“This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.”
– Wolfgang Pauli

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ll preface my remarks by noting that tarot’s field of operation – the subconscious mind – can itself be a “slippery slope” that tilts away from where our conscious intentions want to go. We have no immediate control over its orientation and can only adapt until we regain our footing. Navigating it can feel like tap-dancing on an icy incline and juggling at the same time.

Those who sit for a tarot reading with the hope that they will receive a meaningful answer to an important question are often served something totally unexpected. Then they moan in frustration “Why didn’t the reading respond to what I asked? It’s talking about something completely unrelated!” One common reason for this is that the cards have tapped into a sensitive matter that has been walled off in the querent’s subconscious and is being studiously ignored. The tarot simply opens the spigot and lets it flow, frequently to the seeker’s profound distress.

In a recent post about decision-making with the tarot, I observed that any binary choice involving whether to take or avoid taking a certain action really offers a third option: to walk away without even considering the need to act and let events work themselves out unmolested. While this may look like an example of choosing not to act, it is more fundamental than that: the very idea of stepping into the middle of the affair is moot, echoing the fatalistic expression “It is what it is,” which implies that it would not be any different even if we were to intervene, so we don’t. Whether or not it’s entirely true, the simplest excuse would be “It’s none of my business.”

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli seemed to be complaining that the colleague’s treatise he was critiquing wasn’t even “on the map,” so the question of whether it was right or wrong was immaterial and therefore not worthy of further thought. With tarot reading, the solution may be “in range” but it is deeply buried and digging it up may cause more anguish than it resolves. It’s tempting to say to the querent “Well, after all, you did ask.” But in reality all they did was inadvertently open the door to an opportunistic revelation that could no longer be suppressed.

In the long run this may turn out to be for the best, but in the heat of the moment it can be extremely inconvenient. The reader is placed in an awkward position by metaphorically “catching the querent with his pants down.” In the interest of effective counseling, we can handle the situation with dignity by taking two steps back and examining the problematic disclosure from all sides, looking for a reason that explains its appearance at that particular juncture in the seeker’s life. We obviously can’t do this alone and will need the sitter’s willing cooperation unless they decide to go on stonewalling the issue.

I have to admit that these “broken plays” (to use a sports analogy) are some of the more intriguing scenarios faced by the conscientious diviner. We don’t want to “paper over” them with empty rhetoric and we certainly don’t want risk accusations of negligence by letting clients off the hook for a pitfall that was of their own making. But we would be remiss to just let them blunder over the edge without identifying some kind of evasive “fancy footwork” even though we can’t guarantee them a soft landing. In the end we may be left with the unpleasant duty of having to say “It is what it is, so just suck it up and try to make the most of it.” But I usually do a little energetic “verbal tap-dancing” of my own before I reach the point of capitulation.