Your life is being played out on a stage behind the veil of the word; it is the imagination of all beings, when everything is imagining. To look into this all-reality, you must participate in three ways. Control awareness of what is going on in the mundane smaller reality of your life. Be be wise to the larger patterns of nature and the cosmos. And open yourself, from the tiny point that is you to the infinite. Only then can you become transparent enough to part through the veil and record the patterns matching what you see with what you know.
The real magic happens when the spirit of Divination conveys the relevant signs that act as a catalyst for change. This is where perceptive powers and wisdom interact with Providence.
Focusing from Above
Experience in-toto is not possible in the normal day-to-day sense, and reality must be organized symbolically and in fragments. The world is so huge, so varied, and we only have so much sensory capacity. So we apply our personal filters to reality. This is based on our conditioning, our objective sensory awareness in the present moment, and also our memories and emotions. Generally we shut off much of our power to direct or comprehend what we see. It is like having a radio on and not knowing you can turn the dial. By attuning to certain forces (i.e. war, partner attraction, home), and especially by doing this in a willful manner, we make discoveries. We suddenly see things that we simply had not seen before. A simple experiment is to pick a certain shape or word or object, set your mind to constantly be on the lookout for it, and you will see it everywhere, when you would not have seen it before.
Seeing is merely seeing. With this point we are just observers, and there has been no reflection on the interactive and bendable nature of the universe.
Putting Things Together
The seasons provide an excellent base of understanding for the symbolic reduction of universal forces. Winter is rest, scarcity, and contraction. In Spring everything bursts into form, and with maturation the newly born becomes diverse. Summer is the blossoming and the fruit, the sharing of creation. Fall is balance, maturation, and disintegration, preparing the compost fire for winter.
Pay attention and you will find All Wisdom already scribed in Nature’s Book. There are so many pages – how the moon is full and the tide rises, and its likeness with a woman’s blood cycle, how sap rises up a branch with the heat of the sun and a phallus rises with lustful desire, how water goes down and fills whatever vessel it is contained in, how fire reaches upward and creates more of itself through destructive combustion, how wind can combines things and also make a spectacular mess, and how everything is subject to the weight of gravity. All of these patterns show the way the Universe works, how every piece uses something else and gets used up in turn for the whole machine to keep working. Up close it looks disorganized, but from far away there’s a pattern to it, there are rules.
The curious over the millennia became Wise, and in various traditions we have fixed many of these patterns into symbol sets, such as: the zodiac, alchemical pictures, the planets, the elements, 78 tarot cards, 64 I Ching hexagrams, 16 geomantic figures, the symbolic reading of numbers (gematria).. As long as it’s a complete, well-tested system, the diviner’s dedication to the craft and the attempt itself is more important than the actual symbol set.
The World Is A Mirror
With divination based on chance, you make that moment of Unknowing a portal for the world to reflect back to you. This is done against the backdrop of all that you know. Someone can put up a window frame and hold it in front of them, and perhaps they think, “It would be nice to have a partner!” They count the birds that pass through the window frame. Two seagulls soar into view. Two seagulls require an exposition on the number two and the meaning behind seagulls. Two is a line, a connection, and also what the diviner is looking for. A seagull is a long distance traveler, a navigation expert, and a social creature. Could it be they want someone, not just to have a partner, but to help navigate with them on a symbolic long journey? This answer depends on the diviner/experimenter and their ability to see, their wisdom, and their ability to Un-Know and let go.
Because to get the truths you have to get the number of birds, the specific tarot card, the I-Ching hexagram that reflects that truth. Some people would argue that it’s all relational and the truth is just within you; that you can pull it out of whatever. I disagree. Here is where the Trickster Spirit of Divination comes in and we transgress beyond psychology and metaphysics into the plasticity of reality and the idea of Providence.
A raven once crossed my path slowly overhead in a neighborhood where ravens were never seen. I was walking to my car to ride to the hospital and get a vasectomy. What better harbinger of the end of my bloodline! When I was in the midst of thinking about a tumultuous relationship, a van pulls up with a billboard on its roof and the image is that of a giant red stop sign. I made a pact with Horus and for months hawks would regularly land on the ground within a few feet of me.
It’s like there’s a trickster who knows my path and is providing me with sign posts. Like I’m in a story and, because I’m a magician I know I’m a character. I know the rules of the fiction that I exist in, so I am allowed to play co-author. The Supreme author, who is writing with an ink made from the melted slag of all words and text ever said or written, is saying, yeah, I know that you know, and now you know I know because I’m going to show you these things, these miracle validations.
Let Go of Control
To make this happen you have to break out of your head. Use senses that are not on your physical body. There are other senses. See with the palm of your hand. With entranced focus, drop what is “seen” into the solvent of the oceanic mind. These senses are not about recording things linearly. It’s not A to B to C. It’s more like a a hologram. All language is false. Where you once saw your financial situation, or relationship, or an artistic project, you now see these symbols relating to those things. It’s like looking at the surface of water and into the depths at the same time. You go into a relaxed trance state where the symbols become clear and relational.
To do that you can’t really hold onto a desired result, a This or a That, because then you’re not really in the liminal space where divination will work. You strip down, bared, you lose yourself in the question mark, the Unknowing. You have to let go to chance, the turn of a tarot card, roll of a dice, toss of a coin, that is the portal from which the Spirit of Divination does its trick. If done right, you are working with what’s real, which is not some ego gratification — I want this give me that! — but actually reflecting the relation of Universal Laws in your life.
In theory, the person actually does something with the information and their life course is different than if they had not gotten the divination. The tarot therefore plays an important role in exercising response-ability.
A little eight year old girl I know says she wishes there were real magic. She means that she wants to see the beating of natural law, the impossible. But true magic is about a practice that can lead to what seems impossible, not by breaking the laws but by following them explicitly; knowing the Law so well that you can bend and utilize these Laws to your advantage. The Law is essentially rules of how the universe works, and the magical knowing of the law is sympathetic understanding, correlating what you know out there (above) to seeing what you are trying to accomplish in your mundane life (below), sacrificing control, and letting magic happen.
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