Researchers are beginning to speak up about a growing body of evidence suggesting humans begin responding to shocking, stressful events before those events actually occur.
Early tests involved showing subjects a series of images, then shocking them with an unexpectedly provocative image. As expected, brain activity and the galvanic skin response (the electrical activity monitored by lie detectors) changed dramatically when the shocking images appeared. What hasn’t been explained yet is how and why this distinctive reaction occurs several seconds before the surprises are delivered.
Other studies document a peculiar human ability to influence random events simply by paying attention to them. Everyday people, chosen at random off the street, can apparently influence the output of a random number generator simply by paying attention to it.
Now, using a worldwide network of random number generators, the Global Awareness project has documented an even stranger effect: the numbers produced by these machines “skew” — producing results that defy random chance — during stressful global events. Princess Diana’s funeral, the American elections, 9/11, and the Asian Tsunami all produced distinctive variations in the string of numbers these computers produce.
What is most intriguing — especially for those of us working with Tarot — is that this distinctive skewing of results begins several hours before a global event takes place. As a result, researchers monitoring the devices can tell when something is about to happen … though, as yet, they cannot tell what that event will be.
This is science, not science-fiction. And it would seem to support a pet theory of mine about the Tarot’s uncanny ability to predict future events: my belief that working with a small, simple, and apparently randomized system (like a set of shuffled cards) is a way of “sampling” the flow of a much larger and more complex system (like the world around us).
The random number generators — capable of producing nothing more than a stream of ones and zeros — were a good place to begin this study. Their simple output makes it easy to spot trends … but cannot provide much commentary on or insight into the nature of the events they predict.
By contrast, the Tarot, with its rich vocabulary of archetypal images and symbols, could be a far more eloquent mirror of upcoming events. If the same forces shaping the production of random numbers also influence the random shuffling of the cards, we might be able, with skilled readers, to know more than “something’s coming” … we might also be able, by interpreting the symbols, to know what that something is.
I’m envisioning an experiment involving hundreds of people — not necessarily “tarot readers” — around the world, doing a simple three-card reading once a day, every day, for 365 days. Participants would make note of the cards they pull and, perhaps, record guesses as to themes and meanings.
If we catalogued the results — and watched for trends that seemed to defy results predicted by random chance — might we anticipate, more specifically, things to come?
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