Intuitive Reading
Here’s the bit of the book where I launch into the woo-woo. I obviously don’t think it’s woo-woo; on the contrary, while I’m a staunch advocate for rational thinking (there’s too little of it; too few people know how to do it; and those who claim it rarely practice it), I also think there’s a place for the nonrational. Note that the nonrational isn’t the irrational. Rather than the opposite of rational thinking, it’s the complement to it.
We can divide rational thinking into two ways of reasoning: deduction and induction. Similarly, we can identify nonrational thinking as comprised of a third: abduction. Deductive reasoning is mathematical in nature: it arrives at a conclusion that necessarily follows from given premises. Induction is scientific: it arrives at conclusions based upon weighing evidence. Both involve analysis, the process of breaking ideas into their parts. Abduction, in contrast, is the perception of patterns and the creation of meaning from those patterns holistically. Where both deduction and induction analyze patterns into their components, when we use abduction we perceive the patterns as a whole.
When we read the cards, we don’t abandon analysis: we analyze the cards and their places to narrow down a range of possible meanings. For some readers, this analysis is all they do: the beginner frantically flipping through the book and reading the “meanings” of the cards is performing a kind of analysis. It has value, to be sure, or no beginner would ever move beyond those beginnings.
However, skilled readers shoud use abduction, too. Abduction isn’t a mystical process; nearly every scientist begins with an abduction. Let’s imagine that I’m investigating a scientific problem. I notice that the current theories of, say, syntax don’t quite work for me. I can’t put my finger on it, but I have a hunch that it works some other way. This hunch, which leads to potential hypotheses, is abductive reasoning. I have seen the pattern and “felt” that it doesn’t fit. Now, as a scientist, I design procedures by which I can try to falsify my hunch, leading me into the city streets of induction and deduction.
But let’s imagine that we remain in the twisty forest path of abductive reasoning for a while longer. Scientists use this tool only to find things to investigate, but can we use it as a means of investigation itself? Can we use it to create meaning?
Poets and artists use abductive reasoning all the time. A poem begins—at least for me—in a felt sense of rightness about a phrase or a few words. I might have two phrases, know that they must be separated, that I must move from one to the other, but know nothing else. Then, word by word, phrase by phrase, on a good day clause by clause, I find the rest of the poem.
So how do we use abduction? What is the procedure?
I’ve already discussed focusing, and suggested that this method could be used to derive at more effective questions. It can also help us understand meanings. We can “hold” a possible meaning in our body, and wait for a response. So, for example, I have the combination of 17–Stork and 9–Flowers. I understand the stork is the theme of change and improvement, and the flowers indicate beauty or a gift. So this is an improvement in beauty. I relax and pay attention to my body. Where do I wish to hold this idea?
I feel my attention drift, let’s say, to my belly (although it could just as easily be any other part of the body—and sometimes not even in the body, but that’s a matter for another book). I try to hold this image there, this image of an improvement in beauty. I sit with the feeling for a time.
I try to give that feeling a name. “When I hold this idea in my belly, I feel a round tightness.” If I have hit upon a useful label, the feeling will deepen, soften, grow warm, or otherwise feel “more right.”
Then, I try to give it a name. “Are you plastic surgery?” I ask. I attend to the felt sense I have in my belly—and nothing happens. “Perhaps you’re the feeling of redecorating?” This also gets no response, let’s say, so I sit a while longer with the feeling. “Is this a new interest in the arts?” While I sit with the feeling, it begins to soften. The more I suspect this, the more it feels right.
Where does this information come from? The body? Perhaps. Or perhaps the body is merely a receiver. Either way, you can get some startling insights this way, even though it’s more time consuming than simply memorizing the cards. This is also a useful way to avoid the “reading for oneself” problem, as I’ve mentioned before: your mind might lie, but the body rarely does.
In a spread, cards in certain positions have salience, as I’ve mentioned before. It’s worthwhile to check for salience elsewhere in the spread, as well. There are two simple techniques for doing so that I use regularly. They both involve a variation of focusing I call “breathing-with.”
Breathing-with involves shifting our sensation of breath from our lungs to another body part. For example, we can breathe with our hand. Try this now: begin by focusing on your breath, as you slowly breathe in and out. Now shift your focus on each exhale and inhale to your left hand (left-handed folks may want to swap this, although in my experience it doesn’t really matter—you could do this with your foot, I suspect, and get the same results). You should, with some small practice, feel your hand pulse with your breath. When you do, imagine that you are inhaling a light, mist, or “energy” into it with each inhalation. When it begins to feel warm and hypersensitive, you are ready to use it as an intuitive device. Pass it over the spread, and attend to the feeling you’re holding in your hand. As it changes, pay attention to the cards it hovers over. This practice can be useful in selecting cards as well; for some spreads, I like to fan the cards out face down and select them this way.
You can also use this with a single tarot card, running your finger over the images until you feel the sensation in your hand change, shift, or increase. The particular part of the image where this occurs takes on increased significance.
Breathing with the eyes involves the same procedure, but in this case you breathe—well, with the eyes. With practice, you may notice objects take on increased “realness” as you look upon them. Those objects are salient.
Finding salient cards can help us parse a string of cards, such as in the Lenormand. We can begin to see which cards can be read as combinations and which cards should be read individually; which cards are topics, and which are comments. Salient cards, which seem “more real” to our breathed-with eyes, or where our hand feels heavier, hotter, or weird, are more likely to be topics.
You can do two other things to improve your intuitive grasp of the situation, and they’re both somewhat counterintuitive. Or maybe a better way of putting it (since they’re intuitive in the other sense of the word) is that they’re not what you might expect. One is to distrust your mind, and the other is to trust your body. If you go by movies, literature, and art, you’ll think that divination is a straining activity, wrinkled brow, finger to the forehead. You already know that divination requires intense relaxation, and I’ve never met what I would regard as a real psychic who put his or her finger to her forehead; most of the people in the occult community I know regard that gesture as ridiculous. The other image we have is the psychic who suddenly gets a flash and runs off to warn the president or find the body. That’s usually not the way it works either.
Most psychics worth their salt, in my opinion, carefully consider whether an insight is real or not. It’s easy to create false “insights” out of your worries and concerns. If you suddenly have an insight that you’ll get in a car accident, rather than stay home and hide from cars, you might consider whether there’s another reason you’d have that idea. For example, did you see a TV show with a car accident? Did you read about one, or hear about one on the radio? Are you prone already to be a nervous driver? If you can trace back that insight, even tentatively, to some other inspiration it’s probably not really psychic.
This kind of self-awareness requires both a good memory and a mindful attitude. Regular mindfulness meditation in this—as in so many other things—helps. And so does practice. I find it useful practice to trace back, in my mind, the course of a conversation. Another useful practice is to trace your day backwards in your imagination before you go to sleep. This exercise is surprisingly difficult, but trains your mind to find the origin of ideas.
However, with some insights, you try to trace them back and you find that they came out of nowhere. I call it the “brick wall.” It’s as if an idea appeared through a brick wall, out of nothing. That brick wall is the limits of our analytic mind. Beyond it is the sea of the unconscious. Ideas that come from there aren’t all psychic insights, especially if you have a tendency to a bit of neurosis (and really, who doesn’t?). But many of them are.
The trick is to trace back an idea to its origin. Is it a rational origin, like you have heard your engine making a funny noise so you feel that your car might break down? Is it an irrational origin, like you heard your neighbor’s car broke down and so you’re afraid yours will too? Or is it a nonrational origin: you just know, without knowing how, that your car will break down. The nonrational isn’t always true, but it’s also not to be dismissed as irrational.
Focusing can be aided with a tool that measures your ideomotor response. While that sounds technical, such a tool is actually a simple weight hanging by a thread: a pendulum. I have had my doubts about the pendulum, as I think do many serious occultists. It’s surrounded by nonsense and easily falsified claims. As you probably realize, I’m a skeptic and an advocate of bringing critical thinking to magic and divination. I don’t think the two approaches are incompatible. So when people make scientific-sounding claims that betray an absolute lack of even basic scientific knowledge, I tend to make myself unpopular by pointing it out. Fortunately, I’m a witty guest and throw a mean dinner party, so I maintain at least some friendships.
I was about eleven, I think, when I first experimented with a pendulum. An article in Fate magazine explained how it worked, and I went in search of a piece of string and a nut (the bolt kind, not the food kind) to hang off of it. At first I was pretty impressed with the thing, but then I tried to show it off to my big brother, who filled his office admirably. “You’re moving your hand,” he pointed out. He was right. I wanted it to work so badly I was making it work. I set aside the pendulum and learned an important lesson about self-deception.
My subsequent experiences with the pendulum proved less than inspiring. I worked in an occult bookstore in my late teens, and we had one customer who used the pendulum the way I had a child: to make it say what he wanted to hear. Since that was normally whether or not he should buy some expensive and foolish thing, we didn’t exactly rush to encourage good occult practice.
On the farm, whenever we needed to find some buried thing—a water line, a septic tank (how we lost a septic tank I’ll never know), or anything else—we’d pick up a pickax and hold it with the head resting on our palms and the handle sticking straight out, so it could swing right and left. We’d walk forward slowly, and, as we put it, “when it breaks a rib, you found the line.” It swung with surprising force.
I thought perhaps the pendulum was bunk, but dowsing wasn’t, so I bought a pair of dowsing rods (most of the money I made working at that occult bookstore went back into it pretty quickly, even without a pendulum to encourage my own foolish purchases) and tried them out. They ended up buried in the bottom of a drawer. One would probably need a pickax to find them.
Later, I did what any red-blooded young academic would do. I did some research and found what one often finds in science but what the layman rarely expects: conflicting reports. Several studies showed that some dowsers had a consistent success rate in a contrived experiment. Others showed no such success rate. At this point, we run up against science’s problem with the analysis of anomalous data. Anecdotal data fares better: I know many farmers who swear by dowsing. Anecdotal data isn’t respected and can be easily explained away, even though it sometimes shouldn’t.
James Randi, a famous skeptic, offers a million-dollar prize for anyone displaying scientifically verifiable psychic powers. This prize has never been awarded, and dowsers make the largest category of applicants. Randi explains that dowsing is merely the ideomotor effect, the ability of thoughts to cause small, unconscious movements in the body that influence the swing of a pendulum or a rod. This explanation is demonstrably true. However, it does not explain that people do claim to experience success from it. He admits that most claimants are honest, but nevertheless refuse to face facts. It is clear that self-deception can indeed influence dowsing, and in fact all forms of divination.23
Randi’s skepticism notwithstanding, other research into anomalous knowledge supports the ability of unconscious bodily motions—the ideomotor effect—to reveal information. For example, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer describes her own experiences with dowsing in her book Extraordinary Knowing. Having lost an expensive musical instrument, she employs the services of a dowser who identifies the street and house of the person who stole it.24 Yes, “anecdote” is not the singular of “data,” but it is not difficult to find people who claim success with dowsing.
What interests me about every study I’ve seen on the topic is that the researchers take the explanation of the phenomenon from the dowsers as a given. For example, some dowsers claim that they detect the magnetic fields emanating from underground streams. A geologist will tell you that there are very, very few underground streams; most wells take their water from underground aquifers, which are not moving water but large rock sponges that ooze water over time. Yet researchers into dowsing set up experiments in which water moves through pipes and dowsers attempt to detect which pipes contain water. If the dowsers are right about the mechanism of their dowsing, then this might work. But what if dowsing works by some other means, such as unconscious detection of geological features that might indicate underground water, or even something more mystical, like unconscious knowledge in the Anima Mundi? And what if one of the features that makes such knowledge available is that it matters, that it means something? A well on a farm is symbolically different from water in a series of pipes. I suspect that any test that does not take into account the symbolic significance of the items sought by dowsing will never accumulate sufficient evidence to convince the skeptic. Actually, I honestly suspect that no study could ever convince the scientific skeptic, because most scientific skeptics are not true skeptics at all, but a priori thinkers who have no interest in evidence. But that’s another matter.
Using a pendulum in divination, either alone or, better, in synergy with another system, is easy. Details of methods differ from source to source, and some methods are almost computer-like, in which you offer the pendulum programs and complex procedures, but I use a rather simpler method. Franz Bardon offers a no-nonsense approach that he calls “releasing the hand.” In this method, you take up the pendulum—you can buy a special one or just tie something heavy to a bit of string—and sit at a table upon which you can rest your elbows. Put the pendulum in one hand and the other hand palm down on the table.25
Now, imagine the hand holding the pendulum resting beside the other hand. It may help to stare intently at the pendulum rather than the hand, but imagine your arm sinking down to rest. Try to feel it as vividly as possible. The notion here is that you are symbolically surrendering your hand to the Anima Mundi. Now, ask the pendulum to show you the signal it prefers for “ready.” For some, this is a short diagonal swing; for others, it is relative stillness. Then ask it to show you “yes.” For some, this is a horizontal line; for others, a vertical line or a circle; for me, it is usually a clockwise circle. Ask it to return to “ready,” then once it has done so—do not force it—ask it to show you “no.” The tricky thing here is to make sure you release the hand and not allow yourself to move your hand consciously. At the same time, you must consciously make no effort to keep your hand still, either. Releasing the hand lets you focus on your “double” hand, and not on the physical one holding the pendulum.
Now you have a simple and easy way of determining yes/no questions. You may also want to set up a signal for “cannot answer” or “that’s a silly question.” You can also get it to identify numbers and letters, either by having it clink against a glass or by asking it to swing and change its swing in some way when you say the right number or letter.
This last method, by the way, got me four out of five on a pick-five lottery ticket. Or would have, had I bought the ticket. Isn’t that convenient? I can win the lottery, but only if I don’t play. So much for their slogan. I don’t know why it works this way for me, but I suspect it has something to do with my lack of real need, or maybe the tension and anticipation that I feel if I actually intend to play the lottery this way.
The pendulum, however, is notoriously bad at giving you answers for things you don’t want to hear. It’s like a friend who never wants to give bad news. You could ask it (and by “it” I probably mean the Anima Mundi and your own unconscious) to give you the true answer and not the one you necessarily want. That works, sometimes, but even then I find the pendulum less and less accurate the more I care about the answer. At the same time, if no one cares—if it’s something that matters to no one, or means nothing—I rarely get an accurate answer either. It’s a strange balancing act. In the web of significance, evidently the hand holding the pendulum cannot sit at the center, but the web must have some center.
How can we use the pendulum with the tarot and the Lenormand? For one thing, if we lay out the Book of Life with the Lenormand, we can move a pendulum over it asking it to indicate what the most significant cards are: what, in other words, are the topics? This can be used to parse a long string of cards, as well, to determine which cards to read in combination and which cards to read individually. The same can be done with the tarot, but with the tarot you can actually use the pendulum to indicate particular symbols on a given card you should pay attention to.
For example, you could hold the pendulum ready in your right hand and run your left forefinger across the card slowly. When the pendulum indicates a “hit”—by changing its swing, for example, or indicating “yes”—look at the symbol your finger is pointing at. With the tarot and the pendulum, you can get a complete and complex reading with just one card, by repeating this with each clarification question. For example, you could run your fingers over the Sun and ask, “What symbol on this card indicates my current situation?” The pendulum might indicate the child, which you could interpret as being a beginner. Again, you might ask with the same card, “And what is that situation changing into?” This time perhaps the pendulum indicates one of the sunflowers, which always turn their heads to face the sun: you are becoming a follower, perhaps. “What would be my most effective course of action?” you might ask. Now, the pendulum indicates a hit when your finger points to the eyes of the sun-figure. You need to open your eyes to see that you’re being dazzled.
We can also use the pendulum to double-check our interpretations. “Does 36–Cross here indicate worry? Suffering? Religion?” That has its place, especially when reading for yourself. The pendulum checks and balances the cards, which balance the pendulum’s tendency to tell us what we want to hear. Both act as aids to our intuition, like focusing and other meditative techniques. At the root of it, the pendulum and the cards are tools. But we scorn the use of tools at our own expense; if you doubt that, try pounding in a nail without a hammer or screwing in a screw with your fingers.
Intuitive reading is a matter of practice more than a matter of discussion, which means you need to practice it to get good at it, not just read about it. Therefore, other than the suggestions for exercises that I’ve listed above, there isn’t much else to say about developing your intuition of the cards. The best way to do so is to practice the intuitive exercises above, and create some of your own. An attitude of playfulness is worth a lot more than the serious glowering over dusty tomes that fills our media depictions of occultism. One of the most talented psychics I have ever known was a playful, witty, profane and hilarious woman who relied on the cheesiest oracle deck she could find and forced it into uses more refined and intuitive than any tarot reader I’ve ever met. She read intuitively, ignoring the instruction booklet and, sometimes, the cards themselves. The playful psychic isn’t exactly a common archetype, but it might be a useful one to explore for those who wish to read intuitively rather than by-the-book.
23. Jeff Wagg, “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” The James Randi Educational Foundation (October 2008). http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html.
24. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (NY: Bantam, 2007).
25. Franz Bardon, Initiation into Hermetics (Salt Lake City: Merkur Publications, 2005), 150.