The paper presents education as a process of human development toward becoming our authentic Selves and posits the Tarot hermeneutic as one of the means of holistic, spiritual education. As a system of images and symbols, Tarot encompasses the three I’s represented by intuition, insight and imagination in contrast to the three R’s of traditional formal schooling. If teachers want to foster intuitive abilities in their students, they need to first develop this capacity in themselves using the available cultural practice (...) of Tarot. Through Tarot symbolism we can become aware of the deep meanings of human experiences that may be hiding in the unconscious at the soul level. The informal ‘school of life’ embodied in images unveils the dimension of inner knowledge or gnosis that exceeds the factual knowledge of the external world but reaches toward the Imaginal world due to intuitive mode of perception. (shrink)

This book originated as an action-research project conducted between 1992 and 1994 under the auspices of the California Board of Behavioral Sciences when I was a postgraduate student enrolled in the Masters of Arts degree program in the area of Marriage, Family and Child Counseling and Human Development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Unbeknown to me at the time, my study was to be a type of research analogous to what Jungian scholar Robert Romanyshyn will have called more than (...) a decade later “research with soul in mind” (Romanyshyn, 2007). Yet back then in 1992 I was not only ten years away from the subject matter of my future doctorate in the area of philosophy of education and cultural studies, but also quite undecided on the topic of my Masters thesis that was eventually to be called “Introduction of Tarot readings into clinical psychotherapy: a naturalistic inquiry”. (shrink)