Tarot

When bringing a question to the tarot, to address any figuring of a crisis, and responding to a move that hopes to dissolve it, what is expected – but not planned or provided – is a situation in which the cards, the spread will take over the question. Whatever spread we choose it gathers and presents the question in a way that makes it available for consideration without it being solely a concern of the querent, the one asking it. The key aspect of the process is that we practice reading as a re/de/composition and not a representation. As such, this manner of reading approaches both what exists and how everything exists as fundamentally inseparable while unquestionably different.

This manner of reading differs from the traditional ways of approaching the Tarot in many ways. An important one is that, in our practice, we are not interested in prediction; we don’t read seeking truth or certainty. Obviously, Tarot readings are requested in moments of crisis, of doubt and uncertainty. However, this does not mean that the crisis is something that concerns solely the persons coming to a reading, that it is a result of some action or decision they had made in the past, or that it is relevant only in respect to decisions or actions they may take in the present or future.

While the Tarot is a formal tool, and it requests a discursive engagement, it is at the same time the one that seems to more directly yields a sense of deep implicancy. This has less to do with the object and the procedure – the deck and the spreads as well as the process of reading – as it has to do with the initial gesture that brings someone to a Tarot reader to begin with, that sense that the usual ways of going about dealing with a crisis do not quite work. As if relinquishing the privileges of the self-possessed subject, in these moments, the person gives up self-determination, gives in to deep implicancy.

When reading for a question, any question, whether collective or individual we begin by giving in to the question, by trusting it to the Tarot, and let it be expressed in/as the spread. More importantly because each and every reading is collaborative, we also contemplate the question in a rendering, the conditions for which remain unknown to the readers, including the one who asked the question. Because so much remains undetermined, actually because the opening of the spread is a gesture of trust in indetermination, prediction, truth or certainty, has no place in this manner of reading the Tarot. 

Reiki

Reiki is a kind of hands-on energy healing, which was developed by Mikao Usui in Kyoto, in the 1920s, almost exactly 100 years ago. There are at least two competing versions of the history and the spread of Reiki outside Japan, which we will not introduce here as it will take a long time and the whole affair is colonially and racially inflected. What is not disputed is that Reiki is a kind of healing practice, which involves touch and the intention to channel, Reiki, or Universal Chi. Those who know about the practice are aware that Reiki has in common with other similar practices an attention to the body's energy centers, the chakras. 

In our practice, in addition Reiki treatments — in Person and Distance — we also include a technique developed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva, which we call Reiki Reading. It consists of using the distance Reiki procedure in a way that, in addition to performing the healing, also yields the descriptions of whatever is being read guided by the seven major chakras, base, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown.

The reading consists of is the employment of the distance procedure, which allow for the use of a proxy. After that we ask seven questions, one for each of the major chakras: What grounds it (base), what does it create (sacral), how does it express itself/how is it singular (solar plexus), how does it relate to other existents/events (heart), how does it communicate (throat), how does it express the unknowable (third eye), and how does it express the plenum (crown). As I said before, these questions are not meant to yield definite answers. For the most part all they do is to bring more elements to the composition.

How does a Reiki Reading differ from traditional Reiki? Not so much in terms of what happens when we employ the distance procedure, which is that we tune in Reiki and activate it when connecting to whomever we are reading. The difference is that Reiki Reading, which is a distance practice, in addition to treating, that is, to activating that frequency from a distance, also reaches for, because it presumes, how that which is read is implicated with everything else, the events and existents (the constitutions of them at the quantic, organic, historic(temporal) and cosmic (infinite) level . 

Astrology

When we read an Astrological Chart — Natal, Transits, or Progressions, for instance — we read the cosmos, that is, we look from a perspective in regard to which the view of time and space as separate contexts, within or on which things exist and events happens, has no meaning. The whole expanse of the universe, everything composing the cosmos, is spacetime, which is basically all that exists in the way it does. Now that means that all different (temporarily mappable) configurations of existence figured all and at once. It is important to recall that these configurations include the micro ones, quantic, as well as the ones that are easily graspable by knowledge apparatus, that figure existence in mechanical, organic, or cybernetic ways.

As a tool for knowing, Astrology is met with much suspicion. This is because it is approached as a predictive tool. This has several consequences, the most important being the characterization of Astrology as a fallacy precisely because it is a tool for predicting that does not follow the scientific method. That is, while it does include observation (which in a way is a most important part of the astrological interpretation), it does not include the other two crucial steps in scientific investigation, which are experimentation and verification. It is not possible to shift your parameters of an Astrological Reading in order to improve it. Nor is it possible to verify its results, that is, to show that whatever has unfolded was in fact due to the planets’ configuration. The problem is that the scientific basis presumed here is one that links true statements to efficient causality.

The relations of significance in an Astrological Chart, however, are of a different kind. They are not about one thing causing something to happen to another. The relations read in a chart are formal, mathematically presented influences, which capture the infinite ways in which cosmic existents and events and their relations express their singular mode of existing as well as the mode of existing of every and each cosmic existents and events, including those who exist and happened on the planet Earth.

When Saturn and Pluto are conjunct (zero degree of separation) or square (ninety degree of separation), we know that they don’t touch each other. In our practice, we read these forms, these abstract relations, without rendering them another modern construct, without treating them as fixed, as types, the attributes of which will be found, repeated in anything that has its elements and presentation. When reading an Astrological Chart, we attend to how each of these forms refers to (recalls or suggest) different possibilities – as many possibilities as the number of possible combinations of the different correspondences of the planets, houses, and angles involved, including those of the other planets and their houses and angles and relations with which a planet relates. Instead of reading the angles as indicators of efficacy and to read these forms as representations of immutable (eternal) types, we read them as indications of actual, possible, potential, and virtual events, attributes, etc. Each one of them implicated with the other and constitutive of any present circumstances.