Along with being a writer and a music freak, I am also a tarot card reader, astrologer and numerologist, so I thought I’d take a little time and write about these things.
It’s funny, I believe in these metaphysicals and my own intuition when using them. I feel I have a pretty keen psychic sensibility (really, I think everyone does, to varying degrees), and have used these vehicles to harness that potential. There are times I know things beyond the basics of what a card or birth chart might indicate. In fact, especially with tarot, which I feel is my strongest of the three modes, I’d say that pretty much always happens. I get a sense of something beyond just the card, or because of the cards, I feel something in my own emotional field that is more than just the picture on the six of wands, for example. Also with tarot, the cards can be interpreted differently in different situations, so I feel there is something else at work there, some gut instinct, along with knowing the cards really well.
Actually, one time, when “applying” to work at a metaphysical shop doing readings, the owner asked me to give her a reading using marbles, which I had never done before. So I was without my cards and signs and couldn’t rely on their meanings, so I really had to go with absolute gut instinct, the images that came to mind and the feelings they evoked. And it worked. It was a great revelation to me, because the self-critical part of me always thinks that maybe there’s no magic and no intuition, that all I’m really good at is memorizing meanings of cards. The marble experience pushed me to go beyond that, and I hope I will someday have more experiences to help further my intuition and my reliance on it.
That’s the right-brain part of me. The left brain part of me is a complete skeptic that any of this works. In fact, I think my skepticism is why I like astrology. It’s metaphysical, but it involves a lot of math, with degrees, angles, aspects. I always liked math. BUt yeah, I’m skeptical and cynical about the same thing, which makes it nice when I do readings and people tell me how much it fits their life, or when people come up to me months later and say that everything from their reading came true. It always surprises me because that more science-minded part of me just doesn’t fully trust that cards and signs mean anything. But, I think they do.
I also think they don’t preclude free will. I think all these things show tendencies, patterns, the way the wind is blowing, rather than inescapable absolutes. My personal beliefs lie somewhere between predestination and free will (a topic I love dissecting and discussing to no end), and that the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
In all of these areas, though I have been working with them for awhile now, I am still learning. Every time I give a reading, I learn something new. And I love that. I feel like I’m constantly honing and deepening my skill and understanding. Then there are things in these disciplines that bug me or that I wonder about, and I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about it all.
Anyone, on to a brief description of my own relationship to the the three tools (or toys, as I sometimes like to call them).
~Emilia J
Currently Listening:
“Famous Blue Raincoat” – Tori Amos
(Leonard Cohen cover)
April Julia 
This reminds me of Alexandra Vesant, Secretary-General Douglas’ astrologer in Stranger in a Strange Land. The astrology itself and its whole theory of causation was nonsense; but it provided a symbolic framework for organizing the insights that came from her own second sight.
@Kevin – I think there’s really some truth to that. I think a lot of times there needs to be something more tangible, like a symbol or a sign or a chart or colored marbles, to grab onto and hang the insights on.
I am a skeptical practitioner but I will say this. Sometimes I get surprised by how uncanny things turn out. One time I was doing someone’s astrology chart and all these aspects came up that indicated this person would likely have A LOT of sex partners in her life. Knowing this woman in real life, I really didn’t think it was true. She seemed so proper, and not proper in the way that’s usually hiding a dark past or some secret obsession or something, just kind of uptight and vaguely asexual. That was her vibe. So then when she came over to get the results of the reading, I told her this (it really came up in her chart over and over and over) thinking she would tell me I was a terrible astrologer or whatever, but she confided that it was totally true, that she had slept with over a hundred people, done all these tantric sex workshops and stuff. I never in a million years would have guessed this, and I’m usually pretty good at reading relationship/love/sex stuff from people.
It made me a momentary true believer.
~EJ
Sometimes I wonder if there’s not something to Jungian synchronicity or holographic universe models, and systems like Tarot, astrology or I Ching are just some ways it expresses itself.
I tend to think that if there is a “supernatural” realm parallel to ours, there’s no way of defining it because there’s no way of telling whether the particular religious symbols that it uses to manifest itself reflect some unitary theological reality, or it just exists symbiotically with human culture and adopts whatever symbols are handy for communication.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I think there’s got to be something supernatural (except on days when I’m a complete skeptic, and that happens a lot too) but like you said, it’s probably something not accessible or fully comprehensible by the human mind.
I know some people who I KNOW have psychic ability to certain extent, but I also know people who probably do, or did, or something but went way off the deep end with it, and are convinced of the literal reality of communicating with aliens or some other entity or what have you, or people who think they have psychic abilities and are just…whacked out.
~EJ
I think of the alien consciousness in Carl Sagan’s “Contact,” who addressed the protagonist through the avatar of her dead father.
Yes, me too! Loved that book and movie. It was like the “other” consciousness had to present itself as something that Ellie (I think that was the main character’s name) could make sense of, but was really so much more.
Carl Sagan was the man.
~EJ