The intuitive, the spiritual, and the plain clear reading

Sometimes book launch events can create more text right then and there. When my book, Tarot Tracings: Essays on Literature and Divination was flung to the public via a talk, what I hammered on was this point: the fortuneteller is not spiritual, but rather invested in clarity. My talk about the book – which is an exploration of tracing the surface of divination in authors Italo Calvino, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats, and Rachel Pollack – was a Zen talk about the need to distinguish between what we’re doing and what we think we’re doing when we read the cards.

Because this is an important discussion, I allowed myself to reproduce in writing the ensuing dialogue that took place in the Aradia Academy alumni group between brilliant cartomancer Dorian Broadway and myself, since Dorian’s question and my answer may be of use to others in their own practice. Dorian asked, starting with a reference to the dictionary:

Camelia, you often mention that you are Zen rather than spiritual. Merriam-Webster says this on Zen: 1: a Japanese sect of Mahayana Buddhism that aims at enlightenment by direct intuition through meditation. 2: or Zen : a state of calm attentiveness in which one's actions are guided by intuition rather than by conscious effort.

On the spiritual, Merriam-Webster says this: 1: of, relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit: incorporeal, spiritual needs; 2a: of or relating to sacred matters, spiritual songs; 2b: ecclesiastical rather than lay or temporal, spiritual authority, lords spiritual; 3: concerned with religious values; 4: related or joined in spirit, our spiritual home, his spiritual heir; 5a: of or relating to supernatural beings or phenomena; 5b: of, relating to, or involving spiritualism.

Would you mind elaborating on how you define the two and how you define yourself as Zen and not as spiritual? My curiosity is piqued.

I answered Dorian thus:

Let me ask you this first: what do you suppose ‘direct intuition’ means? Think about it for a second before you move on it. There isn’t the time when we don’t have a direct experience to things. How would the opposite manifest? When I read, is it not me reading, having a direct experience to the act of reading? When I eat or make love is it not me eating or making love who is having a direct experience to these acts? Now that we got this clear, what do you make of the ‘intuition’ related to these acts? Is this intuition not related to these alwyas direct experiences? Methinks it is. It’s this sort of clarity that goes into knowing what you’re doing that we call ‘direct intuition.’ Now, conversely, when we talk about the intangibles that the dictionary also refers to, what exactly are we talking about? Direct intuition or direct experience ? How would this manifest? I tell you this: if you experience a manifestation ‘of the spirit,’ you’re having a direct experience not ‘of spirit,’ but rather, of the language that you use when you think ‘spirit.’

Now let me also ask you this: is your experience of what you conjure into language ‘of the outside,’ or ‘of the inside?’ How? Convince me that such a thing exists, that is, things like ‘inside’ or stuff also known as spirit ‘out there.’ What the hell is all that about? If we have access to ‘spirit’ it’s because we think ‘spirit.’ But since when is what we think reality? Get real here... So, the difference between ‘direct experience’ and ‘spiritual experience’ is one of language and the degree to which we live and see phenomena through language; language that describes what we experience.

Lastly, now I ask you this: since when is language the thing itself? The real? Let’s get real again, amen, and if we are to make an effort, then let that effort be about being clear, or standing clear of all the gross bullshit out there. There’s no ‘inside,’ ‘inner,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘shadow,’ ‘mystery’ or ‘the unconscious.’ The unconscious is as inaccessible as the real, that’s why it’s called the unconscious. If you think that you can ‘make the unconscious conscious,’ to go with this popular Jungian illusion right now, what you actually do is place more layers of fiction on top of what your regular linguistic fiction is already all about. You think you can make your inner, spiritual, shadow, unconscious life conscious? Good luck with that. The only thing you can have access to is how you name your shit on the surface of life. Know it for what it is, not for what it isn’t, and you’ll be a sage. There’s no ‘spiritual’ dimension to our linguistic strategies and tactics, manipulations and enchantments. It’s just pretty words that we use to comfort or to kill with. And that’s that.

Now for the purpose of this essay, I want to state that when I go like this, Zen, or by whatever other concept, I don’t do it for the purpose of merely being a contrarian. I do it for the purpose of highlighting the difference between being clear and being wishful about a state of nature, a state of things, or a state of human character. Being spiritual is being both wishful and wilful, where wilful designates a state of capriciousness and stubbornness about deciding that things are ‘like this’ in spite of contrary evidence.

To give an example that I also offered in my talk, the corona virus is a virus. It’s not a ‘message from the universe,’ ‘a lesson,’ ‘an opportunity to grow,’ ‘an initiation,’ ‘an alchemical process,’ ‘shedding the old self so that a new self can emerge,’ ‘the Armageddon,’ ‘the end of the world,’ or ‘the end of capitalism.’ It’s a virus. All the other intangibles related to our numerous beliefs about what the pandemic crisis is all about are anchored in fictions, wishful and wilful thinking. Now, obviously, it’s not good business to say that a pandemic is devoid of meaning, financial or spiritual business alike, but when it comes to clarity, the only statement that we can provide in actuality is to simply say it like it is, the corona virus is a virus, nothing more and nothing less.

Now extrapolate from this and apply this clear thinking to the practice of fortunetelling, a practice that’s actually anchored in calculating and triangulating angles based on context, image text, and story text. When I read fortunes I engage with analytical, deductive reasoning. I permute with variables of risk and probability. Game theory 101. In this approach to divination, there is no space for the belief that reading cards is a spiritual practice, or that there’s anything spiritual about the cards themselves. The cards do not possess arcane secrets, anymore than I possess a a spiritual dimension. Thinking of metaphysics is no more a spiritual practice than the practice of eating cornflakes for breakfast.

Unless, it’s cosmic...

Here’s an example: woman meets man. ‘Cosmic connection,’ she tells me. ‘But how long will it last?’ she want to know. I understand two things from this question before I let any cards hit the table: 1) If it’s cosmic, ‘what if you can’t handle it?’ so it’s fair to be anxious about recognizing your human limitations in the face of the big thing. 2) If ‘it feels spiritual,’ then why worry at all? Isn’t belief in the cosmic order of things enough? My assumption here is that the woman can’t trust her own words about the relationship – ‘it's a cosmic connection’ – because if she did, she would not come to see me. This is the point when I want to laugh at the uselessness of the belief in the cosmic relation, and yet, regardless of my preliminary analysis of the basic human concern here, I still let three cards fall on the table.

The Sun, Ace of Swords, the Moon.

In response to the woman’s question: ‘but how long will it last?’ I said the following: ‘the cosmic connection will last half a day.’ ‘Heh?’ the woman exclaimed, making ‘goo-goo’ eyes. ‘What do you mean by half a day?’ I explained. ‘We go from daylight to the night. That’s 12 hours. In between we got the sword. We’re with the fast and furious here.’ ‘So, it won’t even last a year?’ the woman wanted to know, disclosing a tone of disappointment.’ ‘Not very bloody likely,’ I said, winking at the dripping blood from the big sword, and then leaving it at that. After this image, no one mention the word cosmic anymore.

And so it goes. I call this reading a ‘clear reading.’ If it’s ‘spiritual,’ or based on an ‘intuitive channeling’ of a mean fortuneteller that came before me, yet one also full of compassion, I haven’t clue. What I do have a clue of is precisely what I gave my attention to: the cards, the context, and the caliber of my precise shot.

I say to my students: try to be less spiritual in your readings and more clear on what you actually see is happening. Then take it from there.

♠

Cards: Jean Noblet Marseille Tarot as reconstructed by JC Flornoy, hand-painted as a gift by Edmund Zebrowsky, a student of the Read like the Devil method.

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Tarot Tracings

Lovers, villains, murderers, magicians, spirit conjurors, and ghosts. You’d think this was a popular book of fiction blending tales of love, war, and magic. It isn’t. It’s a book written with an eye for what I call ‘cartographic cartomancy,’ tracing various literary figures.