We have apparently entered an age of great catastrophes.  With climate change and the rest, it certainly looks like the next several hundred years will be very hard for human beings.  What can I do?  I would like to speak to the survivors. Can I?

If we can, I'm sure there's much that we should say to our descendents.  Now is the Information Age and countless matters that in other times were utterly unknown or mere conjecture or arguments of faith are now actual facts to us if we are simply well informed individuals.  Even knowledge of ourselves, which is the ground of wisdom, through anthropology and history and medical science and the rest, has now become rich with well known facts beyond the fondest hopes of the Enlightenment.  I guess much of that is likely to be lost in the coming general impoverishment.  So could we save some bits of it that seem most important by somehow speaking them very clearly now?  And even with myself personally, my own researches into Mind and also the passage through the Twentieth Century of my parents and myself, which I observed carefully, both strike me as worth adding to the store of human knowledge if I can.

And besides all that, we surely owe posterity some accounting for what we did to them.  How did we do our crimes and why?

Well, actually, I'm only planning to express my own stuff with this project. The rest of human knowledge will have to speak for itself.  The apology for our destruction of the planet is not explicitly included in the project's prospectus either because I haven't found a way to say it, although it may be looming in the background.  So this piece of artwork concentrates on my discoveries in Mind and some of the lessons I think I probably learned from the Twentieth Century.

You may be familiar with my extensive work in Tarot.  That's all fine and good, but Tarot is a child of the printing press and therefore it is probably not appropriate technology for the age of busted gear that is probably beginning. Currently, our culture's most popular divination tool, which is Tarot, in its present form, is obtained by the magical practitioner from a high tech manufacturing and distribution network.  That is unsustainable.  In our culture divination is tied up with industrial production.  That is way out of line with basic tenets of the Western Occult Tradition's perennial wisdom teachings and it is frankly bizarre.

We need a divination system which the practitioner would mostly carry in their head.  There is an old system in some regions of Africa where you draw a diagram on an open space of soil one evening — presumably it is a schematic diagram of life, the universe and everything that you have memorized and/or adapted — then you return the next morning and read the footprints added to it by animals during the night. In the photograph I saw, it looked rather like a large backgammon board with various extra marks.  I wish I knew more about it.  It sounds kind of like a cross between Ouija and Tarot but fabricated into a material object extemporaneously on the spot.  I guess also perhaps a practitioner might keep private notes or sketches.

And too of course there is I Ching.  In our peculiar realm today, I Ching requires a book you obtained from a printing press, plus your personal experience, pencil, paper and three pennies.  But actually, in fact, in its ancient natural habitat in China, an I Ching reading required your knowledge, a brush, ink and paper, and a box of dried flower stalks that you previously collected and kept on hand.  No book.  The system does have almost as many icons as Tarot — 64 hexagrams versus 78 cards — but the I Ching system is packed full of memorization aids.  The 64 hexagrams have many various memory aids attached to them.  These include very concise poems of breathtaking beauty, comic and dramatic story bits, fascinating geometric diagrams, cosmology theories, and much else.  It's true there have been printed or scribecopied I Ching books since ancient times, but when doing divination sessions you were supposed to graduate out of using that manufactured object and work fluently from memory.

(I should mention here that I have a paragraph on Norse Runes further on.)

(I should also make this note:  Practices where you simply drum or dance or chant or sing or meditate or pray or breathe intoxicating vapors or ingest intoxicating food or beverages or gaze on majestic scenery or have sex to reach the proper mental state of complete otherness, and then simply speak, are here omitted from discussion.  Necessarily.  Divination techniques in that category are not very popular in our culture.  If you and I are personally acquainted, it will be no surprise to hear I value that kind of doing very highly, and it has shaped my life and work countless times, as recently as last Saturday, but Western culture for several centuries now has strongly preferred the highly analytic kind of divination where you have a structured understanding of life, although it is certainly open to your interpretations, and then you mystically conjure Mind to select the pertinent bits of it, as in Tarot or I Ching or that African geomantic method described above or even Ouija too.  That analytic idea structure thing is certainly not unique to our Western culture but it apparently fits our Western culture very well, and especially as developed in Tarot, but Tarot, in its present form, will probably be lost soon.  So there is something of an emergency.  A survivable replacement for or version of Tarot should be offered soon.  Soon. That is what I'm hoping to address.  So the whole other world of non-analytic divination is out of scope in this project. But thank you for wondering.)

Here's the project's statement of purpose:  We want to offer a replacement for or version of Tarot that is survivable for the likely coming age of horrible catastrophes and broken junk.  That means, for one thing, that the system must be carried in the user's mind and then manifested with materials that come to hand.  That means it must be rewarding and easy to memorize and easy to imagine with.  That means it must be a pretty accurate portrayal of human beings and their doings, but open to mental play, and well equipped with memory aids and have much fewer icons than the current awkward overloaded factory version.  And it must be colored for the times in which it will be used, which is to say it must be helpful to people who have dreadful painful lives.

Miscellany:

I got the meanings for the letters in Alphabeticon from Tarot.  It just so happens that the Aces plus the Major Arcana in Tarot total 26 cards.  And I knew this set of meanings can work in divination sessions because the Aces plus the Major Arcana form a kind of summarized upper level or view inside the Tarot deck.  It is even an old accepted practice to do readings with a stripped down simplified deck consisting of just those cards.  Very nice.  Excellent coincidence.  Sweet.

The Norse Runes are a very interesting example of a similar but different system that is popular alongside Tarot today.  The Rune practitioner is required to study an ancient foreign alphabet and ancient foreign language (Early Norse) and is thereby invited to the profitable exercise of imagining what life was like in a very different culture than their own.  This historical reenactment study method is not for everyone, of course, but it does offer interesting implications for our project.  Imagine someone three hundred years from now using a version of our product which they obtained by word of mouth plus maybe some teacher's personal notes and sketches.  The person who first published the Runes in modern times told a story where they got it just like that in northern Scotland.

Current project design calls for publishing it as a workbook.  This workbook will have pages printed with the cards which the user can cut out. There will be a variety of pages printed with a layout sheet — a tabletop pattern for doing divination — which the user can also cut out.  There will be suggestions for making little letter "stones" from clay or wood or pebbles or etc.  with the letters of the alphabet written on them that the user can use for divination instead of cards, after the cards have helped them commit the divinatory meanings of the letters into memory.  They can, of course, also choose to discard the stones, paper layout sheets, the book itself and all after the letter meanings are secure in living memory and therefore freed in their imagination. Indeed, this workbook has suggestions for using letters keyed to ideas about human life completely as mental concepts without cards or stones at all, even maybe without pen and paper.  Numerology, bibliomancy and so on.  Philosophic meditation.  Analysis of sacred texts?

Why modern art?  Why black and white?  Please insert some explanation here involving the fact that the Alphabeticon cards are intended to be merely selfinstruction material.  They are alphabet flash cards like children use but designed by the leading experimental artist in the Pagan movement, blah, blah, blah.  Also black and white is cheaper and lower tech to print than color.  Also modern art is psychologically very close to children's art and thereby encourages a user to make their own sketches of the pictures and throw away mine.  There is complex interacting music, dance and play, etc., etc., in this art.  My informative chart "New Modern Art – The Theory In A Nutshell" will definitely be included in the book.

The word "Alphabeticon" has a previous meaning.  The previous meaning is quite obscure, non-trademarked and only related in the very slight way of involving a similar train of thought on different subject matter which is the art history of the Soviet Union.  So I re-used it.  Apologies for any confusion.

What is this claim about the lessons of the Twentieth Century being in the project?  Huh???  Where?  Well, see, that material is embodied in the interpretations which I gave to the Aces and Major Arcana cards when I adopted them from Tarot into this project.  My interpretations of the Tarot cards which I gave the Alphabeticon letters.  They embody a certain viewpoint on life.  They have a certain coloration.  My parents were an alcohol addict and a traumatized veteran of the War To Kill Hitler, who worked very hard and did all they could but could not show much warmth.  I grew up as a white boy in the Jim Crow South, seeing madness in my people.  I was a Cold War soldier.  I was a Hippie. I am a pacifist.  I am a Pagan.  That is all distilled into the teachings about life which I wrote for the Alphabeticon.  Those little writings are my lessons from the Twentieth Century.  I hope they are loving and free.  If so, I guess they might be a voice the future needs.  In any case, they may be a worthy effort.

Blessed be us all.

– Stone

 
Card A Front

Card A Back

 
Card B Front

Card B Back

 
Card C Front

Card C Back

 
Card D Front

Card D Back

 
Card E Front

Card E Back

 
Card F Front

Card F Back

 
Card G Front

Card G Back

 
Card H Front

Card H Back

 
Card I Front

Card I Back

 
Card J Front

Card J Back

 
Card K Front

Card K Back

 
Card L Front

Card L Back

 
Card M Front

Card M Back

 
Card N Front

Card N Back

 
Card O Front

Card O Back

 
Card P Front

Card P Back

 
Card Q Front

Card Q Back

 
Card R Front

Card R Back

 
Card S Front

Card S Back

 
Card T Front

Card T Back

 
Card U Front

Card U Back

 
Card V Front

Card V Back

 
Card W Front

Card W Back

 
Card X Front

Card X Back

 
Card Y Front

Card Y Back

 
Card Z Front

Card Z Back

In most card divination sets, the backs of the cards are all the same.  Therefore it's very easy to pick cards at random just by turning them all face down and mixing them up before you start to choose.  And in this kind of divination system, where you have meanings attached to icons, you definitely need some process for picking your icons at random because that's when Mind sticks in quantum physics phenomena to affect your proceedings.  And having your icons on cards that are all the same on the back, as I said, gives you a very easy way to pick them at random.

But Alphabeticon cards are supposed to be learning aids.  They are supposed to be like the flash cards that we use to teach children.  The two sides of a card are printed with different kinds of descriptions of the meaning, a picture on one side and a bit of story on the other, so you can easily refresh your memory just by flipping a card to back or front as you need.  That's a great memorization aid.  So we need some other way to pick them at random, other than just turning them all face down.

And besides that, there are a host of other issues that I will probably go into at enormous length in a later version of this document.  Like, I'm not even mentioning doing readings for other people, only for yourself.  There's also nothing here yet about seeing the future or communicating with the dead or how to treat people who are mentally ill.

Anyway, I have used the following pages to basically describe several different divination methods using the Alphabeticon.

This is easy.

Put the Alphabeticon cards (if you have them) into a box that has kind of high sides and is not transparent.
 
If you don't have the cards, make your own.  Cut up 26 little squares of cardboard, write the letters of the alphabet on them, and put them in the box.  Also, if you don't have the regular cards, have the card image pages from this document handy to look at.  And when you write the letters, be sure to draw an underline under each letter so you can definitely tell them apart.
 
Mix up the cards (whichever kind) inside the box without looking at them.

Choose an issue in your life for which you would like to get some helpful advice, an intelligent new viewpoint, or more understanding.

Bring your issue into mind very clearly so it is real and extremely vivid.

When your issue is very real, take a letter out of the box without looking.  Just let your hand choose.  When you take it out, look at it. If you are using homemade letters, find it in the card image pages.  Now study the picture and words that go with the letter.

Repeat these steps in any way desired.  You might ask for more information on the same issue, or address other issues.  You might choose more than one letter.  Be sure to bring each issue into mind very vividly.  Stop when it seems best to stop.

I often add another question at the end.  I often ask:  "Please tell me what else I should know."

If you have gained anything, you might like to whisper "Thank you."

Put your divination stuff aside for awhile.  Let this reading sink in.

This is the same method many people use with the Norse Runes except I gave it a poetic title.  There is an old story from Ireland where there are three undying geese flying over the land for ages and ages seeing human life go on below them, but they are actually an older sister and her two little brothers who were magically transformed to live like this.  They are finally restored to human life and finally die as normal.  But anyway, I think that story bit pretty well conveys the mental viewpoint of otherness and the large view that divination can take us to, and it fits this method pretty well, so I used it.

Get 26 small tiles or pebbles or chips of wood or similar things and write the letters of the alphabet on them.  They should be heavy and dense enough that if you toss some of them on a table, they will kind of bounce and scatter a little bit.  Be sure to draw an underline under each letter so you can definitely tell them apart.  Let's call these your letter stones.
 
You might use things that are pretty much flat, so you can definitely say it is either face up or face down.  Or not.  Put the letter stones in some kind of container that you can reach your hand into, like maybe a small bag but also maybe a box of some kind.  Maybe even a cup or jar.
 
If you don't have the Alphabeticon meanings alive in your memory yet, have the Alphabeticon cards (or the card image pages from this document) handy so you can look at them.

You need a layout sheet.  You might use one from this document or you might make one up yourself and draw it on a sheet of paper.  Speaking theoretically, you should have a diagram that represents any human being's life, but seen from some angle that you are interested in.
 
For example, you might take a sheet of paper, draw 2 lines across it so it is divided into 3 areas, and then write "Past", "Present" and "Future" in the three areas.  Of course any human being's life can be seen this way, but you would only do this if you are interested in comparing the past, present and future. Or, for another example, you might prefer to draw 4 areas and write "Hopes", "Fears", "Reality" and "Solutions" in them.  Or maybe . . .
 
Conceivably you are familiar with the old mythic map of Ireland, with its five symbolic provinces, and would like to draw that as your layout.  Or maybe one of the geometric diagrams from I Ching.  Or maybe the Tree Of Life diagram from Kaballah.  Or a Medicine Wheel.  Or maybe . . .
 
Put your layout sheet on the table in front of you.
 
Or else maybe draw your layout sheet on the ground and stand beside it.

Think of an issue in your life where you would like to get some helpful advice, an intelligent new viewpoint or more understanding.

Bring your issue into mind clearly.  Pick up a few of the letter stones and hold them in your hand.  The first few times you do this, maybe just take three.  Don't look at which ones they are.  You might want to squeeze them in your hand.

Now bring your issue into mind very clearly so it is extremely vivid and real.  When it is as real as it can be, toss your stones onto the layout.
 
In the instant when they leave your hand and are in the air, you might want to say something special like "Please help us" or "Thank you" or "For the good of all".  Or you might like to just exhale deeply.
 
Turn the stones so you can read them, but leave them exactly where they stopped.  If you have stones that are definitely flat, like I mentioned above, you might want to remember which landed face down and which landed face up.

Read the Alphabeticon meaning of each letter together with the meaning of where it landed and also remembering the issue that you asked about.
 
For example, let's say you asked about your father's health and "B is for Baseball" landed in an area marked "Past".  That would probably suggest that in the past, your father's health was something that had to be watched carefully.
 
If your letter stones are definitely flat and a stone lands face down, so you have to turn it face up to read it, maybe that means it is a surprise.  Sometimes an oracle is trying to tell you something you didn't know yet.  At other times it will tell you something you already know just to bring your attention to that fact.  Like maybe the oracle is going to continue talking about that fact with the other letters and it wants you to know for sure what it's talking about.  Or maybe it's just saying that this thing you know is more important than you realize.  Okay?  So it can be helpful if you know when an oracle is telling you something you didn't know yet versus something you do already know.  Okay?  So if it landed face down, maybe it's a surprise.
 
Page 30 I live in New England where the land is full of very hard rocks.  There is a big controversy here whether the ancient people, who were here before my people, did much work on these rocks or not.  If you just look around, which I guess some people do not do, it becomes totally obvious that the ancient people moved the rocks around a lot, and piled them up, along with dirt, to build structures which are still here.  That becomes obvious if you just walk in the woods.  But still, the rocks are very hard indeed, for they were once inside the hearts of mountains that are now erased, and the ancient people did not sculpt them.  You don't find any actual sculptures in the soil here and even stones with markings carved on them are very very rare indeed.  The markings are just pecked into the hard rock surface in tiny dots to indicate drawings and even those are very rare.  Except one time I found a large stone simply covered with an astonishing drawing someplace thousands of people go and do not see, at a busy pullover rest stop on a hill on a busy superhighway, right beside a parking space where you get out of your automobile and maybe sit down on this fairly large rounded gray rock that is half buried in the earth on this hill top and is, in fact, covered with an invisible ancient drawing.  I saw it because there was a thin coat of moisture on the surface, a light mist in the air that disbursed the sunlight partly into a kind of universal glow, and the sun glowing low in the west under overhanging clouds, and me crouching down on the eastern side of the rock leaning on it because I was very lonely and weary from life's confusing problems.  The part which my eyes could make sense of was only on the upper rounded center of the surface and it was a Medicine Wheel.  Examining closely, I was sure the tiny dots pecked in the surface continued on out from the wheel and down around the sides, but with the particular light and some moss growing there, I could not puzzle out any more sense of the drawing.  But to me at that moment the Medicine Wheel was absolutely true fact and it was definitely enough for me to know.  I did not go get a shovel to dig it out and take it to a laboratory.  Maybe later I'll tell you about another time there was an eagle flying.
 
Page 31 So here's what I'm saying about divination:  The thing you notice is usually the thing you are supposed to notice.  Pay attention to what calls your attention.  In the Alphabeticon, a single detail of a letter's picture or a single phrase in its explanation is often the main thing for you to think about now.
 
Or the main thing might be something you experienced with that letter in some other reading.  In fact, as you gain experience, a letter might build up quite different meanings for you than it would for other people.

You can throw again.  You might ask for more information on the same issue, or address other issues.  Be sure to bring each issue into mind very vividly.  Stop when it seems best to stop.

At the end you might like to ask one more question and pick out one more stone and just look at it in your hand.  You might ask:  "Please tell me what else I should know."

If you have gained anything, you might like to whisper  "Thank you."

Put your divination stuff aside for awhile. Let this reading sink in.

There is a common worldwide practice where you free your other mind to do its work – the part of you that is always quite aware that you are part of unlimited Mind – by giving your ordinary individual mind something to do to keep it busy so it doesn't interfere.

I first discovered this trick one time when I was a young member of the Hippie Movement practicing Hindu based meditation, which was very popular.  I was having a kind of trouble that I tend toward where I get caught in a net of worries and let my thoughts run around in a circle from one worry to the next, to the next, to the next, then eventually back to the first and so on around and around.  It's like I'm supposed to do this because it is a way to survive and fulfill my responsibilities in the world.  So I was laying there on my bed one day and wondering what the heck to do about this very old pointless crippling thing my mind was doing again, after getting back into the starting worry for about the third or fourth time, with my other mind already partly disconnected and watching the proceedings.  My other mind was already partly disconnected from the ordinary individual mind, which was doing the worrying of course, because I had clearly and sincerely asked it to do something.  (On that day I had asked my other mind to seek cosmic consciousness and that is not what we are dong here, but we will be clearly and sincerely asking it to do something.)  But that's when I reached this understanding that this worry stuff was appropriate and legitimate in its way and not something to actually worry about itself.  So then, of course, my other mind let go of my individual mind more fully, both of them sort of shared a laugh together, and my individual mind kept running around in its circle like that was its proper job and it was happy to do it.  So my other mind grew great wings that it spread open very wide and I flew away with it seeking cosmic consciousness.  Very nice.

Here we will be doing divination.  We will ask your other mind to manipulate things so as to present a clear picture of the truth right in front of your face in a form your whole mind all together can definitely understand.  It will be manipulating things right in front of you, with your own hands, but your ordinary individual mind will not interfere because we will give it something important to do that will keep it busy.  We will give your ordinary individual mind a job to do that will be repetitive and easy enough so it can feel confident, but varied enough that it will have an interesting learning experience and also hard enough to be an exciting challenge.  I adapted this divination method for the Alphabeticon from I Ching.

The little story above is certainly written in the kind of terms I learned from Hindu based meditation.  In that style of work you see all kinds of doings as taking place inside your mind, rather than any of the other kinds of metaphors and dramatizations that various styles of mystics use.  But please don't think that is definitely the kind of experience you will have if you use this divination method.  For example, if you are an ancient Greek, you might feel that your hands are being operated by a deity while you handle the cards as described below, and the deity speaks through the letters.  And if that's what you say, I certainly won't argue with you.  Or if you're Native American or Celtic, you might feel quite distinctly that you are existing in two different places simultaneously during a session.  Or, finally, this method is based on the method used with I Ching and many people who do that get a strong feeling that the I Ching system itself is a person with a distinct personality, a very wise and well meaning but somewhat crusty old man, who manipulates the coin throws and speaks through the hexagrams.  He is sometimes said to be more less a ghost of Confucius, who was the I Ching's greatest editor.

You need the Alphabeticon cards, or else replacement cards that you have made up yourself.  If you have made up your own cards, it is probably best to have a picture on one side, so they will be interesting to look at as they pass through your hands before your eyes.  You probably also want some writing about the meaning of the letter on the card's other side so they will be good memory aids.  In the explanation below I am assuming you have 26 cards, but you could easily adapt the explanation to a different number.
 
You need a coin.  You will call one side of the coin "heads" and the other side "tails".  Decide which side is which before you start.
 
Are you left handed or right handed?  If you are actually ambidextrous, you need to pick one or the other before you start.  In the explanation below, this is referred to as your "strong hand" and "weak hand", for most people meaning right and left.  I borrowed this terminology from hand reading divination.
 
You need to decide on a question or issue that you want to address, or else decide that you want to get a picture of this moment of your life.  That's what I'm going to do in this example.
 
Page 35 You need a layout sheet.  For this method you probably want an actual sheet of paper or a cloth kerchief or a wooden board or a small animal skin or etc., with areas actually marked or indicated on it in some way, that you lay on an actual table in front of you where you are sitting on an actual chair unless, of course, you're sitting on the ground.  The areas on your layout sheet should be big enough that you can lay one of your cards on them.
 
In the explanation below, I have used Layout Sheet # 1 from this document. That is the one with 6 areas ranging from "Things in the past, less important" to "Things in the future, more important".
 
You are going to choose one card for each area of your layout.  Before you start, you must decide the order in which you want to fill the areas.  Which area will you do first? Which area will you do second? And so on.  In my example, with Layout Sheet # 1, I will fill the area in the top left first, the top middle second, and on finally to the bottom right.

Prepare your letter cards.  Gather them into a neat stack with the pictures turned up, in alphabetical order with A on the top, B under that, and Z on the bottom.

With the cards held in your hands, take a moment to look at the layout sheet and reflect how this pattern relates to the question or issue that you want to address.
 
In my example with Layout Sheet #1, and asking for a picture of this moment of my life, I would look at the top left area and say,  "Well, yes, there were things in the past that were less important facts in my life and it would be interesting to look at them."  And so on for each area, until at the bottom right I would say  "Yes indeed, there certainly will be things in my future that will be quite important and I certainly wonder what they are."

Split the card stack into two equal stacks and put them side by side on the table (or whatever) close in front of you.  Of course one stack will be toward your left and one toward your right.  Put the 13 cards from the top (A through M) toward your strong hand (right if you're right handed) and the bottom 13 cards (N through Z) toward your weak hand.
 
Note: As you will see later, when you continue doing this, you will sometimes have an uneven number of cards.  When that happens, you should put the larger stack toward your strong hand.

Now toss the coin to choose which of the two stacks to keep.  I like to make my hands into a ball and rattle the coin around inside them, then throw it down on the table.  That way it never rolls off onto the floor.  (Ignore this if you are working on the floor.)
 
If the coin has heads up, you will keep the stack that is toward your strong hand.  If the coin has tails up, you will keep the stack that is toward your weak hand.  Discard the other stack by picking it up and putting it somewhere else nearby.  However, you should keep the discarded cards in a neat pile with their pictures up.  We will call this the "discard pile".
 
So now you have 13 cards, either A through M or else N through Z.  Split them into two stacks with the top 7 cards toward your strong hand and the bottom 6 cards toward your weak hand.

Toss the coin again.  If it lands with heads up keep the stack toward your strong hand but if it lands with tails up keep the stack that is toward your weak hand.  Put the other cards neatly on top of the discard pile.  Put them on top of the discard pile with their pictures up.
 
So now you have either 6 or 7 cards, either A through G or H through M or N through T or U through Z.  Split them into two stacks again side by side.  If you have 7 cards put the top 4 cards toward your strong hand.

Toss the coin again.  As before, put your discarded cards on top of the discard pile and split the cards you keep into two stacks.  Repeat this until you have one card left.

Okay.  You have one card left.  Someone has chosen the first letter.  Put the card on your layout sheet in the area of the layout that you decided to fill first.  So far, so good.

You can take a moment to study the meaning of this letter in that place, but no more than just a brief moment and not a deep study.
 
Here's the idea:  You should give your ordinary mind a juicy little reward for successfully choosing a card, but you don't want to distract it from getting into the rhythm of the game.  Also, you don't want to interrupt your other mind in the work it is doing.  So don't study the first card for long.

Take the discard pile and start choosing a second card by the same process.
 
Of course you use the discard pile because that's where all the remaining cards are now.  But on the other hand, this might not be a good thing at all because the discard pile is probably badly out of alphabetical order.  In fact, your ordinary mind might feel a twinge of panic, seeing that things are definitely getting out of order.  (Interesting, huh?)  And yet you certainly do not want to stop the game to sort it.  So get back to therhythm of the game immediately.
 
Page 39 Take the discard pile into your hands and count the cards.  There are 25.  Half of 25 is 12 with 1 left over, so count 13 cards off the top.  Put them toward your strong hand and put the bottom 12 toward the other side.  Toss the coin.  Discard one stack and split the other.  Toss again, discard and split.  Toss again, discard and split.  Repeat until there is one card remaining.  Put it in the layout in its proper place.
 
For just a moment examine the result that is now building up.  And see, the process worked okay.  And some useful work is being done.  That's good.  Quickly start again to find the letter that's next.

Now you continue, successfully finding a card for each area of your layout in their proper order.
 
Your ordinary mind begins to be at ease, confident and busy.  Its task is not easy but not too hard.  It feels useful and competent.  And this game seems to be an art.  This is satisfying, like weaving cloth or playing a piano.  Perhaps your ordinary mind is counting cards out loud like a weaver might count shuttle throws or a musician speak the notes.
 
Page 40 Meanwhile, you might also hear another voice inside your brain.  This other voice might be humming softly to the rhythm of the game while it does some other part of the work.  What is it doing?  What is it watching and handling?  Does this other part of your mind know where all the cards are better than you do?  Is this other part of you controlling exactly how your hands toss the coin, to control what cards are chosen?  Is that possible?
 
This other part of you, that you can feel working and might hear humming softly to the rhythm of the game, does that part of you have the final reading all completely planned from the very start?  Do you have access to that much intelligence?
 
Or is Mind somehow molding reality like clay?

I will not offer any suggestions for interpretation of the letters in this method.  You will know far more about that than I do.

I want to write a chapter here about using the Alphabeticon to tell stories.  Like, maybe this is Episode 1 of the eagle story that I mentioned earlier:

And then this is Episode 2: