In Defense of Tarot
To start with, and to borrow a line from the old television show "Lost": "I'm an ordinary man...meat and potatoes, I live in the real world. I'm not a big believer in magic." I'm a big believer in science and the scientific method, as I've written about at great length on here. But I also operate with an awareness of the limits of science, and I try to cultivate a healthy sense of curiosity about what might be lurking in those gaps.
Precursor example: exactly how I react to the question of whether or not aliens exist depends entirely on the context of the conversation and the person with whom I'm having it. The questions "Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is there intelligent life? How could we know?" are scientific questions that were explored by the likes of great minds like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. These questions invite a sense of curiosity and an open discussion about our own epistemological limitations.
On the other hand, specific questions (or worse, assertions) about aliens having crashed on the planet Earth in a spacecraft in the last century, which is currently being held in a top-secret government facility in the western United States and information about which is carefully guarded to prevent it from leaking out to the general public elicits a very different reaction from me. I don't think I can answer this question, but I have severe doubts, and I'm almost certain it's not worth my time to seek the answer.
The wonderment of the first set of general questions is corrupted by the specificity of questions like the latter. It's the difference between questions of deism and theism. If you place the questions on a gradient, qualitatively, there's probably a boundary between these two, but I don't know where it is. (I think the philosophical question of where this boundary lies is an immensely important one, but one I don't wish to explore here.)
Most things that fall under the general umbrella of "mysticism" suffer from the same corruptibility. There may be an interesting or profound set of questions at their core, but they're easily corrupted by specificity. To anyone who would suggest that Tarot cards are capable of predicting the future, I can safely turn a blind eye. The charge that Tarot cards are a direct line of communication between us and a grander operating force in universe at large seems, more generally, like the question of the existence of synchronicities. To this last question, my plan is to remain undecided and cautiously curious.
In terms of broadening my understanding of the world (and the humans who live in it), I've gotten a lot of mileage in the last year from the concept of psychological projection. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what this is, but I'll define it as I understand it at the outset. I'm not a trained psychologist so this definition is loosely operative and not strictly clinical.
There's a lot that happens in our brains that is below our conscious awareness, in the unconscious. Consciousness does not have direct access to what's happening at this level. Projection is the act of an individual attributing some emotion or energy that's happening within themselves, often subconsciously, to someone or something external. This is often some negative emotion that the person has disembodied about themselves. A person feels angry, but they don't admit to themselves, or even have any awareness, that they're angry, and in response they might assume that someone else is angry at them, even if there's no evidence for this.
These days, if I find myself getting frustrated or angry with another person, I generally turn the scrutiny from them to myself to see if I can determine it's true origin. This is incredibly useful more often than you might think, but it is extremely difficult to cultivate the kind of self-awareness that allows you to recognize and make sense of something inside of you.
Everyone projects to some degree. All gaps in our actual knowledge and understanding of the world and the people around us are filled in with psychological projections, much in the way that the gaps in fossilized DNA were filled in with extant frog DNA to get a complete strand that could express a dinosaur phenotype in Jurassic Park.
So, if there is all of this stuff happening deep within our brains, to which we don't have direct access, the question really is: what external constructs should we bring into our lives that will capture and give structure to our projections? It's not a question of whether we will project, but instead what implements we might surround ourselves with and use that help act as a proxy to what's buried within us.
It is precisely this that I find Tarot cards most useful for. I have a question, open-ended, and I don't even know how to begin articulating the answer. I can lay down some Tarot cards in a relevant spread, look up their meanings, connect the meanings of the cards to one another, and then my brain is forced to figure out how these external things are relevant to what I asked. They're not giving me "the" answer, they're awakening that which is latent within me and making it visible to my conscious awareness.
A piece of art hanging on the wall may evoke an emotion in us. Was the emotion in us and our witness to the art brought the emotion to life, or did the art introduce an emotion that was entirely new?
Precursor example: exactly how I react to the question of whether or not aliens exist depends entirely on the context of the conversation and the person with whom I'm having it. The questions "Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is there intelligent life? How could we know?" are scientific questions that were explored by the likes of great minds like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. These questions invite a sense of curiosity and an open discussion about our own epistemological limitations.
On the other hand, specific questions (or worse, assertions) about aliens having crashed on the planet Earth in a spacecraft in the last century, which is currently being held in a top-secret government facility in the western United States and information about which is carefully guarded to prevent it from leaking out to the general public elicits a very different reaction from me. I don't think I can answer this question, but I have severe doubts, and I'm almost certain it's not worth my time to seek the answer.
The wonderment of the first set of general questions is corrupted by the specificity of questions like the latter. It's the difference between questions of deism and theism. If you place the questions on a gradient, qualitatively, there's probably a boundary between these two, but I don't know where it is. (I think the philosophical question of where this boundary lies is an immensely important one, but one I don't wish to explore here.)
Most things that fall under the general umbrella of "mysticism" suffer from the same corruptibility. There may be an interesting or profound set of questions at their core, but they're easily corrupted by specificity. To anyone who would suggest that Tarot cards are capable of predicting the future, I can safely turn a blind eye. The charge that Tarot cards are a direct line of communication between us and a grander operating force in universe at large seems, more generally, like the question of the existence of synchronicities. To this last question, my plan is to remain undecided and cautiously curious.
In terms of broadening my understanding of the world (and the humans who live in it), I've gotten a lot of mileage in the last year from the concept of psychological projection. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what this is, but I'll define it as I understand it at the outset. I'm not a trained psychologist so this definition is loosely operative and not strictly clinical.
There's a lot that happens in our brains that is below our conscious awareness, in the unconscious. Consciousness does not have direct access to what's happening at this level. Projection is the act of an individual attributing some emotion or energy that's happening within themselves, often subconsciously, to someone or something external. This is often some negative emotion that the person has disembodied about themselves. A person feels angry, but they don't admit to themselves, or even have any awareness, that they're angry, and in response they might assume that someone else is angry at them, even if there's no evidence for this.
These days, if I find myself getting frustrated or angry with another person, I generally turn the scrutiny from them to myself to see if I can determine it's true origin. This is incredibly useful more often than you might think, but it is extremely difficult to cultivate the kind of self-awareness that allows you to recognize and make sense of something inside of you.
Everyone projects to some degree. All gaps in our actual knowledge and understanding of the world and the people around us are filled in with psychological projections, much in the way that the gaps in fossilized DNA were filled in with extant frog DNA to get a complete strand that could express a dinosaur phenotype in Jurassic Park.
So, if there is all of this stuff happening deep within our brains, to which we don't have direct access, the question really is: what external constructs should we bring into our lives that will capture and give structure to our projections? It's not a question of whether we will project, but instead what implements we might surround ourselves with and use that help act as a proxy to what's buried within us.
It is precisely this that I find Tarot cards most useful for. I have a question, open-ended, and I don't even know how to begin articulating the answer. I can lay down some Tarot cards in a relevant spread, look up their meanings, connect the meanings of the cards to one another, and then my brain is forced to figure out how these external things are relevant to what I asked. They're not giving me "the" answer, they're awakening that which is latent within me and making it visible to my conscious awareness.
A piece of art hanging on the wall may evoke an emotion in us. Was the emotion in us and our witness to the art brought the emotion to life, or did the art introduce an emotion that was entirely new?