Tarot Etc. Thursday No. 4

Today I decided to mix it up a little. I’d chosen what cards to put in the sunflower box I showed on here recently, but it’s not a Tarot deck. It’s a deck called Karma Cards and it was created by Monte Farber, who was part of the husband-and-wife team of the Enchanted Tarot that I featured in an earlier post (that deck has since been moved to a different box, by the way, and I put the Muse Tarot in the “Dennis” box =), which seemed appropriate). This edition of Karma Cards was published in 1991, but it was first published in 1988.

The system used in this deck is a little too complicated to explain in full, but the form of the questions to ask, as suggested by the author, are: “What will be the outcome (of any situation)…” “What should I do (about, because of, with, to) (any situation)…” or “What should I keep in mind when I…” and “What kind of situation/mood/atmosphere can I expect to encounter or prepare for…?”

The answers come by drawing one each from three shuffled piles of cards labeled Planets, Signs, and Houses. As the front cover says, this is a deck that uses astrology as a guide. The concepts of both astrology and karma are always intriguing to me, so I can see why I wanted this deck. I’d have guessed I bought the deck sometime in the late 1990s, but there’s a sheet of paper in the book that has several questions I asked that could only have been in 1994.

To know the outcome of a question, you read the words in a line from card to card in the blue panels. To know what action you should take, you read the words in a line from card to card in the red panels. The top row of either reading is your spiritual guidance; the middle row is your mental guidance; and the bottom row is your physical guidance.

Confused? Here’s my example taken from that sheet of paper of one of the questions I asked among many related to a certain situation.

“What does [name of a specific friend] need from me?”
I turned up Mercury in Sagittarius in the 2nd House. I was looking for guidance on what action I should take, so I read the red panels.

My spiritual answer was “Communicate your highest ideals patiently.”
My mental answer was “Analyze the rules of what you want.”
My physical answer was, “Let your mind tell you how to get it out into the world and get what you need.”

Looking at this NOW, the most important message comes from the first two answers. This was not about what I wanted or about my will to take action. This was about what this person needed from me. But at that time… I was so desperate to do what *I* thought was best for this person that I depended on the advice and actions of two well-meaning friends to help me get the outcome I needed (the third message). It worked, in the short term. In the long term, I’d have been better off also heeding the wisdom of those first two answers.

I think this is a good (if painful) example of letting one’s will/ego/desire make a person see the answer she wants to see, as I warned about in a different post. Though one positive outcome of what turned out to be an emotionally harrowing experience is that when faced with a similar choice in any number of situations like this one or even unlike it since then, I tend to consider all THREE answers in a healthier way. So while I didn’t remember this reading at all and was surprised to find the piece of paper in the book, I internalized some good lessons from both the reading and my subsequent actions:

• Don’t pay attention only to the parts that say what you’d hoped to hear.
• What was best for the person and what was best for me turned out to be the same thing: Leave it alone. Be patient.
• Figure out what the “rules” are and don’t automatically resist them. How does their wisdom best protect the highest good of all concerned?