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Lately I've taken to do 3-card readings, they have turned out to be my favorite kind of spread. I usually don't assign any meaning to each position, I just let them tell me a story, or something. Even more, I've taken to make "open" spreads, that is, without any question in mind, just asking for something to ponder. I know a lot of people don't like to make open-ended kind of questions or spreads. I myself have liked it a lot, and it does tell me something interesting.
The reading I'll be talking about is different, for one thing, I asked a question, no, three questions, and assigned each card to each question, so I did a positional reading. The motivation for this reading was a feeling that I've had these days, where a lot of the stuff that I have liked to do no longer interests me, I've been feeling a bit burned out on some stuff, but more than that, I don't feel any of that is relevant anymore, and that I want to move away from all of that, despite some lingering interest that doesn't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Put another way, I still hold on to some stuff because I've been putting some amount of energy into it for the last several years, but I have been feeling I should steer away from it as it's taking so much mental space and I'm not really getting anything from it anymore.
So it is that I made a three-card spread with three questions:
The first card of the three, The Hierophant, should speak for itself. What's old is the structures set in the past, the old, rigid, modes of thinking, those that assign categories to things, that pretend to have all answers to things. Those rigid categories that only constrain reality (or one's model thereof) need to go, so we can get rid of the limitations that they impose.
The second card, Two of Circles, in my deck shows a kind of alchemist, a female figure pouring from a big round flask into another. In the reading it may be interpreted in a few ways. What is relevant right now may be the ability to take some of that old knowledge and apply it in something new. It is transmutation, the transition from the card on the left to that on the right.
If the left side is the Hierophant, at the right is The Fool, I couldn't think of a more diametrically opposite card to the former. If the Hierophant is rigid and impositive, the Fool is open and unassuming. The outpouring of the Two of Circles seems to have emptied the vessel and left it ready to receive whatever comes it's way. The personality, once full of preconceived ideas is now free to let itself get carried with the wind and become part of the new reality. In regards of the actual question for the position, the lesson to be learned may be to go with the Tao, to let reality manifest itself instead of trying to grasp it with systems and books and deliberate attempts to seize it by looking for subjects of study, systems of symbols, and to simply engage directly with reality, like a fool, playful, without judgement.
This is truly a card for the times. It is valid for any time, but moreso for the present time of such great change in the world as we are experiencing now. This is why I decided to write about it publicly, as I think it speaks to all of us living in the present time of transition.
To take but one example of how this applies to the specifics of what's going on in my mind, I'll apply the reading to matters of divination itself, and magic and mysticism. The Hierophant on the left may be traditional religion, the Qabalah, the distictions between different magical/mystical traditions, all the different perspectives of the different traditions that can be compared to the proverbial blind men groping an elephant. Instead, I ought to empty myself and experience the divine in my life without the intermediary of such and such mystic framework. To feel and experience divinity directly, instead of interpreting it through the stuff I read in books about one or another mystic system.
The whole spread reminds me of the basic premise of Shunryu Suziki's book Zen mind, beginner's mind, quote: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." It also reminds me of Bruce Lee's famous words: "Empty your mind." Maybe what the alchemist is pouring from between flask is nothing but water :-)