Five Flavors of Stuckness

[image: a hobbyist touching the two probes of a multimeter to a length of wire]

If you've never done this yourself, here's what's going on in that picture.

That little box is a multimeter. It has two wires coming out of it, called probes, and our hobbyist is touching their metal tips to the two ends of something. Could be a cable, a fuse, a string of Christmas lights that's gone dark, or the mystery wire the last owner of the house left in the basement (power off, please).

The meter pushes a tiny bit of electric current out of one probe and waits to see whether it comes back in the other. If the path between them is whole, the current makes it through and the meter beeps. If the path is broken somewhere, nothing comes back and the meter stays quiet. If the path is corroded or loose, some current gets through, but grudgingly, and the meter tells you how much resistance it ran into along the way. Electricians call this checking continuity.

Here are some nice things about it:

• the current is tiny. It can't power anything, and it won't hurt you
• the meter doesn't need to know what the wire is for. Doorbell, lamp, mystery wire... it just checks whether current flows
• the meter doesn't fix anything or tell you what to do. Open, closed, or somewhere in between. That's the whole report
• you can check five wires in five minutes, one at a time

And here's the part that made me reach for this picture. Metal contacts grow a thin film of oxide over time, and the film blocks current. Push a small current through a dirty contact and it can break through the film. Engineers call this a wetting current. Phone companies have run a small current down their copper lines on purpose, just to keep the splices from corroding. So sometimes the test itself is what gets the current flowing again.

(If you're more of an acupuncture person, I think it's a similar idea: a little stimulation down a meridian, and the body does its own adjusting.)

What's happening here

OK, now that you know what the person in the picture is up to, let me lay out what's happening on this mini-site:

• the meter: the interviewer on this site
• the wires: five energies, each one named by a tarot card
• the test current: the questions
• the circuit: you
• the person reading the meter: also you... see below

The five energies come from five cards in the tarot's major arcana. Nothing gets shuffled and nothing gets predicted. It's always the same five cards, and each one names a kind of energy the interviewer checks for. Here's how the five flavors of stuckness show up, card by card:

• The Sun. A child on a white horse, sunflowers, broad daylight, nothing hidden. Its territory is orientation: knowing where you stand.
• The Devil. Two figures chained to a pedestal, and if you look closely, the chains are loose. Its territory is limits, and what holds you.
• The Hanged Man. A man hanging upside down by one foot, his face calm, almost glowing. Its territory is letting go of a position so you can see from another angle.
• The Tower. Lightning hits a tower and blows the crown off the top. Its territory is what you've built, and what it's built on.
• Judgement (Crowley's deck calls it The Aeon). A trumpet sounds and the dead rise. Its territory is a change in the whole picture, not an adjustment inside it.

If you're a student of the Western esoteric tradition and want the Hebrew letters, the paths on the Tree of Life and the rest of the machinery, there's a deeper dive here.

When a channel is clear, you don't notice it. When one is blocked, or running too hot, or shorted around the thing it's supposed to feed, you feel it as stuckness. What I've found is that once a channel gets tested, the rest of the system often notices what's off and corrects on its own. The interviewer doesn't fix anything. It runs a little current down each path and lets you notice what comes back.

You might be asking, "Why the tarot hoo-hah? Can't I just take five possibilities and work through them with an AI?"

You could. In my testing, plain lists of questions led to plain, checklist conversations: the AI asked the same one or two questions, session after session. The tarot's symbolism lets the conversation breathe. Mysticism does for the model something of what it does for us: it leaves room for gray areas, and understanding turns up in the gray that a checklist would miss.

Where the analogy breaks

The wire doesn't know it's being tested

A wire doesn't care whether you put a meter on it. You do. This conversation works on a live system: your beliefs and emotions. You can't test a live system without affecting how it runs. See how it feels for you. I just don't want to promise a detached experience when this conversation can shift things quite dramatically. It has for me... always in the direction of being true to myself.

The meter adapts

A real multimeter sends the same current every time. This one listens to what came back from the last test and adjusts the next one. It's less like a beeping box and more like an electrician tracing a fault.

Who's reading the meter?

You are. The reading probably won't be "my Hanged Man channel is at 34%"... Probably more like "I think I might be holding on too tight to my identity as an athlete...."

I use the multimeter as an analogy to (hopefully) set your mind at ease as to what this is aimed at: reflecting your state, not pushing you toward a different state. The power in it, and why I keep coming back to it for my own work, is that, as the channels come alive via testing, I gain more access to my true feelings and beliefs.

FAQ

What does this cost?

Talking with GPT-6 Luna is free. Other models open with a one-time $5 unlock, so you can see how each one handles the same conversation.

If I sent you here personally, I'd love your feedback, but it's not necessary.

How do I start?

Identify a starting point of stuckness. What feels stuck right now? It can be "my garage cleanup project" or "my partnership with my technical counterpart at work" or "my spiritual evolution". Start anywhere.

Then sign in, pick a model, and answer the first question.

How long will it take?

The interviewer is specifically instructed not to string you along. Once it's tested the channels, some lightly and some more deeply, it will move toward wrapping up and offer you a summary of the session. If you've found something you really want to explore, tell it to keep going. And if partway through you decide to do something about your situation, it will notice, and offer to stop there or set that aside and finish.

Who are you?

Probably, you know exactly who I am because I offered you this directly. I probably did so because something you said in a moment of connection gestured toward stuckness. I probably also value your taste and opinion and am curious how you'd interact with this thing. I wanted to offer you this resource without expectation, and without getting five layers deep into tarot and Qabbalah and losing connection.

If you don't know who I am. A dabbler. Not a magician or an occultist or a therapist or a doctor. Not directly connected to any particular practice or lineage. I just found this neat thing while exploring tarot and Qabbalah and wanted to have a way to share it. I'm not deep enough into my study to judge this thing. If you happen to be reading this and are steeped in the Western mystery tradition, I'd certainly love to hear your take!