The Importance of Semantics and Personal Mythology (As Illustrated In A Pseudo-Fable)
This is 99% "pagan" and 1% "techno", and largely review, but I'm all about reinforcement.
I got back into my cards again. (I've lost a giant trading-card box that had most of my "weird" decks in it, so all I have on me is my old Rider-Waite. If anyone sees a mostly-green long rectangular trading-card box with pictures from that blasted Magic: The Gathering card game on it, and it's full of tarot cards, let me know.)
I had a few agendas this time: I wanted to refamiliarize myself with my intuition, which I haven't been doing quite so much on a practical level lately, and I wanted to refamiliarize myself with my cards, whose meanings are often so fluid that I still have trouble keeping track of them sometimes.
To start from scratch with a basic vocabulary, I decided I'd rather look at cards in the context of an "easy" reading (one I already understood the nature of) than just going through the deck one-by-one. Granted, pictures can provide a much more robust vocabulary, not being inherently tied to single words... but I'm not so attuned to them visually, so a list of words to go with the cards helps. It limits the vocabulary, but for the moment, for me, it makes the vocabulary solid.
So I started by re-hacking together a simple spread, loosely based on my (somewhat dated) Discordian "Law of Fives" spread. The idea is actually more akin to the idea of a more generic cycle, not entirely unlike the "dramas" repeatedly played out (according to The Celestine Prophecy) until we become aware enough of them to choose to break them. For each in a large number of cycles, I focused on someone I knew, shuffled and drew five cards for them, using my intuition and my basic knowledge of their current position in space-time to determine the context of each card and its general meaning. I then took a checklist of all the cards, and for each card I hadn't already drawn yet in the exercise, I jotted down the first few keywords that occurred to me. That checklist is my simple vocabulary, my "training wheels" that I can refer to, until I decide that I can allow the cards to have a more robust vocabulary.
In doing a number of these cycles, I noticed that the process I was going through - naming off a person I knew and figuring out what their current cycle was, based on my knowledge and the cards - was rather similar to the Berkeley “game” mentioned by (HIM again?!? yes,) Bob Wilson in Prometheus Rising, and the imaginary “supercomputer” capable of answering any question or divination you asked of it, provided you had no doubts or reservations about the ability of the computer to report the answer accurately. The only difference was the metaphor I was using to practice divining this information. It is the same with the Seer I first encountered late last year; he simply has a little more practice, a little more concrete understanding of his own Belief System (B.S.) that he can call up from memory, and a little more trust in his own intuition.
So that's it. In summary, the more consciously aware you are of how you believe everything works - down to the little details - the more success your endeavors will likely garner. If you're still a bit hazy on any given detail, you'll likely get hung up on it (or on some other detail that is related to it, whether you are aware of it or not) until you sort it out. Know Thyself? Yeah, that old thing.
I got back into my cards again. (I've lost a giant trading-card box that had most of my "weird" decks in it, so all I have on me is my old Rider-Waite. If anyone sees a mostly-green long rectangular trading-card box with pictures from that blasted Magic: The Gathering card game on it, and it's full of tarot cards, let me know.)
I had a few agendas this time: I wanted to refamiliarize myself with my intuition, which I haven't been doing quite so much on a practical level lately, and I wanted to refamiliarize myself with my cards, whose meanings are often so fluid that I still have trouble keeping track of them sometimes.
To start from scratch with a basic vocabulary, I decided I'd rather look at cards in the context of an "easy" reading (one I already understood the nature of) than just going through the deck one-by-one. Granted, pictures can provide a much more robust vocabulary, not being inherently tied to single words... but I'm not so attuned to them visually, so a list of words to go with the cards helps. It limits the vocabulary, but for the moment, for me, it makes the vocabulary solid.
So I started by re-hacking together a simple spread, loosely based on my (somewhat dated) Discordian "Law of Fives" spread. The idea is actually more akin to the idea of a more generic cycle, not entirely unlike the "dramas" repeatedly played out (according to The Celestine Prophecy) until we become aware enough of them to choose to break them. For each in a large number of cycles, I focused on someone I knew, shuffled and drew five cards for them, using my intuition and my basic knowledge of their current position in space-time to determine the context of each card and its general meaning. I then took a checklist of all the cards, and for each card I hadn't already drawn yet in the exercise, I jotted down the first few keywords that occurred to me. That checklist is my simple vocabulary, my "training wheels" that I can refer to, until I decide that I can allow the cards to have a more robust vocabulary.
In doing a number of these cycles, I noticed that the process I was going through - naming off a person I knew and figuring out what their current cycle was, based on my knowledge and the cards - was rather similar to the Berkeley “game” mentioned by (HIM again?!? yes,) Bob Wilson in Prometheus Rising, and the imaginary “supercomputer” capable of answering any question or divination you asked of it, provided you had no doubts or reservations about the ability of the computer to report the answer accurately. The only difference was the metaphor I was using to practice divining this information. It is the same with the Seer I first encountered late last year; he simply has a little more practice, a little more concrete understanding of his own Belief System (B.S.) that he can call up from memory, and a little more trust in his own intuition.
So that's it. In summary, the more consciously aware you are of how you believe everything works - down to the little details - the more success your endeavors will likely garner. If you're still a bit hazy on any given detail, you'll likely get hung up on it (or on some other detail that is related to it, whether you are aware of it or not) until you sort it out. Know Thyself? Yeah, that old thing.