In this chapter I talk about my philosophy and how I’ve arrived at the conclusions I’ve reached about psychic work, psychic ability, and how it all happens. I talk about the subconscious mind and the right hemisphere of the brain and the crucial role I believe they play when psychic talent is engaged and active. I talk about how tarot was designed and what it was designed to do and how that works with us as readers. I talk about having compassion for all people and how that’s different from caring for specific people and why this matters.
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that life is a series of cycles, a series of spirals of activity, much like the picture of the DNA helix. These are cycles of accomplishment, growth, and change, each leading to a higher level of … more cycles. Some philosophers believe that each of us has a predetermined mission. They believe there’s an ultimate plateau that each of us must reach in this life, and then life will take on new trappings, through death. I believe this too. In fact, this is the life’s work of the great mediums: seeing through that veil of death to what has come before and what is to come. Tarot comprehends the universe, from the smallest living thing to the great and grand schemes of things.
The Arcana
In terms of tarot symbolism, there are two categories of cards. The Major Arcana cards represent big life issues, big conditions, long-term things, the macrocosm of life, major dreams, big events, and major decisions. These cards talk about the cycles that spiral upward. In this section of the cards, between the Fool and the World, there is an entire life; and within that life are all the chapters, and each chapter begins with the Fool and ends with the World. So you can see, we just keep cycling upward, and this is called growth. It’s amazing that this group of picture cards can be so profound.
The Minor Arcana cards, on the other hand, come into play when we talk about the small stuff, the day-to-day stuff. For example, the (Minor) Seven of Swords reversed can mean the client is not being taken advantage of in a particular situation, while the (Major) Justice can mean the client is getting justice on a grand scale, over time. The (Major) Star is about big dreams and long-term aspirations: for example, to be an artist. The (Minor) Seven of Cups is about small dreams, day-to-day things.
It took me a while to realize that there are a lot of parallels between the two groups of cards. It really boils down to the grand scale versus the small scale of things: forest and tree.
Which Tarot Pack Works Best?
I have never met the woman who painted the cards I use, but I am continually astonished at her intuitive ability. It seems she has packed into seventy-eight cards so much feeling and so many symbolic things. I’ve been using this pack for thirty years and I’m still finding things I never noticed before. And by the way, as you work with tarot, it works at your level of ability. You will get the information you need, when you need it, from whatever pack you use. And when you’re ready, you’ll get more. It’s pretty amazing. The subconscious, I think, guides the learning process, and as we grow more accomplished, we draw more nuanced card combinations because we can handle them.
Another thing about the pack I use is that all the faces of the people in these cards are rich with flesh and emotion. For me this is like gold. As I said, I respond at the emotional level in life and to flesh-and-blood people, so I respond at the emotional level to these cards. I feel things. I can realize the things my client is feeling. I just get it. (The Rider-Waite tarot pack is based in the same symbolism, colors, and images, but the faces are bland. They are not so much human representations as indications. Sure, I can work with these, but the great psychic information I get is due, I’m sure, to the very human quality of the “people” in my pack.) Not all of my students agree, but I’ve noticed that the ones who don’t get it have little or no water in their natal astrological chart. They just don’t come at life from the heart. They think their way through everything. So maybe they can do serviceable readings, having memorized everything, but maybe they’ll never have psychic insight. I’m hoping, though, that as they continue to work with any kind of tarot pack, the power of their right brain will strengthen, slowly but surely.
The Subconscious Mind
What, you may ask, am I talking about here? Good question.
Forty years ago there was a lot of talk that companies were inserting pictures of their products into feature films. So you’d be watching a movie and all of a sudden you’d be craving popcorn. What you didn’t know was that you had just seen a picture of popcorn, but it went by so fast that your conscious mind didn’t know it. Your conscious mind was totally into the movie, so it was your subconscious mind that picked up on it. The seeing of that picture inserted into the film triggered a subliminal response. So you were tricked, really, into craving popcorn. As soon as it was revealed that people were being tricked by things they didn’t even realize they were seeing, so-called subliminal advertising was banned, at least so far as they could catch people at it.
Well, I believe that the ideas I get from a group of cards—ideas that seem to have nothing to do with the meanings of these cards—are subliminal responses to what I’m seeing. Maybe it’s the combination of colors or the combination of images or some trigger of my own life experience that I don’t consciously recognize. See, I don’t know for sure. But I do know that I get ideas, that they’re accurate, and that they sure aren’t necessarily what I’m seeing in the cards in front of me.
And so I have learned that my subconscious must be at work as I read.
I once had an interesting experience with this. The only time I allowed a second person to stay in the room to listen to a reading, totally violating my own rule, I was talking on and on. Suddenly, the client spoke to her friend, who was only about eight feet away on the sofa. My client’s voice jolted me out of wherever I was, because I looked up at that friend and what I saw was an incredibly tiny person like a mile away. I was shocked. Where in the world does my head go when I read? Well, wherever it goes, it sure must be the right place.
Again, I need to say that I doubt this will happen for you for a while. As you’re starting out, you’ll get perfectly accurate and adequate information from the cards you draw, and everything will make sense. And you can do a good job.
But how the subconscious kicks in, and when, is another question. I don’t know. It just seemed to start happening to me one day. And that is when I believe my psychic ability kicked in. I said something. Actually, as I said earlier, something just kind of fell out of my mouth, and I was hearing it for the first time myself. I hadn’t actually thought it. I just found myself saying it.
Since then, I’ve “seen” a jigsaw puzzle piece that wasn’t there in the throat of the Page of Pentacles, and that child had in fact choked on a jigsaw puzzle piece when he was little. I’ve seen a 747 in the clouds around the King of Swords, and the person in question was an airline pilot. I’ve seen a little white dog with black button eyes in the cards of a woman who had such a dog.
Not one of these things is in a tarot pack. Definitely not in mine. But I saw them all, as if with my physical eyes. I believe by then I’d worked so hard on my right brain that it was finally just doing its own thing. And, no, I can’t explain it.
So, yes, you can just sit down and read cards as an intellectual exercise and be correct. It’s what happens with all students of tarot. As I said, I read for people for months with a book open in front of me until I finally learned all the card meanings.
But as time goes on and you work with tarot, you’ll start to see more because you’ll be developing the right brain (the side that “sees” what isn’t there) to the point where it can get information that isn’t obvious.
As for tarot cards, as I said, the Rider-Waite pack was carefully thought out and includes colors and forms and symbols designed to trigger not-conscious responses. Take yellow, for example. Real estate agents say, “If you want to sell a house, paint it yellow.” Makes sense, right? Yellow is the color of the sun, so it’s the color of life. It is a glad color, at least in our culture. So seeing yellow triggers a glad response in us. We don’t think about it. It’s just there. And gray? Well, usually gray is gloomy, right?
In fact, there’s a whole body of research on the psychology of color, with conclusions like don’t paint prisons red. Keep hospital rooms neutral in color. Wear bright colors to attract. Black, the absence of color, is for mourning the absence of life in our culture.
In addition to color selection, the very designs of traditional tarot cards all call upon archetypes—the moon, the sun, stars, colors, shapes—and we respond to these without even knowing we’re doing it. An archetype is a sort of icon all humans tend to respond to in the same way. The moon is a romantic thing, for example, to almost everybody. Here again, we’re responding in the same way we used to crave that popcorn in the middle of the movie.
Using (Only Half) Your Head
Since I believe that psychic ability is “located” in the right brain, I believe that the potential to use it is there in all of us, to one degree or another. I believe we’re born with it. But if all we do is exercise and use the left brain (adding and subtracting our way through school and life), then whatever potential we might have to be psychic isn’t going to be developed. Don’t use a muscle, and it atrophies, right?
The exceptions to this seem to be (a) when we’re under extreme emotional duress and (b) when we’re sleeping. In both these cases, our defenses are down and glimmers of that native talent can appear. The mother knows when the child is injured. The dreamer has a clear vision of a bad future event. In both these cases, the adding and subtracting side of our head is turned off, which makes room for the creative side to get through to us. This is probably happening all day long, but all day long we’re usually focused on work, or at least we’re focused on wants, activities, and thoughts. So we don’t “hear” what’s being told to us by our own “little voices.” Believe me, though, they’re speaking.
Getting the Messages
So if it’s true that we humans can reach out into a kind of ephemeral database and extract information, then when we read cards we’re simply using a decoding device to understand what is inside the people we’re reading. Because we’re all connected to the database, right? If I log into Twitter, I’m going to see you and know what you’re thinking and doing because you’ve posted it there. In the same way, our messages are available to others if they know how to look for them.
This is funny. I was once using a very worn pack of cards—half the color was gone—and I started getting accurate information from the worn spots. They looked like things to me, in the same way we see faces and shapes in clouds. And because I was focused on the client, the things I was seeing were real—and they were in fact her things.
So how do you know when you’re reading well? Simply, you know you’re on your way when you can put the book down and get all your information from the cards. As with driving and not paying conscious attention to what you’re doing, once you’ve learned the meanings of the cards and learned the spreads and gotten comfortable with the process of reading other people, reading can become second nature.
To Care or Not to Care
Okay, then. So let’s say you’ve been doing your homework—studying your cards, practicing on people, learning the textbook definitions, and doing exercises to strengthen the creative muscle that is your right brain. And now you think, “Finally, I can read my lover’s cards and do a good job.” Right? Wrong! Remember, knowing tarot isn’t enough.
A successful reading also requires dispassion. As a reader, you simply can’t care about the outcome of a reading. You can care only about doing a good job for the client. If you do start caring about the outcome, your left brain will start calling the shots and you probably won’t see what you need to see because you’ll be too busy seeing what you want to see. See? Any negative subliminal message you may get will probably be drowned out by the positive result you want. And so you will learn exactly … nothing at all.
I watched a reader once who was so darn invested in showing off, I was disgusted. She wasn’t even good at reading, I knew. But her ego was there, big time, at the total expense of the client. She just didn’t care (except, of course, for the fee that was to follow). And this is just bad, bad, bad.
See, what I know is that true reading comes from the heart more than from any other human capacity. It’s my compassion that links me to my client. I have to care, not on a personal basis but on a humankind basis. Psychic information comes not from what you think when you look at a card but from what you feel. The best stuff is what occurs to you before you even have a chance to think. This is why I mentioned earlier that I sit at that table absolutely not judging. We all have faults, flaws, baggage.
And by the way, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re reading is not a nice person. It can’t matter if you don’t like the person. You still have to care that the person is a human being. Maybe the batterer was battered as a kid. Maybe the jealous person was never cared for, encouraged, supported. It may be hard to arrive at this acceptance and understanding, but it can be done. All it means is that the reader has to be selfless. In the same way a doctor will repair the broken arm of a murderer, we professionals have to work in exactly that way with all who come to us. So I try to stay humble. You need to do that too.
And here is yet another “coincidence.”
Not.
An hour after writing the paragraph you just read, I was watching an episode of Columbo. And in a gentle way the detective tells the nice old woman he rightfully suspects of murder that “some murderers I even like because they’re just nice people.” He likes them for who they are; he doesn’t like at all what they’ve done.
So try to be a Columbo when it comes to caring about people in a simply human sense.