AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is more fanciful food-for-thought from my reading of parapsychologist Dean Radin’s Supernormal.

Back in my “hippie wannabe” days (when I was still too uptight in my suburban East-Coast mindset to qualify – as well as much too clean if what I saw in rural Vermont communes was sufficient proof), my younger brother and I and a few friends frequently attended rock-music concerts. During one show in Boston, my friend Bill and I, being slightly older and more responsible, paid our way into the venue, but my brother and his friend decided that they would become invisible and just walk in without paying. In that confident frame of mind, they waltzed right past Security under their “cloak of invisibility” and on into the theater without provoking a single outcry.

A few years earlier I had my own (unintentional) brush with invisibility. As an art-and-literature nerd in high school, I was often relegated to nonentity (aka “wallflower”) status when standing on the sidelines during social events, watching my more well-adjusted peers frolic away on the dance floor and then depart for more intimate encounters. I still don’t know why I bothered to go, but I was definitely noticed some time later when I returned from art school in New York City with my long hair and wild clothes, and was rudely kicked out of a basketball game by the Vice-Principal for no other reason than being willfully strange. A similar thing happened when I walked down the street in my small Connecticut city “flying my freak-flag” as they used to say in West Coast parlance. Locals would cross to the other side when they saw me coming. No invisibility there . . .

These days, when I venture out in my “garden-gnome” disguise complete with shaggy beard and soft cap (a legacy of my diminutive German great-grandfather), trying to wrap myself in the social anonymity that is prudent in most public settings, I’m more likely to receive derisive stares from those of my advanced age who never delved into nonconformity themselves (or maybe it’s just the “flaming-heart-and-eye” tattoo on my left calf that triggers them). I usually accord them an equally-dismissive, cryptic smile and just pass on.

Invisibility is one of the supposed “superpowers” that can be attained through the practice of advanced meditation. I can see that it would be just as useful to the occultist as other enhanced abilities such as levitation would be to a burglar, but perhaps less so than the talent of precognition or prescience that is central to my practice of divination. However, the way I handle it with tarot reading is to let my clients make a subliminal connection to the Unseen through their own subconscious and then transfer the input received to the cards via the shuffle. (At least I assume it’s what they’re doing by concentrating on the question since I don’t explicitly instruct them.)

Although Alejandro Jodorowsky insists that it’s impossible for a diviner to avoid subjective bias and unconscious projection during a reading, I keep my personal experiences, opinions and preconceptions out of the spotlight as much as possible. It’s what I call “just reading the cards as they lay” without appending any intuitive connotations until the concluding dialogue with my sitters, whose inspired insights about the matter are often more on-point than mine once they’re prompted. I “give them their head” when it comes to personal commentary, with only an occasional prod to keep the session moving toward closure. (It sometimes feels like a psychiatric “couch session.”) Ideally, my unobtrusive hand on the wheel will display a light touch that is relatively invisible to seekers as I deconstruct the spread with their help. Despite what they might think, I’m not a magician with tricks up my sleeve, just an experienced occult facilitator who recognizes that they are the stars of their own show.