“I’m a monkey, m-m-monkey
I’m a monkey, m-m-monkey
I’m a monkey, m-m-monkey
Monkey, monkey man”
– from Monkey Man by the Rolling Stones

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m indebted to James Ricklef and Lon Milo DuQuette, in Tarot Reading Explained and Tarot Architect respectively, for bringing these concepts to my attention. (Oh, and to Mick Jagger for obvious reasons.) By way of definition, Wikipedia identifies “monkey mind” as “a Buddhist concept that describes a state of restlessness, capriciousness, and lack of control in one’s thoughts.” DuQuette’s “meat brain” is self-explanatory; we all have one.

My position on mystical divination is that any visionary insights we obtain must be grounded in rational language if we plan to impart them to others. If our aim is to keep these intimations to ourself for private reasons such as meditation, that’s fine but if we eventually decide to share them without first framing them in coherent terms we risk mimicking the unintelligible gibberish of the “monkey mind” instead of conveying the reasoned observations of the human intellect. Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, playing a stuffy Shakespearean actor, inanely described his method of elocution as “All the words are there already, we just have to get them in the right order.”

By processing our thoughts, feelings and sensations into meaningful communication, the brain provides the only avenue by which we can interact with our environment in ways that aren’t entirely instinctual, non-verbal and personal (i.e. “primordial”). Attempting to bypass its cerebral gatekeeping by embracing vague psychic or intuitive epiphanies is not going to take us very far as counselors for paying clients since, as envisioned in that other famous Rolling Stones song, “coming in colors” is overkill when black-and-white is all that is required to get the message across.

In my own practice, inspired improvisation will either reinforce or redirect my literal approach but it will never entirely replace it; intuition is just another creative tool I can bring to bear on analysis, and it isn’t where I look first when I already have the core meanings on the tip of my tongue. I find knowledge-based impressions to be more reliable as well as more accessible than prodding my “monkey mind” to cough up something innovative I can use; if it’s truly needed it will appear spontaneously.

I often think of purely intuitive guesswork in a tarot reading as “runaway visualization,” usually fueled by free-association from the images, that can inflame the imagination and spawn curiously florid fantasies. (Hey, mine are at least rooted in cultural, social, literary and historical precedent!) I tend to be distrustful of such flourishes because they are pulled randomly off the top of the diviner’s head (or, as I like to say slyly, retrieved from somewhat lower on the anatomy).

It may give the reader a “warm, fuzzy feeling,” but this subjective viewpoint is just as likely to be a head-scratching conundrum for anyone receiving the purported wisdom. If I feel the urge to go in that direction, I will first defer to the sitter to hear what they have to say about the ongoing session, thus slapping myself in the face before I wander too far off the path. My primary goal is to inform, while entertainment is secondary; there is always time for that during the subsequent dialogue after the querent’s objective has been addressed.