Re-Learning How to Learn

 

Latest thoughts are about how not-easy it is to teach an old dog new tricks.

The tarot is turning out to be a slog in the same way that poli sci, philosophy, psych, and sociology classes turned out to be back in the day.  Now, this “sloginess” of learning in these field have to do with the nature of the subject.  I want to talk about that sloginess and the ways that I have to deal with such things.

First thing that I want to get out of the way is stating openly that this ain’t science.  Science is ever so much easier to learn than soft sciences.  There are rules of evidence (mostly ignored), specific procedures to march through on the way to what can be considered a “proof” (currently being deprecated), and a vast dataset of previous results that can be used to develop and support new work (this is currently in need of a weeding in order to root out spurious results put forward by MBA’s with visions of riches).

But science, performed in the manner in which it was designed, can lead to a lot of physical truths that can be nailed down to physical phenomenon and reproduced.  Sweet way of doing things if you do things correctly.

But the fields that I wrote of earlier (philosophy et cetera) don’t have the luxury of being able to effectively use the tools of science.  Simply put, what these folks are trying to do cannot be measured and validated, the best that they can do is explain.

"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."

Ernest Rutherford

Now, learning the tarot seems to be more like the social sciences than the hard sciences to this humble correspondent.  There really isn’t a way to perform reproducible, falsifiable experiments with either the social sciences or tarot.  

Even worse, there isn’t a way to take a poll or come up with questionable “data” so that you can fuck around with the numbers using statistics and claim some kind of significance because the equations and methods you used look pretty.  

Unfortunately, tarot seems to me to be all about trying to change the way that you structure your thoughts.  It is probably more akin to what I refer to as “literary” psychology (Freudian or Jungian, et al) than to sciences.  Even more appropriate is its seeming relationship to philosophy.  

Now, at the risk of seeming like the old Gomer that I am, my memory of the approximately fifty years since I started reading is that philosophy has been progressively denigrated during this period of time.  Interest in philosophy has been replaced by worship at the twin altars of science and capitalism.  Discussion of underlying conditions and motivations and initial conditions have been subsumed and covered over by the imperatives of the academy and the market.  So this whole project that I write about on Mondays is an exploration of thought outside money-grubbing and experimentation.  Nothing will be proven and no money will be made.

So, just to be clear to myself and to you gentle readers, I am doing everything in my paltry mental powers to not let the twin evils of scientism and capitalism into whatever it is my “mind” consists of (and whatever constitutes that quoted entity my friends, is yet another subject of considerable and vitriolic discussion and pseudoscientific claptrap) while I try to look at the way that I think and the way that I structure the world around me and my place in it.

So studying the Tarot is just my way of trying to break long-held patterns of organizing my sensory inputs and trying on a new way to structure how I perceive my place in the world.  It might not be perfect, It might even be wrong, but I can’t know unless I go in and work with it myself.

Tangentially, I am thinking about Eliphas Levi’s quote:

“Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!”

― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

The last three words are probably the most important, not because I am keeping a secret from everyone and hoarding the truth like Gollum and “my precious” but because the odds are that I am not nearly as smart as I think I am and I probably don’t have it right anyway.

Look, the reason that science and capital are so popular is that controlled falsifiable experiments and the amount of money in your bank account are tangible.  They are the “precious” and they convey physical power in the world.

Nothing that I will be talking about on Mondays is verifiable or bankable.  I can offer no truth to you.  I am just trying to find my way through a pathless land.