FIRST PART OF FOUR
In this first post of four, we are going to look at the second part of the minor arcana, the cards that are about your inner presence. The four ways you see yourself and present yourself to the outer world. In traditional decks this is the Court Card set. In this deck, it is the 4 Flows of your Inner Perspective, the collective sense of yourself that you connect with and use to make decisions and work through challenges.
GETTING TO KNOW YOU - Getting To Know All About You...
The western tarot system and tarot decks are 78 cards, or in the Thoth deck 79, that are all about you the querent or questioner. Each card is facet or piece of the wholeness of you. While the major arcana is the story of your journey, the paths you are traveling on as you gain experiences, the roles you are seeing yourself or being seen as, as you engage and present your self on your learning experience process. The minor arcana is as we stated in the previous blog post, is the the layers of the lessons, and that makes the court cards or personal reality cards the way you make choices, the book of experiential rules and policy you have so far established in your choice making process.
As you use this deck, you will be learning to see yourself as a powerful being that brilliantly shines unapologetically, when you are being your authentic self. However, all of us have been given, accepted, forcefully made to agree with, or innocently accepted or chose, a variety of filters that limit or recolor the inner light. Tarot decks by their nature, are designed to be like a visual vocabulary that when used with spreads, offer a message through arranged cards. And if both the reader and the questioner are honest and open, the cards will read as a book versus a sentence or paragraph.
The tarot is your personal mirror to see through the carded imagery, what you both don't and do see, and what our are currently accepting, denying, or apathetic about yourself. They are not the choices you are asking for, but instead, the mapping of your energetic current status so that you can navigate your choices from an intuited and informed sense of self. The more you use any tool, the better skilled you become and the better you get to know how the tool helps you get to know yourself as the master of what you are working with and working on; which your Self.
THE 4 FLOWS OF PERCEPTION ARE...
My choice to let go of the monarchy or court based card titles, is to help you see your process and that will help you to ask questions as 'YOU', in the moment, sorting through and applying all your life experience to what is the current concern or situation you are asking the cards. To do this the court cards now become a person's inner process cards. This will task you to understand your role in your choice making, and see the process is based on how you think, self authorize, establish focus and then take your stand for what you believe and act upon. In other words, your destiny is your potential, but your choices set into motion your fate. That also means, once you see how you are making choices and what is impacting the process, you can make different choices and adjust your fate. The personality or personal perspective cards in this deck are now called:
WISDOM (Queens) This is the inner wisdom of you, learned and taught to you
AUTHORITY (Kings or Knights) This is your inner authorization process, self permission
FOCUS (Knights or Princes) Your inner Will that you apply something, someone, etc...
DECLARATION (Page or Princesses) The choice made based on the three above, that you wove to initiate an action, reaction or behavior, your declaration, or choice in action
Let's now dive into why this change of the court cards is a powerful and better representation of where we are heading and takes us deeper into understanding ourselves.
HOW OUR PERSPECTIVE CREATES OUR PRESENCE
In the previous blog we discussed the four suits and the way we layer and build our experiential knowledge and skillsets. The personal trinity of the mind, heart and passion that sets the presence, still applies in the personality set. While the Seed to Summation cards are about the way we are working our thoughts, feelings, and empowerment into transcendence, these sixteen cards are how we are working with each step of the learning process. They cannot be separated from each other and this is why they are an integral part of the minor arcana set, and why the minor arcana is the magical colleague or partner to the major arcana. So let's walk through the four flows and how they work and contribute as a partner to the suits. I have provided the actual deck card in its black and white version and what it might look like if it was colored. Remember, the colors are just an artistic version of what it might look like. What do you see in each card? How would you color the card to create a personalized deck of your own?
OUR PERSONAL REALITY IN PLAY - EXPERIENTIAL WISDOM
The reason the court cards are called personality cards are because they are the seat of where we move from to think, feel, engage and choose to stand, run, stay or hide. Personality is the combination of Person + Reality = Personality or Personal Reality, the owned realness of you and how you present yourself based on your choices. The four cards of this set are as follows: Mindful Wisdom, Heart Centering Wisdom, Passionate Wisdom and Wisdom in Self-Presence.
MINDFUL WISDOM
You have to remember that wisdom is gained from experience of the past to present. You cannot be wise in what you do not know, therefore, you are wise in what you have lived and experienced. This is your inner library or archive of your life up till now. Whether you fully understand your experiences and retained the wholeness of the knowing, somewhere stored in your body archives, are all the patterned awareness of your experiential knowledge. When you are making choices, are you making them from a default perspective, "that's the way we do it, or I have always done it", or are you just reacting and not applying your knowledge to the task of a making a choice?
The card Mindful Wisdom asks you to use your wisdom in a thoughtful and conscious approach. If each card was just titled wisdom, the nudge to understand that conscious choice is being aware of your process and role in the outcome to follow. Being full of mind, and minding your process, will assist you in understanding how Seeding Inspiration to reaching that Cathartic moment of the tenth card. Your inner wisdom will help you walk through the way you are using your thoughts to pattern your future and solutions to resolve and grow and heal.
HEART CENTERED WISDOM
It is our heart center that we move from and the impact of how we feel and discern is embodied into our reality. Passion is about the intensity, but the depth of who we are emotionally is in our heart, because it is the cup we drink and serve from to ourselves and others. This is why the card is titled Heart Centering Wisdom. Just because you have knowledge that you have gained from non-experiential learning - like reading or conversation - does not mean you have the wholeness of that knowledge. You have not fleshed that knowledge out with energy in motions, emotion. An example would be someone who has music theory but hasn't actually played an instrument. Technical knowing is only the mind at work. It is a flat process. This is why prototypes are created, models and drafts of music, art, sculptures and all forms of creative processes in active motion take place. Heart wisdom is no different. It is the partner of the mind and they are the parental or conjugal process of what builds patterns of something that you can pour your passion into later.
The Heart Centering Wisdom card is about making sure your Seeding Compassion & Empathy are not a hollow concept. In order for you to finish a learning cycle of what it means to willfully manage your emotions, you must be centered or return to center to finish, to understand the tenth card on emotional maturity or the Maturation of your emotional flow, the heart's offerings to the world.
PASSION WISDOM
Passion! The fiery center of the drive of our being! Our passion is what some call the lower three chakras, which this deck does not address. But, in truth, we do move, and shift our weight from the hips to the toes.
Passion is data in motion, fired up and either at warp drive or perambulating around the premises. Passion is more than movement if it partners with the mind and heart. Without the mind or heart, passion is unfocused energy that hits a multitude of points and striking one particular point rather intensely. Like lightening. If passion only partners with the mind, we become fiery over thoughts and ideas that hold no compassion or empathy. We would become rigid and controlling. If passion only partners with the heart, we become fiery and out of control emotionally. We become reactive and can cause harm emotionally. When passion does not partner at all, and only flows at random, this causes chaos and potential self harm. This is why Passionate Wisdom is the title of this card, because wisdom that is passionately applied, already is partnering with the mind and heart. It also is the loving manager of the learning cycle from the Seeding Empowerment to the Mastery of one's temperament.
WISDOM IN
SELF-PRESENCE
The wisdom of the mind, heart and passion in one's presence is the stability, a foursome, of the collective wisdom of our self. Everything up to the now, has been layer upon layer of experience through choices made as we gain knowledge.
In this card, Wisdom in Self-Presence, we are stating that all the wisdom up to now, is holographically a part of our inner world, which we use to inform our outer world. Which is why this suit, the suit of Presence, is the fourth suit. This suit of summation. Here the wisdom of our life up to now has allowed us to Seed Transcendence and bring it all to the tenth card, the card of Summation. This is also why the fourth suit in the tarot decks are traditionally the suit the mundane, the body and the outer world. All the we think, feel, and apply ourselves, pours into the manifestation of our outer world, the material and organic reality we experience. This is why the suit of Presence is the powerful reflective mirror of our choices and our experiential knowledge gained, and how we make adjustments through new and corrective experiences. Wisdom is made whole and can give birth to the choice we have patterned, filled with emotion and empowered by passion.
IN CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this post discussed the power and potential of the first four of sixteen cards about how we can consciously apply wisdom in our everyday choices. Conscious choice is a stable partnership of the trinity of self, the mind, heart and passion and then flows into our conscious reality. We call this manifestation. When we live without being fully conscious of our choices, we default to learned behavior. The things imposed through family, friends, cultures, society, and belief systems. Releasing ourselves from these things that bind our wings of flight and higher potential, requires more than just a few changes. Some are deeply imbedded and will physically be felt as we process, purify, and present.
This post is the first of four, and we started with wisdom as our thoughts create the patterns we then build upon. These personality cards are powerful indicators of our inner structures of how we are defining ourselves, or surrendering to being defined. Wisdom needs to be seen as a holographic concept and not something you can easily adjust on a whim. The gift of wisdom, is the gift of inner sight, and that is only as shallow and short-sighted as you choose.
Next post will be on the cards of the Inner Self Authority, and how that informs our inner permission to engage and experience. Email me with any questions. I am happy to respond!