TAROT REASONING

What are Tarot cards and can they predict the future? Take a look at Tarot cards through the lens of logic and reason and remember, from a meta-rationalist perspective we can understand the metaphysical rationally.

Tarot cards are deeply intertwined with our psyche and the structure of the universe. How can this be? We will take a look at some bad interpretations and some positive interpretations; again with logic and reasoning, this in a way that is conducive to a clear and lucid understanding of existence.

Carl Jung was a renowned psychologist who coined the word 'archetype' and ideas about introversion and extroversion.

This is why we will look at Tarot in a psychological way and how it connects to our unconscious, but also in a way to show how it can be tied to the structure of existence.

Playing cards

It is generally accepted that the set of standard playing cards comes from Tarot, employed for everything from high stakes Vegas poker to three-card monte. Like Tarot, the standard deck has 4 suits and if you add up all the values for the cards in the 52 card deck (including the Joker) they total 365.

The 365 corresponds to days in the year and 52 to the number of weeks in the year. Carl Jung emphasized this in a lecture in 1933 and noted that the 'late medieval' cards were the origin of the 52-card deck and that the red and black symbolizes opposites. He believed that the division of the four suits represents psychological images (symbols) that one sees as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.

Jung believed that the cards combined certain ways, and played certain ways, and different combinations, corresponds to the playful development of mankind.

Tarot cards

This is how Tarot also works, with the added dimension of pictures (symbols) and symbolic situations and the many characters; the Tower, the Sun, the Fool, are a type of archetypal idea of a differentiated nature.

The majority don't study the mechanics of Tarot and think it's some mystical set of cards that can tell your future. Or that it works through magic and the power of the mind.

What Tarot really provides is a psychological reflection of the unconscious mind and the structure and development of the universe.

Right brained

Tarot, which is right brained, is completely different than Physics, which is left brained and deals with linear thought processes and models the tangible physical world.

Tarot is completely opposite and can represent the structure and development of the universe as well as the unconscious mind but in a symbolic, archetypal and pictorial narrative. Much like a dream, where things are interpreted in forms of archetypes, patterns, symbols and metaphors.

Your unconscious mind doesn't communicate in words, instead, your unconscious mind will cause you to have a dream in which some symbolic scenario will manifest (like maybe you shouldn't drink so much).

Likewise, the Tarot deck is a set of deeply rich archetypal imagery and that is exactly how your mind communicates, in symbols and archetypes, not through linear thought processes.

Rich set of archetypes and symbols

Therefore, when you are engaging with the Tarot, you are engaging in a set of symbols that represent a language that your unconscious mind understands.

A lot of psychologists will use Tarot cards to elicit emotions from their patients by asking what the card means to the patient knowing that some will interpret the symbology as positive, while others interpret it as negative.

This is an example of  how the unconscious mind is using the cards as a canvas to project and then makes it possible to unlock a lot about what's going on in someone's mind.

Unconscious mind

The Tarot can be a very powerful tool to unlock your unconscious mind and bring different aspects to the surface and can be like dreaming awake.  

Just like you can perform dream interpretation and analysis, you can do the same with the Tarot and unlock your intuition as well.

There's nothing magical or supernatural happening, it's all a symbolic communication with your unconscious mind.

Can be a crutch

Keep in mind that the Tarot is powerful because it helps to unlock your own abilities and exposes your own personal power; but you don't want it to have power over you.

That's an important difference and represents someone who understands that Tarot is a tool to unlock your consciousness, versus someone who uses it as a religious crutch. That's when some get really obsessed with the cards and cannot make a decision in their life without pulling the cards and then totally relying on what the card says to make decisions.

This is when the cards have power over you. You're giving your power away and this is a negative way to use the cards.

Use to augment your intuition 

A positive way to use Tarot is when you understand that it augments your own intuition and you're using it to unlock your deeper knowing and further your understanding of a situation.

You will know when this is happening because topics that are drawn in the cards are pertinent to your life. You may often receive 'keywords' that enter your mind or are active in your life that show up in the reading. Oftentimes in remarkable ways!

What about predicting the future?

Not really. The answer is complicated. Carl Jung believed that we can predict the future when we know how the present moment evolved from the past. He called for an "intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life possibly even predicting future events at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment."

Jung compared this process to the Chinese I Ching (yin and yang) and other such practices. Content seemed to matter much less than form, invoking the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences.

Jung noted in his lectures that man has always felt the need of finding access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition because there is a correspondence or likeness between the prevailing conditions and the conditions of the collective unconscious.

This means that the cards reflect a formal 'unfolding' aspect of reality and by recognizing that pattern, it can help us to predict future events in a formal sense but not in the sense of content.

Overarching structure

What this means is the Tarot is very cool and the Major Arcana represents the psyche and the evolution of a mind. Not only that, it also represents the universe and the evolution of the universe because as above, so below.

The universe is a collective of minds so as individual minds evolve, the collective evolves. The Major Arcana is a symbolic, archetypal system of rich imagery that reflects the psyche and its evolutionary process, as well as the universe and its evolutionary process.

This is done in terms of form, meaning there's a certain pattern to the way reality unfolds, but the particular details of those patterns are contingent and changing. Tarot helps us look at the formal overarching structure rather than the particular content.

An example would be when a reading indicates you will be moving in the future but doesn't tell you when, where or why! From this you can look at the overarching patterns and see stages of development in human life. If you are approaching a certain age you may be able to predict from the pattern, when and why you will be moving (marriage, retirement, etc.).

The universe also has stages of development so when you look at the pattern, you can predict the future of what those next stages of development will be.

From there you can see that the psyche and the evolution of a mind and consciousness evolves in a certain way and it will unfold in a certain way. This is what Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is all about, it tracks the evolution of consciousness all the way from basic bare consciousness to God consciousness.

Stages of development

The Tarot deck mirrors different stages of development in human life (as the infant, toddler, child, teen, etc.) and represents them as the fool, the magician, the knight, in an archetypal metaphorical way.

The magician can be viewed as the faculty of mind that has symbolic power over the elements and the ability to make choices and changes. Each of the cards represents a psychic structure, for example, the hierophant represents the ego who has a conscious reflection of self identity and can make choices based on self-aware conscious thought. Something the magician cannot do.

Because of the subjective nature of individual minds, the cards will represent different structures to each person because it's not some objective truth that everyone's going to agree upon. Everything is open to interpretation.

Since working with Tarot is so dream-like, you can't work with it the same way you would work with something like a theorem in mathematics. Instead, you can use the Tarot in a more holistic way for unlocking the unconscious mind and intuition, in more like an altered state of mind or meditation to receive insights.

But afterwards, you must use your logic and reason to help reflect on those insights to make sure it is something real and not some misinterpretation.

Process of individuation

Jung believed that the process of individuation, the move toward wholeness and integrity, could be achieved with archetypal playfulness. Becoming aware of all your unconscious aspects of your psyche and learning how to make them work together.

Your life is dictated largely by the unconscious processes which are all the programs running in the background that you're not aware of. Just the same as the operating system in a computer runs and provides all the services in the background.

Unlike an operating system where all the processes work together in an integrated fashion, your unconscious can have many tasks running that can manifest in your life in negative ways. One example of this is your shadow self which is a reservoir of all the unconscious thoughts that you cut off because they were deemed to be negative, bad, or wrong by society. So you denied them and put them in your unconscious and locked them away.

Well now they exist in your shadow and can lead to shadow projection, where you start hating others who exhibit those qualities, or addictions which can lead to you lowering your inhibition and allow your bad qualities to come out.

You have many unconscious drives that can cause a lot of conflict in your life. Individuation is also called inner-star actualization which means you become aware of the contents of your shadow and deal with them in a healthy way.

Tarot cards represent the psyche

This ties into Tarot because the cards represent different structures of the psyche since certain cards can represent the shadow, the ego, division, wholeness and unity, the ability to make choices, animus, intuition and the conscious and unconscious, to name a few.

One can interpret the Major Arcana when they're laid out in a linear way as the unfoldment and evolution of the psyche as well as the unfoldment and evolution of the universe in an archetypal, symbolic and metaphorical way.

Tarot will teach you how to create a soul because you are not a body, you are the evolution of an eternal mind and soul (or zeta) is a system of frequency patterns of evolving information that forms these different structures. Tarot maps out is the formation of different structures in a zedic (eternal) mind in a very metaphorical way.

Not a magical system

Jung perceived the Tarot as an alchemical game which attempts the union of opposites, a rhythm of negative and positive.

Your unconscious mind is always looking for something to project upon (like anger, etc.). Tarot can give your rich symbolization to project upon so you can analyze and find insight. You must be highly self-reflective and understand how this relates to things you need to address in different aspects of your life. This is why it's called a canvas for unconscious projection and can be a very powerful tool.

The Major Arcana not only shows the projection of the mind but it shows the development of the mind and the developmental structure of the universe as well. In this sense, one could say, since you can see patterns, you can predict future events.

Does Tarot predict the future, not really. It provides a blank canvas so you can see the unfolding of a mind or the universe without any details into the logical patterns.

So it is prediction based on logical unfoldment and structure, not the way most people perceive it.

Ultimately, it's all open to interpretation, like a dream, there's no one set of rules that is the correct way. This is the beauty of Tarot, we can explore it many different ways. It's an interaction and connection to your unconscious you use as a tool to unlock your power, not as a power to be used over you.

Thank you MorgueOfficial.

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