Rainring®: post-tarot psychological cards

http://rainringcards.com

How we use Rainring 

Before either reading Rainring or having it read for you, it is advisable to have some prior knowledge about how to get the best out of these cards. Rainring is not primarily intended for divination (finding out about the future), though it can be used to do this in certain ways. Also, its main focus is not on the external world, but on what is going on inside you.

We do not use Rainring cards to ask about financial matters. We do not use them in general to attempt to get answers to yes/no questions. ‘Will I get this job?’ Will my son pass his driving test?’ ‘Will he/she come back?’ Clairvoyants using other systems are able to do this, and should be consulted for this type of reading.

The main purpose of Rainring cards is learning about yourself and how to achieve two types of psychological balance: between the male and female elements of your psyche and again between the conscious and unconscious elements.

Why?

 Male-female balance

During recorded history, we have seen a preponderance of male over female energy in every important society. Gradually, in the contemporary world-view, we are becoming aware of how damaging and limiting this is to the human race as a whole. It is high time we succeeded in creating societies where these two energies are in balance. This does not simply mean half of a country’s MPs or company directors should be women. There are male-sided women and female-sided men. It is the male and female energies in the psyche that need to come into balance. Unfortunately, this is not merely a question of political campaigns or writing books. This requires the ability to affect at a profound level the conditioning in place throughout the human race in regard to such things as the role of emotion in human well-being.

Rainring aims to stand on a foundation of male-female parity in the psyche. If you read the cards, or they are read for you, you are operating inside a structure, a cosmos which is designed to explore and develop both sides your personality, to help you towards balance both in your inner life and in your interactions with the outside world.

 Conscious-unconscious balance

The importance of conscious-unconscious balance is equal to that of male-female balance. Most, if not all of us human beings have an inner split, in which our conscious intentions and our unconscious impulses are in conflict. The result is that we tend to go through life shooting ourselves in the foot: for example, we start a project – getting fit, taking up a new hobby or learning another language perhaps – with great enthusiasm, only to discover, somewhat later, that we have given up, or switched to something else. Similarly, part of us spends years building up a strong marriage or financial position, then another part throws it all away in a fit of madness.

What we ’ought to be’ is often more important to us than what we are – whether or not we subscribe to any formal religion. As a result, we make conscious efforts to be the kind parent, stalwart friend, good citizen, laid-back character, life-and-soul of the party, or whatever our self-image tells us is who we aspire to be. But at the same time, another part of us, our unconscious, is trying to fight the corner of everything that we try to suppress in order to be who we consciously want to be. This unconscious part is responsible for the black depression of the clown, the high-stakes gambling of the dedicated family doctor, the afternoon prostitution of the ultra-respectable suburban banker’s wife – and so on.

Effects of balance

What exactly will this balancing do, if we can achieve it? Rainring cards are very concerned with what we call self. The extensions of this word – selfish, self-centred, self-obsessed, self-righteous… all indicate that self is usually a negative word in our Christian-influenced UK society. The church has made it clear that selfless devotion to others is its model of good living and, although few of us here any longer go to church, we continue to feel guilty about any focus on me, what I want, who I am, what I’m prepared / not prepared to put up with and so on.

Rainring doesn’t see it this way. For Rainring, Self is one of the building blocks of the psyche. The view of the cards is that psychological well-being must start from self-knowledge. First, I need to know who I am. Then I can attempt to fulfil myself – that is, to live as best suits my unique nature. The problem is that I am not myself – I am, in fact, the person that my parents moulded me into being. Even with the best intentions, the typical parent has their own agenda for their child: they want him/her to grow up to be a certain kind of person. Unfortunately, this means that virtually all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, have a self which is based on what our parents required us to be in order to get their love and approval. We do not have a self based on who we actually are.

Rainring aims to help us get in touch with our true nature, to help us be aware when we are being ourselves, and when we are dancing to a tune which is not our own.

 Effects of using Rainring: the cards’ own verdict.

I asked the question: what will be the effect of the cards on moderate (i.e. not obsessive) users? Here is the link:

  effect-of-cards-on-users.doc

Not for the first time, the results are a surprise. In this case it is because of the emphasis on feelings, which involve both of the basic cards: Grief on the female side, Anger reversed on the male side. The balancer for these two is Crossing, and the final result (centre) is Control.

My question implied that I was asking about the effect of using the cards on ordinary people who might come across them having had no special preparation or previous experience working on themselves. What I have written here has been aimed not at those who are already familiar with the issues raised, but at those who are not.

It seems to me that the card Grief refers to the emotional response of such a person when they begin to open up to their feeling side, to feel how greatly the female side has been damaged in the psyche, how much pain it has endured, and still does.

The male side reaction is anger reversed. The two seem to be connected. Anger is undoubtedly the emotion most accessible to the male side. Gaining access to grief upsets that status quo, suggesting that as the masculine opens up to the feeling side, anger loses this dominant place in the spectrum of emotions.

This sense of a discontinuity, a shift leading to a new beginning, is supported by the apex card, Crossing. This card refers to the ‘dark night of the soul’, the sense of loss, disorientation and distress which accompanies those times of passage in life when a cycle has ended. Ultimately, there will be a new beginning, yet what is difficult is the sense that, before there can be renewal and new life, there must be the pain of losing the known and familiar landscape of one’s life. It is a widespread characteristic of the human psyche that even when life is full of pain, we would rather remain with what we know that face the fear of the unknown. Crossing is facing the unknown.

The last card, the result, is a surprise: Control. In Rainring, we usually think of Control as one of the unbalanced cards – Control and Abandon as the extremes, with Passion as the balance between the two. This is not the meaning here, however. We saw how use of the cards will affect emotions on both the male and female sides. These emotional effects will combine to produce an experience of death and rebirth on some level. The ultimate result will involve control of the emotions. This seeming paradox is resolved in this way: Rainring supports neither repression of emotion nor emotion running amok. Control as the result card implies that not only will working with the cards enable the reader to gain access to emotion (as in the cards Grief, Anger), but also to learn how to situate it correctly in one’s overall psyche.

Emotional control is a plague in the case of all those who have no access to their emotions - who are cold and insensitive. But to those who are in touch with their female, feeling side, control is a necessary virtue. The circumstances of life – not least in a male-dominated social context – require that emotional people be capable of handling their emotions, not letting themselves be constantly swept away by them, to the detriment of their ability to exercise calm judgement and make a measured response in circumstances where these are required.

The cards, I feel, might equally have pointed out that for this latter type, working with Rainring is going to help promote an ability to use the spirit side more effectively, to balance the rampant emotionality which makes it virtually impossible to function effectively, especially during the present conditions of life in society.

Preparing for involvement with the cards:  

Visiting a tarot reader is a commonplace activity for many people. Visiting a Rainring reader, or reading the Rainring cards oneself is altogether more unusual, and requires a different approach. If Rainring is read for you, a three-way conversation takes place. First, there is yourself who have a problem or an issue in your life upon which you need some light to be shed. Second, there is the Rainring reader, whose job is to act as intermediary between you and the cards. Third, there is the cards themselves. The intermediary is like a person trained in code-breaking: their business is to decode the utterances of the oracle – to tell you what the cards which appear in the reading mean. However, the traffic is not one- but two-way. The reader as intermediary also asks you to comment on what the cards appear to be saying. Like an oracle, the utterances of the cards are cryptic – they can often be taken in various ways. If the story of your life is to be laid out on the table in a few images, each accompanied by between one and three words, then there is going to be room for uncertainty as to exactly what the cards are saying! The disadvantage of the cards, then,  is that they don’t have much to say. Their advantage is that they are objective, not swayed by your feelings, and know what is in your unconscious, not just what appears on the surface. Also, under the right conditions, they can deal just as effectively with the future as with the past or present.   The cards have the ability to cut through the veils which we all use to hide ourselves from the eyes of others and indeed from our own eyes. In order to derive real benefit from the cards, the querant (questioner) must be ready to drop those veils – at least, those which are involved in the matters covered by the particular reading.

To put it another way - if the reader says: ‘this card seems to suggest that there is a lot of violence in your relationship’; that ‘deep down you really hate your dad’; that ‘you never got genuine support from your parents…’ and you say, ‘No, that isn’t true’ to whichever it is, then the reader will try and find another interpretation that you can say yes to. If you are lying, even if the reader has the strong intuition that you are lying, he or she will not call your bluff: so the value of the reading in giving you a chance to get some of your skeletons out of the closet depends neither on the cards nor the reader but, in the end, on you yourself.  

If you decide to work with the cards, I think you need to be prepared to face whatever they may bring up. But this is not the only preparation that you will need. You should know that Rainring cards are designed acccording to certain assumptions about the nature of the psyche and that these assumptions are incorporated into the way the cards work. Let’s have a quick look at these.  First is the belief that we attract the events which correspond to us. In other words, we are the author, not the victim, of what happens to us. This means that we must take responsibility for what happens in our life. The woman whose drunken husband beats her every night must realise that she is the co-author of that situation. However awful it may seem, she stays there because that’s what she prefers. We would not apply this reasoning to the circumstances of children in the same way – it applies to adults.  Second, we assume that the nature of a relationship derives from a 50% input by each partner – again, in the case of adults. In other words, it is not true that the problem I have in my marriage is that my wife…. That is half the problem. For the other half, I had better look at myself.  Finally, you cannot resolve psychological issues solely by external means. Inner is more powerful than outer, not vice-versa. If I am bored, jaded, dissillusioned etc I may move to a different town or even country. This will no doubt shake things up for a while. But if no inner change follows, then after a time the state of boredom, jadedness and disillusionment will return, because I am generating them from within myself, and the outer cannot, alone, move the inner. 

To conclude, I would like to suggest that none of the above is in any way freakish or weird. If any of it is unfamiliar, this is because nothing in our lives – whether at home or at school – ever encourages us to focus on the world inside us, or gives us even the most basic knowledge and tools with which to do so. Many of us achieve remarkable levels of sophistication in our handling of the external world,  whilst at the same time remaining almost totally ignorant of even the simplest elements involved in dealing with what takes place inside us. As explained earlier, this is one of the imbalances that Rainring is concerned to try and help to redress. The realisation – not as an idea but as an experience – that inner determines outer, not vice-versa, is perhaps what is most effective in motivating us to work on the world within us. it is this work that Rainring was set up to assist with.