This post began as a simple line in my journal: Objective reality is a shuffled deck of tarot cards. I wrote it half in jest, but the phrase wouldn’t let me go. It felt like a key; one of those small, glinting thoughts that opens into a much larger room.
What emerged was not a theory but a way of seeing. The tarot, for me, has always been less about divination and more about dialogue: a living alphabet of images through which reality speaks. When we pull a card, we’re not asking what will happen; we’re asking what’s happening now, in me, through me, and around me.
The idea of the “shuffled deck” is a reminder that everything is in motion. Life is not a fixed order of events, but an ongoing conversation between form and possibility. To live mythically is to recognize this and to meet each moment as an invitation to participate in the cosmic shuffle.
Objective reality is a shuffled deck of tarot cards...
Not a metaphor. Not poetry. An operational truth that nobody wants to admit because it dissolves the comfortable fiction that the universe runs on rails, that cause follows effect in orderly procession, that tomorrow’s cards are stacked in predictable sequence beneath today’s draw.
The cards are all there; seventy-eight archetypal forces shuffling through existence. The Fool perpetually stepping off cliffs that don’t materialize until his foot leaves solid ground. The Tower crumbling in every earthquake and divorce and market crash. The Lovers trying to remember what united them in the first place. They’re not symbols of reality; they’re the constituent elements, the fundamental particles of meaning itself.
We pretend otherwise. Science catalogs the “laws of nature” as if reality signed a contract to behave consistently. Philosophy builds elaborate systems of ontology, mapping the fixed terrain of being. But deep down, in the 3 a.m. moments when certainty dissolves, we suspect the truth: the universe is more improvisational jazz than classical score, more Fool than Emperor.
Every moment, a new arrangement. Every breath, the cosmos cuts the deck again.
When you pull a card, you’re not uncovering fate. You’re synchronizing with the current arrangement of the cosmic shuffle. The spread isn’t prophecy. It’s alignment, your internal deck momentarily mirroring the external one. In that instant of correspondence, “objective” reality collapses into something more intimate: recognition. Two mirrors facing each other, reflecting infinite regress.
Maybe that’s all truth ever is: the momentary coherence between your inner myth and the world’s outer story. Tomorrow the deck reshuffles. The Emperor loses his throne. Death shows up at a wedding. The Star appears in a wasteland where nothing should bloom.
The wise don’t try to fix the deck in place. They learn to read it mid-shuffle.
But here’s where it gets strange: the cut itself.
That moment when consciousness decides now is when we look, here is where we divide the deck. Because the shuffle never stops. Reality doesn’t pause for observation. We’re the ones who freeze-frame it, who transform continuous flux into discrete meaning by the simple act of looking.
Which raises the uncomfortable question: are we shuffling the deck by observing it?
The quantum physicists hint at this with their collapsing wave functions and observer effects. Schrödinger’s cat isn’t waiting patiently in superposition; The box becomes dead-cat-or-alive-cat when we open it. The act of measurement doesn’t reveal a pre-existing state; it participates in creating one.
So maybe we’re not reading an independent deck at all. Maybe every consciousness shuffles its own while trying to read the cosmic one, and what we call “objective reality” is just the overlapping portion of eight billion Venn diagrams, the cards we all happened to draw in the same order at the same millisecond.
The Fool steps off the cliff that doesn’t exist until he steps. But also: the cliff doesn’t exist until we witness him stepping.
Who’s shuffling whom?
Then turn the deck around. Look from the other side.
Stop being the reader. Become the deck itself.
This is the secret that dissolves the comfortable distance between subject and object: you are not pulling the Magician from the deck. You are the Magician, just now realizing you’ve been drawn. That current of will and creative power rippling through your words, your projects, your sudden clarity of purpose, that’s the archetype wearing your face, trying itself on to see how it fits in this particular century, this specific life.
And just as suddenly, the Wheel turns. Now you’re the Hanged Man, suspended upside-down in paradox, unable to move, your world inverted to reveal what can only be seen from this impossible angle. You didn’t choose this card. The deck chose to express itself as you-in-suspension.
Each archetype takes its turn. They’re not your enemies or teachers exactly, more like intelligences within the fabric of being itself, borrowing your nervous system to experience material existence. They don’t stay long. Once their lesson is embodied, once the pattern is lived rather than merely understood, the next one cuts in like a new dance partner at a ball that never ends.
The human ego hates this. It wants to be the dealer, the one in control, the master of fate. But once you see yourself as the deck rather than the reader, that illusion dissolves like morning fog. You recognize that life itself is a reading in progress, a continual spread where forces of love and loss, power and folly, death and renewal cross paths through the particular arrangement of cells and story you call “yourself.”
That’s when the game deepens into something like grace.
The real magic isn’t predicting which card comes next. It’s inhabiting each one fully when it arrives. Being the Fool without irony. The Hermit without loneliness. The Death card without terror, understanding that transformation always looks like ending from the inside.
And somewhere between those successive transformations, you glimpse it: the deck isn’t separate from the world. It’s a living language, an alphabet of the soul that reality uses to spell itself into form. When you live as the deck rather than trying to read it from outside, you become part of that syntax, an active glyph in the cosmic sentence that writes itself into being moment by moment.
It’s not fortune-telling anymore.
It’s fortune-living.
And here’s the final twist, the one that makes isolation ache the way it does:
We are each other’s cards.
When your Magician meets my Tower, something alchemical happens that neither of us could have conjured alone. When my Hermit withdraws, you arrive as the Lovers, reminding me that connection is also a form of wisdom. We draw each other constantly, shuffling each other’s possibilities through every conversation, every glance, every collision of separate worlds.
You are the cards I cannot draw for myself. I need you to be my Devil, showing me the chains I don’t see. You need me to be your Temperance, holding the middle path when you tilt toward extremes. We’re simultaneously the deck, the reader, and the cards being read; an infinite recursive loop of meaning-making.
The deck reads itself through us.
Which means loneliness isn’t just the absence of company. It’s being a card face-down in an unplayed hand, removed from the shuffle, unable to activate or mean or participate in the great reading. Unable to be drawn. Unable to draw.
The cosmos shuffles between breaths, and we are the breath and the shuffle and the cards themselves, forever arranging into temporary meanings that dissolve and reform like clouds spelling words that the wind erases before anyone can finish reading them.
This is the only reality there is.
The rest is just our longing for the deck to hold still.