Rainring: post-tarot psychological cards

Web site: www.rainringcards.com 

I’ve decided to revise this in order to be a bit more forthcoming about myself. On the other hand, I have terrible inhibitions about how to present myself - feeling that I can say everything (I did write an [unpublished] autobiography) or nothing, but something in between the two extremes - OMG, that’s hard!

I’m from England, father a rebel from the poor country gentility, married a tailor’s daughter; common denominator of parents: protestant christianity.

Dominant parental influence on my childhood: father. He was a very clever man but completely inhibited emotionally. He successfully educated me into being totally cut off from my feeling side.

At the point where I had to try and open up to my feeling side, this extreme emotional repression meant that I attracted to myself some very violent, abusive feeling-sided individuals, as I guess nothing less was going to open me up. One of these was a girl I lived with for several years, and through that cohabitation  was forced to realise that there is emotional-side excess, just as there is male-side or intellectual excess.

This experience ultimately lead me to try and find a middle road between male-side and female-side extremes. It was this search which eventually produced the Rainring cards, and promoting these is my primary reason for blogging.

What is 94 stranger? In Rainring, there are 9 ‘personal archetypes’ - 9 different basic personal types, of which one is The Stranger. He is described as ‘the eternal spiritual nomad: non-conformist solitary, quester and questioner; the man at the centre; seeing all, identifying with none.’  81 of the the Rainring cards form a 9×9 grid. The position of the Stranger in this grid corresponds to group 9 and set 4 - the two co-ordinates which give him his number. 9 slash 4 is not acceptable for some registrations, so 9/4 The Stranger becomes 94stranger. 

Those situations where you get asked: And what do you do? The answer I feel most comfortable with is: I’m  a student.

 When I say it, my meaning is: I’m a student of life, which is to say that my interest in every situation in which I find myself is: what does this have to teach me?

I used to be bored. I have difficulty even remembering that. Now, I don’t have enough hours in the day, or days left in my life. In the UK it’s fairly amazing to people that in our home we don’t have TV.

This learning is the glue that binds everything else together. I guess what it amounts to is the sense that whatever happens to me, good or bad, pleasurable or painful, is interesting.

The great thing about self-knowledge is that it has no end - or so it seems. I find it always and endlessly fascinating what happens to me. If you believe that you attract the  circumstances, situations which correspond to you, then the world outside you provides an endless opportunity to study yourself. It sounds like the ultimate egoism - everything is about me!

One thing it does, though, is to remove the sense of being the victim. This awful thing is not happening to me because horrible people… This is a reflection which I am drawing to myself so that I can find out where I am at, and learn from that.

See also this post:

http://94stranger.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/art-objects-42-prayer-in-the-desert-an-image-from-my-childhood/