Descriptions:
Video Description
The fortune teller’s question gets a wonderfully careful answer in this short follow-up. Lyam Christopher does not say tarot cannot look ahead; he says the looking is not quite what it appears to be. The cards act as a window into the psyche, letting the archetypes already moving inside a person rise to the surface so they can be seen. What looks like prophecy is often a glimpse of a seed about to sprout.
He offers a useful distinction between two kinds of cause. Fixating on a card as a button that forces a future result belongs to flat, horizontal causality, while vertical causality works through potentialities that are maturing. A skilled reader notices which karmic seeds are ripening and simply watches them emerge, and that can produce predictions that feel uncanny even though the mechanism was never a crystal ball.
The court cards deepen the picture. They are not simply strangers who will appear; they may be roles the querent is already free to play, or inner figures asking for attention. Used this way, divination restores the ancient sense of magic as a practice of awakening rather than a trick for getting what one wants. It still looks like brilliance, he admits, but what is really happening is far more interesting.
Full Video Transcript
This is just a follow-up very briefly to the last video where the last video was called
divination and damnation and I pretty much put forth the idea in that video that the tarot is
about processing karma that’s coming up and in that video I guess it was the plan from the start
to also address how tarot can be used to predict the future or how maybe it’s even misconstrued
to be used as a tool that can predict the future. So in this video, we can talk about that.
So when we have these various spiritual tools that give us a window into the psyche,
they can be used as sort of tantric tools or magical tools for the practice of achieving
enlightenment and so what we can the way we can look at magic is that it is a system of
enlightenment practices which have been misunderstood over time and then sort of
repackaged as a wishful thinking in terms of magic that’ll get you what you want okay this doesn’t
mean though that magic can’t be used to get you what you want uh tarot can be seen as one of those
examples where it it provides a means of like projection or a means of seeing the various
archetypes that exist in the psyche particularly particularly in the western psyche and uh as you
look at these things if there are elements of those archetypes operating within within you
right now they tend to percolate up to the surface so you can sort of see them and then deal with
them as the cards supposedly speak to, right? And somehow as the tarot was sort of repackaged
by the uninitiated into a tool for magic or for predicting the future to get what you want or
things like that, right? The enlightenment practices were lost. But this doesn’t mean
that the tarot can’t be used to see what’s coming for you. It doesn’t mean it can’t be used to see
into the future i think you if you watch the last video you could already gather that the things
that are coming up for you the things that are coming to the surface are the things that are
sort of in your future because they exist as potentiality now and they are attempting to
come out into the open they’re they’re they are karmic the seeds that are attempting to ripen
and then bear fruit and then turn into your life which is usually um they’re going to turn into
some kind of situation that you have to deal with to process your karma or process your baggage,
things like that, right? And of course, the process of becoming enlightened supposedly is you
face these things and you let them go. It’s not like they’re going to go away necessarily,
but then you realize that you stop identifying as characters within these dramas as they come up.
And then you eventually set yourself free from those dramas as they come up
to the point at which they never bother you again. They can actually sort of dissolve and go away
and then you achieve freedom from all the little dramas and all the little karmic formations.
These are basically triggers from your past that have been planted there. So if you’re ever
triggered by something, an automatic reaction comes up and you tend to perpetuate that trigger
by acting it out. And the likelihood of it being triggered again is then reinforced. And this is
what we call karma in some degrees. Karma is more cosmic than that. But we can look at it
psychologically too and just say these various karmic formations, if you act them out and get
some kind of temporary gratification from them, they will continue to rise up again and continue
to bother you and cause trouble for you. Unless you face them down and make meaning out of them,
resolve them and let them go. And the tarot can help you do this. In fact, that’s kind of what it
does. This is also what happens when you dream at night. And this is why aspects of a dream,
there’s usually an element of discomfort to every dream. There’s something going on that is
conflict-oriented or fear-oriented or desire-oriented or inadequacy-oriented or vulnerability-oriented,
something like that because some kind of past trauma probably from your evolutionary past is
surfacing and asking to be noticed resolved and released let go of and the things that are
hovering near the surface that are they’re about to come out into your life but they’re not quite
there yet you can kind of feel them coming up and the tarot can help you see them coming okay so
when you have these karmic seeds that are about to bear fruit in your life you can actually see them
in the imagination first before they materialize in your outer life so what we’re getting at is
a means of seeing what might be in the future okay so when you have a karmic seed that has
not yet manifested in physical reality but that is in the process of sprouting and then eventually
going to come out into the open and show itself in your in the physical world you can see it coming
before it actually matures or bears fruit in the physical world and magically speaking you can
head it off there you can address it make meaning out of it resolve it let it go before it bears
fruit in your physical life okay this is the process of sort of living a charmed life this
is the real uh life of the magician who can uh live a you know a somewhat trouble-free existence
there’s still problems that come up. We can’t see everything. But everything is much easier,
much smoother, much more relaxed, because the magician is in the habit of seeing things before
they manifest and keeping them from becoming a big problem in the material future, let’s say.
There really is no such thing as the future, by the way, and the past. It’s very important to
understand why mystics will say that there’s no such thing as time or that time is an illusion.
This doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to happen in the future. It simply means that the
tendency to make a line out of time, to make a timeline, that’s not real, okay? And if you view
your life in terms of a timeline, you know, birth, school, work, death, right? Something like that.
then the current moment is just a little two-dimensional, let’s say, sliver in that
timeline. It’s moving along and the present moment is just this little tiny compact thing
and the vastness of the past and the vastness of the future is behind you and ahead of you
and all you have is this little tiny confined space of the now. This is not the way to look
at time, okay? Time ultimately doesn’t exist really, but we need to set it free from that
timeline because if you look for that timeline, look around, there is no such thing, okay? And
everything is just happening now and it’s not happening in this little sliver of time on your
timeline. It’s happening everywhere all at once. Bam! Big explosion, right? Upwelling, constantly
upwelling this is time well see time as a timeline does not exist but then we can start to get into
discussions of space time you know space with motion in it this is a more accurate description
of space time than space that simply has stuff going on in it some kind of drama playing itself
out okay that’s that would be more accurate and then uh and and to only regard a timeline
or a timeline of a calendar a timeline of a video recording these are convenient ways of supposedly
measuring time but the timeline does not exist okay and so when you are doing tarot if the
future is involved with the tarot spread the the illusion of the timeline is certainly played with
but there’s much more to a tarot spread than simply the illusion of time as a line okay so
So in the last video, I talked briefly about every tarot card does bring us into some kind
of dualistic scenario, especially when it’s a really cool tarot deck, like the Rider-Waite
tarot deck.
And as you can see here, this is an example of a love relationship or a timid desire relationship,
a romantic relationship with all kinds of meaning potentially there.
Okay.
It’s not necessarily all good.
It’s not all bad.
know just kind of stuff that can come out of that and you can see if there’s something that’s about
to mature karmically for you you might notice it in the card and this this could be your future
okay because it’s it exists right now as potentiality and it’s about to come out
and turn into a storm dramatically possibly right uh unless you um address it
and resolve it on the level of imagination before it reaches the world of action and
turns into physical circumstances. Likewise, another dualistic relationship between, I guess
here it’s like the people on the inside and people on the outside, right? I think the least dualistic
of the cards are the court cards, I would say. But even those are dualistic because they represent
possible people in your life who then have a relationship with you or a relationship with
the querent. The querent is the person who you’re doing the divination for, okay? And so the
relationship then might exist between you and that card. But there’s also, if you see a court card,
there’s very often a relationship between that court card person, let’s say the king of wands
or something like that, and his or her environment. Okay, that’s also a dualistic
relationship because that particular personality has a way of seeing the world. And you can see
that pop up in your terrorist bed, let’s say, and you can then say, what does this personality have
to do with what’s going on right now with me right something like that is this one of the people is
this one of the roles that i can play is this someone who might step into my life and offer
some advice or some antagonism something like that right what’s what’s gonna pop up for me next
so remember yeah the reading the future is kind of there because the things that are surfacing
on the level of imagination have the potential to come out into the physical world so they might be
in the future unless you can head them off there are other things you can do you might see good
things in the future and you can decide whether you want to sort of act as a gardener and provide
the best conditions possible for those karmic seeds to ripen and turn into that wonderful
scenario okay or you can find a way to discourage those conditions from happening if you don’t like
them or it’d be better to make peace with them and to resolve them of course not to try to push them
them away with banishings and things like that.
And so what we’re getting at here is when people tend to do a terrorist
red, like usually that card, you see that cross there, the card that’s
on the right is in the future.
Let’s say, and the card that’s on the left is in the past.
Uh, that looks like a fairly good spread there.
At least the past seems pretty horrible.
And the future seems at least a lot of initiative there in the future
for the immediate future there.
And but more interesting, really, because the the right card and the left card there,
they represent the illusion of the timeline. Okay. And so and the parent himself or you yourself,
if you’re doing a divination for yourself, you are in the very center of that cross as the ego
in the center of his magic circle, right. And so the card on the right represents the immediate
future the card on the left represents the immediate past and then so what’s going on with
these the card above and the card below all right so i found it interesting because i didn’t really
look at the celtic cross tarot spread the way it’s being taught you know all over the internet and
things like that and until today i looked at some of the spreads out there and the interpretations
of the celtic cross are very diverse uh very different even the procedure of laying the cards
down can vary quite a bit. So the way I learned it in the Golden Dawn is it’s funny because the
Golden Dawn didn’t really, my teachers didn’t really say a lot about what each card means.
We kind of just stuck to the more metaphoric figurative words used for each card so that you
can so your mind can then experience whatever needs to come up behind that particular saying
okay i’ll get to that in a moment so uh most people tend to focus on what will be or worried
about the future right um probably more interesting is the card up above in the card below
if we are to interpret the the cross there uh and we are also our scholars of the tree of life
and the Tree of Life diagram, the realm of pure potentiality is up above and the realm of
actuality of the physical world of action is down below. So what might be more interesting then is
the card up above there. And when you lay that down, you say this card crowns him or this card
crowns me if you are the one you’re doing the reading for. And what that means if the card
crowns you, it means this is in the position of Kether, the crown, Kether at the top of the Tree
life which represents pure potentiality this is what wants to emerge it’s in it’s in the state of
pure potentiality because of that it’s sort of governing the whole situation and of course this
is the sort of drama that wants to emerge but of course there’s all kinds of tribulations and other
forces going on that might prevent it from emerging in some kind of pure or honest form
and that’s why the tarot has all these other cards going on below supposedly representing the things
that may or may not interfere with the manifestation of what’s on top there and the the
card down below represents then what is already manifested what is already apparent in the physical
environment because that’s not in malkuth or in the realm of action or the physical world
so that’s interesting because then the card to the right supposedly represents the future
but then the card up above represents pure potentiality okay so the card to the right
represents the immediate future but it’s more like the illusion of time what the illusion of
time is telling you might be coming up whereas the card up above is representing what’s trying
to be born or what’s trying to come out into the world as to manifest might not be a good thing
either it might be a difficult thing things exist on the level of pure potentiality in a completely
harmless pure innocent state but of course as they emerge they become wow like they could be
a very dramatic very difficult challenge they could be something beautiful okay and so uh in
these the realm of pure potentiality it’s fine up there but as it matures and becomes uh manifest
you know first manifest in the world of of uh creation and then the world of formation
and then the world of action and when it emerges in the world of formation which is the world of
dreams or imagination you can begin to sense that it wants to emerge okay so that card up top can be
really important okay this is what the difference between horizontal causality and vertical
causality a lot of times you could say that when people get into magic the if they’re not initiates
they always think of causality in terms of i push this and it goes that way and it then it pushes
back and I go this way. This is horizontal causality and that sort of cause and effect
reality. Whereas the initiate tends to view things in a more mystical way that despite all the push
and pull of the cause and effect that goes horizontally, there’s also vertical forces
at work and that these are just things that are attempting to manifest in the midst of the push
and pull world. Okay, so the drama of push and pull of cause and effect and horizontally
actually, is really mainly just a manifestation of the things that are descending from above
from the realm of pure potentiality into actuality. Okay, so that card up above can be really
important. Okay, and so if you’re looking to predict the future, it’s really important
to look at what is trying to manifest. And then you can see it as possibly being interfered
with as it attempts to manifest by all these other process cards.
And there are many versions of the Celtic Cross spread. What I’m pointing out really is that all
these various tarot spreads, they have some kind of philosophical or cosmological magical system
behind them, probably an astrological one. In the Golden Dawn, they were heavily influenced by
the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. And that’s why I’m getting these various interpretations now.
and you can see that um card number three this is what crowns him him being the significator
or the person who’s um you’re doing the reading for there we have what’s before him we have what’s
behind him is number five what’s he uh yeah uh it depends um sometimes five and six were reversed
the idea there was that uh whichever way the card was facing then the future would be uh where the
there’s this there’s a card that’s a significator so when you lay it down one of these spreads you
put down the card that represents the person you’re doing the divination for okay um it usually
would be one of the court cards it represents a person that you think is more you know represents
that that person that you’re doing the divination for and then of course you put down the first card
and it covers that card up and that’s the current situation pretty much and the thing that crosses
him is the thing that might be holding him back from what he wants maybe or very interestingly
might be heading preventing that thing up on number three there from manifesting what is it
that’s going to sort of try to thwart that process of manifestation so card number two can be a
really important one to look at as can card number nine hopes and fears okay and notice how card
number 10 what will come doesn’t really take on a lot of significance until you take card number
three and card number five and card number two into consideration uh because you want to see you
can see the number three wants to be born into the world of drama back and forth push and pull right
and uh you can see that four is what has already been manifested you can see that number four and
number five there let’s say the past and the thing that’s manifested down below and the thing that’s
in the past those can see be seen as kind of getting out of the picture possibly they could
keep happening if you don’t let go of them, right? They could just keep happening as karma.
But then the things that are coming into the picture are more the, in this diagram,
it would be card number three and number six, what’s before him, right? Those are the things
coming into the picture. And then number two is what’s trying to keep them maybe from manifesting,
or it seems to be blocking them, seems to be blocking them. And then ultimately those all
come together with the other cards to form card number 10 okay so the important thing is uh here
that uh we’re not really looking into the future we’re looking into the realm of yatsira or the
world of imagination where uh potential dramas of our life are beginning to merge in an imaginal
sort of dream state where they can be seen and um processed uh and experienced and um there’s a
whole uh you know science to how we do this uh and it basically does involve the science of demon
summoning and evocation and things that i’ve talked about in previous videos but the ability
to make peace with these scenarios before they manifest in the physical world that’s really the
chief operation of the magician. Magician is somebody who basically surfs reality. He is
pretty much able to see karmic forces as they rise up out of the ocean and he’s able to ride
upon them hopefully skillfully by sort of processing them before they become disastrous
external like traumas or or calamity right okay and so the the the level of of prediction of the
future that’s not really real it’s really more uh looking into potentiality the things that are come
that want to come into existence and then the things that are have already manifested and are
probably going to subside now and disappear as more things emerge okay and we can see things
as sinking into the past and emerging from the future but of course past and future don’t truly
exist they just appear to exist okay so i hope that um clarifies um you can see how using tarot
to predict the future then becomes a sort of wishful thinking of the non-initiate the sort
of exoteric interpretation of magical methods, trying to see them as sorcery and things I can do
to literally predict the future and attempt to cause things to have effects on a horizontal
plane of existence. And when you take into account vertical causality or you take into
account pure potentiality that wants to emerge that is much more accurate as far as what’s
happening that doesn’t necessarily truly involve seeing the future but it certainly looks as though
you are predicted the future and some pretty amazing predictions can be can be made using
tarot in this way. Okay, it’s basically knowing how karmic seeds are ripening and about to bear
fruit. Basically, tarot is a way of looking into that and these various other forms of divination
can also help with that. Okay, so I hope I could clarify that. Can tarot be used to predict the
future? Well, yes, but that’s not really what’s happening. But for all intents and purposes,
it certainly seems as though you’re doing that and that makes magic really cool, right?
All right, well then, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher