or sterile and inhibitive, holding us back from enjoying a fuller and happier life. Which mode of operating is in charge at any given time doesn’t have to be hidden in the deepest recesses of our mind. By using the tarot as a psychological magnifying glass, we can bring a fuller conscious awareness to any inhibiting mental processes and in so doing lift their restrictions and limitations on our life experience.
Tweaking the inner workings of our mind can then help us avoid destructive or toxic fictional narratives. For instance, by addressing any tendencies towards denial, scarcity or poverty, our consciousness can enable us to allow ourselves the experiences of love, wealth, health or fulfilment in our work.
The unrefined mind is like a roughly hewn lump of stone or masonry, which makes for an ineffective building material. To create a balanced, stable block that we can effectively and constructively use for building, we need to work the stone, to chip away at it, to keep perfecting, refining and flattening its rough edges. Only when it is perfectly flat and smooth, devoid of any bumps, lumps and imperfections, will it be ready for use in building a stable structure, a structure that will stand the tests of a lifetime.
The idea that what we put into life we get out can be seen very clearly when we start this process of chipping away at our own mind; for every lump and bump smoothed over in our mind, an equal and opposite reaction occurs in our external environment, so paths and impediments clear and the rocky roads of life become that little bit smoother and more negotiable.
The more we work with the tarot in this way, by viewing our own psychology as the main building contractor for our reality, the more stable our world becomes. Where, on the other hand, there is little awareness or scrutiny of our own psychological construction methods, they become nightmare cowboy builders, destabilizing and eternally patching up the building of our life.
The idea that the inner workings of our own mind should remain largely elusive and enigmatic seems strangely inconsistent with the open-access ideal of the information era. As the world around us becomes increasingly optimized and efficient via computerization and robotics, the mind becomes the optimal nut to crack. Impervious to such updates, it often presents the greatest challenge of them all.
If we allow it to be, the tarot can be our own private and personal detective, uncovering the workings of our own mind. Using this system, we can objectively observe the dialogue between the higher, enquiring and equality-seeking aspect of our mind and the domineering ego aspect that usually prefers to remain anonymous, for to be recognized and labelled would imply that we had conscious awareness of its otherwise hidden power over us. But Modern Day Tarot Play is all about putting ourselves back in the picture: looking at our life with a greater sense of the part we have to play in moulding and shaping it. Rather than being a bystander, passively observing while our ego mind takes us on an unnecessarily bumpy ride, we can awaken and play a more active role creating our life.
If we allow the tarot to honour and serve our higher good by using it to forge a deeper and more honest relationship with ourselves, we will find that we reap the greatest and most profound of its benefits. For the finest thing we can ever offer ourselves is complete truth and honesty; it is only from that stabilized point that we can build a life full of greater meaning, purpose and fulfilment. When our mind begins to focus on transparency and honesty, starting with itself, the rest of our world also comes into a clearer, sharper focus, and this is the magical key to physical and material manifestation.
The more awareness we direct to the fact that our thoughts create our reality, the more control we can take back. When we shuffle the tarot cards and lay out a spread, it will always show what narrative role our own mind is playing in a situation, and how and what it is creating, allowing or attracting. For the tarot works on a ‘like attracts like’ basis, mirroring the workings of our own mind in our external environment.
Cognition versus Intuition
Most people, especially in business, rely wholly on the cognitive part of the brain – the neocortex – to evaluate key or critical situations before they choose how best to proceed. It’s what our modern education system encourages as part of our formative training, and thus, once the foundations are set, like a wind-up automaton, it is often difficult to break or override these behavioural patterns. When decision-making on a day-to-day basis, we can slip into a somnambulist state, sleepwalking through life, following the same pre-programmed coding and producing adequate but not particularly original or transformative results.
The growing epidemic of the ‘automaton mind’ is reflected in our external consensus reality via our increasing reliance on automation robotics, Excel spreadsheets, Data Science and Business Intelligence. While these are powerful tools, they render the internal and inextricable external landscape flat, devoid of the beautifully orchestrated learning curves, the creative glitches and errors fundamental to the way we naturally learn and from which our most unique, original, innovative and inventive thought processes are derived. In the automated landscape there is no room for error, no room for chaos, or for the type of mistakes that give rise to opportunity.
There is a deep irony to what is done in the name of progress having the equal and opposite consensus reaction in the human psyche, and bringing our higher development, due largely to emotional self-reliance, to a complete standstill. It seems now that a gradual refining or perfecting of the character, via myriad accidents, mistakes or errors of judgement, gives a crucial opportunity for the psyche to grow, change and transform, and this is becoming much delayed as we become more dependent on external processing machines and less on our own processing abilities.
The infantilizing devices upon which everyone so heavily relies are replacing the parental and grandparental wisdom that allows, via human fallibility, for us to make mistakes and learn from them. Young minds now profess to ‘know’ not through their own direct experience, but via online prophets’ second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-hand inexperience. Suddenly individual subjectivity is being superseded by indirect objectivity: the antithesis of the magical principle that lies in each and every one of us – the freedom to directly experience the unseen. So the mind is moved ever closer to mundane concerns and levels of operating and away from the unfathomable divine and sacred aspect.
It is ironic that with the rise of all-pervasive modern technologies, the world as augmented by our own direct experience should have become so closed off and shallow. At the same rate as the world is seemingly opening up, the modern cult of mundane, sense-perceived, reductive reality is closing it off, packaging it neatly inside an egoistic, all-knowing box.
When a real-life decision is needed, the information-numbed, automatic data-crunching mind cannot provide a unique, original, radically innovative answer. Only the autonomous intuitive mind can make such leaps into the unknown, and there it waits, quietly ahead of forever-increasing lengths of cognitive ‘real time’, for the latter-day mind to catch up. Sometimes this can take days, or weeks, or months, or years, making this an inefficient and ineffective method of decision-making. Thus the seemingly progressive information era, in terms of human evolution and development, is as impedimental as a tightly plotted farce played by business moguls or politicians instead of trained actors, i.e. sans entertainment or comedy.
Fortunately, the quiet higher clarity or transparency of the intuitive mind has ways and means of making itself heard, both on- and offline. The tarot provides a platform, raising up this objectifying voice so that it might speak and be heard. When it is heard, and uncorrupted by lower, base or unwise motivations or instincts, we can wholly trust it. Both our own and others’ intuitions or gut feelings can be relied on to resolve the trickiest problems or make even the most difficult decisions.
When several options seem equally attractive, perhaps due to too many unseen criteria, the tarot can also help us to make a clear and incisive choice. Making everyday decisions shouldn’t be like fiction, where the mind seeks an entertaining, dramatic and diverting narrative route from A to B; the tarot avoids such unnecessary convolutions and takes us to where we want to be authentically, precisely, directly.
In more important decisions – when we, for example, meet a new love interest or a candidate for a job – our brain begins data-crunching, and decision-making can be delayed and progress impeded due to the need for further information or analysis. The mind, the biggest