The Fount of All Wisdom?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It could be argued that any human activity — no matter how slight — that isn’t fully automatic on one hand or totally arbitrary on the other has an implicit blueprint or model that expresses its ideal performance, even if this exemplar is only a personal benchmark that we keep in our own head. It may represent conditioned behavior that is often called “rule of thumb” or “modus operandi,” but at its most propulsive it is about proving something to ourselves (and maybe to the world).

By this I don’t mean objectives that have established and documented standards of excellence supported by metrics; those formal strictures represent external obligations that have little to do with individual goal-setting. I’m referring to the private agenda for which we acknowledge full responsibility in pursuing an informal commitment of our own making. It epitomizes the optimistic “I can do this” reaction to challenges.

When we undertake this initiative, we may be privy to only a tiny piece of the “master plan” that we’re intent on executing in the hope that it will take us to the intended destination. For the most part, unless we’ve had prior experience with a similar situation or possess a reliable roadmap, we could be flying blind in our shortsightedness. What we’re telling ourselves subconsciously may be poorly informed by more universal implications. I like to think that a tarot reading will reveal more of the untapped potential than we’re able to perceive from our mundane vantage point, thus filling us in on the “big picture” and possibly giving us a broader basis for acting that is not strictly self-imposed.

I was brought to this contemplation by a recent question on the r/tarot sub-reddit regarding whether tarot merely spits our own thoughts back at us (so-called “confirmation bias” at work) or can in fact provide an outlook that goes beyond our subjective self-awareness. If we’re passionately fixated on a single purpose, whether it’s in the form of positive or negative reinforcement, that may be all the cards are able to comprehend, to the detriment of a more unbiased appreciation of the matter. I gave my standard answer (slightly expanded here):

“(Tarot) has been called a ‘mirror of the personal subconscious,’ but where the subconscious gets its broader social and spiritual insights is open to conjecture. A few possibilities are the Collective Unconscious; the Akashic Record; the Astral Plane; the Mind of God; the Cosmic Plan; and Plato’s “Soul of the World.” In other words, it’s intuitively channeled knowledge that enters through the subconscious.”

This knowledge is generally abstract or impersonal (the definitive word is “archetypal”); it only becomes wisdom when we translate it into our own terms and put it to good use in our cause; if we don’t act on it or fail to optimize its application, the received information becomes moot. We might as well not have asked the Universe for guidance in the first place. Absent the kind of foresight that divination can provide, most people just look for glimpses of validation in any feedback they’re able to obtain from their circumstances. The danger, like the mythical “boiling a frog” scenario, is that by the time errors in judgment are recognized, it’s too late to conveniently change course. As the saying goes “Hindsight is 20/20.”

Another persistent question is “Does this stuff even work?” In my experience, it does to some extent as long as we don’t try to put too fine a point on our expectations. If we look for hints of truth in the guise of emerging tendencies, trends and possibilities rather than hard evidence that quite often fails to materialize in a literal sense, we can come up with some valuable revelations. (I call this mode of interpretation “impressionistic” rather than factually descriptive.) A case in point is my work with numerous missing-person enigmas, many of which have “gone cold” over the years. From time-to-time I’ve received remarkably coherent “ballpark” testimony from my readings as to the whereabouts and condition of the absent individuals, observations that turned out to be valid even though the victim was rarely among the living when found.

One prediction advised “she was transported over water and is now in a wet place” (she was subsequently retrieved from the bottom of a pond);

Another confided “he is in the country, most likely in an agricultural setting that is involved with farm animals” (his dismembered remains were unearthed on a farm):

A third observed “she most likely committed suicide and is now lying in a concealed spot” (she was found deceased in a storage facility locked from the inside);

Yet another assumed that “he is in the woods East of where he was last seen, and is not readily visible” (he was eventually discovered in the vicinity some time later after multiple searches of the area);

Then there was the matter of an English woman’s brother who went missing in Paris, for which I was able to pinpoint the direction from her hotel and aim her toward his location in a nearby “institutional facility” (which turned out to be a jail and not the hospital I had envisioned, where it took her only an hour of sleuthing to find him);

. . . and the first reading of this kind I ever did revealed “she has probably drowned” (she was discovered floating in the Yuba River in California). There have been many failures and partial successes along the way, but these stand out as substantiating my methods.

I can vouch for the fact that “this stuff” does indeed work if we’re able to decipher the clues with any degree of proficiency and aren’t discouraged by repeated lack of success (which is all too common in this rather grim business).

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 27, 2024.