Jeff Carreira: So to get started with the interview, I wanted to ask you if you are familiar with a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes.

Julia Eve: Oh, yes. I consumed the whole thing over the course of a weekend, a month or two ago, a little bit after I found it. As soon as I started listening, I listened to the whole thing and I've been listening to some of the episodes they've released since too.

Jeff Carreira: That is wonderful as that podcast inspired this issue on how to unlock the hidden potentials of being human. I've talked to a couple of people so far about this topic and it's interesting what I'm hearing because, if you listen to the telepathy tapes, the evidence is overwhelming for telepathic capacities in autistic children. So one of the questions that remains is how is that possible? Because, according to our scientific conception of the world, that shouldn't be possible, which is why they are having such a hard time getting any official recognition for something that seems to be so obviously true.

I wanted to speak to you about it because I see a lot of parallels in terms of possible worldviews that can help make things like telepathy more plausible and understandable. The certainly unusual capacity of tarot cards seems to give us information beyond what we see. So that's my premise for our interview.

Julia Eve: Oh, I love that. When I listened to the tapes, obviously, I could not help but think of all the many parallels between how I understand the world, how I use the cards, and how I do my practice. It's all very interconnected. And many of the things that the kids and the parents said in the episodes ring so true to my experience, even if we can't properly measure it or prove it in ways that would be accepted. So yes, I'm really happy to talk about that.

Jeff Carreira: And so since you've already been thinking about it, what do you see as the kind of main parallel between what's happening with the autistic children and what you experience as a tarot reader?

Julia Eve: I don't know what's happening with the children from The Tapes, but from how their experiences were described, it seems much more intensified than what I'm experiencing. And I think part of that probably has to do with the fact that I am much more “in this world” compared to these children who often report not being much in their body. With the way it was described in the tapes, their knowing comes from a very experiential place. They're living it, they're breathing it, so they wouldn't question it. That's their reality. But for me, it's a little more faith driven because I'm not living in that space all the time. But I believe in it so much. If I didn't believe, I wouldn't be engaging with the tools that I engage in and I wouldn't have the worldview that I did.

I believe there's something else going on. And when I'm tapping into that field, whether in my day to day, whether in my dreams, whether with the cards, I’m pulling back things that feel outside of the realm of what is considered normal. It's like tapping into that space that you can't quantify. I think that's what’s happening in both cases: with me and the cards, and with the children from the tapes. It’s about going to a different place on some level, but it’s not a place that is anywhere or anything; it's something else. And it was remarkable hearing the Telepathy Tapes because these children are in it all the time.

Jeff Carreira: I'm curious about that space. I think some of the ways that it has been spoken about – and one of the terms I like the most for that space that comes from a French Islamic scholar of a century ago – is the imaginal realm. It's a realm of symbolic wisdom. I just spoke with a professor at Rice University named Jeffrey Kripal; he was explaining to me a philosophy called dual aspect monism. In that particular philosophy, reality is recognized to be an undifferentiated wholeness which defies the possibility of any understanding, because any understanding would have to exist independent and separate from wholeness. So reality starts as an undifferentiated wholeness of potential and possibility. But anything that we are able to experience or understand comes from a dualistic experience of self and other.

And so, paranormal or mystical phenomenon are actually communications from that wholeness itself into this world of experience. In other words, Jeffrey Kripal is saying that these experiences are ways in which this underlying unity is trying to communicate itself to us. And what it's mainly trying to do is get us to question our current worldview and open to something bigger. I love how he put it, and I would love to hear your own thoughts and experiences on the matter.

Julia Eve: Yes, I think that's incredibly relevant. I mean, I think that's what it all boils down to, right?

We have this reality that we come into, and we think we understand it, or at least we're given some frameworks with which to navigate it. But then we have these experiences and think there's something else going on here. These question marks start coming up about the reality that we're living in. And it feels like something is trying to get in. Something is trying to slowly shift you out of what is considered this normal worldview that we're all participating in. And I think that we are given this experience for a reason. But I also think, through my work and my practice, that we're supposed to be in this duality and to live this way, as long as we don’t forget what else there is or can find our way back to unity. Tarot is my channel or my pathway of choice in order to find my way back, but I think that you could use any tool you're interested in. The most important thing is not so much what the tool is, but how it speaks to you and how it inspires you. For some people, that medium is going to be art, writing, or creativity in any shape or form. Some deep interest will get you there as long as you’re open to it.

Jeff Carreira: Beautiful. And I can see from what you've said so far that The Telepathy Tapes fascinated you because you saw that those children were living in that sort of experience of unity, or at least much closer to that experience of unity, probably because they are less entranced by the world of the familiar.

Julia Eve: That's what I took from it as well. I don't claim to know anything for certain, but so much of what they said in those tapes just rang so true on a deep level for myself. I think that's how we come to know truth anyway, by just how it feels in our body when we hear it.

There was an episode in The Telepathy Tapes in which the mother was questioning her child’s abilities and almost suggesting the possibility that he was lying. And the child said something to the effect of not being able to get these kinds of gifts if you lie. And I thought, yes, you have to be transparent, you have to be pure and honest and true to get these gifts. That's part of how it works.

That's part of why it works, and that's also probably part of what keeps us from it. In the podcast, there was that whole idea of who can come to the hill and who cannot come to the hill. And it's not so much about picking and choosing people based on any attribute other than just what they choose to be honest about; that honesty within them. So, in a sense, you yourself choose whether you can receive these gifts or not. No one keeps you out of it. I think we're our own gatekeepers in that sense.

Jeff Carreira: That's fantastic. Now, you and I first connected because you wrote to me after you read my book The Path of Cosmic Consciousness. In that book, I see cosmic consciousness as one way of describing that space that we've been talking about; that was Edward Carpenter's term for it. And I see that space as the closest one can get to the absolute unity, as the unity of the divine is unknowable. So when you are just touching up against that, you have this wide open, almost unified consciousness, but not entirely because there's still some experience that's at least a hair's breadth separate from the unity.

And so, in my other book Higher Self Expression, I had started to get interested in the tarot. I read Pyotr Ouspensky's The Symbolism of the Tarot, and in his introduction, he basically talks about how the tarot requires the development of a certain kind of awareness. And he called it a special cast of mind. And I was very fascinated because for him, he wasn't really a tarot reader per se, but his feeling was that the tarot offered one of the best ways of developing that special cast of mind. I see this as related to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that everything that you experience is symbolic of a deeper underlying reality. And that's how I see the tarot cards.

And so, I would love to know more about your experience of reading tarot. How long have you been reading tarot?

Julia Eve: My journey with tarot has not been very linear. I started, I dropped it, picked it back up and it's really been in the last 10 years that it has exploded for me. I was first drawn to tarot really young. I don't know why, I don't remember where I saw it or what about it fascinated me, but I was 11 when I got my first deck. Honestly it was a deck I had no business reading as it was beyond what I could understand at 11, but I was just so fascinated by it. I tried so hard to understand what the book was saying, to understand the meanings, to try to figure it out. And that experience was really interesting to me and it stuck with me even though I was 11 and did not have much life experience to add to this tool..

I then picked it back up in my teens, put it back down through my whole 20s. And then it wasn't until 2014 that I came back to it after ignoring it for a very long time. I was in a period in my life where things were expanding and shifting for me spiritually and I felt the call back. I've been working very intensely with it since then.

Jeff Carreira: And what is your experience when you do a reading? Do you tend to use the traditional cards?

Julia Eve: I use them now the most. I didn't always. It certainly didn't start that way. My first deck was a deck called The Servants of the Light. Certainly not a deck for 11 year olds nor tarot beginners. I would never recommend it.

Now I work primarily with the Rider Waite Smith tarot and that is because it's come to be extremely meaningful to me. I recognize how deeply intentional every piece of it is and it speaks to me because of that, as well as because of the symbolism and depth with which it was created and presented.

Jeff Carreira: So I have a friend, her name is Judith Marsden, she's also a tarot reader. And I'm continually amazed by the spontaneous way in which she looks at the card and pulls out meaning that feels incredibly relevant. This meaning relates to the card, but obviously it relates to something beyond the card.

And I'm fascinated by this. I'm going to read this passage from Ouspensky, it says: “There are many methods for developing the sense of symbols in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of nature and man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic and one of the most interesting of these methods is the Tarot”. And that's what I want to know. When you are reading cards, it seems like you are entering into what I would call an in-between state where you are allowing that card and the symbolism on it to directly communicate something to you that's beyond what's in the card itself.

Julia Eve: Well, I think that's what's so fascinating about the cards. I think a lot of tarot readers get frustrated in the process of learning because there's this idea that once you memorize what the cards mean, then you will be able to read the cards. But it is not like that. When you enter into the space of actually reading a card, you are convening with the moment. You are entering the moment, and every single moment is different. You have to go into this space of being open, curious and receptive, and in that moment, you're allowing that card to speak what it wants to speak out of all the ways that it could speak. So I think of the cards sometimes as these packed thought forms. There is so much that one could say, endless amounts that one card could say, let alone many cards together. So it's really in that moment that you enter that you are going to decide – based on intuition, your gut, your intention, what's coming to your mind and all your senses – what’s gonna come to the forefront of all the possibilities that exist within. And it is rather spontaneous. I think it requires equal doses of intuition and reason. I think both are important to bring to that space.

Jeff Carreira: There's a spiritual teacher no longer alive, named Richard Rose, and he coined a great phrase that I love called betweenness. And basically, there are many different ways you could think about it, but essentially the main way he described it is you have an incredibly strong intention at the same time that you have a complete openness to possibility. And he calls that the space of magic. So in this case, it's like you intend to gain the wisdom of the card. You have a very strong intention to gain that wisdom, but you are completely open as to how that's going to show up. And then you're in the place where magic happens.

I am guessing that corresponds to your experience?

Julia Eve: Oh yes, for sure. I find I get the best results from readings where I am really curious about the answer, but at the same time, I'm not very concerned about the outcome. I've got a healthy dose of detachment coming into it as well, but I am still inquisitive.

You don't want to be indifferent going into a reading. In most cases. I think that fascination, that awe, that curiosity, is a really important ingredient to getting to that magic for sure.

Jeff Carreira: Right. And I have used the term to explain that mechanism that you're describing. I've used the term creative illumination, which implies that something is being illuminated to you, but you are playing some creative process in the illuminating process. So it's not passive illumination. You're not just sitting there utterly passive, being given information. You are creatively engaging with the possibility of wisdom in ways that help bring that wisdom into manifestation. So, I would assume that is what a tarot reading is. I would assume you’d consider it a creative or mystical endeavor?

Julia Eve: It's my creative endeavor of choice. You know, I mean, creativity can obviously manifest in a number of ways, but tarot reading is definitely a creative act. And not just the reading of the tarot, but contemplating the tarot, meditating with the tarot, studying the material, writing about the tarot; that's my creation. That's my way of creating. And I think anytime we're inspired by something, to the extent that I feel inspired by tarot, we are entering the space of creation.

Jeff Carreira: That's beautiful. So this is what I consider to be the crux point of both the Telepathy Tapes and the tarot. There are many things that fall into this category: mystical experiences, paranormal experiences, UFO experiences, the telepathy of autistic children. They all fall into the category of seemingly not possible under our current scientific worldview and therefore dismissed. Now, if we start to describe it the way you and I are right now, as this kind of higher creative endeavor, then anything can act as a portal to that unified wisdom and be a creative endeavor? It doesn't just have to be tarot, right? It can be any circumstance in the world. For example, you can look at a tree in a certain way and you can let the tree tell you things about yourself. So there is an aspect in which you are needing to engage with it. You're needing to creatively pull the wisdom out in a certain way.

As soon as you explain that to a scientifically materialistic world, they say that makes no sense, you're making it up. This is what Henri Corbin was so strong about in terms of the imaginal realm. It's a realm. It's a non-physical realm, and so in that sense imaginal. But it is not imaginative or fantastical. It's real, but it's not material. And that's what is difficult. People try to protect themselves against the possibility that there could be something that knows me better than me on the other side of that card. And so to protect yourself, you go, well my subconscious made it up. Why? Because we don't want to give any credit for agency or for knowing to anything besides human beings.

And so, I want you to speak to that, because when you are reading tarot, you've got someone sitting in front of you. There's probably some context for that reading. You're pulling the card, you're entering into that space of the moment and you are seeing something real there. What is your experience of that?

Julia Eve: It is so hard to put that into words. It feels like something clicks. It feels like, “Oh yes, this is it!” Like, like an aha moment or an epiphany. There's that inner purity where you know.

And I think about what it means sometimes to know something for sure. So I used to do this exercise sometimes to understand this space better where I would play with the idea of like, what is it to know something for sure? What is that feeling? As opposed to a feeling of ‘maybe’. So, for example, here I've got the fool in front of me, right? So if I turn this card around so I cannot see it and I ask myself, what is the card that's underneath here? I know it's the fool. Then I go, okay, what does that feel like, to know something for sure? Because I know for sure this is the fool, and I can compare that feeling to the feeling of speculating about the next card here that I can pull.

And there is a difference between that. A subtle difference between being pretty sure and being absolutely sure about something, really feeling that knowing. Sometimes, not always, when I am doing readings, I'm hitting on some piece of information that feels like that knowing. And that's how I recognize it as a knowing different from a speculating. It just feels like, “oh, yes, this is exactly what it is”. It feels quick, too; very sudden, like something coming together.

Jeff Carreira: Yes. And I can relate to that in terms of when I write books, because writing for me is that kind of creative process. It happens very much in some state of direct connection. And then there's a kind of knowing that comes in the moment; a certainty that this is true. Often, when I go back to reading my books, there are large sections when I was in some kind of flow state with something that I have no memory of writing. There are other parts in which Jeff was writing, and often those are the parts that help connect the dots between the flow parts. But there are long passages, I would say probably the majority of the book, which I don't remember. It wasn't knowledge coming from Jeff. It was knowledge flowing through Jeff from beyond.

Reading tarot is another way of channeling that kind of information. Now, the thing I'm fascinated by with the tarot is, especially if you're using the traditional Rider Waite deck, it’s packed with symbolism that has the encoded wisdom of the Western hermetic esoteric tradition from nobody exactly knows how long ago. Ouspensky called it the most complete code of the hermetic symbolism we possess. And so, I think of the tarot as a lens. You can look through it and see everything differently. It's like you're looking at the world in three dimensions, and then you look through the lens of the tarot and four dimensions now become available to you.

Julia Eve: Well, it's really interesting because it's one of those things that reveals itself over time. It wasn't until years and years of working with it that I started to open up those other dimensions. It is then that I realized that there is a whole other thing happening here. This is not just what I thought it was. I mean, it's always been interesting to me. It's always fascinated me. It's always all those things. But, okay, now I think I know why. I think I know why I've always been so drawn to this. And this brings me back to what you mention in Higher Self Expression; how when you come back to things, they aren't the same because you're not the same. And I think tarot works much in that same way. It can only meet us where we're at, in our development, our understanding, our worldview. So myself as an 11-year-old, coming to it, as eager as I was, I was not ready for that information. I wasn't ready as a teen, I wasn't ready in my 20s, and I wasn't ready when I came back in 2014. But eventually I became ready and it was there waiting for me when that time came. And I'm grateful that I stuck it out to that point because now I see what I'm really doing with the cards, whereas before, I don't know that it was as clear.

Jeff Carreira: That's fascinating because the wisdom that comes out is a combination of the wisdom in the symbolism and our ability to connect with that wisdom. And that changes over time. Now you have Spiral Sea Tarot, which is the guise under which you do tarot readings. Why ‘spiral’?

Julia Eve: Yes, that's a good question because honestly I don't think I could have even answered that when I first put that together in 2015. I don't know, I think there was a reason that I put those two things together with tarot but to come up with an answer now, I almost have to reverse engineer it. But now that I think about it, and as I thought about it over the years, what I really think is interesting about tarot is that it can help us tap into different things both below and above. So I think of tarot as being a mechanism to channel information from the subconscious, but also from the superconscious, and us as the conductors between those two spaces as we are potentially pulling information from those places during a reading.

I often equate symbolically the sea and the ocean to the subconscious and I think of space as being more related to the superconscious realm (i.e., cosmic consciousness, the spiral and the galaxies and all of those things). So I think about those two opposing forces and how we meet in the center of them, pulling from each and arriving at the message, whatever that message might be.

Jeff Carreira: That's amazing. Now, I also know that, besides doing readings, you also teach people to read the cards and that that is your favorite part. Why is that?

Julia Eve: I think because I'm so passionate about this tool and I know what it has done for me. Not just the information it gives me when I read it, but what it has done for me personally, developmentally, spiritually, in a life-changing way. I know what this tool can do for people and I am so passionate about helping people connect with it in a way that is meaningful and potentially even life-changing for them.

People have different reasons for coming to Tarot, and depending on what those reasons are, I may or may not be the right mentor for them. And so there's a bit of a process of trying to understand what someone's needs are and what they're trying to get from the tool. But I tend to work with people who are looking to go a little deeper with it, trying to not just understand how to read for others, but how to really get to the depth of it and figure out what it can do for them in other ways.

Jeff Carreira: In my case, similar to what I read in Ouspensky, my interest in using the tarot is to develop what I call mystical vision, that deeper vision beyond the familiar, and to learn how to more efficiently and effectively navigate that sense of inner knowing, which I feel like I have a lot of experience with. A lot of what happens for me in my spiritual practice of meditation is this kind of movement from knowing to knowing to knowing to knowing, which seems to take me deeper and deeper and deeper into mystical revelation. And I would like to learn how to transfer that capacity to the tarot so that I can explore the inner realms of revelation. I'm also very curious to explore the symbolic wisdom of the tarot, but not as a learning process. I have accumulated a number of books on the tarot and I find them fascinating, but I don't want to just learn about it, I want to learn from it. I want to be inside that world of wisdom that the tarot is a doorway to.

Julia Eve: Yeah, that's what's fascinating to me as well. You know, it is truly something you can step into. I really look at it as something of a map. Both a map to our mundane regular lives, but also a map to our soul's journey and our spiritual evolution. I think that there are things encoded in the tarot that go beyond just understanding the symbols, but also really deeply integrating them and seeing how that plays out in our lives, in our psyche, in our hearts, and in all the places within us.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, that's beautiful. So, in concluding our interview today, what would your message be about the tarot and your hopes for what the tarot could potentially bring to the world?

Julia Eve: You know, I like to meet people where they are, and I know that it's asking a lot of people to make these leaps of faith. I don't like to push people before they're ready. And I think that when the time is right, these things will find them or they'll find these things. The only thing I ask of people is just to keep an open mind and to become more curious of their own experiences. Tarot aside, you know, it's a funny thing that happens to us every night, for example, when we go unconscious and have these weird dreams and experiences. I invite people to even just get curious about those sorts of things which we all experience, and to open their minds up to the possibility of something else going on.

Jeff Carreira: That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for the interview and for speaking to me.