***Personal Growth Becomes Mutual Through Reality-Testing Your Faith

Let's say your question is how to get out of an undesirable situation or how to make a desired situation happen. Asking the question is an act of faith in the universe, whether you address the question to Tarot or anywhere else.

Your answer contains a suggestion to act upon. It says to deal with a person in a certain way, or to take advantage of an employment or schooling opportunity. You act upon that information in faith, testing its reality. When you act upon intuitive advice, one thing leads to another. You find people - people that you help, people that help you. You have an open door now, you can see your way.

At some point as you ask 'the Universe' and follow the part of the advice that resonates with you, and things work out reasonably well, faith turns to certainty. Your reality testing establishes some facts.

Faith, you see, is a cipher, a placeholder, a theory, a crutch you use while the muscle is developing. When it leads you to certainty (to knowing), you will find a situation down the road that again calls for a hypotheses, calls for faith, and you take out that cherished crutch again.

Personal development happens in this cycle, also called spiritual growth and even maturity.

You find out what you really believe when you act upon it. Spiritual life is real life. It's who you really are, who you are even when your body is no longer. And what you really believe is not what you assume you believe, not what you are led to believe you believe, and certainly not what your social circle believes. Those things are programming, and they have their place, they have their function: They are the grease that organizes social life. But these labels and brand name sets of beliefs need to be kept in their place until they are validated or modified by experience.

The real you is under the surface. And the real identity of everyone else is also under their surface. When we can inform ourselves not only of who we really are but who the people we are dealing with really are, three-dimensional reality germinates into effective communication and even effective community.

That is why it is such a good idea to frequently ask "Why does he act that way?" and "How does she, in her own perspective, view me and the relationship we are in?" - because who we can be together involves the sum of who we seem to be plus who we each really are.