The metaphysics of Tarot
I grew up in a conservative Christian household, where occult and new agey things were powered by demons and/or Satan himself. Of course, my dad also said to me at some point, "If you don't let a kid near the stove at all, they'll either become afraid of it or obsessed with it." It is little surprise that sometime in my teenage years I started taking an active interest in learning about the occult, starting with books by Robert Anton Wilson. (Wilson, by the way, is what kindled my interest in psychoactive drugs.)
And, you know, my current career goal is "professional wizard."
Aside from ouija boards, I think my first hands on experience with the occult was when my friend Bo got a Tarot deck. He was an atheist, and I was at an awkward stage of trying to reconcile my religious experiences with my belief that everything should be able to be explained with appeal to the physical world. Neither of us had a reason to be afraid of the cards, because the worst thing that could happen was that they turned out to be boring and meaningless.
The cards actually turned out to make a lot of sense for the questions we asked, and we found this pretty fascinating. It did not take us long to learn one of the unwritten rules about Tarot: they are going to tell you the straight truth about what you are doing wrong, and they do not care about your feelings. You will walk away from it saying, "Damn, I just got told by a deck of cards." I think we started to show them more respect than one would otherwise give to inanimate objects.
Our understanding of how it worked, which I still believe in, is that the cards make you think about your situation from a different point of view. They operate through sets of symbols, and can have enough interpretations that it is usually possible to fit a card or set of cards to one's present circumstances. There might be information you're ignoring. You might be focusing on the wrong things. You may see that you already knew what the answer was to your situation, but it was an answer you didn't like, so you tried to tell yourself that you would find an answer you did like. The reason the cards bring up so many bad feelings is that your unresolved emotions are the reason you even have the problem at all. You have to accept the way you feel, or you can change your circumstances to something more preferable. You can't expect to feel better about it if you don't do anything.
I never really got that good at it. I wanted to, but I felt kind of dumb having to look up every single card in my booklet every time. Learning the meanings of all 78 cards seemed like an intimidating task. I didn't really understand at the time what it means to suck at something and keep doing it until you're kinda good at it. I hate feeling like I'm bad at things. If I'm going to work hard at something, I either need an external motivator (like with school) or to feel good about the learning process (like with video games).
The reason I am choosing right now to get into it is that I am in the process of digging into my memory for the things I've lost over the years. There are a lot of things in there that make me feel bad when I think about them, so I try not to think of them at all, ever. Over the years, I have also stopped thinking about anything that is even related to them, even the good memories, because they feel too weighed down by the associated bad memories. There are periods in my life where I can remember just a few disjointed details, and the broader memory of it is just a narrative with a vague sense of perpetual misery.
It is my hope that the cards will bring up spontaneous memories that I can flesh out and develop, the way Proust gets when he eats madeleine cookies. My other memory strategy for the moment is to start with a specific target, and then follow the thread of it as far as I can. I'm sure there will also be something like a meditation journal eventually, but meditation is yet another "this feels hard" activity that is giving me trouble.
This whole thing is going to involve a lot of sacrifice, but most of that sacrifice is going to be Facebook. There is no better thing to sacrifice in one's life than a social media addiction.