Spiritflow

THE WISDOM OF KNOWING YOU DON’T KNOW

Most people come to Tarot with a question.

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

Whatever form it takes, the underlying desire is the same: to see more clearly than you can right now.

That desire is not naïve. It is human.

But clarity is not the same thing as certainty. And Tarot, like everything else human, does not give certainty. But what it does give is still useful:

• It helps you get your bearings.
• It helps you notice what you’re not noticing.
• It helps you name what’s actually happening.
• It helps you see choices you’ve been avoiding, and assumptions you’ve been treating as facts.
• It helps you choose more wisely—then take the next step with more honesty and less panic.

This book is built around one simple conviction: Tarot should not replace your judgment. It should strengthen it.

That’s why I call this book The Tarot Path. Not a stack of meanings to memorize, but a practice you can repeat—so clear seeing becomes wise choice, and wise choice becomes practical follow-through in real life.

WHERE ARE YOU?

Before we go any further, write down one question you’re carrying right now—however it shows up. Practical, emotional, spiritual, messy, even yes/no. Just write it honestly.

In Tarot language, the person who brings the question is called the querent (from “to query,” meaning to ask).

And the person interpreting the cards is the reader.

Sometimes those are two different people. When you read for yourself, they’re both you: you are the querent and the reader—asking and listening at the same time.

If you’re hoping the cards will deliver a verdict, that’s understandable. When we’re uncomfortable, we want quick closure. But Tarot tends to be most helpful one step earlier: not by deciding for you, but by helping you see what’s real—so your decision can actually be yours.

So keep your original question. Don’t change it.

Now add a second question alongside it—one Tarot is especially good at answering: 

What would help me get my bearings here?

If you like imagery, think of Tarot as a kind of spiritual GPS. A GPS does two things: it locates you—where you are right now—and it helps you read the terrain so you can choose your next move with more care. It doesn’t drive for you. It doesn’t decide for you. It helps you orient. (We’ll come back to this metaphor later, and make it more precise.)

Now choose one prompt below as your “bearing question”—the angle you want Tarot to illuminate first. Put a checkmark next to it:

• Where am I, really—not just externally, but internally?
• Which direction am I moving?
• What routes are actually available from here?
• What is slowing me down—or pulling me off course?
• Do I need to reroute, slow down, or proceed with confidence?

WHAT THIS BOOK IS (AND IS NOT)

You can find plenty of Tarot books that offer one of these experiences:

• A list of meanings—seventy-eight entries you memorize and apply
• A promise of certainty—the cards pronounce, and you’re supposed to obey
• A very gentle vibe—“take what resonates”—with little guidance for what to do when everything “resonates”
• A fog of esoteric authority—correspondences piled high, with little help for real-life reading
• A personality-type shortcut—“you’re a High Priestess,” “he’s a Knight of Wands”—that flattens people into labels

Some of those books are helpful for what they are. But they leave many readers with the same problem: They can “know” Tarot—and still not know how to use it without drifting into either guesswork or dependence.

This book is trying to solve that problem.

So let me say plainly what you are about to experience if you keep reading—in six movements: 

1. Orientation over certainty (epistemology)
2. Language, not glossary (system)
3. A 3×7 backbone (structure)
4. Spiritual seriousness without coercion (stance)
5. Integrity of the reading encounter (ethics)
6. Insight into follow-through (praxis)

1. This book treats Tarot as orientation, not certainty.

You will not be encouraged to use Tarot as a verdict machine. And when the reading doesn’t resolve cleanly, you won’t chase certainty with “just one more card.” Instead, you will learn a more grounded way to read: 

• Ask better questions
• Make interpretations you can test against lived reality
• Tolerate uncertainty without filling it with fantasy
• End readings with integrity—without compulsive loops
• Take responsibility after insight

Tarot becomes a way of seeing more clearly—so you can respond with more freedom.

2. This book teaches Tarot as a system, not a glossary.

While there are anchor meanings to learn, I won’t hand them to you as seventy-eight disconnected parts.

Tarot is a coherent symbolic system—an ecosystem of images, patterns, tensions, and thresholds. Its power emerges when you learn how the parts work together:

• Major Arcana: the big developmental pressures and thresholds that shape a life
• Minor Arcana (numbered cards / Pips): the recurring situations where most of life actually happens—played out through the four suits
• Minor Arcana (Court cards): the stance you bring into those situations—who is meeting the moment, and how

When you read Tarot as a whole, the cards stop feeling like standalone notes. They start making music. 

3. This book has a backbone: a 3×7 developmental map of the Major Arcana.

Many books treat the Major Arcana as a vague “journey” through a set of archetypes. This book treats them as a developmental curriculum of personhood—three cycles of seven cards each:

• Self-birth: building a coherent self (I–VII)
• Self-maturation: becoming accountable, steady, and ethically awake (VIII–XIV)
• Self-transcendence: reclaiming repressed energies and entering lived wholeness (XV–XXI)

Here, the “Fool’s Journey” isn’t a slogan. It’s a pathway with distinctive phases and forward momentum—and that structure changes how you read every Major.

4. This book is spiritually serious—but it won’t bully you into belief.

Some Tarot writing leans hard into psychic certainty. Other writing flattens Tarot into nothing but psychology—interesting, but thin.

This book takes a third route:

It does not require you to believe in anything supernatural.
It does not mock spiritual experience.
It invites you to test what is life-giving.
It respects your intelligence.

You are allowed to be skeptical. You are also allowed to be moved.

5. This book cares about the integrity of a reading.

A Tarot reading is not just “symbols on the table.” It’s an encounter between human beings—complete with anxiety, hope, projection, and power.

So you will learn practical skills that most books don’t teach:

• How to create warmth without smothering
• How to hold boundaries without hardening
• How to pace a reading so the nervous system can actually take it in
• How to speak with humility without losing clarity
• How to end without leaving the querent ungrounded or overly reliant on you

In this book, technique is not a bag of tricks. Technique is how responsibility shows up in real time.

6. This book turns insight into follow-through.

Tarot that never results in practical change is just a pretty set of images.

So this book includes spiritual practice activities: small, time-bound, realistic steps that help you build an ongoing relationship with the cards.

Not heroic self-reinvention. Not spiritual theatrics.

The kind of practice that survives Monday.

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 their heels, a pack on a staff, distant peaks, bright air, a white rose.

Of the 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 openness. Zero suggests not-yet. Zero suggests you could be stepping into something new—or arriving at a threshold you didn’t plan.

That is why the Fool is not merely “a card.” The Fool is a human condition: the experience of moving 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: he knew he didn’t 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 own stories. We are biased toward our own viewpoint. 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.

And we need a way of using that mirror that doesn’t turn it into an idol.

That is what the Fool represents in this book: not a “beginner card,” but a stance.

• a willingness to admit what you don’t know
• a refusal to pretend
• an openness to being corrected
• a commitment to small, honest steps rather than dramatic certainty

If you learn Tarot from the Fool’s stance, Tarot becomes less magical in the cheap sense—less “I got an answer”—and more powerful in the real sense:

You become harder to fool, including by yourself.

A LITTLE ABOUT MY STORY

How Tarot Found Me

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

Here is how Tarot found me.

I first encountered Tarot in 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 couldn’t yet say it plainly—was healing.

Part of that search was intellectual. I became a philosophy major, then went on to graduate school, earned a master’s degree, and taught college philosophy for eight years. I was trying to understand what makes a life meaningful, what makes a life good, what makes a self coherent.

But before graduate school, I walked into that bookstore and found something that spoke to a different register—one not satisfied by arguments alone. Tarot’s images weren’t making claims in syllogisms; they were speaking in symbols, archetypal pressures, and scenes: people doing things, choosing, hiding, giving, refusing, grieving, hoping, clinging, releasing. I left with a Rider–Waite–Smith deck and a couple of books.

That was more than thirty-five years ago.

In 2003, I changed careers and became a Unitarian Universalist minister. Tarot didn’t 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 wisdom. In my tradition, wisdom is not something you swallow whole. You test it. You engage it, interrogate it, and watch what it brings out in you over time—keeping 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 WE BEGIN

Now—with your question in hand—we begin not with theory, but with practice.

In the next chapter, you’ll read immediately: one real question, one card, one takeaway. A method for discernment that doesn’t chase final answers or spiral into “just one more pull”—and that still ends with a workable next step.

Tarot does not have to make you more superstitious.
It does not have to make you more dependent.
It can make you more awake.

It starts when you turn the page.  grounded question, one card, and a simple way to listen.