I don’t come from a long line of gypsy fortune tellers, and I don’t think of myself as psychic (whatever that means to people). My mother was interested in palmistry, astrology and the Tarot, and used to do reading at my school’s summer fete. And that is how I became exposed to this funny set of pictures.
I started out in electronics and computer science, but realised that the mind and brain, in their role of information processing (acting a bit like a computer), would use complex symbolic data structures. Mental illness would represent a “bug”, which could be reprogrammed for better well-being. I figured that hypnosis might be the “programming language” and that dream symbolism, also present in magical symbols and the Tarot, might be the “data”. This was in the late 1980s when I started reading the Tarot.
I discovered that Bandler and Grinder had arrived at something similar in the 1970, and, based on the hypnotic patterns of Milton Ericson, had developed Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). I immersed myself in NLP and began to employ psycho-therapeutic ideas to my work in information systems consultancy and organisational problem solving.
My PhD research took me further into cultural evolutionary psychology – what is the “DNA” of culture, and how does it develop? I began to see the connection between my work and that of Carl Jung with his notion of the collective unconscious and archetypes. I believe a psychological view of the Tarot enables it to be used in a healing mode.