Auto-suggestion: “A psychological technique where an individual consciously or unconsciously influences their own attitudes, behaviors, or physical states through repeated self-instruction or mental affirmations.” (Wikipedia)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I first picked up the tarot in 1972, reading the cards was primarily an expression of esoteric principles applied in a mystical way, and about as far away from fortune-telling as one could get. There was no talk about how intuitive or psychic we were, and I didn’t run into that until I discovered the online tarot community upon returning to professional practice in 2011 after a long hiatus.

My first thought was cautionary. How did exclusively mystical diviners assure that what was being perceived wasn’t merely subjective bias or astral mischief? Because they told themselves so? It sounded suspiciously like navel-gazing to me, pursued with the unshakeable belief that uncommon wisdom was being delivered by a higher consciousness, perhaps via a “spirit guide.” It was often coupled with visual free-association from the imagery that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the established knowledge-base, and book-learning was held in utter contempt by the most advanced (or the most misguided, who can say?) members of the population.

Intuitive conjecture is now the lingua franca of the modern diviner, but for me it is only supplemental notation to a solid grounding in the tradition. It may sound plausible to both the reader and the sitter who receives the prediction (and if it’s “true seeing” it should) but on the other hand it could have little or nothing to do with the future reality of the matter, about which both of them can only speculate at the time of the reading. It can rapidly become too late to correct for error and all that remains is offering apologies to a former client whom we drove away.

In reading about a “blind” experiment conducted by Dr. Dean Radin to assess the different levels of extrasensory perception exhibited by believers and non-believers in the existence of clairvoyance, I was struck by the notion that the believers, who performed significantly better in the tests, were boosting the acuity of their mental cognition through a spontaneous application of auto-suggestion. They were convinced it would work as described, and the controlled environment of the investigation proved that it did.

It’s entirely possible that something similar is occurring in the intuitive tarot reading, but what is lacking is the rigorous oversight under which scientific research is conducted. What we wind up with is typically an anecdotal account based on subjective impressions derived from who-knows-where, but I suspect they emerge mostly from the diviner’s over-stimulated imagination presenting itself as a legitimate source of prescience, abetted by inferences drawn from the pictures on the cards (which after all are only one artist’s view of their symbolic meaning).

Given that the reader is almost certainly tapping into cryptic subliminal intelligence and for all intents and purposes improvising from its unsubstantiated testimony, I wouldn’t place a whole lot of faith in the augury. I would rather make my observations under circumstances that don’t seem so self-referential, by which I mean that there is an external body of precedent in both theory and practice underlying the parameters by which the forecast is being developed. This is often castigated as rote memorization, but at its best it accesses a thoroughly internalized storehouse of prior knowledge that can be brought to the fore without having to tart it up it with exaggerated supposition.

I don’t mind a touch of inspired verbal tap-dancing in the service of a compelling narrative, but I use it with great economy of articulation, often in the way of storytelling tropes like metaphors and analogies that are rooted in the cultural history shared by reader and client. I like to describe what I offer as a “main course” of two-way conversation with a “side” of unique insight from my own lengthy experience and not a lopsided monologue of the take-it-or leave-it variety or its homelier cousin, the (in this case non-scientific) “wild-ass guess.”