Topics range from tarot divination, Buddhist meditation techniques, Jungian symbols and synchronicity, cognitive behavioral therapy, deep personal sharing, dreamwork, consciousness, and developing intuition.

Many who have taken my classes before know they are usually small, friendly, and intimate. Tarot opens social interaction like no other.  Each week I will present a select topic of interesting psychospiritual and tarot teaching materials from my books, teachings, personal practices, and therapy experiences as a clinical psychologist, that I believe will deeply enhance and develop your own way of discovering and working with the deck of possibility, as I call it, even if you are a “beginner.” 

This series will combine both a succinct body of sophisticated information regarding the structure of the deck and the skills needed for effective readings AND also offers guided instruction by an experienced teacher, as well as ample practice time in class, topical experiments, group discussion, emotional support, and connection. Our tarot approach will be largely intuitive and feelings based, the essence of the “therapeutic approach” to tarot work.

If this looks like something you’d like to join in with please email me asap or call (Text/Cell) 760- 518-2001 of your interest level, or any further questions. Below are both schedules, live of Friday evenings in Solana Beach, CA as well as online via Zoom, the course work will be similar.

ONLINE CLASSES IN TRANSPERSONAL, JUNGIAN, AND SPIRITUALLY-ORIENTED PSYCHOLOGY, INCLUDES MINDFULNESS MEDITATION AND TOOLS OF ACTIVE IMAGINATION LIKE TAROT AND DREAMWORK. Classes are given the last Friday evening of each month over Zoom and sponsored by Moonlight Counseling. No insurance is accepted.

 Taught by Dr. Art Rosengarten, a Jungian psychologist and author of Tarot and Psychology: Spectrums of Possibility, Tarot of the Nine Paths: Advanced Tarot for the Spiritual Traveler, and Tarot of the Future: Raising Spiritual Consciousness. Additionally, Dr. Rosengarten has taught The Tarot Circle in Southern California for over 30 years, and is currently a full-time psychologist at Community Psychiatry, Del Mar.

Classes are highly supportive, interactive, and experiential, but also primarily didactic and educational in nature. They are not meant to be a substitute for psychotherapy if needed. Contact Dr. Rosengarten if you are interested: drartrosengarten@gmail.com

What people have said:

-Dr. Rosengarten is an exceptionally talented, caring, and skillful therapist. I have learned a great deal in this course.  The role play opportunities were great and the didactic material was wonderful. I took this class and found it above and beyond my expectations, as I have already completed a Master’s level group therapy class. The balance between experiential, didactic process was outstanding and extremely engaging. This class will positively affect me professionally through my career. Thank-you.  S. L., Doctoral Candidate at SDUIS, class evaluation.

–“Thoroughly enjoyed the class. Art is very knowledgeable and skilled at a deep, intuitive level in the Tarot. One can know a subject and regurgitate that subject but Art speaks a language of Tarot. He is able to teach his in-depth understanding and wisdom in a simple and creative fashion.” Maxine Hudson

–Just watched that interview with you on the blog, was really great, very insightful.  I am so thrilled to be working with you.  That last session was a great one… I really appreciate your approach to Psychology, you are a credit to your field. Look forward to seeing you more frequently in the future.  Have a great weekend. Jeffrey W.

Relationships

THE TEMPLATE:
ON THE WISDOM OF “MEETING HALFWAY”

“Coming to meet halfway is possible only between people who are mutually honest and sincere in their way of life.”

As taught in
The I Ching (or ancient Chinese Book of Changes) based On Hexagram 44
Translated by Carol Anthony and Annotated by

Dr. Art Rosengarten

Key Points:
1. Coming To Meet (Hexagram 44) describes a “correct” relationship as one in which two people come to meet each other halfway. Halfway means that both are open and receptive to each other. Coming to meet halfway also must be mutually voluntary.
2. We must maintain reserve in our relationships until the coming to meet is mutual. Maintaining “reserve” is the correct action (or nonaction) during turbulence and communication breakdown
3. Coming to meet halfway is possible only between people who are mutually honest and sincere in their way of life. It is the great joy of such relationships that they are full of mutual trust and sensitivity
4. “Coming to meet” is best understood as a contract made between two people. If one is indolent in performing his part, or has mental reservations about what he is willing to do, the contract may fail. Although such a person may have entered the contract without any immediate objections, his attitude may contain objections which arise only at the time his obligations are to be performed. Such a person may secretly feel that contracts are not to be taken seriously, or, on seeing how difficult it is to fulfill his part, he may hedge on doing it because of some idea that all contracts are subject to fitting into his concept of what is “reasonable.”
5. It is impossible to come to meet such a person halfway and it is better for us to go on our way alone and to wait until the fundamentals of unity are firmly established before we commit ourselves to other people.
6. When we cater to another person’s ego because it is uncomfortable to go on our way alone, we choose the high road of comfort rather the low road of modesty and loneliness. Withdrawal from the high road is the action often counseled by the I Ching (The Classic Chinese Book of Changes).
7. If a person is treating us presumptuously, and if we remind him (or her) of this, he may correct his habits for a few days, but gradually revert to the same pattern of neglect. This he does from egotistical indolence (apathy), something in his point of view makes him feel he has the right to be indifferent.
8. Likewise, we must withdraw from the indolent person, “cutting our inner strings” of attachment to him, and no longer look at his wrongdoings with our inner eye (preoccupations, self talk, ideations etc.).
9. This enables the person to see what he is doing in the mirror created by the void. By dispersing any alienation we may feel, we also lend strength to his superior self. Momentarily, his ego is overcome. We need to realize that his change is short-lived, but it is an essential beginning. The change does not last because it is only founded on his response to feeling the void. It becomes permanent change when he sees clearly that unity with others depends upon his devoting himself to correcting his mistakes. Only then can we abandon a more formal way of relating to him.
10. The sense of loss, loneliness, or poverty of self a person feels on our withdrawing from him is called “punishment”(in the I Ching), but I prefer the term “mindful disengagement.” Mindful disengagement works only if it is applied in the way described—we must consistently and immediately withdraw, neither contending with him nor trying to force progress by leverage. We withdraw accepting his state of mind, letting him go. We must take care not to withdraw with any other attitude than that required to maintain inner serenity, and to keep from “giving up on” him (or her).
11. If on the other hand we withdraw with feelings of alienation, or of self-righteousness, our ego is involved as the punisher. The ego lacks “the power and authority” to punish. The culprits not only do not submit, but “by taking up the problem the punisher arouses poisonous hatred against himself.” One person’s ego may not punish another person’s ego.
12. When a person returns to the path of “responding correctly” (being open and receptive) we likewise go to meet him (or her) halfway, rather than tell him he is doing things correctly. In this way he comes to relating correctly from his own need to relate correctly and we do not force it on him. Our consistence and discipline in feeling out each moment and responding to it does the work.
13. It is unnecessary to watch a person’s behavior to see if he is becoming worse or better; we need only be in tune with ourselves. Our inner voice warns us precisely when to withdraw and when to relate. We need only listen within.
14. It is important to work with a situation only so long as the other person is receptive and open, and to retreat the instant this receptivity wanes. When we understand that this represents a natural circle of influence, we learn to “let go” when the moment of influence passes, and not to press our views. This gives other people the space they need to move away from us and return of their own accord.
15. We must avoid egotistical enthusiasm when we think we are making progress, or discouragement when the dark period ensues. Throughout the cycle we learn to remain detached. Holding steadily to the light within us and within others. The instant we strive to influence, we “push upward blindly.” If we insist on accomplishing the goal at all costs, our inner light is darkened and our will to see things through is damaged.
16. The strength of a person’s ego corresponds to the amount of attention it can attract. On the most simple level this recognition is by eye-to-eye contact; on the more basic inner level we strengthen other people’s egos by watching them with our inner eye. Only when we withdraw both our eye-to-eye contact and our inner gaze do we deprive his ego of its power—“We cannot lead those whom we follow.”
17. Inner withdrawal is an action of perseverance that has its own reward, but only when it is modest perseverance, not an attempt to impress others by getting them to notice our withdrawal. In many situations the problem is resolved, not through any external action that arises spontaneously on our part, but by simply “letting it happen,” through letting go of the problem. Our “action” is to “let go.”   Art Rosengarten

Moonlight Tarot Seminars is launching an exciting seminar series of online classes called Tarot, Imagination, and Consciousness taught by Dr. Rosengarten. For more information go to our new website, MoonlightTarot.com and receive a free e-book (below) that is one of the main texts used in this remarkable 9 class program taught live via Zoom with group participation by Tarot scholar, author, and master teacher, Art Rosengarten

MoonlightTarot.com

INTERACTIVE PROCESS GROUP THERAPY

Saturday mornings in Del Mar at Coastal Psychiatric

Led by Dr. Art Rosengarten, Clinical Psychologist

THEME: Understanding How Your Mind Works:

-Making it work for you in terms of well-being, satisfaction and increased self-esteem and self-awareness.

-Sharing deep personal experience, including relationship challenges, breakthroughs, and new insights

-Building a highly authentic, supportive space for people to share, interact, take risks, connect deeply, feel support, receive peer feedback, and express true feelings without fear of judgment or retaliation. Recovery, relationships, and spirituality discussed. Meditation is included.

The series goes for four months of weekly meetings before a break is taken, and new series begins. Members may continue if they wish, or take a break, and new group members may join at the beginning of the next series.

For more information, contact Coastal Psychiatric in Del Mar: 8585-259-0599 or Dr. Rosengarten directly at (760) 518-2001.

From Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot#Occult_tarot_decks

Tarot of Nine Paths

The Tarot of Nine Paths (TNP), designed by Art Rosengarten, is a deck of possibilites that is a tool for the spiritual traveler. It retains tarot’s essential infrastructure while expanding the Major Arcana from 22 to 27 cards. The additional cards contain contemporary psychological and spiritual themes related to integral wholism that enable users of the deck to learn paths to higher consciousness through games or readings. TNP catalogues timeless teachings of humanitt’s higher purpose, destination, and spiritual complementation, echoing C.G. Jung’s view that tart trumps embody the “archetype of transformation,” that is, those universal symbols possessing the greatest constancy, efficiancy, and potentiality for psychic evolution, and which point from the inferior and towards the superior. New cards use old symbols to convey integral archetypes, for example: The Well for renewal, The Ring for wholeness, Judgement for awakening, and The World for integration.

To be released by Paragon, March, 2018

For more information, contact Dr. Art Rosengarten at

drartrosengarten@gmail.com

ALSO COMING SOON: TAROT OF THE FUTURE: Raising Spiritual Consciousness by Arthur Rosengarten

BY ARTHUR ROSENGARTEN

Essay

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order” wrote the Swiss founder of Analytical Psychology, C.G. Jung.  Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the everyday lives of ordinary people. No matter how skilled we’ve grown in plugging the holes, the illusion of control jumps back like a yapping Schnauzer and bites us in the tightened buttocks of “business as usual.”  The world of conventional reality is a manufactured cosmos of deluded chaos; it scratches its dense skull in search of the only remedy it knows: the pursuit of perfection.

That slow leaking tire, running nylon, or bad-hair day, the ‘B’ you thought was an ‘A’, the surcharge and fine print, ALL conspire to dissolve the joy you’ve envisioned for a flawless day. The state of perfection is outright libel, though no laws protect us from its rampages. The impeccable is “oh so peccable,” the impeachable so easily impeached!

Flawlessness is itself a flawed vision (of perfection).  To the contrary, “flawfulness” is perfection’s secret virtue—rendering the current strange construction of “the perfect” virtually null and void.  The odd is, in effect, the beautiful. The anomaly that generates brilliance in a quartz crystal–that which is most different, most natural, most striking and unique, most “FLAWED” (if by that we mean “least commonplace”)–makes for a thing’s true beauty and character, its atypicality.  And naturally, this is not an indistinct, uniform, degree of “flawlfullness” which might then be “reproduced to perfection.”  (The Pet Rock only works once!); one must never attempt to redo the undone. Certainly this brought the death knell to rock n’ roll in the seventies.

Even the gods and goddesses sprout an occasional blemish, and the real deal is closer to the trashed “Out-Takes” in the film editor’s dustbin than the perfect teeth made from plaster of Paris implants in the Hollywood state of the mind. Sacred mistakes (because nature made them as they are) capture the trouble we’d rather not know we have.  Here we “make” the boat we’d actually be better off “missing.” The aftermath isn’t pretty or inspiring. Culture dies another vital strand each repeat performance for which the great monolith is reflexively imitated.  The perfect game every day. Desperately, though blindly, we recalibrate our slipping ‘predictometers’ hoping to lock-on to the emerging assets of the best case scenarios of our castles-in-the-sand reality.

Dying modernists that we are, we sorely regret the inconvenience, dissolution, the shifting of gears.  IT was our mother, and we remain attached to the predictable outcome like goat cheese on gourmet pizza. When (mis)constructions of the “perfect picture” are not matched in actuality, when life takes on that “almost but not quite” taste, we filter away to masturbatory memories (of perfection) before the dreaded real reality returns. We want the Hollywood moment-–the perfect teeth and triumphant skies. “Jesus, it’s good.”

The cosmos thus appears contained in our small-mindedness.  Briefly life feels unwrinkled and cooperative.  Uncle Gino receives a hopeful second opinion. And a secret order may be plucked out from one’s vortex of disturbance.  Good news. It bears no abeyance whatsoever to the clocks and cashiers of the conventional order. We must respond now as artists, not the usual escape artists. We can now use our natural materials with no mention of perfection.

This strategy goes to the heart of what I fondly call “the problem with trouble.” 
Rebounding too quickly from trouble denies us a rare opportunity— the wisdom of natural chaos. As the commentary to the third line of “Difficulty at the Beginning” (in the Chinese Book of Changes) states:

If a man tries to hunt in a strange forest and has no guide, he loses his way. When he finds himself in difficulties he must not try to steal out of them unthinkingly and without guidance.

The hexagram further tells us:

“Fate cannot be duped; premature effort, without the necessary guidance, ends in failure and disgrace.”

The problem with trouble is that we are a mad, trouble-fixing, people. We fix to fix (and function to function), and typically miss entirely the secret order that an honest barrel of trouble provides us.  The sages called this ‘Fate”:

It is only a matter of time before we meet it.  Fate is not antagonistic or vindictive; it is there to teach us, in an impersonal way, that the goal may not be gained through false means. (Carol K. Anthony)

Fate is not the way out of trouble but, paradoxically, the way into it.  Thankfully, fate-born-of-trouble stymies our misguided pursuit of perfection—and returns us to what matters, ourselves.

(1994)

For more of Dr. Art’s writings, go to Far-seeing Art https://artrosengarten.wordpress.com

QUOTES OF GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950): First Thoughts in the Aftermath of Trump’s Election

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. George Orwell

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. George Orwell

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. George Orwell

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. George Orwell

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. George Orwell

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. George Orwell

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. George Orwell

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. George Orwell

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. George Orwell

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. George Orwell

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. George Orwell

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. George Orwell

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. George Orwell

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already. George Orwell

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. George Orwell

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. George Orwell

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose. George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. George Orwell

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. George Orwell

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. George Orwell

Big Brother is watching you. George Orwell

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him. George Orwell

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. George Orwell

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. George Orwell

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. George Orwell

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. George Orwell

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. George Orwell

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself. George Orwell

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves. George Orwell

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil. George Orwell

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. George Orwell

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. George Orwell

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. George Orwell

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. George Orwell

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return. George Orwell

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. George Orwell

Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is perhaps best known for his dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty Four (published in 1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His non-fiction works are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture.

In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.^[4] Orwell’s work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including cold war, Big Brother, thought police, Room 101, memory hole, newspeak, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.