by George A. Boyd ©2003
Tarot card reading has been associated in the popular imagination with
"fortune telling" or predicting the future. This is an incorrect notion
that should be clarified.
While each card can provide an intrapsychic representation of external
objects or relationships with others, or act as a metaphor for personal
or spiritual experience, it does not per se, tell us anything about the
future. We will examine the different ways that you experience the future,
and see in what capacity the Tarot does or do not predict the future.
The future in the Metaconscious Mind
The faculties of the Metaconscious mind, based on the goals that you
have set for yourself, effectively create the idea of your personal future
or "destiny". The following vehicles of the Metaconscious mind play a
role in constructing the future.
- Causation (Effecting change) - the activity of the will sets into
motion the changes that move you towards a defined goal. The will
is an organizing and coordinating force for the whole personality,
directing behavior and all faculties to progressively actualize a
visualized objective.
- Pattern closure (sense of completion or purpose) - The intuition
grasps the idea of completion inherent in your goal, and recognizes
when you have reached it.
- Problem Solving (overcoming obstacles to achievement) - The intellect
breaks down the path to the goal into discrete tasks that must be
accomplished, and solves the problems encountered in each task.
- Planning (scheduling and identifying the steps to the goal) - The
Concrete Mind checks of the steps towards completion, and delineates
the time markers for each step to completion.
- Standards (ideal) - The Conscience creates the sense of ideality
that will be achieved when the goal is attained. It also defines what
are acceptable and unacceptable means for you to achieve your goal.
- Imagination (acting as if) - The persona allows you to imagine what
it would be like to experience achieving the goal. It also embodies
the social skills you must use along the way to get people to cooperate
with you in reaching your goal.
- Commitment (motivation and perseverance) - The desire body commits
to achieving the goal and tenaciously strives towards the goals despite
setbacks and obstacles.
In the Metaconscious mind, you effectively reate your future by setting
goals and acting on them. You make up your mind and work with skill and
determination to achieve them.
When you don't have goals to work for, you may experience the state of
being. This brings needed rest and repose. When you meditate, you enter
the state of being.
The Tarot cards may mirror to you the activity of your Metaconscious
mind. The cards may show that you have made a powerful commitment to a
goal (Four of Pentacles) or that you have a very emotionally satisfying
goal to work for (Ten of Cups). They may also you indicate have decided
to undertake a new goal (Ace of Swords), or that you are planning for
the future (Two of Rods). When the cards are reversed, they may show you
that you remain conflicted, hesitant or uncommitted.
The Future in the Conscious mind
In the Conscious mind, you dwell in the experience of the present time.
Here the sense of your future is mediated through filters of belief, reasoning,
feelings, and the activity of your nervous system.
- Expectation (anticipation) - Your ego builds an expectation about
what will happen by drawing on past experiences. Negative experiences
in the past may produce attitudes of dread, pessimism, worry or anxiety.
Positive experiences in the past may construct expectations marked by
anticipation, hope, optimism, and confidence.
- Scenario Analysis (Reasoning and Inference) - Your reason analyzes
the situation and attempts to arrive at a conclusion through seven strategies
- It forms a null hypothesis, a belief that whatever interventions
you do will not produce change, then analyzes the results of your
intervention to see if there is indeed a change.
- It constructs a trend-line analysis, projecting past experience
into the future through mathematical modeling.
- It uses deductive reasoning to infer behavior of people and
objects from evidence available.
- It speculates about possible scenarios for the future and assigns
a probability for each occurrence.
- It critically examines the evidence for each scenario to see
which scenario is most likely
- It evaluates the potential risk of each scenario.
- It makes a conclusion about what will occur in the future based
upon an analysis of the possible outcomes.
The quality of these inferential predictions is contingent upon the
accuracy of the information available to you. The better the information,
the more accurate your prediction will be.
- Emotional Response (affective reaction) - based upon your beliefs
and attitude, your feeling center gives rise to different emotions.
Hopeful and confident beliefs are linked with positive emotions. Negative
attitudes engender negative emotions.
- Neural Activation (Behavioral Excitation/Inhibition) - Based on your
beliefs about a potential scenario, your nervous system will either
facilitate behavior towards that scenario (neural excitation) or block
it (neural inhibition). Positive expectations typically produce neural
excitation, while negative attitudes bring about neural inhibition.
In the Conscious mind, you try to make guesses about what the future
will hold based on your expectations and your inferences.
The Tarot cards may reflect some of these attitudes you hold, such as
discontent (Four of Cups), anxiety (Nine of Swords), pessimism (Five of
Cups), grief (Three of Swords), optimism (Nine of Cups), or pride (Three
of Pentacles). It can also show you your efforts to analyze and predict
your situation, such as evaluation (Seven of Pentacles).
The future in the Subconscious mind
In the Subconscious mind, your sense of the future is conveyed through
impressions, images, and dreams. This dreamlike sense of the future is
mediated through your astral body, and is sometimes called premonitiona
strong feeling of dread or foreboding about the future that you cannot
express in words.
You may travel in the astral body in the trance state of hypnosis, in
the state of dreaming, or in meditation. You may even seemingly travel
into the future in guided meditations. Here you may gather impressions
or glimpses of scenes in which you envision what the future may be like.
Nothing is definite, though. This sense of the future is vague, contaminated
by your wishes and fears, and associated with unrelated memories and images
from your unconscious mind.
The Tarot captures this random and chaotic impressional nexus of the
Subconscious mind in one of the Major Arcana, the Moon.
The future in the Superconscious mind
In the Superconscious mind, your sense of the future is your spiritual
potential. Here you examine the future states of spiritual evolution of
your Soul, the markers of progress of your spirit in the Nadamic Path,
and the potential forms of your vehicles as you undergo the fires of initiation.
As you grow in your ability to see within in meditation, you enhance your
faculty of spiritual discernment (viveka), and can trace the track of
your spiritual destiny.
In the Tarot cards, the Major Arcana card, the Star, captures this sense
of spiritual potential.
The future as portrayed in the Tarot
The future pictured by the tarot is closest to that of the Subconscious
mind. It is vague and impressional. It suggests an image or symbol to
represent the unknown, the mysterious. This premonition-like presentation
of the future is uncertain, not fully formed, even dreamlike.
The Tarot does not portray a destiny that is clear like a plan, or reveal
a future with discrete behavioral events on a timeline. Instead it presents
a template of meaning through which you can explore your expectations
about the future, your attitudes, your guesses about potential outcomes,
your wishes, hopes and fears about what might be or could be.
The Tarot in your future
Using the Tarot will amplify your ability to use reflective meditation
to explore the meaning of symbols, and will activate your faculty of intuition.
If the Tarot truly speaks to you as it does to some individuals, it can
become a valuable tool that you can utilize to tap your intuitive wisdom.
If the Tarot speaks clearly to you, you may be able to access this intuitive
gift to do readings for others. As you use these cards more and more,
you will find that each card has many facets and shades of meaning that
they will reveal to you. In this way your gift will grow and you will
become a better reader in your future.
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