Chance Favors the Prepared Mind

Tarot cartomancy is like wakeful dreaming—meditation on images that produces a sense of invigorating relaxation. For a moment, as we read the cards, we retreat from the hurly-burly of everyday life. The “autopilot” is switched off for a moment. By the time the cards are shuffled, there’s a feeling of curious and relaxed openness. Any one of seventy-eight cards may now come. If several cards are picked, we can expect an enormous number of possible combinations. This puts into perspective our assessment of our own situation and of the issues that currently preoccupy us.

If, in this spirit of mindful openness, we first simply contemplate and examine the cards we have picked without immediately interpreting them or drawing a conclusion far too quickly, we gain something that is important. We learn to open ourselves. As we read the cards we gain practice in what is typical about mindfulness—the “intentional focusing of attention on the present moment and on current experience.”* Reading the cards prepares us for the unknown and the unexpected, and the opportunities they bring.

Mindfulness—Working Creatively with Chance

Louis Pasteur coined the groundbreaking sentence “Chance favors the prepared mind.”* Since the days of this great scientist, more than a hundred years have passed. In that time, as a consequence of numerous discoveries in the fields of culture and science, chance has been considered to be a significant part of reality, ranging from important branches of physics to improvisation in art and entertainment.

One example of working creatively with chance is serendipity. This refers to “a chance observation of something originally unplanned that turns out to be a new and surprising discovery.”* A famous example of this is Christopher Columbus, who, while he did not find his original destination of India, did find something else, something very remarkable which he had not looked for.

Serendipity refers to the kind of creative processes that enable us to discover something we did not previously look for or even know. It is a productive chance, more than simply a matter of luck, because the precondition for it is preparation, active investigation, and a certain methodology. This,