How to select which supernatural to believe?

[emjay]

...perception still goes a long way, depending on how you frame things.

Yes, I think the way you describe it is exactly right. 

Wish fulfillment, and finding excuses for justifying the things we want to believe. I suppose we all do it in a way. 

I don't believe there's a hidden world that decides what card comes up next, or any of those magic methods. 

At best, I think tarot or something like that can prompt us to think about things that otherwise might not occur to us clearly. The cards in the deck are designed to provoke associations of ideas and give our feelings some form that we can then think about. I've heard Freudians say this about dreams -- the dream itself has no meaning, but how you interpret the dream afterward says a lot.

I do think the subconscious mind is full and active, and it's hard to put it into some kind of order so that we can start to deal with it. Having certain symbols to hang on to allows us to clarify our own minds.

The trouble of course is that some sets of symbols are better than others. And propagandists or other people with an agenda know how to manipulate our confusion to their own ends.

Without agreeing that all that stuff comes from the devil, I agree that it might be wise to avoid a lot of it. At best it's organizing what's already in the mind, but (as you know) it's also used to scam people and propagandize, and we get enough of that without going to fortune tellers, too.

Great literature can provide symbols we can hook on to and reveal our unconscious minds to ourselves, in a much richer way than some palm reader can.

I haven't really thought in detail about the symbolism in tarot cards or suchlike, and don't know much about them other than I think what I saw in a Bond film, Live and Let Die, but the two main cards I remember there were 'death' and 'the lovers'... so yeah, they are exactly the sort of vague focal point I had in mind for this sort of thing, something that can be interpreted in a million different ways... ie is it the death of a person, a relationship, a goal... etc? Could be anything but yes, I think you're bringing up interesting points, and perhaps I was too harsh on it.

Looking at for instance Freudian dream analysis, personally that's not something that has ever appealed to me, on account of that vagueness, so when I've had and looked for therapists in the past, Freudians have been at the bottom of my list of possibilities, but that said, what you've said does make me think that maybe I was a bit too harsh on it. Ie maybe a better way of looking at it would be to say that it provides, or can provide, a truth rather than the (as in 'definitive') truth. Ie you could interpret dreams according to Freud's ideas or anyone else's ideas, and though they'd all be acting on the same underlying information, they would all lead to different interpretations, different meanings and meaningfulness to the individual, and different, but still potentially useful, insights.

Basically, how you interpret something is how you frame it, and different ways of framing the same information can result in different insights, so in the case of something like therapy, it makes sense to have something that resonates with the individual, like you say, to help unpack and make sense of the mind. Doesn't really matter if it's the truth or just a useful perspective, because if nothing else, the journey itself will probably lead to insights its own.

Still, I wouldn't have the patience or faith to undergo Freudian therapy, but yeah, I can understand that it still has value, and may resonate better with other types of people... it can be a truth to some, if not the truth. Personally I'm happy enough saying a dream is probably just my brain consolidating the learning and events of the day and leave it at that, so don't even attempt to interpret its content for meaning beyond the obvious, but as I say, I concede that there may be insights to be had by interpreting it, just that that sort of thing does not appeal to me personally.