what is self awareness for?

homo sapiens is a pattern-making creature. it is in our genes. making patterns is what got us down out of the trees and (for better or for worse) into a position of dominance over other species. that and opposable thumbs.

but an incidental consequence of having this particular wiring in our brains is something that seems to us like self-awareness. we remember bits and pieces of the past, and we can plan some short distance into the future, and we imagine some kind of continuity between the two, a narrative that provides a sense of "meaning" or at least a story arc. always talking, talking to ourselves, talking ourselves into a "reality."

and we can almost watch ourselves thinking, though the moment of actually standing outside always eludes us. and we begin to think in terms of an individual "something" that is "behind" the noise in our heads. the ghost in the machine, the "self," the spirit. while at the same time we are at least "objectively" aware that it could simply be the play of atoms and molecules and electrical impulses.

we might, if we are alert, observe that how we ourselves experience the external world is in some ways different from, but in some ways similar to, the way others experience it -- that there are story arcs in common --, and we develop vocabularies -- analogies, metaphors, archetypes -- describing how one person or another engages with the "world." greed, lust, avarice, the hero, the trickster, the outsider, and so on.

tarot is for me an expression of one such vocabulary.

and here let me make a disclaimer or two. i have not studied the history of the cards with any seriousness. the meanings that have grown up among the cards for me originate in a very loose reading of rider-waite, but they are idiosyncratic to my own experiences with the cards, which continue to unfold, and informed by perspectives i had acquired long before i found the cards.

also, i am not a believer in any particular alternative to rationality, though i do recognize that rationality is itself a religion. in working with the cards, i have engaged in a willful suspension of disbelief, accepting the possibility that there may be "significance" not only to reversed cards, repeated numbers, "unsupported" courts, etc., but even to each dropped or "accidentally" faced card.

in the course of working through even a three- or four-card spread, let alone an entire celtic cross, you can become immersed in a very introspective frame.