Why intuition? Why with tarot? What is it that we are really trying to accomplish with tarot cards?  Why magic, alchemy, Kabballah, and astrology? How is any of this intuitive? To be dreadfully honest, none of these are intuitive. If this stuff was intuitive, everyone would know the meaning of every card.

Let’s not ponder the mechanisms for this moment, let’s ponder what, “The people that invented tarot cards were doing”. These people were searching for what? To put it most succinctly, we will borrow a phrase from Ouspenski, they were in search of the miraculous. The miraculous does not exist here in our world, so the search led inside, to the inner world, where enlightenment resides.

These people were the first of the new age movement. People drawn to meditation and the inner landscape of the mind. Techniques that were the sole province of religious mysticism and philosophy were were being grasped by non-believers.  They literally did not have the training or the structure to follow through, they needed to create their own structures. This driving need for a tool with a structure to assist in this search led to the creation of the tarot.

Tarot cards in this view were created as an outgrowth from a spiritual searching. These were created by people who had already spent many years exploring the inner worlds of their being through religion, meditation, yoga, and anything else that came their way. The tool needed to be flexible enough to incorporate varied studies and at the same time depict correspondences and relationships between the concepts themselves and between the different areas of study.

Tarot is the new kid on the block, so to speak. Most systems of divination and tools for inner searching are literally hundreds upon thousands of years old. It is easy to wonder if the industrial age allowed for this to happen so quickly and fluidly this time. The ability to communicate and travel the world, the opening of libraries full of lost documents, and maybe most importantly the fall of the old order. As the institutions of the old world were crumbling the last holders of those secrets were urged and drawn to sharing their secrets with those who were searching for it, or else it all be lost forever. Helena Blavatsky, George Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Elbert Benjamin, Peter Ouspensky, and many others were gifted with the chance to learn in places and from masters who had been separated from the world for centuries. The words of these spiritual explorer are very special and precious, the secrets they would learn, would be all wiped away by the ensuing conflicts and two world wars.

The inner world still looms large and unexplored. Surely we are probing deeper into space than we are into ourselves. It is far more illustrious to be a rocket scientist that probes the heavens, than it is to simply be aware of one’s self and one’s place in all of nature. The funny thing about the inner world is it is tricky to get to and even harder to stay in, just like outer space.

There are really two main ways of getting there under one’s own will. Through the breath and through intuition. The makers of our tarot cards will have learned this from their studies of Yoga and Kabballah. Almost everyone knows to some extent that controlling the breathing coupled with visualization is a very basic way to trigger meditative states, less well known is to use intuition, where a person must observe themselves, it is an acting of being aware of ones awareness.

This intuitive meditation is the key to shuffling the cards. One is observing themselves shuffling and yet at the same time detached and only observing. As if there are two minds working, one is shuffling and handling the cards, the other is observing the shuffle and aware of the issue that is the query for the spread and the way the cards will be spread out.

What is really amazing is that once one reaches this point, the cards become less important. The cards are not even needed. Tarot cards are like a high chair or training wheels. At first they may be needed, after some time they are kept out of sentimentality, but then a time comes along when they are just holding the process of enlightenment back from moving forward.

Intuition is the ultimate branding in occult studies these days. So we figured it would be prudent get on with this little series of how intuition and tarot cross paths….since people are just going to click on anything that has intuition in it, right?

How to recognize intuition.

It is time to break intuition down into it’s basic parts. Before the entire occult of the internet rises up like some evil dragon and roasts us for dissing on intuition and it’s tarot. Please remember this is our experience we are speaking with. To learn about intuition, we suggest reading some neurology books about the brain and consciousness, there are quite a few good ones these days that break things down in layman’s terms, that mere mortals like us can understand. Science is fully on board, scientists and psychologists and doctors have spent decades trying to get to the bottom of this underlying rhythm of consciousness. If the interest really has grabbed a hold of you this article on the Ventralmedial prefrontal cortex is a very well written piece, tons and tons of references. The intuitive process appears to be entwined with consciousness at the most fundamental levels. The article itself is not about intuition, but intuition appears to be all about the Ventralmedial prefontal cortex.

Intuition is fast.

Blindingly fast, intuition is so fast that it knows what the card is before you turn them over. Intuition knew what the cards were going to be, before you shuffled. When you shuffle the cards and get that stinking feeling you didn’t shuffle them right or this is a bad spread coming, now that’s doing a reading with intuition. Your intuition is saying, “hey I didn’t have time to get those cards in the right order for you.” Staring at the cards wondering what they mean, is not intuition.

Intuitions requires data

Intuition draws on memories such as past experiences, learned behaviors, and knowledge learned. . Intuitions other data set is sensory input, our little intuition machine is always grinding away measuring what is happening against what has happened. As long as something is being sensed intuition is intuiting.

In ones memories there needs to be a subset of data that is the meaning of the tarot cards. For this reason it is important to become one with the cards. The closer one is in understanding the the specific meaning of the cards the more accurately the intuition can select the proper card. Trying out different decks means starting over from complete scratch.

Intuition has access to an unbelievable amount of information, all the same it is not omniscient. With these memories intuition compares past experience with the current sensory load, extrapolates future probabilities, and takes actions accordingly. Intuition can only calculate the answers with what it has on hand to use.

Intuition gets instant updates of sensory data from the senses. For the tarot user it will use this data to have access to your shuffle. Intuition has to know where the hands are, how the hands move, how to press with the fingers, it needs that tactile feeling of the fingers to sense the surface of the cards.

Intuition needs to know what the cards mean to you. This takes memorization plain and simple. Repetition and memorization. Don’t change systems. Don’t switch decks for this or that. Find something that feels good and keep it.

Intuition’s language

Intuition speaks its own language. It functions in the language of your memories and dreams using image complexes, symbols. This is why the image complexes of tarot cards are so readily accessible to the intuitive mind. The intuition already speaks to itself in symbols, making memorized tarot cards a fertile field for intuition to work in work in.

Intuition’s only ways to communicate with you of its own volition is by taking control of your body. It can increase your blood pressure and adjust your hormones triggering flight responses, make a hand tingle or a ringing sound in the ear. Intuition is easily drowned out by conscious thoughts,

By entering a state of self observation or meditation, the mental process that are taking a rest allow intuition to be heard or in the case of a diviner of tarot to hi-jack the muscular system to shuffle the cards. Intuition has very little power to exercise over the muscular system, It is of paramount importance that shuffling becomes an ingrained automatic process, to the point that you are literally shuffling intuitively.

It is likely that there is no intuition available for looking at pictures. Intuition is not at work when we are observing the tarot cards. Staring at the Thoth deck until the meaning comes is not using intuition.

“intuitive tarot,” is a redundant hyperbole

If we are not using the tarot intuitively, we never were using the tarot at all. Using tarot cards is giving the intuition a series of cards with values that it can communicate through. It’s as if we were talking to someone and we only had 78 words to work with. Without including intuition in the process it’s just a card game. Everybody that owns a tarot deck is not going to be able to do this. Most will get some sort of results of a worthwhile value, once they have memorized the cards and have ceased their searching for those card meanings.

a bridge to your soul

There is intuition, and then there is intuition. Where is your intuition directed? We focus on the shuffle not the image on the card. Grab a card any card and look at that image. The creator of that card designed that card with a specific meaning in mind, that meaning is the value of the card. The moment intuition is used to understand that card or discern it’s value, the original value for that card is void. If we could make any plea to all the tarot practitioners of the world it would be, ”stop guessing what the card means with your intuition.”

Lets have a thought experiment.

In this experiment there is only one kind of deck of tarot cards in the world. We have all learned the meanings of these cards, they are engraved upon our souls. Everyone knows the meaning of the cards so well, they don’t need pictures just a card with a number. Everyone knows the value of the fiftieth card as well as the first. The meanings of the cards are so well understood they are used to describe the landscapes of our psyche, the cards are road maps to our soul. Everyone finds they can communicate their emotional states to one another with these cards. The internet goes quiet, there is no one asking the meaning of individual cards anymore.

In this world there is no intuition involved with reading the cards, since the value of the cards are completely understood. Now that the value is always known the attention must be directed to the shuffle. It is the shuffle and the cutting of the cards that is bringing the cards to the top of the deck that will give the spread the meaning that is read.

The tarot spreads retain their meanings still. Intuition is expressing itself though our hands as the shuffle is done. To do this, everyone is shuffling more.

Ok…the experiment is over, this little thought experiment was about to destroy the entire tarot industry since everyone was buying the same deck of cards.

A couple things are apparent if enough time and effort are spent in this thought experiment. First off, somehow intuition is capable of being accessed during the shuffle. Secondly in order to leverage this intuition a complete command of the meaning of the cards is needed, no guessing the value of the card is allowed.

We find that the shuffle is a meditation in and of itself. By shuffling the same over and over, shuffling becomes a mechanical movement, an action that the body goes through without any direction or conscious awareness. All awareness is directed towards the question or subject of the tarot spread.

At this point when shuffling comes without thought, is when intuition can take charge and lead the shuffling to stack the deck in it’s favor, so it can communicate the answers requested. In order to do this the shuffle has to be done with such a regular rhythm that intuition is enabled to do it’s magic. If the shuffle goes on too long, not long enough, or a different amount of cuts are made the wrong cards will be on the top.

For instance we shuffle three times then cut three times, shuffle three times and cut three times, and then finally shuffle three times and cut three times. While in the meditative state it requires only the lightest attention be paid to ensure the right amount of shuffle and cuts are made. There is more than enough shuffling to allow for an intuitive stacking of the deck.

Before the shuffle make sure the spread has been decided on. With this choice intuition is being informed as to how many cards are going to be needed for the spread, and what type of thing each card will refer to. Make a conscious decision how you are going to shuffle, and then do that for the rest of your life. Don’t shuffle for so long it is impossible to keep track, don’t make the shuffle so short that it is not possible to re-stack the entire deck. Most importantly, NEVER CHANGE THE SHUFFLE YOU CHOOSE. The important thing is that the shuffle becomes complete muscle memory so that the focus is on the subject at hand and not the handling of the cards.

It is nice that images on some cards connect with people. It is cool that artists are painting over the old stuffy religious cards with something fresh and new. It is more important to accept that cards need to be a complete system with a certain set of values. Values that cover a specific range of events and emotional states in order to communicate. Changing the meaning of one cards necessitates the changing of other cards to reflect the new values. This is no small task, so lets be mindful of our tarot, and not assign meanings where they are not meant to be.

It is now time to shuffle shuffle shuffle. Pull out those old decks you don’t really care for and beat them to death practicing. Shuffle till your hands hurt. Shuffle until you can not count how many decks you have thrown in the garbage. Shuffle and shuffle and shuffle, shuffling should be your new fidget spinner. At some point it will just happen, effortlessly.

At that point the cards will become the bridge to your soul.