Along the Tarot Path

It is possible for anyone, no matter the level of spiritual development, to harmonize the four elements and thus establish a “covenant of peace” between body and soul.
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The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the awareness of duality. To eat of this fruit is to descend into the illusion of separate existence, of polarities and opposites, of birth and death.

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Between two thoughts, there is said to be a gap, a gap which is very subtle, a space which can be seen, felt, sensed, as stability and silence. It is in the space between arising and subsiding, between in-breath and out-breath, that the Self, Consciousness, can be experienced.

Around every card and between any two cards in tarot there is such a space. When a spread is laid out, cards are joined across these spaces by a web of continuity. This continuity is the sense of an individual life; the web of connections between changeless moments, the joining of the eternal “now” of separate cards, is a “story,” a drama. This ever-changing drama of separate existences obscures the changeless moment from which every drama arises.

It can be said that the root energy of creation, from which all form, substance and activity is derived, is Time which manifests as Change. All that arises, arises in Time. And all that arises in Time subsides in Time.

Time is the root of every story, of all its characters, objects, places and actions, and of its plot as well. The movements of Time as change are revealed as the story itself.

In tarot, what changes is a spread, a web of connected cards that reveals a bit of the story of a life. What does not change is each individual card, each one a changeless moment containing the entire message of that moment for whoever pauses to hear it.

The power of the message contained in any moment is greater than the significance of any bit of the continuous web of drama.

The power of the message contained in every moment, in every card, is that it connects the one who hears it to timeless consciousness. The power of the message in any spread, in any bit of the continuous drama, is that it perpetuates the drama.

One level of teaching about tarot concerns itself with reading the drama. On another level the emphasis is on reading the changeless moment from which each such drama arises. Finally, tarot teaches us to join the eternal moment with a steady flow of time in a single understanding and experience.

In the same way that a drop of water contains all the essential properties of the ocean, each tarot card contains the essence of the whole deck. There is no real difference between the deck and each of its cards.

The apparent difference lies in the mind’s attachment to drama. If the mind did not have this attachment, the drama would not exist. There would be no need for spreads and readings; the web of connections would evaporate and each card would stand alone as the complete message. In the same way, each moment of every life stands alone and contains the message that it is the purpose of each life to hear.

An aspect of the magick of tarot is to allow time to stop so that we can examine a single moment, in the form of a single card, in its fullness. Ironically, this process takes patience, care and time.

– Wald Amberstone

Filed under: Tarot Musings, A Cup Full of Tarot on June 26th, 2007