A Philosophical Essay on Tarot Divination and Human Consciousness by David Bruce Albert Jr PhD (2004).pdf

(2106 KB) Pobierz
A Philosophical Essay on
Tarot Divination
and
Human Consciousness
by David Bruce Albert Jr., Ph.D.
(c) 2014 by David Bruce Albert Jr.
Contact the author at: doctordruidphd@yahoo.com
Works quoted in this essay are believed to be in the public domain unless otherwise
stated.
Tree of Life diagram and tables of card meanings adapted from “The Book of Thoth” by
Aleister Crowley.
Some typefaces used in this work were developed by Kevin King of Kingthings --
http://www.kingthingsfonts.co.uk .
Printing Date: 18. October 2014
Revision Number: 28
I. The Tarot and Human Consciousness
The Tarot may be thought of as an art form that has a variety of uses and meanings. It
can be viewed as a work of art that is appreciated for its beauty and complexity,
irrespective of whatever other functions it might have. Depending upon the specific
Tarot deck, it can serve as a textbook for the study of an esoteric system. It can serve as a
stimulus for active imagination or meditation, and it can also be used for personal
analysis. When many people think of the Tarot, however, what they are really interested
in is its use as an
oracle:
a method of discovering things that are normally hidden from
view. Usually this means discovering things that are in the past or future, or some great
distance away, or for some other reason inaccessible to ordinary methods of discovery.
To understand what an oracle is, and how it works, it is first necessary to understand
something about how consciousness works.
Consciousness
is that part of the
psyche,
or
totality of all mental processes, that is aware of itself and aware of the outside world.
What differentiates consciousness from everything else is its self-awareness and its
subjectivity:
its awareness that what is happening is
happening to me,
and that
there is a me
for things to happen to, an individual that is distinct from its surroundings and persists
as a single, unique being over time.
Consciousness normally interacts with the outside world through the senses -- sight,
smell, taste, hearing and touch -- and this process of interaction is called
perception.
Experiences that consciousness understands in this way are said to be
immediate,
because there are direct connections -- or at least there appear to be -- between the
experience, the body, and conscious awareness. In addition to perception, consciousness
is also capable of
introspection
-- having experiences of itself, and not just of the outside
world. Thoughts, recollections, reasoning, and similar introspective events might also
be considered immediate, as they are observed and experienced in much the same way
as perceptual experiences.
The purpose of an oracle is to allow consciousness to discover events that are not
immediate to it, which in the case of oracles usually means separated from
consciousness in space, time, or both. How the oracle is able to reveal non-immediate
experience to consciousness remains a matter of theory. One such theory is based upon
the observation that there appears to exist within the
unconscious
a pre-existing image,
or pre-cognition, of certain events of which consciousness cannot be directly aware. The
unconscious
is a general term that refers to those elements of the psyche of which
consciousness is not directly aware, either because the element has insufficient
psychic
energy
-- which can be understood for this purpose as “importance” -- to come into
conscious awareness, because it has intentionally been pushed out of awareness, or
because it is of such a nature that it cannot be directly understood by consciousness no
matter what its level of importance.
It is this last category of unconscious contents that is of primary interest in
understanding how an oracle is able to reveal hidden events. It would appear, based
upon the results of experiments, that within the unconscious are representations of
events past, present and future, to which consciousness does not have direct access.
While consciousness does not directly perceive these representations,
psychoid processes
in the unconscious do, but these processes cannot communicate with consciousness
directly because they involve modes of perception and categories of cognition that are
completely alien to consciousness. Instead, they communicate with consciousness
indirectly, such as through dreams, fantasies, and the imagination. This indirect
communication is
symbolic
-- its meaning is cloaked in an abstract and seemingly arcane
imagery that can only be understood through interpretation.
For clarification it should be mentioned that the often heard term
subconscious
is a
different concept from that of the unconscious, and the two should not be confused.
Subconscious
is a value term -- it implies that those things in the psyche of which
consciousness is not aware have a lower status or importance than consciousness. These
would be things that have been forgotten, things that have been repressed, or
intentionally pushed out of consciousness, and things that have not yet accumulated
enough energy to become conscious -- but the idea is that these things are all readily
understandable by consciousness, because they are fundamentally the same kind of
representations. The theory of the subconscious specifically denies the existence of the
last category of psychic elements that are different in kind from consciousness, but can
have just as much, or even more, energy in the psyche than consciousness itself.
Unconscious
is, in itself, a contrast term and not a value term -- it simply means that
everything that is not conscious is unconscious, without suggesting inferiority or other
ordering principles. As it is the category of unconscious factors that are different from
consciousness that is of interest in divination, the idea of a
subconscious
implies a
theoretical framework that does not apply to the analysis of divination, or of the psyche
that experiences it. It should also be noted that the terms
conscious
and
unconscious,
while they seem to imply mental contents that are relevant to the individual, do not
necessarily imply that such things are exclusively "in the head," in the brain, or even
particular to the individual.
Symbols and Self-Consuming Artifacts
While there may already exist a foreknowledge of future and other non-immediate
events in the unconscious, the only way consciousness can be aware of them is
indirectly, through symbols used by the unconscious to communicate their meaning.
The function of an oracle such as the Tarot is to coax these unconscious representations
into consciousness using a set of symbols whose meanings are already somewhat
familiar. Instead of waiting for dreams, whose images can be difficult, if not impossible,
to decipher, the oracle provides a ready-made set of symbols for which consciousness
already has some basic understanding. The oracle then acts as a translator between the
language of the unconscious and the language of consciousness, using a pre-defined set
of symbols familiar to both.
The good news in this is that through the use of an oracle, consciousness can gain access
to unconscious representations, including those of past, future, and distant events, of
which it could not otherwise be aware. The difficulty with this process is that the
symbol does not “wear its meaning on its sleeve”, but requires interpretation and
analysis to have any meaning at all. This interpretation process, called
divination,
has
both intellectual and intuitive components: it involves the aligning of a body of
knowledge about the history and meaning of the symbols, with a series of subjective
impressions and feelings with which the symbols are imbued by the unconscious.
Divination is therefore both rational and irrational at the same time; it could be said that
it involves both a learning, and to some extent an un-learning, or willingness to
abandon the purely intellectual interpretation of the symbols, to arrive at an
understanding of what lies within the unconscious.
Divination therefore involves an essential paradox: one must learn a set of meanings for
the oracle's symbols in order for consciousness to understand them, yet one must also to
some degree abandon those meanings to the often abstract and contradictory
impressions through which the unconscious communicates its hidden wisdom. The
situation closely parallels a similar problem in art critique that is addressed by the
concept of the
self-consuming artifact.
According to this theory, a work of art such as a
painting, a poem, a piece of music, and so forth have no meanings by themselves; the
“meaning” of an artwork emerges through a dialectical relationship -- a sort of back-
and-forth give-and-take -- between the work and the observer. A person viewing a
painting, for example, comes to it with certain attitudes, expectations, beliefs, tastes, and
so forth, which when engaged by the painting, focus the attention on various aspects of
the work. As the work is studied, different aspects of it become more or less important,
which in turn alters the way the observer views it. This new attitude toward the work is
then modified by further study, and the dialectic between the work and the observer
continues until the painting itself vanishes in the train of ideas it produces. The artwork
itself is “consumed” by its interpretation, and thus the “meaning” of the work is not in
the work itself, but in the process of interaction between the object and the subject who
views it.
Similarly, Tarot cards used in divination are self-consuming artifacts. There is no
meaning in the card or symbol itself -- it is really just ink on cardboard. When a card is
viewed in a reading, it calls forth certain associations in the consciousness of the diviner
-- keywords, recollections, learned sets of meanings, perhaps its significance in some

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin