I guess the big supernal question is what is tarot?
Perhaps putting tarot into this full-fledged biographical thought experiment may be a way of breaking up far more comfortable lines of biographical association.
In some ways I might actually want to give an occult view of my life which would have very little to do with my family of origin after I’m 20 and a great deal to do with my inner life.
But even my inner life has a bunch of people parading through it! For me, being an extrovert, I find the people I know and the inner experiences I have bleed into one another.
Among the things I would like to see covered is some personal biographical information, realizing this is for a public forum, some specific details should be left out. I will try to model for you what I think is a reasonable degree of specificity for this message board.
It would be nice to know where you were born and grew up.
What your family was like and what were your friendships like childhood?
What was your relationship to older and younger siblings?
Did you have a particular relationship with your mother or father and what was their character like? Were you orphaned?
Also for any of us who had early psychic and childhood spiritual experiences, that might be fun to hear about too!
What kind of student or you? Do you remember the way you understood your education, and the way it was presented to you by your family and the community you were being educated in?
What was your relationship to religion? Was your family religious or was anyone in your family specifically religious? What were your early ideas of religion and how have they evolved through your lifetime?
What were some of the fads and fancies of your childhood? I remember a time when I sought out how to learn judo as a way of dealing with a difficult transition from grade school to junior high school. I also want through a brief bout of coin collecting and stamp collecting.
What was your experience of your intellectual awakening? This varies but usually begins around 11 and may not actually happen until 15, this is when one has an incredible awakening to the inner life of thinking and caring what other people feel this is where all that peer pressure comes on and usually has our first blundering explorations of sexual politics. We become interested in the world and we find the world interesting.
How did you get on in high school? What were your friends like? Were you part of a specific crowd? Or were you a loner? How did you characterize friendship as a child and as an adolescent? How did your friendships change?
Did you have any particular career dreams for your adult life? How did you envisage a Prince charming? Or Princess charming?
Did you go to college and what was the transition like?
When did you start working and what was your working life like?
How did she feel about your supervisors and boss? What were your coworkers like? Did any of them become friends?
What talents have you discovered about yourself at this point in your life when you’re young adult? Where did you discovered these talents and how did you learn to exercise them?
Say something about sure undergraduate experience or your early trial jobs. Did you join the armed services?
What were some of your more significant sexual experiences? Who were some of the more important people that you bonded with in your life? How did those stories go?
How did you stumble into your life career or work and how did it you’ve all been a change over time?
What were some of the more important social and historical issues that were going through during your life? For instance were you subject to the draft? Were you part of the counterculture? Did you take up the persona of an artist or craftsperson for a while? Were you a member of a religious cult? Did you join the Peace Corps or Vista?
When you were growing up did you feel you were poor? Has wealth and money than a port and stimulant in your life? What are the kinds of things you've done mainly for the money?
Did you marry and did you have children? What was that experience like? What was your relationship to religion during your young adult years?
How would you characterize your spouse? How would you describe them to someone else? How has the relationship evolved over time? What do you see its future being?
Have you experienced being divorced, separated, or widowed? Describe the emotional and life story decision ark that you experienced in those changes?
Has catastrophic illness or accident been a aspect of your life? where you a patient or a caretaker or merely a remote bystander?
Have you had to deal with chronic disease and mental illness in your family or in yourself?
How would you characterized its story? Do you ever tell people this story? Or do you feel ashamed and only share with a few trusted people who might be already sympathetic because of their own circumstance?
Did you decide to stay single or did it just sort of happened to you?
Is your sexual orientation a significant part of your life story? How would you characterize it?
Do you feel that you have been a member of a discriminated against group? Have people ostracize you because of your religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, politics, occupation, education, class, attractiveness, weight, hair- length, accents, antecedents, diet, intelligence, or-just-to-be-mean?
To what degree is did your jobs become all-consuming?
Did you develop any strong hobbies and applications that required incredible amount of time? For instance in one part of my life I was very busy doing “church work” which had away eating up my time without myself ever seriously settling to express my authentic personality. In fact in my experience it was a nice way of not dealing with anything.
Describe your educational and career threads. Describes some of the seasons in your life that may be marked by the person you’re married to, the job you are doing, the place you are living, or the educational track you or on.
Yikes what a list! I really don’t expect anybody to write about all this stuff online to a bunch of strangers.
I bet more than one of us was becoming quite uneasy reading all these questions!
To the degree that is the case, it might be fun to try to remember some of the stuff just for yourself.
It also be nice if you come up with questions about the life quest that were not developed in this list and share them with us.
You don’t need to answer these questions. But it is really possible that making them up will cast a light on your own life experience.
Humph! Maybe I should start again?
Saying a little bit about your background and life, what was the context in which you discovered tarot?
When did you decide to become more serious about the study tarot?
What were the social and psychic contexts in which you discovered tarot?
What is it that you are looking for and the deeper study of tarot?
What do you want from this teleconference class?
Is there anything that you particularly would like to have happen in this class?
Okay folks, if you had the pantience to read through this list, maybe you have some questions yourself to ask?
Personally I do plan to provide some sort of biographical tarot statement, but it will be a different thread and there I will invite others to share their tarot story too.