For spiritual work with what I call “hungry spirits” — false goals and desires that a person begins to serve — I prefer the Tarot de Marseille. The reason I choose this deck is that it is not rigidly tied to the more complex system of Kabbalah.
The World card is a picture of your inner world. At the bottom we see two animals: the Bull and the Lion.
The Bull is the element of Earth, but it is also our body, or more precisely, our brain. In the cards, this corresponds to Coins, or Deniers.
The Lion corresponds to Fire and to our desires. This is the lower manifestation of Will. In the cards, it is the suit of Batons, or Wands.
The human figure represents Water, the emotional plane. This is the higher manifestation of the soul. It corresponds to Cups.
The Eagle represents Air and intellect. This, too, is a higher spiritual manifestation. It corresponds to Swords.
The card describes a model of the soul through which the soul can be cleansed and understood.
The lower row is the earthly level, our survival, which is necessary for life on the higher plane.
The higher plane consists of Emotions, the fundamental basis of any mystical experience, and intellect as a means of understanding emotions. Socrates used intellect as an essential part of the soul in his method of dialogue. Through dialogue, a person comes to know their soul.
The lower part of the card represents what suffers within us because it is fixated on the physical level. Think of all those schools of “success at any cost” embodied by the Lion of Desires. The Lion serves not Intellect, but the satisfaction of the brain through dopamine.
The Lion of Desires becomes dependent on the very desires it generates. Desire for the sake of desire.
It is at the level of the Lion that all sorts of false goals arise, born of these “hungry spirits”.
The task of spiritual work, then, is to look upward and establish life goals belonging to the higher plane. This does not necessarily mean some “spiritual work” that will make you “spiritually elevated”. Higher and lower are states that everyone passes through from time to time; that is how the world works. Your goal may be something entirely worldly. What matters is how important that goal is to you personally.
The aim is harmony among all the functions of the organism. To achieve it, you must cast out the “hungry spirits” by recognising their weakness.