The “Aperture of Awareness”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: More musings inspired by Sallie Nichols’ Tarot and the Archetypal Journey.
The Collective Unconscious has been characterized as uniting (at least in theory) all conceivable human potential in a comprehensive “architecture of becoming” composed of archetypal symbolism that exists apart from exterior reality. It intrudes upon our waking world only to the extent that the two realms occasionally match speeds and produce instances of synchronicity between archetype and outward experience. At a mystical level it bears a striking resemblance to the “Formative World” of the Kabbalah that foreshadows physical manifestation. The role of our conscious mind is to parse this conceptual totality into bits-and-pieces of subjectively verifiable fact that can be digested and wielded at an intellectual level. Nichol’s suggests that our “aperture of awareness” often presents too narrow a “slit” to admit these momentous events in a cohesively integrated way, so we just marvel at the coincidence and go on about our business; otherwise they must be particularized and thus rendered intelligible and — more importantly — actionable.
In my work with the tarot over the past five decades I’ve been led to the conclusion that the Subconscious (a term with lingering New Age cred that is disavowed in modern psychoanalytical circles) is actually the internal dispatcher that routes messages from the Unconscious to our mental decoding faculties in a symbolic form that can be deciphered with a pinch of imagination and a storyteller’s flair for anecdote (not unlike dream analysis). Picture the Magician in the middle of our head with his wand raised high to receive the inspiration and his free hand pointed downward to send it on its way toward conscious expression. There is a parallel in the chakras, but regardless of where these intimations arise and their putative agency, capturing and processing their subliminal signals is part-and-parcel of how I think “tarot works.”
It’s all very “quasi-scientific:” the querent’s concentration on the question aligns the psychic channel for insight to flow into the reading from the Unconscious, and that numinous input informs the shuffle via sensitive mind/hand coordination that results in just the right cards being subconsciously selected to convey the message. (Even if one believes in a purely spiritual or non-rational origin for the information, this translation must occur or the process of tarot-reading would be entirely clairvoyant.) The images on the cards spark a cognitive leap of recognition in the reader that springs from a storehouse of prior experience and acquired wisdom that may or may not have been founded entirely on the study and practice of divination; intuition is always lurking just behind the scenes, ready with an astute turn of phrase.
Ideally, the querent’s latent awareness of future circumstances will rise to the surface in a conscious burst of revelation that will find congruence in the import of the cards, and together they will form a coherent whole that is in silent agreement with the querent’s understanding of the situation. All that remains is for the reader to clothe that unspoken perception in language that clearly demonstrates the validity of the connection. In the best cases there is little or no mismatch between the reader’s observations and the querent’s emerging grasp of the scope of the matter. Think of it as the querent viewing a private mental “screening” of the video footage with the reader doing the voice-over.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 12, 2023.
