Pre-Reading Prep — “A Moment of Silence”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Questions come up frequently in the online tarot community regarding what, if any, special preparations experienced diviners make before they embark on a reading session. This is usually focused on spiritual practices like prayers, invocations or meditation; environmental considerations like lighting, seating and music; and “props” like crystals or incense.
Around the time I entered high school (don’t ask how long ago), public-school teachers were given the order to disallow any kind of religious expression on school property (they took their “separation of Church and State” seriously). Someone in government came up with the cunning evasion that, during the pre-class “homeroom” assembly, students would be given roughly a minute of total silence to engage in whatever form of attunement we chose. (Whether we were actually “talking to God,” pondering the “meaning of life,” briefly catching up on our sleep [my preference], or just obsessing over that “hot” kid at the next desk nobody ever knew, we were just really impatient to get on with the day.) This was around the same time they nixed the Pledge of Allegiance because, to paraphrase Monty Python, it “had some God in it.”
Fast-forward nearly a decade to when I began reading the cards. During that period I was a confirmed agnostic, but my cousin, who was the pastor of a Spiritualist Church in Connecticut, offered a non-sectarian “white light” invocation that I could use silently to prepare myself for safely contacting Higher Consciousness. Since it was utterly innocuous and non-intrusive, I used this for years but it gradually fell by the wayside and I began just sitting there keeping my mouth shut, trying to blank my mind, while my sitter concentrated on the shuffle.
More recently, I encountered the Hindu “peace mantra” (Om Chanti) and began intoning it internally while I waited as a way to “calm and center” myself. Unfortunately, it’s the same cycle I use at night to banish insomnia, so there was always the risk I might doze off (for the record, it’s excellent for inducing sleep). Finally, as a current “Spinozan sympathizer,” I concluded that there is no point in soliciting the cooperation of external forces because by our very nature we are already in a state of universal integration (its operative premise is a rather mechanistic or utilitarian form of the “We Are All One” paradigm without the mystical “woo”).
A few years ago I was reading John Michael Greer’s Druidry Handbook, in which he discussed the act of meditation and examined the differences between the Eastern goal of emptying the mind of all thought and the Western “discursive” model that selects a single thought and dwells on it to the exclusion of all others. The latter presumes that the Western mind is too restless for unstructured meditation and needs a concrete idea to lean on in order to stay focused. Even though I’m a Westerner, my sensibilities gravitate toward trying to reach a completely acquiescent mental state, except when I’m reading for myself when my own subconscious awareness must be accessed.
These days when I approach a reading, although I’m non-religious in any orthodox sense, I’m mindful of Benebell Wen’s observations (slightly redacted) regarding Hexagram 20 (Guan; Observation) of the I Ching:
“In the ancient rituals honoring the Divine, there is a moment of quiet introspection between the commencement of prayers to the Divine and the explicit appeal to the Divine for support of human endeavors. Make the most of it. This is the time to cleanse yourself of inferior motivations.”
In my present work I hark back to the old “moment of silence” experience of high school and make an effort to purge myself of any motivations (including the desire to deliver a successful reading). I adopt a poised stillness in which all self-referential thought recedes into the background and I open myself to whatever comes from the cards after the client is done with them. Once my sitters complete their silent communion with the gods of tarot, I undertake my own subliminal conversation with the cards which it is my duty to render into a coherent narrative for their enlightenment.
In these scenarios there isn’t much opportunity for malicious intent to slip in through the cracks without being intercepted (I have some experience with astral matters and usually recognize an incursion when it occurs), so I don’t worry about my own state of spiritual purity. If my client has any such issues, I won’t know it (and don’t want to know it) since I observe absolute discretion regarding personal privacy. I don’t request any background information other than what comes up in casual banter (including the querent’s specific question) and just let the cards work their magic without my subconscious prompting.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on July 12, 2024.
