"What the Bleep" is Tarot?: The Voyager:  Practice for Quantum Living by James Wanless, Ph.D.

It all started when my intuition said, "Leave your work." 
My ego-self responded, "Go where? I'm successful as a political science professor.  Why leave?" 
"Just go," said the inner voice, again. 

Intuition will often tell you what before why, and being free and trusting, I quit and left – for something spiritual, for new inspiration, for meditation – to India.  It felt right. This was 1974.

In a circuitous route involving years of seeking, I found the tarot, which for the past 25 years has been my "right livelihood" of path/profession/passion/play/profits. 

In this quantum world, physicists have described the underlying nature of reality as a wave of interconnected oneness.  The lesson is that "everything is everything."  Our work is not just work, but inclusive of everything else.  Quantum life is a hyphenated – slash n'dash, as above/so below way of being. 

The secret of living in accordance with this mind-boggling, revolution in consciousness is intuition – that strange, ambiguous yet decisive feeling where "you know for sure, but not for certain." Intuition is how we pick tarot cards, define and apply them – indeed, a powerful practice for quantum living.

With our changing times, we want to change, and need to change and grow. Yet, in this 21st century world of ours, we have few evolutionary roadmaps of life.  The map that our parents followed is outdated.  Television as a script that tells us how to live?  Most fall into a state of "collective hypnosis," living out a  subconscious story of life that is an amalgam of herd consciousness. 

Take the tarot's intuitive roadmap of life and you will encounter your quantum self (selves, actually) and see your way to the evolved life of wholeness, diversity, and authenticity.

Consider the tarot as a mentor.  Its universal counsel tells you to live quantum, which is to consciously live out all of its 78 cards and all of its symbols within them – to express all the emotions we feel, to use all the physical and mental qualities composing natural genius, to seek wholeness (happy, healthy, holy and wealthy), and to fulfill the primordial human archetypes within.

Like many, I was raised in a family with a restrictive repertoire of emotional honesty and self-expression. What a limited life. Tarot taught me to free up all my/our multiple dimensions.  Wow!  Here was permission to be a radiant Magician, yes I can and yes I am!  To show Fear... oh, to be vulnerable, exposed; and to express Anger, (I am so disgusted and revolted with our Iraq "policy"!!); to cultivate the yin aspects of the Empress, as I decorate the new house and water the begonias with lots of TLC. 

This roadmap to personal diversity is the way to authentic being.  For the first time in in human history, we have the opportunity to be our true self(s) – this is particularly true for baby-boomers with a new "second life" beckoning.  It's time to boom!  Not the golden years, but the go-go years.

To me, authenticity IS the spiritual path, and this means liberation! – to get free of social conditioning and the myth of how we are supposed to live.  Real freedom means living in harmony with our "essence self," our quantum quality of synchronous multiplicity and undeniable wholeness/oneness.

Life is, indeed, a hero's journey to the essential self of quantum being. The cards, (through their inherent archetypal truth, along with the impact of picture symbols, and their meaningful synchronistic appearance), give us insight and inspiration – fuel for the road!

"But how can picking facedown cards be correct?  How silly, how stupid." Physicists agree, however, that a so called "random" selection of cards is not just random chance.  Something pulls us towards choosing the appropriate card.  This synchrony, called "entanglement" in quantum theory, is far too mysterious and magical for physicists to fully understand.

Tarot is an intentional way for valuing the mystery and diving into the unknown as the ultimate creative source and resource. The simple act of picking cards facedown is a spiritual, evolutionary practice.

On the subatomic level, we are nothing but space (and, paradoxically, because we are in physical form, we are "more of nothing"). According to quantum physics, there is, in fact, nobody home to pick the cards. What a great way to transcend the fiction of ego.  I suppose this gives "spaced out" new meaning. 

The elegance of the tarot map is that it constantly changes.  When we pick cards for who we are and where we are going, they are often different from the cards chosen before or after.  And our way of interpreting a card differs from time to time.  Finally, we have a life map that is dynamic and quantum – change-able; reflective of our own changes from moment to moment; and creative, transformative, change-making, itself.

In our quantum reality, there are no objective truths.  Everything we observe and define is dependent on how we see – an inextricable creative relationship exists between viewer and subject.  In fact, we make up what we see.  And we are it!  When I see the golden hand of the Buddha in the Compassion card, I am compassionate.  Seeing the crystallization of light in the Creativity card, I feel inventive, I think anew, I am novel!  Aren't we all?

Because of tarot as my quantum path, I am not the same balding, uptight guy I was 30 years ago ... I am a "sacred actor," the Voyager Man of Wands... a simulcast expression of both particle and wave, Hermit and Lover, of "both/and" thinking.  "I am free to be All of me now, including past-future, here-there, this-that" (my quantum mantra). 

It is so freeing not to be the same person playing the same old role, but to have permission to be a living both/and contradictory, yet "complete" person.  In the quantum tarot world, the worst condition is to be bored and boring – which means you are out of synch, delusional, and rapidly becoming obsolete in this multiworld.

It takes a spiritual warrior to discover all of the real you(s). In this revolution of consciousness, we need allies. Tarot helps you battle against the demons of mediocrity, safety, and conformity.  Have you noticed how the tarot is heroic?  Look at the Archetypes... it's not that you are just intuitive but the Priestess, not that you are traveler, but a Charioteer.

Why don't therapists and more of us use this empowering process of tarot? Probably because tarot has become labeled an entertaining, hocus pocus "fortune telling" game. Should I still be awaiting my "crippling disease," as one tarot reader once told me?  I don't think so. 
The power of suggestion can be crippling or empowering, 

and since we have choice, I call my use of tarot, "fortune creation." It's my spiritual yoga, to pick a card a day, and become it!  Since we dwell in a material environment of physical behavior, it makes quantum "parallel universe"   sense to not only to live the mental insight from the cards, but to actually embody and enact them. 

If generic tarot is so effective, I am often asked, "Why create a new tarot deck?  Why Voyager?"  Because old roadmaps aren't so useful.  Voyager Tarot was conceived as a quantum tarot, and titled synchronistically with the Voyager spacecraft exploring the mysteries of our solar system.  As we abide in a quantum inclusive world (well beyond the medieval symbols of classic tarot), everything but the proverbial kitchen sink is collaged in the Voyager cards.  (I never did like to do the dishes). 

But so what? (my favorite question). The fullness of Voyager is to reveal a symbolic pathway for fulfilling the universe within yourself.  Quantum physics shows that life is indeed a hologram replete with fractals. We are a universe within a universe within a universe.  We are stars and snails.  Check out the backside of the Voyager cards and you will see a magnificent star, actually our DNA; and to the human eye, this genetic mandala is exactly the same as a snail's.

To my perplexity, I have been told by metaphysical bookstore owners, "Wow, all this Voyager stuff is over my head.  How can anyone read these cards?  This is for the advanced." I reply, "It's for the advancing...the journey is the destination." 

Curiosity rules and process is everything... we are verbing and reverbing, not a static noun of a fixed identity and type.  Quantum teaches that we are both particle and wave simultaneously. Voyager takes you on the quantum magic bus, moving your eye from one point (picture) to another, not to just a simple, set image of particle existence, but as a process of continuous wave – moving, feeling, and knowing by a kinesthetic inner movie of cognition.

Unlike the old paradigm of hierarchy and authority, in the 21st century quantum world of relativity, there is no one way of anything. Voyager is full of possibilities and options; not for memorizing guidebooks written by others as projections of their particular/particle truth. 

I have always been very good in life at memorizing facts, steeped in the left brain, knowing the "right" answer and the right way.  In our continuous evolving quantum world, that way is dysfunctional. Amazing!