Where is tarot most useful? – Part III

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

More often than not, when we consult the tarot (either for ourselves or on behalf of another), we are primarily driven by one desire: we want answers.

We might have a question that is weighing on our minds. We might be looking for validation. We might be seeking an experience of clarity. Whatever the reason for the reading, the idea that we are able to get the inside track on something that has been eluding us has the ability to eclipse anything else that might be taking place during a tarot reading.

So what of the possibility that we are getting something else from a tarot reading that is equally, if not more, useful to us? And what if answers, in this case, were not the priority?

Tarot connects us to something bigger than we are.

When we work with the tarot, we are getting in touch with something that transcends our fleshy borders. That ‘something’ is open to debate. We can have our ideas and our own certainties, but nothing is provable and it has a quality of fluidity. It is understood in many different forms and goes by many names, including consciousness, the collective unconscious, source, a higher power, the divine, spirit and God/dess, among others. Some people see it as lying outside themselves; others see it as coming from within. Some days I feel I have an answer, but that answer is mutable, and has changed over the years as I have changed.

Be that as it may, I’ve come to understand it as something whose presence is unwavering (as opposed to my presence, which is prone to moments of obliviousness, flightiness and distraction). Like an electric socket, once you’ve plugged yourself in and switched things on, it’s there, waiting to connect with you.

This ‘connecting’ is what happens when I do a tarot reading, I’m writing about tarot, or I’m occupied with anything that puts my mind in the present, for that matter. I do what I can to get my side of things in working order — ranging from diving right in to having to distract my way in. Once I’m connected, the energy starts flowing. It’s not a steady flow, however. It comes sporadically, and I can’t maintain the connection for long periods of time — and it might be useful to bring up this point, because I always used to equate ‘sporadic’ with ‘not doing it correctly’. I’m coming to believe that’s not the case. I take a lot of breaks: I step out to rest either physically or mentally (my laptop’s Spider Solitaire gets a good run for its money when I’m writing, for example), and then find my way back in again.

It is when I step back in that I tend to find something new waiting for me. Sometimes what I find there is more-or-less expected. At other times, however, I find something I hadn’t anticipated. When this happens, I feel like I’m on the receiving end of a cosmic joke that is there to inspire rather than to trick; and which seems as familiar as it does strange.

This quote from Joe Dispenza, in What the Bleep Do We Know? encapsulates this when he talks about his own experience of working with spirit:

… [S]how me a sign today, that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won’t expect, so I’m as surprised at my ability to be able to experience these things, and make it so that I have no doubt that it’s come from you.

When I read his words, I feel his joy in the connection itself as much as the result: “so that I have no doubt that it’s come from you.” In other words, it is not the fact that he has a connection as much as what he is connecting to.

Becoming willing to expect the unexpected in tarot broadens the scope for experiences that are not limited to the answers we are looking for. This includes, at its most simple, viewing the encounter not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, where insights and answers are a valuable adjunct.

And what of those times when there seems to be no clear line of sight between what we are asking, and what the cards are giving us? We’ve done the prep-work and followed the guidelines thoroughly: there are no half-arsed shuffles, no thoughts about what’s for dinner while cutting the cards, and it’s not your third attempt because the first two didn’t give you the goddamn answer you were looking for! We feel centred, we’ve suspended doubt and awe, we’ve engaged an attitude of detachment and faith… only to find a disconnect between what we’re saying and how our client is reacting, or — in the case of reading our own cards — only to have a layout that defies all logical explanation.

When I have had client readings like this, or when the cards I’ve laid out in my own readings have made me go, “Huh?” then I can either drop immediately into doubt, where ego sits in the corner of my conscience in wounded self-pity, or I can remind myself that there was, indeed, a palpable sense of being plugged in, and go back to the simplicity of the connection itself. “Only connect.” I came across these words by writer E. M. Forster a few days ago, and they returned to me as I was writing this.

There are whoosh-bam readings where everything falls into place and there is an energetic interplay between reader, client and spirit. When these happen, the connection is hard to miss — and it often yields a rich source of assistance and information in a short space of time. Then there are the readings whose limits disappear into the fog, where it’s either hard to make out the presence or proximity of your client, or it’s difficult to discern the meaning the cards hold for you.

That does not mean the connection is not there, though. Nor does it mean that it’s not doing anything. It just might not be doing what you think it is doing, or what you feel it’s meant to do. Who knows what happens in the physical world as a result of conversing with the divine? That is where the idea of the connection itself comes into its own. It exists independently of any need for answers or immediate feedback. It works its own magic behind the scenes. When we work with tarot, we bring that magic, and its potential, into the room. We can assist in the process by detaching from the need to do anything specific with it at all. What will come, will come; what doesn’t might just be entering through a different doorway.