Divination
Seeking Divine Instruction in Patterns of Psychic Imagery
"Occult" =
"secret, not divulged," from Latin occultus "hidden, concealed, secret," pp. of occulere "cover over, conceal," from ob "over" + a verb related to celare "to hide,"
from PIE base *kel- (see cell).
"Shadow" =
- late Old English sceadwian "to protect as with covering wings".
~~ www.etymonline.com
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
~~ T.S. Eliot, 'The Hollow Men"
Recommended divination technologies:
Choose a divination method that is easy and culturally accessible for you. Use the chosen method to answer your most urgent questions immediately!
The ancient Chinese scripture has recently emerged as a high-value divination technology in the West. The Taoist and Confucian values loaded into the I-Ching (Book of Changes) seem to be universally accessible.
Like Jyotisha, the Yi-Jing provides a *mirror* of one's own intuitive thought process. There are numerous excellent resources on the internet that allow push-button divinations - no longer necessary to wait for coins or yarrow stalks to fall!
When asking an anxious question, the diviner must apply the discipline to go *carefully* through the answer provided by the ancient oracle. If one has the discipline to frame the question carefully and inspect the answer in close detail, one will generate a very useful data-set of repeating questions and repeating answers.
Do not confuse the divination with superstitious notions of a spirit being "inhabiting" the book or the teachings. The book itself knows nothing. The wisdom contained in the book is a blessed reflection of one's own mind.
Great praise to the sages who composed these 64 hexagrams! The 64 hexagrams each have 6 changing lines giving a mirror that can capture several thousand possible thoughts and fixed-combination (yoga) thoughts.
The Judeo-Christian Bible is found not only in designated houses of worship, but also in hotel rooms across the world. Anywhere that the Bible can be found, this book can be used as a divinatory tool. The holy scriptures of any religious tradition can function similarly.
One should form a sincere and reflective question, in a state of prayer. Praying "to" any deity or none is OK; but the state of mind should be open and prayerful.
Although the card images derive from Renaissance Italian court culture, the wisdom of the archetypal drawings and the thought patterns that can be reflected in the card spreads are possibly universal.
Kinesthetic patterns in the body can also reflect the thought patterns. Divination by dowsing or pendulum is extremely accurate once the practitioner has established "yes/no" and learned to frame a starkly clear question!
Still-water gazing; mirror-gazing; candle gazing
These methods allow the imagination to project its expectations directly in "movie" form onto the mirror-like surface of still water, glass, or even a flame.
Although vividly accurate, the results may be frightening. Only a skilled practitioner should use these methods.
Unlike still-water gazing, dream results are evaluated after the fact. Most of the emotional charge has gone out of the dream - even a nightmare - by the time one has regained consciousness and begun to write or mentally evaluate it.
The contents of dreams are instructional and validating. However the native must be attentive to "shape-shifting" which is the mind's permission to use the bodily appearance of familiar people and things to *represent* other less familiar people and things. Therefore dream messages must be carefully reflected upon. The person doing an action or bearing a message in the dream may be only a recognizable stand-in for the real agent.
Jyotisha is a divinatory system of considerable accuracy but also great complexity. The skilled Jyotishi must negotiate thousands of factors and eliminate hundreds of logical contradictions en route to the proper prediction. Many Pranams for computers! Yet even with the computations now performed quite accurately at the push of a button, the amount of intuition and knowledge base required in Jyotisha is truly daunting.
One may wish to acquire knowledge of the Vidya of Jyotisha over time. Jyotisha really specializes in the predictive "long view". The Vimshottari Dasha predicts a pattern involving 120 years with no repeats! That view is highly complex, and that view can only be stabilized with a good deal of patient practice.
The art of "prashna" or immediate-questions-answered might be a good introduction to the on-the-spot powers of Jyotisha. However even this service does require a knowledge of the characteristic behavior of the planets.
Palmistry is an adjunct method which complements Jyotisha or can be used independently. Palmistry is very useful and easy and accurate regarding matters of career, fame, longevity, marriages, children, etc. General predictions for timing of events are straightforward. More precise timing of events with an accurate month or year are quite impossible. Accurate timing predictions are best gained from the dasha systems of Jyotisha.
On the other hand, the difficult longevity predictions of Jyotisha and matters of multiple marriages can be resolved quickly by a glance at life map on the human palm. (Feet have their own map too.)
Each cultural has its own traditional divinatory methods.
From tea-leaves and river stones to heat-cracked tortoise shells to reading the entrails of slaughtered pigs, all of these methods are perfectly legitimate ways to stimulate the intuition of a skillful diviner.
It is important for the diviner to use a culturally accessible method. Thus I, as a career vegetarian, would probably not function well with the pig entrails. Really, I wouldn't even try! But with my European cultural background, I can use the Tarot card archetypes easily.
The Taoist priest in his mountain temple will prefer yarrow stalks or sacred stones. The Tibetan lama may prefer traditional dice; while the Pashto landsman may see a pattern in strips of Holy Qu'ran verse shaken in a jar of water, or in the movement of newly-shorn, herded goats.
The predictive power of all forms of divination derives *entirely* from the specificity of the question.
Questions like "what will happen in my relationship with X?" are much too vague! The question must be precise, such as "will X and I be married in the coming year?" or "what is the most beneficial thing I can do to support X at this time?" or "will I be the successful candidate for the [specific] job?"
Sincere questions will be answered. The answer must be acknowledged and carefully studied in relation to the question.
Divination = Dialog of Subconsciously Held Beliefs
Observe the patterns in your questions and answers!
This question-answer dialog is the mirror-pattern of the mind "talking to itself". The chronic uncertainties, doubts, and fears of the mind will expose themselves in the divinatory process of asking and answering.
Keep a record of the divinations!
Keep accurate records of all divinations to see repeating patterns. The repeating patterns expose your subconscious expectations.
The seeds of karma are buried in your subconscious expectations.
Helping others with Divination
It may be helpful to provide divinations for others, to get personal practice in precise formulation of the question. One's own anxiety to get a fast answer to a burning personal question can damage the accuracy of predictions.
Helping another person to negotiate the interference caused by anxiety and guiding them to a clearly formulated question can provide useful practical education in the workings of the human mind. Divination technology is very simple but the client's mind is often conflicted and reactive, thus divinatory results may be highly inaccurate. The diviner's own mind must be purely calm at all times.
If one offers divinations to others, one becomes responsible for maintaining a calm and reflective conversational environment, free of superstition and fear. The diviner is simply offering a mirror view of the native's own mind. Divinations must always *confirm* the native's own intuition.
If a divination contradicts the native's own intuition, then either the question was too vaguely formulated (cause of 99% of errors) or the native is suffering mental delusions. Severe mental illness such as hallucination or advanced states of the standard DSM-IV personality disorders will show a "crazy mirror" that has no discernable answer. I
Divination is a spiritual practice. It only works when the mind is fairly calm.
"Fortune", the predictable path of future events, is not a mystery. One's fortune in the future is quite naturally the result of one's beliefs, thoughts, and actions in present-time.
Why then divination?
Why tea leaves, yarrow stalks for Yi Jing, fire-cracked tortoise shells; patterns of stars, clouds, pig entrails, or the flight path of birds?
Why "mo" dice, color patterns in the electrical field around a human body, almanacs, medieval Italian playing cards?
Why pages of Giddeon's Bible, a crystal pendulum poised from the elbow bone?
Why dreams, omens, astrology, or stock market reports?
Because, despite the future being rather predictably the result of the present - which itself is the natural result of the immediate and distant past - very few people have the least idea of what one is actually doing in the present!
The divination is a precious moment during which the Reptile Brain's frenetic survival signals are consciously, temporarily, shut down.
In this brief and precious moment, one gives oneself permission to take a snap-shot of a thought-and-behavior pattern, and observe its consequences.
The miracle of synchronicity and the blessing of permission
It is the miracle of what Jung called "synchronicity" that such a mirror-reflection "photo" of one's own thought-behavior pattern can be exquisitely captured in a moment of fully-focused, conscious attention to specific phenomena in the "outside world".
Humans are part animal and part divine, but the animal brain still "runs the show" for most people. From world leaders to the dumpster divers, the vast majority of folks are utterly programmed to put their full life forcing into doing "whatever it takes" to Eat, and not Be Eaten. We are simply wired that way.
For a privileged few, however, there comes a light through the clouds. The reptile brain can be calmed, and - if only for a moment - contemplative awareness becomes possible.
The intentional moment of conscious divination interrupts the instinctive drive toward more food, more sex, more protection. This moment fills the field of awareness with intuitive knowledge.
Specifically, this "photo moment" contains a detailed report on what one is indeed doing, consciously or not (usually not!), in real time, in the real world, which is generating a very specific "fortune".
That's how it works. Divination just freeze-frames the spinning cosmos for a split second and allows anyone who has permission to look - to look!
Catching the Moment, Freeze-Frame seed of the Future
It is indeed a miracle that humans are even capable of these brief, intentional "seizures" during which the attention can be focused on the specific mechanism which drives the creation of one's "fortune".
But in this frozen moment, the diviner (and with luck also the divinee) can see their own thoughts-beliefs-expectations-behaviors in full machine operation, working willfully and enthusiastically to create a predictable default result.
Can the result be changed? Yes of course.
But sadly, change is quite unlikely. The reason change is unlikely is that, except for the occasional Ascended Being working incognito on our little Earth, most of us are sleep-walking. The reptile brain is hard to redirect. It's difficult to calm it and quiet its fears.
The rare person who does succeed in turning down the volume from the reptile brain, in order to take a look at one's own true behavior, usually has some special life experience of direct contact with death, which reduces their fear of death.
It is a huge blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing in human life, that even some people have earned the right to claim permission to interrupt the driving survival machine for even a brief moment, to "catch oneself in the act" of creating the future.
Jyotisha = Easiest and Most Difficult Divination Method
Jyotisha is in a sense the easiest divination of all, because the movement of the heavens is extremely regular, and it is possible to determine the positions of the planets with a sharply accurate "snap-shot" for virtually any moment in Earth's history. Just press a computer button in the modern age, and you have your divinatory image.
Jyotisha is in another sense the most difficult divination, because there is such a massive amount of information available in each freeze-frame. The pattern-recognition skills and inuitive competence required to even begin to sort out this "astronomical amount of information" (lit.) is rather hard to achieve in one lifetime!
Still, we try.
Divination vs. the Reptile Brain
One lives tightly imprisoned in the grips of the animal-survival portion of human nature, unable to notice one's own interactive partnership in the process of creating reality. The Life Force fuel-tank seems inevitably to be consumed by "work" and "family".
"Society", which is the sum total of all the socialized humans survival-drive interaction, powerfully reinforces all survival & "security" behaviors. Therefore one who demonstrates a fierce commitment to making money, buying & defending property, getting higher crop yields, fighting off predators, producing children, etc. receives abundant social praise. These are the Winners, the Good Citizens, and the Security Guards who maximize group survival.
Most folks' awareness is completely dedicated to managing the fear of death through a neurotic (but compelling!) life practice of "meeting essential needs".
However, what one is conscious of is not the neurotic response to rationally unnecessary striving, but rather the "need" for social approval and praise. Virtually all requests for divination are driven by the querent's need to know when and how much social approval they can obtain.
Divinations regarding "success" and "money"
Will this strategy "work"? Will that relationship "succeed"? What is meant by "succeed" is, almost always, "will one receive social approval and praise for the outcome?"
Particularly the issue of Money is so obviously irrational -- and yet so compulsively insane.
What is the daily utility of Money in the money-economy? The rational mind would answer that Money (represented by electronic bytes in a computer, or cash papers, or value of merchant trades, or other mode of exchange) is simply a means to an end. The logical ends are food, clothing, and shelter. Logically, when one has enough money to eat well and be sheltered, one should be free to turn one's attention to other things.
But there is not a moment of rest! Even after a good meal in a warm house, the hungry mind cannot rest! The reptile brain keeps signaling. The minute one has enough money, the reptile brain doubles its efforts, signaling aggressively for more, more, more! It becomes impossible to think about anything else! The hunger for "more" and for the social praise that comes with "having money" is unbearably intense!
Recently a woman in her sixties asked me to tell her precisely "when" she might receive the monies she felt were "due" her so that after a lifetime of feeling disliked and uncomfortable she could finally be "secure".
This woman, a former nurse, lives in a wealthy European country where she does not work due to a medical condition. She is supported by the State. She lives in comfort, has no family relationships, and - except for petitionary prayer to statues - has no religious life. She does no charitable service. Yet she was sure that More Money would correct all of her life imbalances. The amount she "needed"? Approx. 10 million Euro. This amount seemed very reasonable to her, as the proper amount she would be "due" for her efforts in this life.
Why her expectation of a huge, and rationally unlikely, amount of money? Why not "enough to buy a house" or "enough to fund my retirement"? A normal happy citizen in the USA lives very comfortably in a much lower income bracket.
She was quite clear on the point, that her question was strictly and solely about whether and when she would receive this fixed amount of money, and no other item. She seemed convinced that this amount was a "necessary" and "appropriate" payment for a business scheme that she had devised which would pay rich profits. Her only divinatory concern was "when".
A cursory look at the Jyotisha chart indicated, not surprisingly, a lifetime of selfish and fraudulent behaviors. Bandhu bhava (the core of life) showed terrible trauma in the childhood home, caused by an emotionally volatile and lashing-out mother. The native became a profoundly insecure and manipulative adult, seething with vengeful anger, and desperately needy for exorbitant levels of social approval.
The nativity displayed traits of deep emotional and financial corruption, emerging as extravagant spending and seductive, manipulative relationships intended to squeeze the life out of her victims (Ashlesha). Luckily, most of her victims ran away when faced with her angry tantrums. She lived far beyond her "handicapped" means. She was caught in a cycle of illegal businesses, living in a chronic anxiety of discovery by tax authorities, who were clearly on the trail of her well-masked frauds. Her anxiety caused fainting spells, which reinforced her belief that she was terribly ill and "just holding on".
And her solution to this situation is... money?
Yes, that's right.
Because the reptile brain says precisely that it is money - which by its exchangeable nature can be converted into all things (food, power, sex, security, protection) - that solves all problems. Not honesty. Not service. Not healing the awful childhood trauma that left her feeling victimized and used, obliged to perpetrate the cycle by exploiting others. Not even a sincere puja, asking for help from a cast of loving gods. Just "money".
And since she had a *lot* of problems - some very deeply rooted and obscene - her internal reptile calculations announced that she needed a huge amount of money to "solve" these problems.
Wow! As you might imagine, the Jyotisha chart showed no evidence of windfall monies, and I had to tell her that I did not see great wealth or indeed any improvement in her situation whatsoever (in fact, some actual danger) unless she got into intensive recovery therapy and started doing charitable work. The client was angry, and accused me of - you guessed it - Fraud.
IMO, divinations must take into consideration that humans are fundamentally programmed for greed. It is a terrible truth. Greed, like fear of death and anger, is a mental illness This is certainly no one's fault, and greed shouldn't be punished as a crime. Rather, it is a mental illness and deserves firm compassion.
Greed usually hungers to acquire infinite amounts of money, but it can also hunger to control (possess) a person or a species of social power, such as political office. Greed is separate from ambition to reach a goal, which is basically a healthy process which bring satisfaction upon achievement of the goal.
Greed is always driven by the fear of death, and it can never be satisfied. It is a form of insanity. Greed must be checked with positive knowledge of death, before the native destroys himself and others.
Unfortunately greed and other fear-driven reptile anxieties can completely ruin the positive, healing values of a divination by preventing the native from hearing anything more subtle than a "yes/no" answer.
These divinatory situations require attentive psychic management, starting with rigorous grounding and protection of the diviner against the predatory fear agents who feed on the terror of the triggered reptile brain.
Divinations are necessary because few people can look accurately into their lives and see the answer plain as day. The answer is always embedded in the question! And it is always "right there" for the diviner, who has permission to see the patterns which express the answer. However the taboo on self-knowledge (which includes knowledge of the timing and circumstance of death) is quite fierce, and the average person simply cannot see their own stuff.
Due to the historic structure of the human brain, it is really quite a challenge to get a rest from the survival signals. Despite what the rational portions of the brain may be saying, the reptile brain is a 24/7 engine that drives an obsessive cycle of compulsive acquisition.
The Reptile Brain wants to Sleep
The reptile brain is biologically programmed to acquire, and it fiercely resists any type of loss. Therefore the minute one has food, or money, or sex, or a house, etc. -- the reptile brain goes into overtime, planning & scheming for how to acquire more money. There is as my mother used to say, "No rest for the weary."
In Survival mind, Reality seems to be "there" as some independent, objective creation; almost like another animal with whom one must compete and dominate. Reality can even become a demonic enemy, invested with superior strength, and one's deepest survival fear of annihilation through weakness fuels tremendous fear of death.
It is quite difficult to gain a clear view of oneself when the pressures of daily life are so intense. The reptile brain signals constantly, threatening the direst consequences (pain, death, annihilation) if one does not immediately attend to the daily business of survival.
The reptile brain lives in a state of emergency. It wants food, sleep, sex, and protection from predators. Its messages of anxious, urgent, desperate need tend to saturate the conscious awareness, so that one simply cannot pause to reflect.
Catching and Holding the Wisdom
Most people, when they sit down to meditate on their lives, simply fall asleep. How hard is it to imagine a pattern in one's own mind and let it tell you a message? It's kindergarten simple. But shutting down the survival brain, into order to create the sacred space for it, is too scary. The base brain says, if you're not looking for food, you should be asleep.
That is the nice thing about organized religion: the rituals, liturgies, and ceremonies give the frightened mind something to hold on to. Some modicum of spiritual consciousness can emerge there. Not much, but something.
In a divination, we hold onto the pattern observed in the chosen phenomena. We celebrate the pattern. But the mind is often terrified, so it is essential for the diviner to understand their priestly role, and to establish the proper psychic grounding in the reading space.
Most of the work in a divination isn't seeing the truth and reporting it. The main work is managing the fear & resistance that interrupts one's concentration.
"I remember most vividly my first lesson on epistemology as a child, when I had to memorize the dictum
"The definition of the mental is that which is luminous and knowing."
Drawing on earlier Indian sources, Tibetan thinkers defined consciousness. It was years later that I realized just how complicated is the philosophical problem hidden behind this simple formulation. Today when I see nine-year-old monks confidently citing this definition of consciousness on the debating floor, which is such a central part of Tibetan monastic education, I smile."
Luminosity and Clarity
"These two features--luminosity, or clarity, and knowing, or cognizance--have come to characterize "the mental" in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought.
- Clarity here refers to the ability of mental states to reveal or reflect.
- Knowing, by contrast, refers to mental states' faculty to perceive or apprehend what appears.
All phenomena possessed of these qualities count as mental.
These features are difficult to conceptualize, but then we are dealing with phenomena that are subjective and internal rather than material objects that may be measured in spatiotemporal terms.
Perhaps it is because of these difficulties -- the limits of language in dealing with the subjective -- that many of the early Buddhist texts explain the nature of consciousness in terms of metaphors such as light, or a flowing river. "
Illumination
"As the primary feature of light is to illuminate, so consciousness is said to illuminate its objects.
Just as in light there is no categorical distinction between the illumination and that which illuminates, so in consciousness there is no real difference between the process of knowing or cognition and that which knows or cognizes.
In consciousness, as in light, there is a quality of illumination."
~~ H.H. Dalai Lama. (2006). The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of Science and Spirituality.
updated: 04 October 2008
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