from nowhere – are the lateral mind’s innate way of avoiding the queue of slower-moving logical, rational and reasoning lines of thought. Intuition relies on the fastest part of the brain – the limbic system – and is considered to be 80,000 times faster than our cognitive thought processes. The limbic system quickly and easily communicates feelings and bits of information to our conscious intelligence to maximize our chances of survival in a threatening context. Artists know how to access and use their intuition, but they need many years of studio practice to hone it. For those who don’t have the time or inclination for artistic practices, the tarot offers another ‘in-house’ mind-tapping option. So this book is, in a sense, simply a user’s guide to the mind, to help access as yet untapped aspects of intuitive brain functioning.

The tarot also provides a sacred space in which we can examine and observe the phenomena that arise or are constructed in our mind. Many ancient and modern minds agree, be they teachers, preachers, scientists, philosophers, heads of state or business moguls, that our thoughts create our reality. So, by knowing ourselves and the inner workings of our own mind, we can make the very best of life and positively augment our reality.

For me, the most exciting, relevant and contemporary use of the tarot is as a psychological tool to render us more effective, balanced and constructive individuals in our own lives and society. Most tarot books give an explanation of what’s happening on the outside, but rarely do they answer this all-important ‘Why me?’ question. So these books, like a quick-fix doctor offering curative but not preventative treatments, are the sort that will keep seeing their readers again and again, always with the same complaint. By identifying our own psychology or life philosophy as the root cause of our external life experience, however, we are able to effect lasting change. So, rather than write another quick-fix tarot book, I decided to take a more holistic and preventative approach, to serve my readers’ prospects better in the long term.

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.

The Power of Symbols and Imagery

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.