THE WISDOM OF KNOWING YOU DON’T KNOW

Most people come to Tarot with a question.

Sometimes it’s a practical question: What should I do about this job? This relationship? This decision? Sometimes it’s an emotional question: Why am I stuck? Why do I keep repeating this pattern? Sometimes it’s a spiritual question: What is life asking of me right now?

Whatever form it takes, the underlying impulse is the same: a desire to see more clearly than you currently can.

That desire is not naïve. It is human.

But clarity is not the same thing as certainty—and Tarot, at its best, does not offer certainty. It offers orientation. It helps you locate yourself honestly, so your choices can be made with greater wisdom.

This book is not a “fast food” guide to seventy-eight disconnected definitions. I’m not interested in handing you a stack of meanings to memorize. Tarot is a coherent symbolic system—an ecosystem of images, patterns, tensions, and developmental thresholds—and it only really reveals itself when you learn to read it as a whole.

Still, every journey needs a place to begin. And the right place to begin is not with mastery, but with the wisdom of knowing you don’t know.

WHERE ARE YOU?

Before we go any further, take a moment to write down one question about something in your life that feels genuinely unclear—something you would sincerely like to understand better.

Then, see if your question finds an echo in any of these:

• Where am I, really—not just externally, but internally?
• Which direction am I currently traveling?
• What routes are available from here?
• What obstacles or delays are on the road ahead?
• Do I need to reroute? Slow down? Proceed with confidence?

Notice what these questions do. They do not demand a prediction. They do not ask for a verdict. They invite you into discernment.

This is the spirit in which I want you to learn Tarot: not as fortune-telling, not as a loophole around responsibility, but as a way of seeing what is already true—and responding with greater freedom. If you like imagery, you can think of Tarot here as a kind of spiritual GPS: not driving for you, but helping you orient.

The Fool As A Mirror Of You And Me

In asking your questions, you are in good company. The Fool can sympathize.

If you have a deck nearby, pull The Fool and look closely. If you don’t have a deck yet, picture the classic image: a traveler at the edge of a cliff, head lifted toward the sky, a small dog at his heels, a pack on a staff, distant peaks, bright air, a white rose.

Of all seventy-eight Tarot cards, The Fool is unique. Seventy-seven cards belong to a numbered sequence or a courtly rank. But The Fool is numbered zero—a paradoxical beginning.

Zero suggests mystery. Zero suggests openness. Zero suggests that you could be anywhere and nowhere at once: at the beginning of something, or in the middle of something, or at a threshold you didn’t plan to reach.

That is why The Fool is not merely “a card.” The Fool is a condition: the experience of stepping forward without being able to see the whole road.

If that feels familiar, it should.

In this respect, you are also in good philosophical company. Socrates—often treated as the fountainhead of Western philosophy—was famous not for possessing certainty, but for refusing false certainty. His wisdom began with a sober recognition of his limits: I know that I do not know.

This is not despair. It is honesty. It is also the beginning of real learning.

Tarot begins here too—not because we are incapable, but because we are human. We are inside our stories. We are biased toward our own viewpoints. We are skilled at rationalizing what we already want to believe.

So we need a mirror that can show us something we cannot easily see on our own.

A LITTLE ABOUT MY STORY

How Tarot Found Me

Knowing that I don’t know—and that I could use help seeing clearly—has been at the center of my relationship with Tarot. Here is how Tarot found me.

I first encountered Tarot at a New Age bookstore in Austin, Texas. I was young, curious, and hungry in the way a person gets hungry when they can’t quite name what’s missing. Looking back, what I most wanted—though I could not yet articulate it cleanly—was healing.

Part of my route toward healing was intellectual. I became a philosophy major. I wanted to understand what makes a life meaningful, what makes a life good, what makes a self coherent. Eventually I went on to graduate school, earned an advanced degree in philosophy, and taught college philosophy for eight years.

But right before graduate school, I walked into that bookstore and found something that spoke to a different register in me—a register that was not satisfied by arguments alone. There on the shelf, Tarot’s images stood beside my beloved philosophers like a strange, vibrant cousin: not making claims in syllogisms, but speaking in symbols, scenes, and archetypal pressures.

The images mesmerized me. I left with a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and a couple of books on how to read the cards.

That was more than thirty-five years ago. In 2003, I changed careers and became a Unitarian Universalist minister. Tarot did not disappear from my life. It deepened. I continued to use it as a tool for reflection, discernment, and honest self-encounter.

Unitarian Universalism has its own way of relating to sources of wisdom. In my tradition, wisdom is not something you swallow whole. It is something you test. You engage it, interrogate it, see how it behaves over time, see what it brings out in you, and keep what proves true and life-giving.

That is also my stance toward Tarot.

If you walk away from this book unconvinced, skeptical, or indifferent: good. Think for yourself. Find your own way up the mountain.

But if you walk away with greater clarity, deeper self-honesty, and a stronger capacity for wise action: even better.

My hope is simple: that this book can help.

Now—with your question in hand—we begin, not with theory, but with a practice: one grounded question, one card, and a simple way to listen.