Modern Day Tarot Play: Know yourself, shape your life

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.

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