Transformation Sparks Hope

As you gear up for Black Friday deals, take a moment to truly consider everyone on your list. Whether you’re at a loss or need a little inspiration, our Gift Ideas for Every Sign can give you extra insight for any member of the zodiac you’re shopping for!

After you do, be sure and check out the Tarot.com storefront at CafePress. From Tarot-themed goodies (these are my favorite!) to personalized gifts for every sign of the zodiac, you can cross anyone off your list.

And if your near and dear happen to be fans of our divination experts, they can get their own Rick Levine, Jeff Jawer or Hans Decoz paraphernalia!

Oh, that’s right — if you happen to know a fan of yours truly, there are a few lovely items up for grabs …

Happy shopping!

This Thanksgiving, we invite you to explore how expressing gratitude can not only lead to more abundance in our lives, but in the lives of others, too! After all, we believe that by highlighting the bounty in your life, you can become infinitely richer.

And in addition to our push to “pay it forward” as a community, we’re pulling out all the stops to show you how a few key divination tips can ensure a happy holiday: from making small adjustments to set the ideal atmosphere at home to surrounding yourself with the right people, Tarot.com helps you celebrate the season in the style that’s right for you.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we’d like you to kick off holiday preparations by visiting the Tarot.com community forum to tell us what it is you’re most thankful for. For each unique member “Good Karma” post, we’ll donate $ .50 to Meals on Wheels, an organization devoted to bringing Thanksgiving feasts to those who are housebound. We invite you to take Tarot.com’s 2009 Good Karma Challenge!

Then visit our one-stop shop for season-specific insight! Our articles, readings and reports show you how to use your personal Astrology and Numerology to not only perfect your Thanksgiving celebration, but to reflect — on both the blessings and the obstacles in your life. Arm yourself with knowledge to live the best season possible!

And since our home base becomes such a focus during this time of year, we have a library of Feng Shui articles to show you how rearranging the most basic aspects of your living space can attract love and success – in other words, even more personal wealth!

What are you waiting for? Harvest the Insight this Thanksgiving!

Since Saturn went into Libra and squared Pluto in Capricorn, the combination has produced confrontations that we have all seen coming, both in the political, financial and social world, but also at home, in our personal and work relationships. Can’t you see it, or, even better, feel it?

It is kind of amusing that the primary options for such a configuration are on the one hand focusing and efforting (Saturn) can easily lead to great resistance on a collective level (Pluto), but on the other, it can lead us toward a deeper and more personal expression of our more profound inner thoughts, wishes and magical talents, that is if we are able to go down there and bring those insights back up into consciousness. We can struggle with expressing who we are, but the more philosophical issues are the ones that take over the spotlight and beg for our attention. And that is what is happening to me, for sure. Knowing that compromises are the name of the game in such situations, we learn to accept them, work through them rather than resisting, and find ways to fulfill our destiny.

I went to a dialogue between Thomas Moore and Rick Tarnas, both of whom have influenced many people toward accepting astrology and the more spiritual  and philosophical paths toward realization in our confused modern era. Their conversation was in Cambridge, MA, and it was fascinating for me because they touched upon ideas and issues that are central to my creative work at the moment.

One was about how important the stars are upon us. This sounds strange, and almost axiomatic, but it is a great verity. They talked about ecology and its relationship to ecological ideas and indeed it centrality in such discussions. My to-be-published-in-2010 book Sacred Landscapes makes a primary point that in early prehistory the entire world, earth, nature, trees and mountains, streams and rivers, sky and ocean, were all sacred. The earth mother cultures supported this belief and it wasn’t until the patriarchy began to wrest control from the eternal feminine that the balance shifted toward mind and the masculine dominance of the feminine and also of nature (which are really the same thing). By defining certain temples, churches, mosques and other places of worship as sacred, it meant, behind the scenes, that all of the surrounding world wasn’t sacred. This means that identifying the sacred precinct makes the entire outside world not sacred, which immediately leads to the kind of environmental destruction we have created on our (only) planet Earth.

My new book is really then about how to re-sacralize the world, how to bring back a reverence to the sacred, not only in our ideas and philosophies, but in practice and belief. By rediscovering the primal myths of creation, of generation, of the trials and tribulations of nature in its yearly cycle, we create a new link to the natural world that is really its only hope for our collective future. We must revere nature, its cycles through astrology and being aware of natural calendars, and by accepting and even paying worship to everything that echose this natural dynamic in our midst.

When, in my new book, I confront this issue and attempt to foster these ideas, it is taken by the editors as proslytizing rather than healthy restructuring of our distorted belief systems. I therefore ask that we go outside, touch the ground, feel the earth and renew our compact on Thanksgiving to restore the earth and the feminine that represents it in every way that we can.

Awomen……………

Numerology looks at a personal chart from many different angles and the results are not always well understood. In my readings I always attempt to explain what particular aspect of your personality we are looking at.

Which brings me to Gita’s recent response to my blog: “Sorry Hans, I find these Numerology readings a bit dubious. according to my reading, I have no karmic lessons for this lifetime, I am perfectly balanced. Really? how many karmically balanced people are walking the earth along with me? I’d love to seek some out to compare experiences. This reading flies completely in the face of my Astrology chart, which is loaded with 12th house stuff and it flies in the face of my experiences, which indicate some incredibly strong karmic influences. Please explain what it means to have no karmic lessons in this life and how to reconcile this with an astrological chart and life experiences that indicate anything but.”

This is a question that certainly deserves an answer, so I hope you will bear with me.There are many different areas to your numerology chart of which Karmic Lessons is only one. And while it is possible to have no Karmic Lessons (approximately 6% of us), it is not possible to be “perfectly balanced.” (I know my reading did not say that, but it may have said that this “represented a perfect balance,” two very different things.)

As I mentioned, Karmic Lessons is but one small aspect covering a particular facet of your personality. We also have Karmic Debt numbers, Challenge numbers, cycles that at times conflict causing disharmony, numbers in different locations of the chart that disagree with each other, and several other parts that may not be ideal. Hence the impossibility of ever meeting a “perfectly balanced” human being.

Allow me to use an analogy to explain how these different parts of a chart affect us, as I have found that analogies tend to work very well. Think of your numerology chart as a description of a house instead of an individual. Perhaps you are a classic Victorian, perhaps a ranch house or a townhouse, a castle or a farm, there are many different kinds of houses.

Within that analogy you might say that Karmic Lessons compare to a part of the house that is like a workshop where the person living in that house keeps his or her tools. There are nine kinds of tools. There are carpenter tools, plumbing tools, yard tools, metalworking tools, and so forth. If this particular house has all nine different kinds of tools present in the workspace, the person has the potential to deal with any kind of problem that may occur.

So, having all nine sets of tools creates a kind of “perfect balance” between potential problems and the tools needed to fix them. This is when we say that a person has no Karmic Lessons. If, on the other hand, the number 4 is missing and 4 represents metal working tools, the person would have a very difficult time fixing a problem that requires metalworking tools.

The Numerology chart will in that case explain that you have a “4 Karmic Lesson.” Most of us have between one and three Karmic Lessons, the 5 Karmic Lesson being the least common and the 7 the most common.However, that does not mean the house is perfect by any means. Perhaps you have a Karmic Debt number (13, 14, 16, or 19) somewhere prominently in your chart.

That would be, to continue our analogy, like having a house that is not properly insulated, a faulty state permanently causing discomfort, etc., and not easy to fix no matter how many tools you have as it requires a lot of work, materials, and other obstacles to overcome. Another aspect in your chart pointing to potential disharmony would be your challenges. We all have four challenges more or less unique to us, which we cannot avoid during this life no matter what we do.

Challenges would be like having a house that may not be as well designed for your needs as it could be and, during the life time that you occupy this house you will be asked to make the necessary adjustments to overcome these issues. No doubt there will be Essence cycles and Personal Years cycles that are incompatible during certain periods of your life representing different problems or challenges during different times in your life. There are always numbers in your chart that can potentially cause conflict even if each of those numbers on its own represents positive influences.

As you can see, there are a number of characteristics in your chart indicating the kind of issues we have to deal with during this life, whether they are karmic or not, there is no such thing as a numerology chart free of challenges, weaknesses, obstacles, and shortcomings.The ability to properly read and understand your numerology chart, is always the most difficult part of any attempt to self-reflection.

It is more than worth the effort, but it requires at least as much from you as it does from your numerologist, whether your chart is produced by a computer or you come in for a person to person consultation. Contemplation and an objective, open-minded approach are absolutely necessary. And there are other things to consider. First, metaphysical sciences, whether Numerology or Astrology, I Ching or Tarot, are by definition inexact sciences (same with psychology, psychiatry, etc.) as they are not based on hard and proven facts. We should always keep that in mind.

Second, and more importantly, no matter how much time and expertise is applied, the view will always be limited. To use another analogy, Numerology or Astrology is like looking into a courtyard that is surrounded by a solid brick wall. By peeking through a small hole in that wall, you will see some limited part but by no means will you see the whole picture. You could spend your lifetime looking through a dozen holes (Astrology, Tarot, what have you) and you will still not see the whole picture. And this is exactly as it should be.

These metaphysical sciences are not meant to show you the full and complete picture of who and what you are. For that, you will need to find that elusive front gate and while that gate is known and recognized by many, if not all, scriptures, we tend to focus on the little holes or, if we decide we are going for the big picture we turn around, away from ourselves and start pointing at the sky, a church, a cathedral, a book,  and so forth, as opposed to pointing at our own heart, the one place where even failure represents a greater success than anything else has to offer.

Gita, the fact that you have no Karmic Lessons can be a blessing as it does mean that you have what it takes to overcome many of the problems human beings are faced with during the course of this life, not without effort or even occasional heartache, but with potentially a positive result. I sense from your comment that perhaps you reserve the lion share of your skepticism for Numerology and that you are more comfortable with Astrology.

This is understandable, we all have preferences. I have never been attracted to astrology (I tried, for awhile), while anything with numbers tends to get my attention. Numerology has its own advantages if you take the time to look for them. However, if your goal is to find the deepest and truest meaning of who you are, what you are, and why you are here on this planet, no metaphysical science, or any kind of science or religion for that matter, will be of any help, as the answer to that quest lies right there where the source of that quest also rests; within your own heart.

By the way, if we continue the analogy of a Numerology chart representing a house, think of yourself as having been under the illusion that you are your house while in fact, the house is just your shell and what you really are is the person living in that house. Find the front gate and you will be introduced to the person living in the house and this will be the moment that you finally become one, where mortality meets immortality, where knowledge replaces doubt, where you come home for eternity.

If you want to know why you make the choices that you make, or what your specific talents and weaknesses are, or which of your personality traits are worth improving, and so forth, yes, the metaphysical sciences can be of enormous help, including Numerology, if used properly and as long as its limitations are also understood.