Spiritual autobiography, part 2

I made it pretty clear, in a post last week, that I’m an unrepentant heathen. I’ll sometimes go so far as to say I’m an atheist, but it’s just as accurate to say that I’m a pantheist — I believe there’s a little spark of something-unexplainable in everything, and that it’s all connected somehow, in a way that we’ll probably figure out someday, if we don’t poison ourselves or blow ourselves up first. That’s also why I find things like brain imaging so fascinating. I’ve always loved psychology — why we think what we think and do what we do, and what that means as we move through the world. But did you know that we can now take a picture of the brain forming a thought? Or see how meditation actually changes the the brain’s very structure? We think what we think and do what we do in part because we’re big bags of chemicals shot through with electrical impulses, which is amazing to me. And everything else we know about is made of chemicals and electricity, too, and that’s also amazing. And the connection is in there somewhere.

Which is why it’s only somewhat surprising that this avowed secular humanist is also, not at all secretly, a damn good Tarot reader. Do I believe that little pieces of painted cardboard tell the future? Don’t be ridiculous. But do I believe that certain universal archetypes live in all of our hindbrains, in Jung’s collective unconscious, and that we can use tools that refer to those archetypes to see what’s going on in our lives from a different perspective? Oh, now you’re speaking my language. And then there are two traits that helped me navigate my messed-up youth — the ability to notice tiny cues in people’s words and actions, and the empathy to interpret those cues and infer what they might be thinking and feeling. As an adult, I’ve learned how to harness those skills so I can say to people, “I hear the situation as you’re explaining it to me; now, let me use these cards as a tool to show you another way to look at it.”

Sometimes I don’t get it until after the fact. Earlier this year, I kept running into the Two of Cups. Reading for myself, having a reading done for me, seeing it at random, you name it: the Two of Cups. The card of love, romance, sweet affinity. At the time, I was in a situation in which I was getting exactly the opposite, and I couldn’t understand why I kept getting that card. But in retrospect, I’m choosing to interpret it as a message from my subconscious mind: “This is what you want, this is what you deserve, and I’m going to remind you of it repeatedly so you don’t settle for anything less.”

Tarot is as close as I get, at the moment, to a spiritual practice. It’s not in the cards, though. It’s in me. It’s useful because it helps me turn disconnected facts into a coherent narrative. And for a writer, after all, isn’t storytelling what it’s all about?

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)