Creativity, self development, self help

Image via WikipediaEvery Tarot aficionado has their own favorite deck of Tarot cards.

My long-time favorite is the Universal Waite Tarot, which has lovely soft colors.

From a review:

 The soothing, pastel coloring, done so beautifully by Mary Hanson-Roberts, brings out all of the delicate intricacies of Lady Pamela’s famous drawings.  Each card now seems ready to step out and guide you along Tarot’s path of wisdom.  The facial features and their expressions are more readily decipherable now, showing the sorrow, pain, joy, happiness, greed, wisdom, resignation and anticipation of each figure.

Each esoteric symbol on every card can be seen and better understood.  Subtle nuances, such as the patient, waiting gaze of the Hermit as he watches for others seeking knowledge; the healthy stalks of grain growing before the Empress and the fresh green and gold in her starry, Earth Mother crown; the despair on the faces of the Tower’s victims; the weary, but still resolute face on the IX of Wands; the pensive wariness of the IV of Cups; all of these and more now leap out at the reader.

It’s a lovely deck, a joy to use.

Image via WikipediaLife is a process of cycles. Using a symbol tool like Tarot is a way of finding out which cycle is in operation in our life, and where we are in each cycle.

The Tarot cards cover all forms of experience, and existence as we know it. When we draw a card, the cardboard and the symbols on it become a clear mirror in which we see ourselves and our situation.

Buy a set of Tarot cards.

Also, buy a blank, unlined notebook to use as your journal. You want the pages to be unlined, because you want to be able to create pictures in it. A few pens of  various colors are also useful, as are coloring pencils or paints. Even if you decide that you will write your journal on a computer, do get the blank unlined notebook for your drawings.

You can’t draw? Nonsense. If you can draw a line, a triangle and a circle, you can draw. We’re not selling your drawings as works of art here. They’re not meant to look good. They’re meant to exteriorize your feelings. Let me give you an example.

I’m going to suggest that every morning, when you come into your office, before you start working, you sit down and draw a Tarot card so you can get in touch with your subconscious mind and use its help throughout the day.

The card you draw is your Daily Card. As you calmly and quietly contemplate the card, a number of feelings may come up. You take your journal, turn to a blank page, and start doodling.  Just draw a doodle, using as many colors as you wish, or just use a pencil or a pen.

Doodling is fun. In fact, keep pads and pencils around your house, so you can doodle as the feeling strikes you.

L.J. Read of The Enchanted Mind, wrote:

“It is well established that much of our creative expression is birthed in the unconscious mind. To use creative expression and solutions in your everyday life, it is necessary to dip into the unconscious at will. Doodling is one way of doing this. Doodling allows the unconscious to render in symbolic expression. Symbols have universal as well as personal meaning. When you are stuck for an answer to a problem or looking for creative innovation, the technique of doodling will unleash the hidden symbolic powers of the unconscious mind.”

By no stretch of the imagination would you ever call your doodles works of art. They’re not meant to be. They can be as ugly and as meaningless as you wish. The thing is, they won’t be meaningless. They are you, communicating with you.

Image via WikipediaHighly successful people are successful because they use their intuition.

Why not try using the Tarot cards and other esoteric symbol systems to help you to focus your intuition, and to make it work for you?

If our conscious mind makes up 10% of our mental abilities, our subconscious makes up the other 90%. Our subconscious is also the gate to the collective unconscious. The Buddha says that we live in a mental world, and the physicist is saying the same thing.

So if our total mind contains such wonders, how do you get in touch with the whole thing? How can you communicate with the other 90% of you which is normally closed off to you?

You use the Tarot, or a similar symbol system, through which to focus your intuition. This is not complex or difficult. Forget anything you may have heard about developing ‘psychic’ powers. You’re not developing any supernatural ability at all. You’re simply bringing your true knowledge into awareness.

Think of yourself of two people. There’s you, and your subconscious mind, whom we’ll call Fred. In the movie Drop Dead Fred, the Fred who caused such havoc was an aspect of the heroine’s subconscious mind.

You have your own “Fred”. Your Fred knows and understands much more than you do, but he has no way of communicating with you, other than through emotions, memories and symbols.

For example, let’s say you get to work this morning, and a memory pops into your mind. The memory involves a trick you played on an old girlfriend, twenty years ago. Being slightly more mature now than you were when you were seventeen, the memory makes you squirm.

Beyond the embarrassment, wrapped around the memory is a feeling of vague discomfort, a tightening in your stomach muscles. You couldn’t call this mix of emotions real anxiety, but it’s close. At ten o’clock you’re due to sign a contract with a new supplier. You don’t connect the memory of the old girlfriend and the trick you played on her with the signing. Six months later, when it turns out that the plastic conduit the supplier sold you was shoddy, costing your company big bucks, you still don’t make the connection.

Tarot helps you to focus your intuition, and to make connections.

Image via WikipediaIntuition is vital to our life. Unfortunately, many of us have been hypnotized to imagine that our intuition doesn’t exist. This makes as much sense as going through life blindfolded, which is what we do, when we don’t use our intuition. The more you trust and use your intuition, the more smoothly your life will flow. Our intuition is part of everything we so, and a signal that our intuition is working properly, is when synchronicity emerges into our life.

Often, when I am writing, I will get an impulse to pick up a certain book. There is no discernible reason why I should pick up this book, except the strong feeling that I should. Invariably, when I pick up the book, it refers to something that I am working on at the moment: something that is exactly appropriate to my work. In fact, I know that my work is going well, because synchronicity happens with such regularity.

No one really knows why and how Tarot works, but Carl Jung believed that it worked through synchronicity.

From Wikipedia:

Jung coined the word to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Jung variously described synchronicity as an “‘acausal connecting principle’” (i.e., a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by conventional, efficient causality), “meaningful coincidence” and “acausal parallelism”…

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence, but are later found to be causally related are termed as “incoincident”.

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic.

One of Jung’s favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.