Decoding Tarot Cards Infrastructure - Why Tarot Cards Are NOT Magic But Practical Tools

Tarot Is Considered A "Game" But Is It?

I Like To Think Of Them As Powerful Tools...

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You name each position in the spread and randomly shuffled the "family" cards and deal the cards into a specific pattern and use that pattern to assign the chores. Although I've never seen a deck like this, this is very much how alot of decks these days called "themed" decks are created. They deal with a range of spiritual concepts, instead of spring cleaning so their magical power perception is often preserved.

I think alot of people have the wrong idea about tarot cards. The cards don't tell your future. Even though one of the famous Celtic (pronounced Kel-tic) cross spread is the future position, this simply means probable outcome.

I want to start this by saying I'm no tarot expert, I'm not certified in the art of tarot reading, however I've studied many books, classes and personally use the cards every day for guidance. I don't see them as fortune telling cards so much as a tool in helping me make decisions, and in alot of ways I think they give a pretty accurate representation of my current state of mind, emotions and they help me see the thoughts in my subconscious mind through interpreting the pictures.

I lend you here my insight and what I've learned about them but I too am still a student. But I find tarot cards not to be magic any more than a car is a magic vehicle allowing people to move fast across the earth.. no I see them as a technology that works primarily on psychology and through tools like astrology, and numerology and exercising intuition. If you're constantly wondering what the meaning of life is you can discover this in the tarot cards and lessons about them. Tarot cards are the hierarchies of life defined in pictures.

You should first take each card and meditate on it for an entire day. Carry it with you and look at it constantly. Why? Because as you go through YOUR day the cards picture will relate to every situation in some way. As you develop each cards meaning to you personally as you do this, reading them later becomes second nature- like answering a question you already know the answer to.

Meditate on the cards picture and realize each one has an amazing amount of detail. No color or part of the picture is benign. Think of it as a zip file where every file in the listing is a part of the picture, and everything, and I mean every single thing, even things you don't see right away, have a real and detailed meaning. The depth of detail and the meaning of each and every line or color, every detail- is what gives these cards their power.

In the subconscious these things come out and when you master the reading of the cards you'll see that these things are further dimensions than simply decoding the picture. They add rich details to your reading such as time, places, and even events surrounding the meaning!

The first set (above picture) is just the cards  the second set (picture below) I added the keywords found in a book called The Instant Tarot Reader by Monte Farber and his wife Amy Zerner. This book is an excellent way to get started if you know absolutely nothing about the cards.

You look at each card (calibrate) assuming you've learned what each card means to you, then shuffle with your question(s) in mind.

The questions are not magically answered by the cards they are focal points to think about, and your mind formulates the answer from the intuition and subconscious mind discussing it as you shuffle, and the subconscious mind is like the jury speaker who says the verdict, it does so by formulating the cards to land at the top of the deck in the order based on your preconceived pattern you will lay them down in. With practice you will be able to do this more quickly and accurately.

What seems to be a random act of shuffling is actually a conscious / subconscious mind meeting your simply not paying attention to. You stop shuffling the cards when you get the "feeling" that they're "ready", until you get the signal you get the urge to keep shuffling.

When the cards are laid out, you interpret them individually based on their placements definition and what the cards "speak" to you through the pictures. Much like you look at red and get a picture in your mind of something red or the definition of red. You network the pictures and meanings both at the individual level and as a networked effort. One card may make another card mean something different, and they influence each other.

A "Reading" is really just an advanced exercise in thinking using picture cards and a programmed hierarchy (the spread is just a goal definition of the answers) of placements to help you focus. In the end the answers to your question come from and are generated in your mind, using your intuition, your subconscious and your knowledge base  skill sets etc.. The cards do nothing more than provoke you to think at a deeper level than you're used to!

The cards stimulate your thinking using amazing thought provoking pictures that help you reconnect to your intuition. Most people ignore their intuitive thoughts and these pictures bring it to surface in a fascinating way.

You could say you "get to know your deck" and when you get practice at reading cards you'll find that your not trying to define them so much as interpret the thoughts in your mind when you look at the pictures.

You get accustomed to certain thought forms coming with certain pictures and over time all the cards become connected to other cards in different formats and where they land etc.. It's a lot like how language is formed by learning how to talk/write the words then eventually people develop their own style of talking, forming words and sentences and thoughts become communicated through language but it's not the words but how you use them that change their meaning.

For example, come here is different from she's coming this way, the same word is flavored by the other words in the sentence. The cards do this in a way only the language is more telepathic in nature, pictures translate into thoughts and embed emotional responses and so on.. The thoughts and motivations for your answers are often there but beyond your conscious awareness..

Much like you get nervous at a job interview but when your away from the stress the things you really wanted to say seem to surface.. The cards are pictures that have been shown to almost magically stimulate your thoughts into a lucid form from your subconscious processes and allow you to more clearly understand what your mind discovered but simply didn't share with the conscious mind.

The fascinating thing is when you lay a spread down like the Celtic cross you can look at the cards pretty fast and your answer seems to poke out at you like staring at a very vivid painting of something.

You start to see the big picture so to speak come alive in more rich detail, like a 3D picture. You look at for example position 6 (near future) and position 11 (or 10 depending on your format) (distant future or consolidated answer (position 11 tells what all the other cards are saying in one card) then you can see the bridge between how card 11 got its answer and card 6 came to be.. The left card in the cross and the right card are past to future so you can see how the past event unfolded to the future circumstances and so on...

I did alot of searches for tarot lessons when I started out but this site has everything you need. Most sites don't explain the cards intuitively or systematically in a learning format so I put this site I used. I get no credit for sending them traffic or anything, I just enjoy the format because it is very good. They even explain how the hierarchy works in a story format here:

 "FOOLS JOURNEY". I think you should read this first as it really helps you crystallize everything in this article.

Root site:

http://www.learntarot.com/

Index to Lessons (links and overview)

http://www.learntarot.com/course.htm#lessons

You can buy the Waite Rider deck and use this site as your interpretation site as you learn. You just lay the cards out (they show you the two most used spreads) then click on the particular card you want to define (at first you use crutches like this to get familiar with the cards hierarchy definitions then as you go you start to sway into your own definition and meaning as you practice).

You develop an intuitive sense of what that card means to you then eventually you do it naturally. This site shows you the entire course and its where I learned, its one amazing class in tarot. I printed out every page of the site and laminated it then put it into a binder as my go to book for definitions  I always tried to define it myself but if I drew an absolute blank this bailed me out.

In the cards just count the pentacles or cups or swords or wands to get the number i.e. if you count three wands its the 3 of wands, face cards all have the card name on the bottom.

Although there are spreads that are used a lot, you'll realize later as you get the hang of it that these spreads are just training wheels (although many like me use the Celtic cross religiously lol, because its truly a powerful way to read the cards) but you can generate your own spreads, just define each position before the reading so your mind knows how to select the cards as you shuffle.

One spread uses all 78 cards, talk about a detailed reading. It's like taking every aspect of life based on the question and putting the entire map into perspective! Don't stress right away, you'll get it, it just happens as you play with it..

You wont get amazing and accurate readings right away, well often you do but don't realize it because you haven't yet trained yourself to know the cards meaning (at many intuitive levels) to you until you do a few readings.. But when it kicks in you'll feel an almost magical thing happen like answers just appear without effort.. That's when the cards get really fun..

They train your intuition and you'll feel almost psychic after a while as you discover the training/fun unlocks a power to perceive life more fully and accurately even with out the cards! it exercises your brain in a very interesting way that will feel magic and brilliant (but so does noopept a cognition enhancing nutreceutical, but it's not magic in either count- it's plain physics).

The best way to learn and get motivated is to do mock readings for friends. When I started I worked at Wal-Mart and would take my deck to work. I did over 300 readings over a month's time, I picked up the cards meaning pretty fast, as I did the readings I literally just guessed what the cards meant.

When the reading was over I'd write down (for my own not theirs) what i thought it meant would happen, then later I'd write down what DID happen and see the spread (which I photographed) again and read it based on the past/present descriptions. Where there was a difference I looked at the cars again and realized it told me something but I didn't listen/see it. Over time this develops into a more honed skill set like watching a magic trick then later seeing how it's done (unfortunately in both cases it takes the magic away but in the tarot cards you don't want magic- you want results!).

I didn't use my books (too cumbersome to carry around all the time) I was often pretty close, I never even let them tell my their question and often answered it by what I "saw". The pictures made me feel something and I just said what I felt.. It was magical really (to be fair I am pretty fluent in reading people so that played in and became the question).. People wanted me to do readings so much (I got really good at it) that I left my deck at home to get a moments peace...

Card Definitions Index

http://www.learntarot.com/cards.htm

Enjoy! Good Luck!