AUTHOR'S NOTE: In a recent post I explored the subject of "using" and "being used" in a socially-manipulative way. Here I'm making good on two "oh-by-the-way" suggestions I made in that essay. One was to create a spread to examine the social priorities of a target individual (or entity) and the other was to bin … Continue reading A “User Profile” Spread and Table: Stalking the Wild Sociopath
Author: parsifalswheeldivination
Social Neutrality: Neither “Using” Nor “Being Used”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've long believed that the prototypical "average person" often harbors a private agenda that exemplifies the "social user" stigma of the title. They may not even be aware of their antisocial inclinations, but those close to them certainly are. As a group, social users aspire to either dominate others and thereby gain a … Continue reading Social Neutrality: Neither “Using” Nor “Being Used”
The Principle of Mentalism: It’s Not That Easy
"The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental"- The First Hermetic Principle (from The Kybalion) AUTHOR'S NOTE: The premise that we can obtain anything we want by "thinking it into existence" is an alluring notion that has been co-opted by the Law of Attraction crowd in what looks suspiciously like auto-hypnosis with its roots in … Continue reading The Principle of Mentalism: It’s Not That Easy
Data-Driven Reality and the “SWAG” Default
AUTHOR'S NOTE: As a teenager in the '60s I read a 1963 science-fiction book by Daniel Galouye titled Simulacron-3 that described a computer-generated city in which the inhabitants "thought" they were conscious beings but were in fact only figments of the programmer's imagination, fictional participants in a market-research simulation (an early take on the ideas … Continue reading Data-Driven Reality and the “SWAG” Default
A Drama of Threes
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Recently I was digging through my old posts looking for a specific piece of information and came across this amusing and instructive bit of whimsy that first appeared in a slightly different form. (I've linked the original post below, but be aware that it gets deep!) The essay involved numerological correspondences between pairs … Continue reading A Drama of Threes
‘Tis O’er the Hills and Far Away: Clairvoyance as a Hedge Against Cold Reading
AUTHOR'S NOTE: First a disclosure. Ever since the day I returned to public tarot reading in 2011, I've been a vocal critic of remote divination in general, and especially of that offered by online practitioners in the form of "psychism-with-props" (cartomantic clairvoyance or precognition). But here I'm approaching it a bit differently, beginning in the … Continue reading ‘Tis O’er the Hills and Far Away: Clairvoyance as a Hedge Against Cold Reading
The Thing About Fences (or “If You Can’t Trust Your Mother, Who Can You Trust?”)
"Before I built a wall I’d ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out"- from Mending Wall by Robert Frost AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've written about Frost's poem in relation to tarot reading in the past, focusing on the idea that "good fences make good neighbors" even though Frost didn't believe it himself. At … Continue reading The Thing About Fences (or “If You Can’t Trust Your Mother, Who Can You Trust?”)
Here’s the Woof, Where’s the Warp?
"Both consciousness and matter exist, but neither arises from the other. They are separate, primitive "substances," like the warp and woof of the fabric of reality,"- from Real Magic by Dean Radin, published in 2018. AUTHOR'S NOTE: Wow! Just wow. I encountered Dean Radin's book just over a month ago in an r/occult sub-reddit thread, … Continue reading Here’s the Woof, Where’s the Warp?
The Major Arcana as “Dining Experience”
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In 2022 I satirized Douglas Adams' already-satirical novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (see the link below), in which a talking cow (aptly named "Dish of the Day") offers up choice cuts of itself to discerning diners, carved from its living flesh "on the hoof" as it were. My own … Continue reading The Major Arcana as “Dining Experience”
“Predisposition” in Tarot Reading
"Now, what if - as magical lore suggests - intention bypasses the ordinary flow of time, manifesting the goal in the future and thereby causing events unfolding in the present to be pulled toward that goal? This (referring to one of his experiments) suggests that some intentional effects may involve processes that - from a … Continue reading “Predisposition” in Tarot Reading
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 