Author: whatsawhosit

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astrology Divination Occult Art perfecTrine Alchemy tarot

perfectTrine – alchemy

K of Clubs Alchemy

We have begun the final art for the new perfecTrine poker cards.

The art for the Alchemy deck is the result of our decision to meditate upon the philosopher’s stone during the covid quarantine. With hundreds and hundreds of designs it seemed like it was a simple stretch to use these new designs as the sigils for our perfecTrine deck. Life doesn’t like to make things simple.

The new designs did not lend themselves to line art. One of the kids needed our computer to continue school during quarantine. The project moved to different media, Copic markers which gave everything a really nice glow. We can’t say enough good things about Copic markers they turned what may have seemed sterile and empty into something vibrant and crisp. As some put it, “good enough to eat.”

There is so much we would like to dive into about occult art, the art of the Alchemy deck, and the perfecTrine deck of cards. For now, we need to get back to it, we will touch on all those topics and more as we get more and more of these finished.

There is still a long way to go. There are dozens of designs for the back to go through and select for each version, the tuck boxes need to be designed, foil work, embossing, etc. Each step needs to work hand in hand with the others. We have been working on perfecTrine for so long now it is time to set it all in ink.

We are excited to finally be doing this with you.

Categories
astrology Divination tarot Uncategorized

Divination… Or is that prediction?

Probably the most mysterious thing about tarot cards, and the most scoffed at, is the idea that one can predict the future with them. While the idea itself may seem to defy common sense, some people seem to be pretty darn good at it.

The matter of whether this is divination or prediction is a matter of origin. Divination implies the answer comes from without, from a divine being or from nature itself. Prediction relies on laws of causality, that one thing leads to the next and with enough understanding of the things that happened before one should be able to ascertain what is about to happen.

Whether it’s one or the other is really a moot point. Regardless of where the understanding originated from, it had to travel through the diviner. The person doing this divination is accomplishing the same thing either way… Regardless of what their beliefs are in how the prediction is accomplished.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that our brain is literally a prediction machine. Doctors, scientists and neurologist have discovered people react before a thing happens. There are studies on languages, movements, visual recognition of emotive responses (people shown joyous or traumatic images randomly react emotionally before the image is seen), music, etc. If there is a thing which we respond to, there is a scientist measuring how fast we do it….and often they find we are doing it before the event happens! Just about everything we do in the day happens mechanically before we even know it’s happening. Our mind knows the joke is coming we are smiling before the joke is told. When we’re really hungry or thirsty, and we eat something we will feel better right after, but really it takes 20-30 minutes maybe more for the body to process that food and do anything with it that’ll help with the hunger.

When these things happen internally or repetitively we hardly notice.

“Of course, we were smiling, that person always makes us laugh. We were just waiting for the punchline.”

“Of course, we feel better our body knew the food was in it and that it would soon have the energy needed.”

But often times these instances take place very much outside of us, outside of our experience. Sometimes the length of time is so great we notice, when these things happen to us we come up with concepts like Deja vu, intuition, signs and omens. And if we were looking for the answer, if we were making a conscious search to find out what was going to happen we may call that divination or prediction.

Some people are very good at predicting. Rarely people are just born good at it, they are the exceptions and usually we hear about them because they’re special. Most often this magical ability to predict what’s happening comes with understanding and being, awareness and focus. The more life experiences, the more aware one is of what’s going on around them, the better one’s brain works at retrieving past experiences, the more talented the individual will be at prediction.

In reality though, our lives are pretty cloudy and muddled. Worries and concerns, aches and pains, traumas and pleasures. We don’t know about you but there are nights when we can’t even shuffle and lay out a tarot spread without screwing it up a few times first. Over the ages nature and by extension the cultures of humanity have designed some really cool tools to assist in this process of dragging the prediction out of ourselves. Naturally we have dreams, gut feelings, butterflies and as cultures we have devised things like reading ashes, leftover dinner, tea leaves, clouds. As cultures started to coalesce into large dynamic bodies of people, complicated systems were created. Things like the i-ching, astrology, and tarot were created with symbols that could embrace states of being and describe the human experience in more compact forms.

But no matter what form used for divination. No matter the answer whether it be about tomorrow or next year. That prediction came from within. The brain is just being leveraged to do what it does best, predict what’s going to happen. In the general happenings of day to day life the mind must try to predict what’s going to happen to stay alive, to stay out of trouble, stay fed. By using these tools we’re tapping into that ability for our own conscious reasons. By using these tools we’re giving ourselves a way to communicate our own concerns and desires with ourselves.

Most likely the biggest treasure of all, is that we are aware of so much more than we are aware that we are aware of. The parts of our mind that do these predictive calculations have access to the nearly limitless troves of data that our senses collect. When we are mastering these techniques of divination these processes of prediction, we are re-accessing all of this data to look at it from a different point of view. Initially our mind only use this data for staying alive. By using tools like the tarot we can kind of run all that stuff through again from the point of view of our question.

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Uncategorized

Energy

Words are funny things, they can mean anything.

An un-ending amount of things can be said about and for energy. It drives our cars and runs our homes, appliances, computers, phones. Sometimes we have energy sometimes we don’t have much energy at all and just drag ourselves through the day.

Energy tkes as many different forms as there are applications for it. There’s fuel for cars, electricity for electronics, there’s sunlight for plants. There’s energy that’s just waiting to do something, resting behind dams are millions of tons of water just waiting for a way through to express it’s energy one way or the other, either as electricity going through the dam, or as a torrential wall of water washing a mountain canyon clean.

Often, we think of energy as something physical like oil, coal, nuclear reactors, but energy can take the forms of things that are much more subtle, things that actually don’t even exist. What we think of as money and the monetary system is an amazing example of converting our energy into something that can be saved and used later. We exert energy doing one thing or another and someone pays us for that. By using that money, we can exchange our energy in potential for something from someone that would not have needed our particular energy.

The monetary system has a life unto its own, a field of energy so to speak. It’s life is created by the intentions of all the people exchanging their money for various things. This exchange, this life we breathe into this idea of money, gives it life like characteristics. The financial sectors have become so specialized that any sector trying to operate alone would collapse and take the others with it. It requires the constant exchange of potential energy in the form of money, to keep the economy alive.

All of the different cells in our body exchange energy as well. They are so specialized so integrated with one another the cells in our body lack some abilities to obtain the things they need. Everything about us on the inside is about this exchange rate, the chemicals and the communication with one another is the key aspect for any individual cell to stay alive. Some cells bring oxygen some cells bring sugars some carry away waste, some send messages, some only receive messages, white blood cells are famous for protecting other cells. They are the police cells that guard the borders and stop foreign Invaders from attacking these other specialized cells that have evolved in such a way that they’ve lost their ability to defend themselves from cells that are not within their own system. The whole circulatory system supplies energy to much more specialized cells that need to function in a very different way and cannot waste their time obtaining energy, allowing individual cells to spend an incredible amount of energy specializing themselves into tissues organs and nerves. We have a short supply of this energy on hand, just stop eating drinking or breathing and one will be reminded quickly how fast the reserve of energy is depleted.

Scientists and doctors that study the brain have a saying,”a person’s wired the way they are fired.” That’s them referring to the fact that when we think a certain way over and over it forges neural pathways that create patterns of thought. The more energy, the more input, the more likely it will be remembered, the larger of an impact it has. At this point because the neural knot has been created thinking upon the particular matter it was initially created during becomes easier. Soon if enough energy is added we may even notice this new neural connection as a reoccurring thought or habit. This is no small feat and has a gigantic impact on us. We can see this in effect with people that are addicted to drugs, people that stay in a dysfunctional relationship because they have convinced themself to stay, people have had traumatic memories and suffer from things like PTSD that just cannot get a series of images or thoughts out of their mind. So quite literally the sense impressions from a moment that are severe enough, or even the constant drip of small experiences over and over for years can create very specific structures in our mind…. In particular this process is an exchange, storage, and release of energy..

As we meditate on it and look around us it is easy to see how just about everything around us can be boiled down to some sort or other exchange for energy. In our modern world life is almost completely centered around obtaining money. Staying alive in modern society is literally a game of creating a homeostatic state of economics. When we look at it this way money loses some of the “money is evil” connotations, and it begins to look like evolution still at work. In 10,000 years, what will money have become to us? Will it be like the molecules that a cell makes that help it communicate and support and receive support from the other cells around it? The mysterious substance that ensures life, but when viewed from the outside would be completely mysterious to someone observing who did not have money.

Most of us work to maintain a state where we make just a little more money than we spend so that we’re always in this sweet spot. Just like a simple single cell organism that always eats a little more than it needs so that it has energy to search out for its next meal. People spend their entire lives planning out a way to attain this state of existence, some people will spend years going to college or building their career so that this one one simple thing is taken care of. When this balance is maintained this is called homeostasis.

This homeostatic economy that we strive for in the outside world, takes place on the inside world as well. Antonio DiMasio wrote a great book about homeostasis a while back, that describes this process of how the flows within a culture mimic the flows that are taking place inside of us. Anyone that has time should read it, it was called The Strange order of Things -Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio.

Interestingly data represents energy as well. In the obvious sense that every printed word requires a printer to set the letters, and a energyto run the presses, energy to make the paper and buying the books all these things are energy consuming processes. The act of serving data on the computer requires an incredible amount of energy to read and write it. This process consumes so much energy and puts off so much waste heat it’s a huge conversation point for environmentalism. The same thing takes place inside of us when we remember something it takes energy to create a neural knot, a neural map, a mental image, that represents that memory and all of its aspects, and then it takes energy to recall it, it takes energy to create the mental image that we view.

When we are going about our day, encountering the world, sensing things in the world around us, experiencing an emotion, feeling that emotion, thinking about that feeling or observing the feeling connected to that emotion. The thinking about things we are doing is a myriad of processes of transferring data around within ourselves. And just like in the real world transferring data is expensive. Our brain uses 20% of the energy that our body has at its disposal, while it’s self only being about 5% of our body. Compared to the other parts of the body the brain is a power hungry monster.

Everybody has homeostatic mechanisms within them to prevent their brain from obtaining too much energy. So we are truly very limited in how we can use that energy for our own reasons, seeing as how a great deal of our brains activity is set aside for maintaining our physiology. Due to these circumstances this is why mental fatigue sets in so quickly when we are exhausted or doing something that is extremely mentally engaging. We have literally used up all the excess energy reserves set aside for the brain… One can really run themselves into the ground exceeding this level. Some people get tired just from reading a book that’s making them think.

Thinking of energy in this way gives energy a much broader foundation. When we look at a tarot card that we have assigned a meaning to. It represents an idea or image in our mind. It represents something that took energy to create, it represents something that takes energy to recall, it represents something that requires energy to be added to. When we use a tarot card to meditate or focus on something we are using that card to focus our energy onto a single image and make that image in our image instead of allowing it to be automatically compiled by the systems within us.

Since there is a limited amount of this energy available, lets remain aware of what we choose to ponder. it would be a shame to feel great conviction over the destruction of natural resources while we waste the energy that is closest to us, focusing on worthless pursuits, worries and anger about things we are powerless over, daydreams, etc. It is no wonder we are tired as a society, sometimes it seems as if just reading the news when one wakes is enough to burn up all the days energy

Categories
Occult Art tarot The Spread

A perfectTrine major arcana

We must apologize for being late on our blog post, we were right in the middle of something. It started as an honest side project to create a small graphic that showed the cards laid out with the order you lay them out in numbered order just like any other picture depicting a tarot spread.

Well the picture looked so plain and boring we got distracted. So we spent the last 3 weeks meditating on The Spread and drawing cool art for each card position in the spread.

We’ve had the idea of making a major arcana for the perfectTrine deck for a couple years. But nothing ever really seemed to fit the bill.

This one’s an artistic contemplation of the three thought types functioning.

Well it’s actually coming out so good so quickly, please bear with us a few more weeks. Hopefully we can go through these next posts on The Spread using some cool pictures we made, rather than just a picture with a bunch of rectangles with numbers.

In the meantime let us leave you with this art and wish you well.

Categories
meditation tarot The Spread

The archetypes of thought

The Spread pt2

In the last post we left off with The Spread, hopefully everyone still has all the major cards arranged in three rows of seven with the twenty-second card, the Fool, set to the side. The longer one sees the cards in this order the better a hold one will have upon it in their mind. Before we can continue with what these cards are doing, a very concrete understanding of what the cards represent needs to be created within one’s self. Lets start with broad strokes and work our way into the details.

A tarot card, like any symbol, represents a group of thoughts that are connected by association and analogy. Each of these groups of thoughts are a complex group of thoughts that are connected by associations with one another. Every person shares many many thoughts in common, these thoughts combine into complex thoughts that are our personality or who we are.

For instance there is a complex of thoughts in everyone that is curious and wants to know something, This expression of thought is represented by the first card of the tarot, often called the magician. The first card represents those thoughts that are always searching, always learning, always measuring and comparing. People who have this as a dominant archetype are likely to be interested in being scientists or explorers.

A different thought complex is represented by each card. Each card being a family of thoughts that are all in agreement with one another, for the most part. Just like a real family everybody does not always agree all the time and some members of a thought family can find themselves connected to other thought families. Thought complexes are connected one to the other by individual thoughts that feel at home in other thought complexes. Certain activities require the combined effort of multiple thought complexes.

These thoughts are real, that make up these thought complexes. When we say “real,” we mean thoughts are not ghost like phantasms that wisp through one’s mind coming from everywhere and going nowhere. When a new thought is formed a small part of one’s mind is crystallized into new neural connections. This neural connection is a thing, not an imaginary space between two things, these connections have mass and are created with energy. However tiny, they are as real as the chair you are resting upon. All the same it is quite an infinitesimal amount of “new brains,” that a normal day to day thought creates. The neurons in our mind have been compared to the stars in the sky, they are that vast. At that scale a single thought may be compared to a particle of dust floating through a beam of light in the depths of outer space. So small and yet a real thing, when a person has a real thought they create something. Neurologists and neurobiologists and a veritable army of other scientists at this very moment are learning how to map out these thought structures. Mapping these structures is like trying to map the stars in the sky and all the ways that light travels in between them. 

When a thought is associated with circumstances that create a deep impression, so many neurons are fired and with so much energy that those thoughts become a memory or a reoccurring thought. Keep in mind that this thought is a real thing, created in the brain, with the materials present in the brain transformed by the electrical processes taking place in the brain when that thought was focused on. All of the added energy created by the circumstances creates a bigger bit of brains. When one focuses on a certain thing, constantly thinking of the same thought in meditation, reinforcing that thought and focusing on it. That single thought is gaining a mass which conversely means the thought is gaining energy.

The structures of these thought complexes created by our experiences are built upon pre-existing thought complexes that already exist. When we are born we have these pre-existing thought structures, that are commonly referred to as archetypes. Everyone has three basic thought archetypes that are composed of an entire type of thinking.

  • The thinking thought structures are associated with thinking, reasoning, questioning wondering imagination.
  • The moving thought structures are associated with interacting and responding with the physical world around us.
  • The emotional thought structures associated with emotion and feeling recognize and interact with emotions and ideological concepts such as belief, love, friendship, disgust, etc.

All thoughts are organized in their respective categories by what they function at the best. As you read this, many moving thoughts are at work doing their bits moving and focusing the eyes scrolling the screen and whatever else you must do to read the words. Thinking thoughts are correlating the words you see with your past memories and recognition of what the words mean, gleaning the concepts from the words and giving them meaning. Every now and then emotional thought may listen in to see if there’s anything worth getting excited about.

At this level of organization from here on out let’s refer to these as our three brains. There’s lots written about this, numerous belief structures from the Orient and the east incorporate these thought or psyche structures. So there’s nothing new about this, but then again there is. It turns out that science is starting to think that we have three brains as well.

In summary

Our thinking brain is good at thinking; it can recall past events, compare them with the present, and approximate the future with various levels of understanding of the probabilities of the future. This brain is what people think of when they see the word brain.

The moving or physical brain is good at keeping us alive in a dangerous world, and at it’s core levels it runs our central nervous system and all of our musculature and organs. Tasks like driving are almost all done by this moving mind. Have you ever gotten somewhere and thought wow I don’t even remember driving here? Well you’re moving brain was busy driving while you’re thinking brain was thinking about whatever was on your mind at the time and the two had no idea what the other one was doing.

The emotional brain processes feelings and emotions. It has access to more energy than either of the other bodies. This is energy can be seen at times when people become emotionally charged or in a religious ecstasy, and they perform what would be considered superhuman feats. This is caused by the emotional mind getting involved and giving a big jump start to the other brain in charge of whatever needs to be done or even does the task itself.

Take some time to yourself setting in front of those cards. As you stare at them in those three rows, match up what you have just learned about the three types of thoughts and how they correspond with the rows. Ponder the meanings of the cards as you know them and see how they fit that pattern. Next week we will start picking apart the first row of the Spread.

Categories
Divination tarot

The Intuitive Tarot pt.3

The Intuitive tarot pt.1The Intuitive Tarot pt.2

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.

Categories
Divination tarot

The intuitive tarot pt. 2

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.

Categories
astrology

Astrodynes pt.1

Intuitive astrology?

Even through the names are much alike, the application of intuition in tarot versus the application of intuition in astrology is completely different. For the lost souls that think everything we say is right, and for the others that literally just believe everything they read right off the bat, we are going to turn it into one sentence.

TLDR; There is no intuition used in natal astrology what so ever.

That sums it all up, if you are interested in who, how, where, when or why this is so, read on. As usual let us include our general disclaimer, this is our opinion. We are not professional astrologers, as in we don’t make our living erecting and reading charts for people. We are not amateur astrologers, we don’t erect or read other peoples charts for free either. So if we say something that doesn’t agree with your world view, take it with a grain of salt or better yet ignore it. If something seems to make sense research these concepts more, or leave a comment and we will all ponder these things together.

Of all the occult fields of study that there are, astrology stands alone. While the world of magic and the various occult practices rest on a foundation of systems, concepts, ideologies, and beliefs whose applications are freely interchangeable with flimflam, astrology stands alone in that it rests upon the use of math, the pinnacle of reason. A room full of philosophers could argue till the light of morning over the mechanisms behind magic, tarot, divination, clairvoyance, astral projection, you name it. No matter if everyone agrees on the meaning of the cards, they could still argue till they were blue in the face over how that card came to fall on the table and what it means in relation to the next card.

Astrology is science, I just made rolly eyes. It sounds so cool, calling astrology science. And that makes astrologers astrological scientists, right? Astrology, the occult science. The science of the occult, astrology. It sounds cool coming and going.

When we are dealing with accurate birth charts and their progressions we are looking at a blueprint of the moment something took place. There is no maybe or possibly involved, the planets and zodiacs are where they are. It doesn’t make any difference what kind of astrology is used. Charts are erected to very specific rule sets. Every relationship in the chart has a specific rule set to stick to. Different types of astrology have different sets of rules, but the rules are still there.

So how does intuition figure in astrology?

There are actually two fundamental ways intuition is found in a chart reading that are acceptable astrological practices. The first is the time honored practice of rectifying or correcting a chart. If someone doesn’t know their exact time of a birth, an astrological scientist, or astrologer, can take a rough estimate of the birth date and intuit from looking forward and backward in time to gauge the exact moment of birth. It could be reasonably argued that rectifying a chart is more of a learned instinct than intuition.

There are also other uses for astrology that would require intuition to discern what the chart means. Horary astrology or weather prediction for instance. Both of these require the astrologer to use intuition at one end of the process or the other. In horary astrology the time the question is formed has to be selected. Since thoughts can bounce around in the mind for a long time before they become something one is aware of, this can be a tricky time to pin down for chart erection. Astrologers get around this issue of when the question was formed by erecting a chart at the moment the question was asked of them. With weather prediction the chart must be read for a certain geographical location, which requires intuition and instinct for that geographical area and it’s likely weather patterns.

A third way intuition will sneak into a chart reading is by guessing. When a person is still not fully prepared to do chart readings, their eye flows around the chart and things jump out and grab their attention. This is how all beginners read a chart, and it always results in things being missed. The more little bits of info one can give the intuition to work with the better, so these astrologers will add every comet, node, eclipse, and the kitchen sink to the chart to get a “better” more accurate reading.

Having said that, there is still always that person that is special. The one that can look at a chart and just know intuitively. It is likely though people this gifted will also find the same answers in a bowl of soup.

Is there a way around this?

Anyone that has had their birth chart erected by someone, a program, or website has had that wild eyed look. The one where the eyes are going round and round wondering all the while what does all of this really mean? Luckily there is a way to get around spending years learning to erect and calculate charts, and yet know exactly how a chart should be read. We don’t have to be gifted in the arts of intuition to know which planet is most powerful and which house is the weakest. We will use math under the disguise of astrodynes or cosmodynes.

Astrodynes are a unit of measure applied to the planets, zodiac, aspects, and houses. Astrodynes are a relatively modern innovation to be introduced to astrology. They were devised in the early to mid-1940s by Elbert Benjamin and W.M.A. Drake. Through the 1960’s and 1970’s many astrologers kept refining the technique, Doris Chase and Ken Stone being the more notable architects. The American Federation of Astrologers would use the term cosmodynes and Doris Chase would release their official view of how to calculate them.

What cosmodynes do is assign a value of power and a value of harmony or discord to each part of the chart. Formulas were then created to measure the planetary aspects with these values, and a rule set for progressions so that astrodynes could be calculated into progressions as well.

What can we do with Astrodynes?

Astrodynes give us the ability to analyze a chart in an empirical manner. With the power, harmony, and discord for each house accurately represented, it is a simple matter to see in which departments of life a person will have ease and opportunity or which departments will bring grief and toil. There is no intuition or experience needed to find a person’s elements, most prominent planet, most afflicted planet, best house, best planet, etc. All of these things are pretty much laid out in a quantitative fashion.

Astrodynes allow you to look at the interactions between the planets and see exactly where the harmony or discord is originating. This allows you to balance specifically for the desired outcome.

There are astrology programs that calculate astrodynes. Most will refer to astrodynes as Cosmodynes since the developers would like to receive their approval from the American Federation of Astrologers. There is a great website called AstroWin that offers free online calculations and free programs for windows and android that do just this.

So take yourself over to AstroWin and run your chart. Stop guessing and KNOW.

We will do a few more installments of astrodynes in the future that go over how we use these astrological values in our Work. We will use AstroWin for some calculations for use in our tarot and share them with you.

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Uncategorized

The intuitive tarot pt1

a divine-itive path

Intuition is such a popular subject lately. We have a lot to say about it, so this intuitive tarot thing will keep re-emerging. Intuition seems to have sunk into every aspect of life…..it will be nice when the topic fades away again. Most of the time one reads about intuition it is really just guessing or telling tall tales. Most people wouldn’t know what intuition was if they were being crushed under a mountain of it. Taking a good guess or closing your eyes making that leap is definitely not intuition.

Tarot cards are just the latest in a seemingly infinite list of tools to divine with. Other tried and true methods include but are not limited to; sticks, coins, animal guts roasted in the ashes of what was probably a nice camp fire, tea leaves, candle wax, clouds, the list could go on and on and on and on. The systems these tools are attached to vary in complexity greatly and also in how attuned one’s intuition needs to be to take advantage of it.

A person reading smoke or tea leaves will have developed quite a solid way of interfacing with their intuition. In this way they can work directly with the abstract images that are the language of intuition itself. A person using a divinatory system such as the I-ching or tarot is using a pre existing set of symbols that the intuition can assign values to, that the diviner understands the meaning to.

Ironic that a great deal of those practicing, “intuitive tarot,” are convinced they do not use tarot cards for divination. Divination is the use of intuition to get some guidance. As to what is informing the intuition, that is an entirely different subject. Divination acquired it’s title since it was said that the divine god’s were informing us, the new age movement supposes the “is” is doing the informing. Some believe the cards know the answers…

The thing is, the answers are there in our intuition. At this point there is little reason to argue about where the intuition is being informed from. Lets just figure out how to access the intuition and find out what it knows.

The truth the whole truth…

One must learn all the system they have chosen as a whole. A well functioning system of divination as a complete whole will have a facet that represents each of the various situations, personalities, and characteristics of life. If you change the meaning of one card through ignorance or on purpose there would have to be other changes made to compensate. The great decks were created by masters with specific meanings in mind, learning a tarot deck is about climbing into the creators frame of mind.

The more complicated the system the more accurate the divination will be. There will be more answers to choose from, hence covering more specific situations in larger breadth. Tarot’s ability to have the answer staged in the form of a spread that contains extra dimensions to the answers allows the tarot a far greater command of divination than it would appear to have on the surface.

Studying the deck is the key, which comes down to learning all of the cards. There is the memorization method which is how everyone will start out. The other method is to study the subjects the creator of it studied themselves. This method creates an understanding of the card that far exceeds the simple description in a Little White Book. This means if you are using an RWS it is time to read Arthur Waite’s works, not read a book written by a person that read his works and painted their own new pictures.

In Astrology, for instance, it can seem daunting to learn what a planet in a certain sign means. There seems to be so many combinations to memorize. The key is not to memorize but to learn how combinations of attributes evolve into specific state. The same is true with the tarot.

With a command of the meaning of the number seven and of the meaning of the element Earth it is just one simple step away to always understand a seven of swords. There is no need to grapple with making a memorized description of the seven of swords fit the overall meanings that fit the question put forth. The seven of swords can be drawn as the answer to any question, but it will surely have a different way of being interpreted.

As this method is assimilated and begins to function automatically, intuition will slowly be left out of the process of reading the cards all together. Any spread before you and you will know what the cards actually mean. This gives intuition a chance to take it’s rightful place taking control of the shuffle so that you can read the proper cards.

At this point your tarot will have reached the level of divine interface. You will have accessed the infinite mind that shaman, oracles, seers, witches, and the wise of all ages have accessed. The evolution is still grinding on, what was once the realm of reading hot coals has evolved into a deck of cards.

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Divination tarot

The magic is in the shuffle

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.