Tarot Truths 

by Dr Adrian Vaughan Hillman

Tarot Truths - Part 1

Tarot Truths - Part 3

PART 2

About Professional Tarot Readers

The ability to read the Tarot is exactly that, the ability to read another language. With a minimal amount of instruction and a book to look it up in, a Tarot to English dictionary, anybody can interpret a Tarot reading. Each card becomes a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and all that you have to do is to put the puzzle together. Experience of dealing with people at a deeper level than a telesales operative is the main core of this ability. A psychologist or counsellor with six months experience should be as good or better at interpreting the cards as a clairvoyant who has been doing it all of their life.

But it is not the simple reading of the cards that is the most important attribute of a professional. It is the degree of contact that they can create. This person is going digging into your psyche and the quality of the reading is dependant on their ability to get deep. The Tarot can go as deep as you want it to go. The mundane uses of a Tarot reading would be 'what would happen if I…', 'how do I really feel about this person?' or 'what is the next year going to be like?' At the other end of the scale the Tarot can be used to look into past lives, the karma that you have brought with you or your life mission.

It may be that you are looking for a casual Tarot reading. This is not the sort of thing that you are going to stake your whole life on. If you are just interested or want the answers to a few mundane questions you can become passing trade to a randomly selected reader at psychic fares, New Age shops or adverts in the window of your local newsagent or newspaper. You are pretty safe with all of these options so long as you do not ask too much of them. Another option is to have a Tarot party where a reader comes in and does individual readings one at a time whilst you chat with your friends awaiting your turn. The combination of Chardonnay, chocolate and friends around you is perfect if you happen to get some bad news!

I have already hinted that the level of contact is partly dependant on the proximity of the reader and querient, as the person asking the questions is usually called. The closer that you are to the reader, the deeper that the reading can go. Another factor in is the empathic ability of the reader. I have met a few tele-Tarot readers in person and they have all possessed marked psychic abilities. Each has had more than enough personal power to relate to the energies in a voice over the phone and home in on a connection with you through the Collective Unconsciousness. Tele-Tarot is perfectly adequate for the mundane and simple questions over the phone. In fact it is great since you do not have to make and wait for an appointment; they are cheap and happen at your convenience. Tele-Tarot readings are free if you make the call from a boyfriend's phone. You can also learn more by this than using your own phone. When he gets the bill will also be an indication of how much he loves you. That is if you still want to stay with him after the reading!

Questions to Ask the Tarot

Even if you choose to have a Tarot reading on the spur of the moment, you should at least think of what you want to ask the Tarot. This is often not a problem, since people ring up the tele-Tarot because they have had a question going round and round in their mind and see an advertisement in a magazine for tele-Tarot.

There are some things that the Tarot is good at answering and some things that it is bad at answering. The Tarot is especially bad at answering 'Yes or No' questions. With these sorts of questions the Tarot will often tell you more than you want to know. If you want to know if you are going to get a promotion in your career in the next year, the Tarot may reply that you will at some point become disillusioned with that career and want to leave it and that the more successful you feel that you are in that career, the harder it will be to leave and the unhappier you will make yourself.

Using the Tarot as a sole means of divining the future does not usually tell you when something is going to happen. There is no card that means 'in six days time'. The position of the cards in some layouts can give you an indicator of soon or in the distant future and your question can affect this too. There is one particular layout that simply gives a summary of the influences that you will be under for the next year, month by month, but it is a very difficult reading to accurately interpret since the cards do not necessarily relate to one another to build up an accurate picture.

Although the Tarot is restricted in telling you when something is going to happen, most practitioners have more strings to their bows. Many can add to your reading by intuitive methods or by using a spirit guide. You will often find that psychics have many different abilities such as seeing auras or spirits and they may have training in techniques such as Reiki. Even if they advertise themselves as purely a Tarot reader, it can help to ask which other modalities they use. Obviously the more techniques that they are able to employ, the more information they can gather.

The Tarot is the language of mental and emotional states and changes. It is possible to choose your questions to make best use of the Tarot. The type of questions to ask are the 'why?' and 'how do I really feel?' questions. Another good area of questioning is 'what would happen if I…" This is a very good way to ask about the future since there are very few things in life that are fixed in the future. Most people ask about the future because they are trying to make a decision on which way to go at a crossroads in their lives. Obviously the outcome will depend on which choice you make.

You can even ask 'how does somebody else feel about?' type of questions. If you are asking about somebody else and you are having your reading in person, it can help to bring a personal possession of the person that you are asking about or a photograph. Many psychics need something to home them in on the other person.

Predicting the Future

The rational argument is that it is impossible to know the future but you can predict the obvious with a fair degree of accuracy. Science is about being able to predict how things interact and the results of those interactions. If a moving pool ball strikes a stationary pool ball at this speed and at this angle, the stationary ball will go bouncing around the table and knock one of the opponent's balls in, while the cue ball will go into the corner pocket. Science can also tell you how to hit the shot exactly right to put your own ball down and be in the perfect place for the next shot. So long as the scientist knows enough, like the weights of the balls and the fiction between the balls and the table.

In this way the Tarot can be used to predict, but not know, the future by asking our super-conscious mind to clarify our thoughts. It is like falling in love with a handsome, charming travelling salesman who is really good at sex and knows it. If it was happening to your best friend, you could accurately predict that it was going to end in infidelity and tears. It can also predict other things that you already know but do not want to consider, like in the other example, where you know your job is making you unhappy and yet you strive for promotion into an even more stressed position in your mischosen career. The problem that the Tarot will resolve is that you cannot admit the error of your career choices because the job is well paid and you just cannot consider a life where your neighbour has more material possessions than you have. Or it may be that you are still entrenched in the idea of making your parents proud of you by working yourself out of your sanity. You know that sooner or later you will burn out and give up the job. The Tarot at a rational level is all about bringing out your thoughts and emotions with clarity.

The Tarot can play tricks on you. Remember that the super-conscious is more intelligent than your conscious mind. In your little world, it is all knowing. It knows exactly what you are like as a person and how your conscious mind makes decisions. Just because it is cleverer does not mean that it is entirely honest.

Let us say that the person who is going for the promotion at work asks the question 'how should I behave in order to get the job?' or 'what sort of person are my employers looking for to promote to senior management?' In the rules that you have been given, these are really good ways of getting the best from the Tarot. Again, be aware that the Tarot can give you more than you bargained for. The Tarot can also create the future. What if the Tarot tells you that you need to be aggressive, self sufficient and arrogant to become a manager in your company and you take its advice. Then you do not get the promotion that you were acting for. They give the promotion to a meek 'yes-man' who does exactly what he is told.

Either the Tarot reader was incompetent or your own super-conscious is lying to you. Maybe you resign in disgust and start to look for a new career. You give up the car and find a job that you are really happy in. Now you are never exhausted but vibrant and full of energy and vitality. You have a wonderful social life and meet the partner of your dreams. Basically your super-conscious has been playing you like a fiddle through the Tarot to lead you to a better place.

You could find that two months later there has been a restructuring at work and all of the managerial posts that you applied for were made redundant. Of course, employers would never promote a person beyond their capabilities, a person who lacked the initiative to be a manager, just to break them and get them out of the company, would they? Your super-conscious would have seen the warning signs and seen this coming. The part of you that knows better may not like your job but it may not want to see you suddenly unemployed and your self esteem completely wrecked. This is a very good reason to listen to your super-conscious, the part of you that does know better than your conscious mind.
So the Tarot is capable of changing your future. It can guide you to choices where you have no idea which way to turn. It may not give you an honest answer but this is your voice speaking to you. The voice will give you the answer that is best for you in the long run.

There is another trick that your super-conscious can play on you. It can ask a different question to the one that your conscious mind wants to ask. Let us say that you have fallen in love with our oversexed travelling salesman but you phone up for a tele-Tarot reading to ask about one of the million things that your conscious mind is worrying about to stop you from thinking what he got up to last week when he was away on business.

For instance your Inner Dialogue may have decided that it is easier to fret about if you should change apartments because one of the neighbours is a bit creepy. That neighbour has been the same ever since you moved in five years ago and until now it did not bother you. Or rather your Inner Dialogue did not make it bother you until now. So you have the problem of finding a new apartment, moving all of your things, how do you check to see what the new neighbours are going to be like, what if the new neighbours get a dog that yaps all of the time after you have moved in… You know the sorts of problems that your mind can create when it needs to. You know that really that it would be stupid to move because you have spent years getting the place that you are in looking perfect and the rent is well below market value.

So you ask the Tarot reader if it is a good time to move. Would you really be surprised if your highly intelligent super-conscious told you nothing about moving houses and read you the riot act regarding your boyfriend? Not really.
There are also occasions when the Tarot will tell you nothing at all. It may tell you what you already know and provide you with no new information. The spread of the cards can even be so baffling and nonsensical to the reader that they cannot tell you anything. This has its meaning too. It means that now is not the right time for a reading. Some packs even include an extra card that will come up if this is not the right time for the person to have a reading.

There are lots of reasons why a reading is not right for you right now. It may be that the reading will make you believe that the future is guaranteed and make you lazy or unadventurous. Most of the time, the success of a project or relationship is dependant on hard work to make them succeed. Sometimes it is simply a matter of your needing to go through a hard lesson for your own good that stops the cards from telling you anything useful. On other occasions it may be because you are not ready or equipped at this point in your life to confront the truth.

Whatever the reason, it may well be that you just need to wait for six months to try again. In the mean time it will do you no good to keep trying different Tarot readers until you find one that can answer your questions. Maybe the Tarot is just trying to teach you patience.

Knowing the Future

Our common sense tells us that it is impossible to know the future, only to predict it. We can only take an educated and informed guess at what will actually happen. The Tarot can only help to educate and inform us. We are able to change our path and change our future.

The problem is that there is a lot of evidence that the future can be known. The classic stories seem to involve plane crashes. There are many stories from the second world war of pilots knowing that their time would be up that day and accepting it. There are many cases of people who fly regularly refusing to get onto planes that are about to crash. I knew a person who flew all over the world without a hint of anxiety who was disabled by panic attacks the morning that he was due to get onto the Lockerbie plane.

An ex-girlfriend of mine woke up one morning having dreamt the winning numbers for the lottery. I told her to write them down before she forgot them. She said that she would remember them just fine and guess what. The minute that the lottery for that night shut, she remembered them. We watched as those numbers came up in the order that she had finally written them down.

The girlfriend of a previous neighbour of mine dreamt that they had a car crash. She described the crash to her boyfriend. Two days later they were driving along and she started to shout that they were there, where the crash was going to happen. Her boyfriend pulled off the road to avoid the crash. He was just telling her that there was no silver sedan coming around the corner, out of control, when it appeared, skidded all over the road before ploughing into their car as it sat stationary at the side of the road. Fortuantely nobody was seriously hurt. Strangely in this case, the dream caused itself to come true. Had she not have had the dream then they would have been gone a minute or two before the accident.

That is just a few of the stories that I can recount from friends. There is plenty of well documented evidence of these phenomena. Some of them can be explained by self fulfilling prophecy, like the fighter pilot that knows that he is going to be shot down. Maybe he believed it so much that he froze in battle and allowed himself to become an easy target, or became reckless because he was convinced he was going to die anyway. The case of the friend who was due to have been on the Lockerbie plane could be explained by him tapping into the terrorists who bombed the plane via the collective unconscious. I can think of no alternative explanation for the other two events.

There is one scientific experiment that was done that is, I believe, beyond any doubt proof that we can see into the near future. They were analysing the physical stress responses to violent or pornographic images by measuring sweating and pulse rate. The images were randomly interspersed with photographs of household objects. They were expecting to find that the pulse rate and sweating increased when the emotive pictures were displayed. What they did not expect to find was that the body was responding to stress in the next picture, before the computer had even randomised them.

A Different Way of Looking at Time

It is more than common sense that is rebelling against the idea of the future being fixed; it is our whole being that is repelled by the idea. For the future to be fixed would destroy our world by reducing us to the characters in a novel. We would become entirely powerless. Not a single thing that we said, did, thought or chose would be of any significance because the future could not be changed. All of our decisions would not be our own but predestined. We would all be acting like puppets on a string, even our thoughts being controlled.

Unless….
Unless it was our own super-conscious, you could call it our spirit or soul, which was both author and puppeteer. Each of us would be living our own novel and play and interacting with the others around us.

Imagine that we are all characters in a soap opera or television series in which the casts write the script for each character. Before filming they get together, discuss and agree the plot and the dialogue. There are strategic meetings where the whole of the series content is discussed and then more detailed meetings as the time for filming gets closer. Each individual scene gets discussed in intricate detail between the characters that are in the scene.
Then they all go to the same film set to act out what each had decided their character would do in that situation. The actors all know what is going to happen but as they are playing the characters they have to lock that knowledge away inside them and act as if the whole thing was spontaneous. There is only one take and so there is a little bit of ad-libbing but the nature and outcome of the plot remains unchanged.

Serious Tarot

The Tarot is a very serious tool. Casual Tarot readings are relatively safe psychologically but still they can go too deep for comfort. We all have skeletons in our closets that we would rather forget about than confront. Fortunately the super-conscious is intelligent and on your side. It will only let out past traumas when it is time for you to deal with them, when you have the tools available to deal with them.
This is not a process where you casually walk into a shop and come out half an hour later cured. Tarot therapy takes time. It also takes a very special type of therapist. You need to be able to find somebody that can support you through the difficult situations and memories that you are going to drag out of your darkest depths. You need somebody who is capable of understanding and absorbing the whole picture.

The Tarot can piece together significant fragments of your past lives, the parts that are important to your present life. In this way it can tell you about past karma that you have brought with you into this life. In each life we have things to learn and things to experience and the Tarot can explain these things to you. We also have things that we need to achieve at a spiritual level, our life mission. The Tarot is a tool that can help us to stay on the right path. Deep inside we all know what we are here for and our psyches make our life simple and joyous if we are following the right path. If we deviate from our path our life will place obstacles in our way to try to communicate that we have strayed. Unfortunately most of us just keep battling on regardless. The Tarot can illuminate our path so that we follow the best life for us, the one that will fulfil us and avoid unnecessary heartache. This path is the path of least resistance, the path of freedom.
Most of us have suffered from some sort of heartache along the way to where we are now. Most of us will have to give up more than the oversized, eco-unfriendly car to find our freedom. We will have to give up our bad thinking habits. We will have to source the root of those damaging thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. There will also be memories that we cling to with unhealthy ties. We are conditioned to denial of our problems and often cannot even remember where our beliefs came from in the first place.

So what do we do when we reach that point in our lives where we want to face up to our past and present and cross over to our path of least resistance for the sake of our future?

A personal recommendation that a Tarot therapist is experienced and good at the psychological care of the deeper problems may bring up is one way to find the right therapist for you. Again, if you have no recommendation, the best thing to do is to look at what else a Tarot reader can do. Ideally you want to find one that has a history of working in psychological care.

You may be surprised at the number of Tarot readers who have a background in psychology. It is natural that a person who has an interest in other people's thoughts and helping other people would go in this direction when then leave school. The careers adviser probably does not have Tarot Card Reader as a job on his list and so recommends studying psychology as a sensible career. Others will drift from the caring professions such as nursing or counselling when the see that there is more to life than immediately meets the eye. To a psychologist or counsellor the lure of being able to know a client's inner thoughts and emotions can be enough to break them away from their safe existence and salary. The Tarot allows them to break barriers that take years to even find using standard psychological techniques.
Perhaps the most stunning combination in the art of opening, understanding and healing you life, is that of Tarot, psychology and Reiki. Adding in Reiki to the equation produces and instant closeness and feeling of kinship for the patient as well as allowing better targeting of the therapy and healing for the emotional wounds of the past.

Tarot Truths - Part 1

Tarot Truths - Part 3

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