divination

Ep40 Divination and Free Will

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:45

Hello, everybody.

It's been a little while since I've done one of these actually, it's been just just about a week. But we just crossed the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. And for me, that was a very busy time where I ate my body weight and pie, and delicious things. And time has a way of being very flexible, which, you know, very relative to our mere mortal minds, which will lead me into the topic for today. Pretty well, actually. Uh, I hope you're doing well. We are in the midst of the holiday season as I record this, we Diwali was a little while ago, Hanukkah, we're I think third night of Hanukkah, maybe. I'm sorry, to my Jewish friends. I, I know we're in the middle of Africa at some point. And we're in. We're now in December. And it is. It's cold here in the state of Maine where I live in the United States. I was just a guest on a podcast last night with a group of people from Pennsylvania. And they were like, Oh, how cold does it get up there? My God, you know, negative 30 Fahrenheit? And they're like, oh, yeah, that's nothing. We you know, I live in upstate New York or I live in Pittsburgh, or what have you. That's nothing. But it's cold to me. I realize it's colder, many, many places on Earth than it is here. But so relatively speaking, and relative things are going to be really important to today's conversation. We're going to get into divination, which happens to be one of my favorite topics. And I'm going to talk a little bit personally about divination. My theories about how divination works and can you predict the future? Could you pick winning lottery numbers? Why not? If you can't, doesn't that mean? Divination is a load of crap or something else. And, you know, on a personal level, when I started training in shamanism many moons ago, shamanism is my chosen path. And by chosen, I mean, it chose me, not the other way around very much. So. My own story is that I was dealing with a personal crisis and doing some meditation. And there was a very loud voice, booming male voice that came not from inside my head, but it sounded like it was outside my head saying you need to learn shamanism. Not you need to go see a shaman or what have you. And living in Maine, I was like, Well, how's that going to happen? I don't even Siberia or Peru or Mongolia. And turns out there are some fantastic shamanic teachers up here. My teacher who is Gosh, retiring from teaching at the end of this month. You know, and I am I count she was a guest on this podcast earlier. In the year, I count my blessings. I I am so grateful that she I was able to study with her while she was still actively teaching. Now she's still you know, she's still going she's, you know, she has become an elder. But she's not actively teaching classes or or students anymore and as passing the torch on to myself and some others, which is I'm also grateful for. I'm one of eight people who she trained as a teacher. So that's kind of that makes me feel really good about myself. But when I started shamanism, and like okay, we're gonna do divination. I was like, I don't want to do divination. And if I have to look back on why that was so problematic for me, there are, there are a few reasons. One, I'm relatively scientifically minded. And, you know, I thought, not all but I thought most divination was kind of a load. Like I thought people were making stuff up, you know, I have seen I have seen psychic Grifters who do things like cold reading, you know, you know, I can tell by the way you're standing, that you're a person who cares about other people, you know, they make these really bold, generic statements that are true to everyone.

So I had a little bit of prejudice going in. The other thing that sort of held me back from divination, work was the was fear. And the fear that, gosh, if I do this, if I do this divination work, and I'm wrong, right? If I, if I come up with some information for this person that I'm doing divination for. And it's wrong, then, you know, a, I could be, you know, they could be following what I tell them and run into trouble. Or, you know, be it just might mean that I'm making everything up in my head. And there's a time in all practitioners lives where, you know, probably more than once we're like, okay, am I actually making all of this up? Am I inventing all these things that I'm experiencing? Well, the longest short of it is kind of Yes, you are making a lot of it up. In fact, as you listen to my, the sounds of my voice, you're not listening to the sounds of my voice. You have, there are airwaves that are hitting your eardrums that are coming out of some machine, whether it's your car stereo, or your laptop, or iPhone, or you know, whatever device you're listening to this on, you know, electrical signals are turning into waves in the air that strike your eardrums, and your consciousness is inventing the experience of hearing me speak. So we are, when I say that we are co creating the universe, which is a part of my part of my professional bio, I believe that we are all co creating the universe. That is absolutely 100% true all of the time. You are creating the all of the experiences that you're having. Yes, there is external stimulus coming in. So, you know, but then there is the I'm inventing this out of whole cloth, feeling with divination, right? Am I just completely making something up to have an answer to something, you know, my pulling answers out of, you know, my, I'm inventing something, you're gonna fall down a well, tomorrow and break your hip? You know, there is, you know, there is a question that always comes up, but not always, but frequently comes up with people as they're practicing as they're learning that about whether they're creating fictional information, I guess I should say, that's probably a better way to phrase it is this fiction. And so, let me I'm going to dive into a delve into that. And I'm gonna talk about how I believe divination actually works. And if you don't know what divination is, you don't know what the word divination is, I'm going to define, I'm going to define my terms as I always do. And again, not because I think my definitions of things are better than yours, or should replace yours. But just so you know, what I mean, when I'm talking about things. So divination is using, you know, using methods of determining things like the future prophecy, you know,

observation without physical, beyond physical means, right? So, anything that does sort of predicts the future or, and there's, you know, there's Oh, so many different kinds of one of my favorites, Wikipedia pages, is, I'm looking up on my phone real quick here, so I can give it to you. It is, pardon me. It is meth called methods of divination. And it is a huge, huge, huge list. I just Love going through it, I just think it's interesting. And there's all these things that end in the word Mansi, which I think is the Greek, meaning, the Greek root for sort of prediction, right? So there are, you know, there's something called Test Diomansy, for example, which is using coffee, to predict, predict things using coffee to prophesize. Right? I mean, that's interesting. And there are, you know, almost anything you can think of can be used. So, some popular means of divination, we might look at scrying, which is looking at a crystal ball or a, you know, a bowl of water or a, you know, dark mirror or something along those lines. To see at a distance, that's called scrying. There's probably a Mansi word for that. There's cartomancy, which is telling the future or you know, prophecy, it's not always telling the future, but, um, is doing divination with cards. So those are really popular tarot cards. Some people use regular playing cards. I'm a fan of card set of cards called Lenormand cards, which are not as old as tarot, but much simpler and in my opinion, easier to grasp. Taro is an amazing, amazing spiritual tool, particularly the rider, Waite Smith, tarot deck. And I don't just say, Rider Waite, because the images were painted by a woman was last name with Smith. And we don't give women enough credit for the things that they do, including helping to find the structure of DNA. We know Crick and Watson. But I can't even remember the name of the woman who was integral in that discovery. So let's give women some credit for the things for the things that they do. I apologize if I went silent for a second I was messing with the cords in the back of my soundboard and something came loose four seconds. And I don't generally edit these things I like it's not just that I'm lazy and don't like editing. I have done some editing in the past. But I think it's more pure, you get more of a sense of who I am. If I'm not editing out my little coughs, silent moments, my arms and ORs that sort of thing. I'm working on my I'm sinners working on that. I'm told that that's a bad thing in public speaking. So I see there's an I'm, I'm practicing, practicing trying to reduce my arms and ORs. So there's, there's one again, now I'm conscious of it. Now you are too probably. But let's forget that let's talk about so I was talking about Lenormand cards, which are simpler than tarot cards. Tarot is a powerful tool. It is more than just a tool of prediction. There's a whole allegory going on, particularly in the Major Arcana, the rider, Waite Smith, tarot deck, let's give women the credit that they deserve for the things that they do. And the inventions that they come up with and the art that they create. We are well, we should be well past the age where we cannot give women credit for things, and that men are taking more credit than they should. So let's talk let's dive into divination. And so you know, there are pendulums and crystal balls and cards and in I'm sorry if this is gross. But in ancient Rome and Greece, they would read the end trails of slaughtered animals. And they would there were there's, you know,

doing predictions based on the movement of birds. And there's divination from dreams, which is called Oh, near romancey. I just that's just one that I know. But if you look at the methods of divination page on Wikipedia, I don't know I'm fascinated by it. I don't know how all of these things work. I don't know how divination by dust works. Do you throw dust? Right? A famous method from China is the eaching. Right where they would cast lots, I think there were bones or sticks. And the way they would land would create, you know, they would create these hexagrams these, you know, these six lined figures, and then they would look up the meaning in a book. And you can do that also with coins. There's a way to do that with coins. And I just think it has to be kind of a heads or tails kind of thing. I'm not sure I've I've had eaching readings done before and was so many years ago, maybe like 30 years ago. that I don't exactly remember how that worked. But yeah, somebody I remember casting something, I think it was coins. And you know, the person use that to create these hexagrams. And then each hexagram is broken out into a trigram. And they're then read together, and some of them are immutable. So they transform, you know, from one thing to another, and there's, you know, there's some, there's some science behind it. So there's a little bit of science behind a lot of forms of divination, for example, when I say science, I mean, sort of written ways of reading certain things. So if you, you know, you can get a book on tarot, and you can draw the, the moon card, and look up what the moon means in Tarot. How, whenever, like, all things, these standard written definitions start to break down, because they have to be necessarily they have to be sort of generic. Right. And this is where the, my, my thing with divination, my hang up with divination, the very beginning sort of took place. So if I draw, you know, two people are sitting in front of me, and I draw the moon card for each one of them out of a tarot deck. Does that mean the same thing for each person? You know, can I just read out of a book what that card means? And for me the answer that is no, you can't just do that. And the books and the learning have certain meanings, certain attributes of a card, or a symbol, or that sort of thing. Those kinds of things. You know, looking them up, is sort of operating with training wheels, like knowing the dictionary meaning of the word food, is one thing. But being a chef, is an entirely different thing. Right. And so knowing that, knowing the book, meaning of the moon card, out of the Tarot deck is one thing, but being able to read that into somebody's question into somebody's presence, being able to connect with this symbology there and relate it to somebody that requires some skill, some practice, some effort, some ability. And so my take on divination is it is not the tool. But the person using the tool that makes the reading accurate or not, or useful or not. Accuracy is one thing, usefulness is another thing. I could draw a card and say Your eyes are blue, and that would be 100% accurate if your eyes were blue, and useful, not at all. Right? So accuracy and usefulness are not necessarily the same thing. So I think what has to happen is you learn a tool, so I know people who are fantastic with Tarot cards, or fantastic with astrology, or fantastic with scrying, or what have you, well, scrying scribing is a whole other thing, because you have like, you can't, you can't do scrying without ability, because you're just then you're just staring at a crystal or something.

So, but we'll take you know, we'll take things like cards or eaching or, you know, something dust where there are specific symbols, that means specific things, certain numbers of birds appearing. And they, you know, they have maybe what we might call dictionary meanings or book meanings.

So somebody who's really good at divination goes beyond those things. And those are kind of a starting point for doing in tuit of reading and yes, there are there are people who are psychic or clairvoyant or what have you, who use no tools whatsoever, and just to, you know, pure readings on people. And that you know, and that's a thing. I like, I'm going to I like different tools. I like playing with different tools. I like cards and pendulums and scrying mirrors and I have a divination bundle that I that I use for readings. And so, you know what has to happen is that a person has to develop the right state of mind, in my take, you know, to be really accurate, and there's been some experiments with this, people with EGS, you have to read it reach a certain state of mind and the information kind of flows through you. And these tools are sort of two things happen. One is they are a leaping off point for the reading that you're doing, like if I do a card spread. And I would do, you know, let's say I would draw some Lenormand cards, and the same spread would come for two different people, those readings would be completely different, even though the cards would be the same, there would be some thematic elements, that would be the same. But you know, I, you know, get to the point where I let my, I let my in to ative abilities, pass through the reading. That's the best way I can sort of describe it. So there is a thing to be said for skill, not just going out and buying a pack of tarot cards, and all of a sudden, you're a fantastic reader, you might be you might be particularly sensitive. But you have to learn them, and you have to spend time with them. So let me tell you a little personal story. And this is not to be indulgent. And that's not to brag. It's not, I am not better than anybody else at divination. But I thought I was worse than everybody else at divination, or I thought, This is not something I want to do. And so I was in training. And I was assigned to work with another student who in do some divination work. And I, it took a little bit of the pressure off, right, because this is just another student, if things are not if things don't go well, you know, there's not, you know, it's it's training, training. So the pressure is off a little bit. But I, you know, I did feel some pressure. So, you know, this person asked me some questions, to do some divination for. And so what I did was divination journey, meaning I did a shamanic journey to determine some information for her. And, you know, I've had many experiences like this sense, but this was sort of the first thing that happened to me that was like, Oh, I could not possibly have made up this information. So she asked me about, she was considering a couple of different places to move. And, you know, I think one of them was Bangladesh. And the other one was like, California, or, you know, whatever. And so in my journey, I saw, you know, snowy owls and snow foxes and snow, and I saw, you know, direct line to the northeast from where we were, and I was like, you know, I don't know about that. She's like, Yeah, that, whatever. And I was, and I sort of dismissed it. And then I didn't, you know, and she sort of dismissed it. Yeah. You know, that doesn't sound like it anywhere that I'm intending on going or even thinking about. And the other thing that I saw was a, you know, there were, like, I had this vision in front of her where were some glasses of beer. And she was pushing them away, and grabbing, like a smoothie or something, something healthier off the table. And I related that to her. She's like, Huh, I wonder what that's about? So, you know, who knows, who knows, I just sort of let it go. I'm like, okay, it was my first practice. And,

you know, I don't know if I can do this. So a few months later, she emails me and she had moved to Sweden. On top of that, she had decided that she was drinking way too much, and she had given up drinking. Now, one might wonder if my reading at that time influenced her decision or what have you. But at the time, it wasn't, you know, that move was not an option. That was not something that was on the table. So, you know, this I counted, you know, I sort of said, Wow, I you know, that's really what I felt and saw in this sort of relates. And so maybe there's something to this. So a little while later, because she felt that that had been really successful for her. The place where she was living was unsuitable. It had rodents or some other problems with it, and she had to move out and she asked me to do another journey for her and determined trying to help her find, you know, some work and a job and that sort of thing. So I like okay, well, you know, I'll do what I can. And I tried. And so I got this really strong vision of a red farmhouse, red farmhouse. And then I also saw this city scape. And I to the point where I drew a map of it. And it was like, there's an official building here, and there's a river here, and there's cobblestones, and there's a fountain here. And then there's modern building over here, and another street over here. And I could actually draw a map of the, the city. And so then I contacted this person, and I said, I'm, you know, I'm seeing a red farmhouse. And then, but I'm also seeing this city area, where there's an official building, and to the east of that is a river or a seaport or something, water, and there's a fountain and there's cobblestones, and this is the way the building looks and XYZ. And she's like, well, you know, I don't know, I mean, I live in the city, the farmhouse thing, maybe that's a metaphor is again, you know, maybe I don't know. And, you know, what, the city, you know, that sounds like some areas I've been in. And she told me, the city that she was living in. And I went back, and I use Google Maps. And this was a place. This is a country, I've never been to a city, I've never been to a city I didn't know anything about.

And I looked, and I had depicted the official like the city hall building, and everything around it, and had drawn it out on a map, I could, you know, overlay it on top of Google Maps, I was kind of blown away by that, but still didn't know what the red farmhouse meant. And so, you know, again, another couple months go by, and I get an email from this person. And she said, I wanted to send you this picture. This is the view out of the window of the house that I'm now renting. And looking out the you know, the kitchen, or I don't know which window it was the window, the main large window, and her house was a red farmhouse, she an opportunity to move to the country to rent a rent a house that was part of a farmstead and her landlord lived in the red farmhouse. And it was exactly what had happened in my vision. And I was a little bit blown away. I've all you know, not, again, not by my own abilities, but by the things the spirits were showing me for this person. I have since had many, many, many other experiences that I could not have possibly made up. So I was working with Rhys very recently working with a client. And I don't think that I'm particularly psychic, or clairvoyant or what have you, but when I'm in Journey, spirits sometimes show me things that are factually empirically accurate, and can be proven almost immediately. So I was working with a client not that long ago, over zoom, she lives in another part of the country. And, you know, I'm journeying for her. And during my journey, I keep seeing this little black and white kitten. And it's like, rubbing up against her and standing next to her and, you know, just really seems to want to be around her. So, you know, I'm talking to her resume, and I come back and I, and I say I, you know, I don't know if this means anything to you. But during my journey, I just keep seeing this. This black and white kitten. And she said, I just bought a black and white kitten. And it has been trying to get in this room with me, since I have been on the Zoom call with you. And I said, we'll let her in because she wants she really wants to be next to you. And she left the kitten in and brought it up on the, on the I think she was sitting on a bed or a couch or something. And she led her up on it. And the kitten was just pleased as punch being next to her rubbing up against her just as I'd seen in my journey. So there have been some very, very immediately verifiable moments in journeying for me when I've been able to determine determine certain factual things and sometimes things take time. I've sort of predicted maybe some health conditions that people might experience to, you know, clients to help them warm things. And again, I'm not saying any of this to brag or say that I'm special. I think anybody can develop this ability Um, but again, it has to be an ability that's developed, that's worked on. So when you pick up a deck of tarot cards, or you, you know, roll dice or you use a pendulum, really the what's going on as you are the interface between the spirit world and these tools, but also between these tools in the spirit world. And if you're doing the reading for a person or yourself, you have to surface these, these things into consciousness.

So I want to spend a little bit of time about predicting the future. And I just, you know, I just talked about a couple of, or at least an incident. Well, there were a couple, a couple that I discussed. One was the red farmhouse incident that one's always stands out for me because it was the first time I had done divination, shamanic Lee and, you know, read farmhouses, pretty visual. It was, you know, bright as day sort of visual kind of thing. And, you know, getting the email from from this person later on was pretty cool. I love to get confirmation. I had a client very recently, who I predicted some health, some health issue for him, like, you got to watch out for this. And she contacted me and like, Oh, yes, that arose. That was a problem. I'm a bit blown away that you were able to see that set me up. I mean, I get it, I understand. But sometimes the spirits show me things. And as a shamanic practitioner, I don't take credit for any of this stuff. This is all stuff coming from the spirits. They're showing me things. I don't, I don't particularly have the ability to. I'm not particularly clairvoyant, or psychic, or I guess I'm probably more sensitive to most people. Because I work in this field, I work in a field that involves spiritual healing and divination and that sort of thing. So I've developed some sensitivity, but I don't think I was born with it or anything like that. Um, so let me dive into predicting the future and how I think that works. And what are the implications for being able to predict the future? Like if I could predict the future with 100% accuracy? What does that mean for freewill? Like if I, you know, if I was 100% accurate in my future predictions, and I say tomorrow, I'm going to have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Does that mean I can no longer choose to not have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch tomorrow. And my feeling about that is no, we we have freewill. Things are not predestined in that way. And I have not yet heard of anyone being able to predict lottery numbers. So we have this lottery here in many states in the US called Powerball. And your chances of winning that are something like one and 300 million, you are much more likely to get hit by lightning multiple times in your life than you are to win that lottery. There are many things you are more likely to die in a car accident driving to the store to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery. So, there are many many you know the probabilities are our you know immense, and so, when somebody is predicting the future, the physical reality future, so, on a spiritual level, there are subtle levels where time starts to break down because we know that time is very much linked to mass matter. Right? And so on the physical and the etheric and even the someone on the astral levels time still affects things because these things in the physical level for sure because there's mass there, but the etheric is sort of like the next spiritual level and you know, the etheric is is affected by time and the astral a little less so, it's even more subtle, and the mental level not so much affected by time. So there you know, there's these different levels to reality to human reality, or non human reality as well. And so, what I think happens with the future a little right now I exist on the physical, the etheric, the astral, and is that there are a set of probabilities That can happen. Right? There are things that are more probable and less probable, given the given the set of, you know, almost infinite circumstances that are going on right now. So, for example, it is very probable that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, because the earth hasn't changed the way that it spins. Could the earth change the way that it spins?

You know, I'm guessing that maybe there are some circumstances under which that could happen. Maybe it gets hit by a giant asteroid that changes the direction of its spin or something I don't know. I don't know. But it is incredibly improbable. And so we can all predict that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. And we would all be sort of spot on probably spot on accurate because that is, there are some significant probabilities there, the probabilities against that. So I think future prediction is about reading probabilities. And that in some systems of divination, I know Taro, particularly Lenormand, says, you know, their particular spreads that say, this is the result of you go down the path that you're currently going down. Right, and so that it's looking at the probabilities based on what's going on right now. Now, you can make different choices, you can change those probabilities. My friend, when I told her, you're going to move to a place of the red farmhouse could have nots, she could have, you know, that opportunity presented itself said, Well, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna make that not happen. And I'm chosen a different place to live. So could have definitely, or, you know, could have, could have definitely done something to foil that, you know, that sort of thing. So, and again, this also works with things that we're trying to manifest. I think manifestation divination are closely related. I'll talk about that sometime in the future on a different podcast. But I think, you know, so let's say that I predict, say, somebody asks me about losing weight, something people are concerned with, they want to manifest, they have blocks to that, and I say, oh, you know, you're working out, you're dieting, all these things are going on, and I do a reading and it says, you know, if you go down this path, you know, you are going to lose the weight you want to lose in the next three months. And the person takes that information says, Wow, I'm going to lose that weight in the next three months, no matter what I do. And I'm going to go out and eat six cheeseburgers and drink nine milk shakes every day. Well, that predictions not gonna come true. Because the person has taken the information and changed the probable course of things. So let's talk about the lottery. I like to use that one, because it's an extreme example, right? If if, you know, divination were 100% accurate, if we could predict all probabilities based on a huge amount of chaos, you know, I could tell you exactly what the lottery numbers are going to be tomorrow, or whenever they draw the lottery and keep up on it. So lottery there, they, the way they draw it here, I believe, is that they have these machines that are full of, or a machine that's full of these ping pong balls with numbers on them. And the machine gets mixed up in at a random time that you know, somebody, you know, sort of random, somebody like pushes a button and then six numbers are drawn or something or however many it is, right. And so the odds of picking those exact numbers are something like one in 300 million. So trying to predict that you're trying to predict a one in 300 million thing. There's a lot of probabilistic stuff happening, right? So first of all, those balls are physical objects, and they're very light. And they're affected by things like air currents, movements, vibrations in the room, and they're inside this giant machine that's stirring that's going to stir them up later. And the machine is probably stored away. I think, you know, I don't know, but it's probably locked up. So people can't tamper with it. Well, you know, in between drawings and then wheeled out and That moves those balls around when it's wheeled out. So there is a lot of chaos in the system, meaning there's a lot of things that aren't fitting certain patterns may be very challenging, or nearly impossible to predict something like that or to affect something like that. See, I think manifestation is about affecting probabilities.

You know, and I think divination of the future is about determining is about tapping into those probable futures. Now we have, you know, a relative relatively infinite, isn't that a weird word, phrase, relatively infinite. That just means to me, it's so close to infinite that I can't, I can't measure or count, right, an infinite number of probabilities. And every time we make a freewill choice, we split off from the probabilities. So you know, from from a choice that we didn't make or a different choice that we could have made, we split off from that set of probabilities and affect the future. And we can do things very easily, physically, very easily to manifest stuff. When I say manifest, I mean, like, you know, let's say I want to manifest a clay pot, I can go buy some clay and a throwing wheel and learn how to,

you know, learn how to make a clay pot on a on a wheel. And I can manifest that way physically. That's very easy. And that's really affecting a bunch of probabilities when they go out and buy clay and learn how to, you know, throw clay on a wheel and how to spin and, or whatever the, whatever the phrases are for making clay pots. Okay, that's different than sitting at my table and wishing real hard and expecting a clay pot to show up on my table to manifest. Could that happen? Absolutely. And then infinite in the expanding universe, anything is possible. And we know that through quantum tunneling, things can disappear and appear in random locations, does something that macro happen,

like, do clay pots, or, you know, cars or whatever, disappear and reappear in other places frequently? Not that much, not so much. Okay, so it's easier, it's easier to affect the probabilities of something physical happening physically. So the reason it's so hard to predict the lottery is that there's so much chaos in the system, every little movement, every little air currents, every, you know, you figure the electricity running through machine is running at 60 cycles per second, but it's probably not all that clean, there's probably a lot of fluctuation in that and every little thing affects the system. And we can't account for all of that we can't necessarily or you know, if you could, it would be something pretty impressive to determine all in the correct sort of future path that we're going down. And this has implications for, you know, I've done some things with parallel lives when we, you know, make choices, and we split off. And this is what I said, we have sort of infinite parallel lives, different sets of probabilities playing out in different parallel universes. You know, and that sounds very sci fi or very fantasy or whatever. But I have had some experience with doing this work. And it does seem to be a thing. And it fits well into my model of how divination works. Right? So, um, you know, somebody comes to me, I don't do I don't do love. I don't really do love work. Like, I don't make people fall in love with other people. I think love magic like that is probably fairly it's not a good thing, like anything we're doing where we're trying to take away somebody's free will is not fantastic. And I also wouldn't do divination work or somebody who's like, what is my what is my soulmate look like or you know, what have you. But if somebody were interested in finding a partner, and I've done work with people who this has been a priority for them, you know, it's, you know, I want to find a partner. And I really just want you know, what I want to happen is I walk in my house and the phone rings And my soulmate is on the other end of the line waiting to meet me. And I'm very realistic with people and say, that's not going to happen. That doesn't happen, okay? Or I can predict with some degree of

certainty that those kinds of things are very rare, if not zero occurrences. So, you know, if you want to meet somebody, and eventually find your soulmate, I might do divination for you for you and say, what would be in your best interest in meeting somebody who would be suitable for you, and I might get information along the lines of, well, you know, you really should take care of your take care of your parents, because people, you know, maybe unfortunate, but people do. First impressions are based on appearance. And, you know, you need to learn to talk to people, because if you are so shy, that you can never have a conversation with somebody, nobody is going to come up and force themselves upon you. They're like, I'm your soulmate. You we are now dating. And I think that's a little bit of what people kind of expect with spiritual manifestation and divination and that sort of thing. So, you know, when I work with people on that stuff, I'm not going to tell them who their soulmate is, I'm not going to tell them how to force somebody they're obsessed with to fall in love with them,

any of those things. But what I might do say, okay, you know, if you want to increase your chances of meeting a partner, there'll be suitable for you, here are some things that you can do that will, you know, turn you towards those probabilities that will help help those things, help those probabilities, increase them, help things come into fruition

I think it's gonna be very ineffective. And so I like to use a car analogy. We talked about firing on all cylinders, right? So cars work with cylinders. At least most do electric cars don't have cylinders, but gasoline engines have cylinders. And they, they, you know, they're in these chambers. They're these chambers where the gas essentially has little controlled explosions that make the pistons move.

And that turn the machinery in the engine that makes your cargo. So if you have six cylinders in your car, you are firing on all cylinders. You're working at maximum capacity. If you have six cylinders in your car and so if you have body mind, spirit, soul body, spirit body astral body, divine body, bliss body We all have these, you know, all of these components to you. And you are, you know, half of them are doing one thing and half of them are doing another thing, you're not firing all cylinders, you're not going to be very effective.

So if I want to lose some excess body fat, and I realize I'm using this, I'm just using this because it's an easy example. This is No, I don't want to go down the whole pathway of our unhealthy obsession with things like weight and dieting, and that sort of thing. But let's say for health reasons, it's an easy example, because it's physical. And I can explain how we override that or override ourselves with wrong action. So let's say I want to, for health reasons, lose in excess 10 pounds of body weight. What am I going to do? Well, on physical level, I'm going to start going to the gym, or workout or run or, you know, what have you and start to eat, right. But I also have to get my mind and emotions behind that. Because it's going to be so hard to eat right? People are emotional eaters, it's me so hard to continue to eat, right? It's going to be so hard to get to the gym, if I don't have my mind and emotions in alignment. And here is a real secret, my friends, a real spiritual secrets to manifesting the life that you want. The things that you want in your life, get into alignment. And that means your mind, body and spirit are acting as one. You are firing on all cylinders, you're all moving in the same direction. And there you know there are that's sounds very easy. It is not always very easy to do that. It's hard to change our minds. It's hard to change habits. It's hard to know how to do things spiritually, that affects the physical world. You know, but knowing that knowing that you need to be in alignment, you can take steps to learn how to do that, to do that to do practices, what have you. There are a lot of different ways to go about that. I'm not saying that. I don't recommend shamanism as a path to everyone. Not on here proselytizing. We don't do that. But there are ways to do that. There are lots of ways to do that shamanic Lee is just one of those. There are meditative ways there are strictly psychological ways. Although you know, at some point that psychology will, will move over into spirituality as well. Our mind, body and spirit are connected. They're all one big continuum. These are not separate things. I realize I've gotten a little far off the beaten path of divination. But it's important for me to talk about freewill because we have freewill. And I do things to support people's free will and autonomy and spiritual sovereignty. And, you know, let me be clear that I don't think sovereignty necessarily means I do whatever I want. And there are no repercussions for that. No, I'm sorry, that's not sovereignty, that is being a sociopath. You know, we're going through pandemic right now. And there are a good portion of the world who are resisting some of the very easy things that we could be doing to prevent people from getting sick and dying. And they refuse to in the name of their freedoms. And it's a little bit you know, not to get too political. And for me, it's not even a political issue. It's a matter of being selfish. Yes, you have freewill. You have freewill. You know, but that doesn't mean you're free from the repercussions of your actions. You're free to make whatever choices you're what you want. You have freewill, you can go out and murder somebody tomorrow. That is your free will. And you have that. But that doesn't mean you get away with it. But it doesn't mean you don't go to jail. That doesn't mean we don't take you out of society. Because your freewill is interfering with my freewill, my free will to live. It is my right and my freewill to live. It It sounds almost contradictory but it's not that hard concept to grasp. You're absolutely free to make whatever choice as you want,

but you're not free from the repercussions of those choices. If I decide that I can fly by jumping off a 14 story building, that is my choice, but gravity is going to intervene, and I'm going to fall to my death. And that in no way takes away my freewill. I have made my choice. I've decided I can fly. I chose that. But physics says otherwise there are repercussions for actions and that has that has repercussions are the natural consequences of the exercise of freewill? So today, I, you know, I hear so many people talking about freedom, as in free will, meaning I do whatever I want. And there are no repercussions. And what kind of a world would we live in? If that were the case? Right. My Freedom says I can drive drunk on the road. And if I get into a car accident and kill a family, then nothing can happen to me because that was my freedom. It's my freedom to do that. No, no, it is not. I'm sorry. It is my freedom to pollute the environment and cause health problems for everyone because that's my freewill. Sure, it's your freewill to choose to do that. But there are going to be repercussions for that. So let's, you know, let's start being mature about freedom. Let's start being let's start talking, you know, talking about that. So it's important for me to discuss freewill, I realized I went off on a little bit of a political rant, because they're talking about predicting the future. And I don't believe that doing future predictions takes away our freewill at all. Because we can do things to alter. So these are probable futures. When we do predictions, there's a certain amount of probability it's more probable than not given certain given current circumstances, and those current circumstances can change. Right? I can predict, I'm going to get a raise at work next week. You know, and show up to work naked, and I'm probably going to get fired. But my prediction said I was going to get a race. Sure. But I stymied that. I stymied that prediction by exercising my free will. And then there were repercussions because I got fired. I'm in, in shamanism a really good like one of the things we'll ask in divination is what is likely to happen if I do like if I'm trying to decide between different choices. So if you are trying to pick between I've got two job offers, and which one should I pick? I don't do should I predictions? What I do is what, you know, the divination journey that I would do, the question would be, what might it be like? If I chose Job A? And what might it be like, if I chose job B, and then I can report those things back to the client I'm doing work for. So then I can say, well, you know, in scenario one, I see long term growth and this and that, but you seem really bored with your job and job to it seems shorter, lasting, but it's more exciting, and there's more money and, and I am not taking away anyone's free will, given the information that they have, they can make their choices, job one or job to whatever sounds better to them.

That sort of thing. And so, for example, when I saw, you know, I saw a problem, a potential problem with somebody, a client's knee, when I was doing a diagnostic journey for them, I'm like, I don't know if you have knee problems yet. But, you know, just be aware and keep an eye on your knees. You know, it looks like there's something there. I don't think it's arthritis or whatever. But you know, if it gets painful or whatever, just seek some medical attention to go okay, you know, whatever. And then she contacted me later and said, You know, I was out for a bike ride and all of a sudden my knees started to really kill me, you know, really be so painful and I decided to stop biking and take a break from that. And I'm like, well That was a good choice. You know, and she could have ignored what I said to keep an eye on the on her knees and kept going and maybe cause some damage. So she had freewill, she had free will to choose what to do with that information. I never tried to take freewill away from anybody. But I will make people aware of their consequences should they exercise certain parts of freewill. So anyway, I've talked about a lot of things. But this has mainly been about divination. I don't know if you do divination or if you have a favorite method of divination. But it's something it can be fun, can be light hearted, it can be something you do at a party, it can be you know, you don't have to if you you're interested in divination, something you can, you know, dip your toes into, you don't have to dive in headfirst and be the world's greatest tarot card reader or scryer, or what have you, right off the bat. And you can try different things you can try eaching or you can try, I don't know, all kinds of stuff out there. Don't don't sacrifice animals, please. But or people don't sacrifice people either. But, you know, give some stuff a try. But keep those things in mind that anything in the future is just probabilities. Things that are more chaotic, meaning they have you know, more probabilities are much harder to follow the line so to speak down the path and figure out what they're going to be and you can intervene with probable futures using your freewill so if you something you know there have there are many stories about people seeing disasters, plane crashes and whatever and deciding not to get on a plane and you know, there's a there's a probability there and they can you can make choices to keep yourself safe and sane and happy and healthy.

So with that, I will leave you for this time. I hope you stay happy and healthy. I hope to hear from you. Please visit my website I have a I also have a brand new YouTube channel which you can get to from my website. My website is maineshaman maineshaman.com.

Announcer 1:02:49

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John more. For more info or to contact John go to Maineshaman.com That's maineshahman.com

Ep34 Divination

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:47

I wish you good morning, though I don't know what time of day it is. I apologize. My voice sounds a little scratchy this morning. I am just getting over a little cold. Nothing too serious. Not to worry. But there has been a cold that has hit everyone. Everyone I know. It is not COVID fortunately, and I've only had it for a couple of days. And I feel much better now that my voice is getting worse. I'm going to be sipping some hot beverage at while I normally sip hot beverage while I do this anyway. Hmm, yeah. So I apologize for my voice. Although it does sound deeper, I can do this some, you know, deeper voice thing cuz my voice is a little scratchy. It's totally fine. I'm good. But as I, as I talk to you this morning, it is we are well into fall now, almost almost to October as I as I'm recording this, and that it's dark, like, in the morning. It's one of the things about fall in winter here in the northern part of the US. It the sun comes up later, and it sets earlier. And that'll happen until winter solstice. In January. You know, some people get seasonal affective disorder, right? They get sort of seasonal depression. And I understand that, like, you know, sunlight really affects us significantly. It affects, you know, our body chemistry and our, you know, the way our brain works and our hormones and all kinds of stuff, you know, just vitamin D alone from the sun light on your skin, you know, in this part of the world, they basically say that everybody should be taking vitamin D, between October and April every year. So anyway, today I'm going to talk hopefully, this will be a little bit of fun, but useful information. And I'm going to talk about divination. And divination is a sort of a, you know, a fun topic, I think, I hope. But, you know, divination is so widely practiced all over the world, all kinds of cultures have different different ways of doing divination, and some are, like super common all over the world. And someone talk about that, and then I'm gonna talk about can you see the future? Um, let's talk about divination a little bit. What is it? What does divination mean? Well, it comes from, you know, the Latin words for to foresee to foretell to predict so it does sort of imply seeing the future. Or it's related to it's related to the word divinity, to be inspired by God to get insight into a question, right. And you know, there are there have been throughout time there have been rituals for divinations appeasement to Gods and you know, these things are obviously called by different names, in different languages in different different cultures. Some of you know, you might think of divination you know, a really, really common one, at least around here is reading tarot cards, right? cartoon cartomancy. There are different you know, lots of people read different kinds of cards, but tarot cards are incredibly popular and I do a little work with Tarot, but I also read another deck which is a little less popular called the Lenormand Decades from the, from the 18th century, comes out of Germany and France. And it was like the, like the Tarot and like regular, you know, playing cards came from a game.

You know, they were used to play used to play games, and then somebody picked them up and started to use them to do divination, to predict things and to give people insight into questions. So you know what I'm gonna talk about them and talk about the tools of divination, and some of the different kinds of divination that are out there. And I'm going to talk about my take on how it works, and how predicting the future works. And why if, you know, if we can divine things, can we win the lottery? For example, can we get, you know, can we get the numbers from the lottery? Why not? Right? If we can, if we can predict the future, I'm gonna talk about my take on all of this, you may have a different take, and that's totally fine. But this is come from experience. And my background in divination comes through shamanism, and I don't do divinatory work kind of on its own, right, people don't come to me for psychic readings are any, any of that sort of thing. But what I, what I do is I work with people from a healing perspective, and I always do journey work in the beginning to gain insight into whatever problem they've come to me with, or, you know, questions that they have, or what healing work should be done, and what their part is in that, in that sort of thing. So, um, you know, from that, and that's a form of, you know, it's a form of divination. I just happens to be in, you know, inch dramatic journey. And you want to talk a little bit about that, as well. We'll talk about why. Why that matters. And I you know, maybe I'll give you a couple of stories. I don't like to, I don't like to come off as bragging about stuff. So but I do want to share a couple of stories of doing divination, work for people where, you know, something was uncannily spot on as an example. And, you know, when I do that, I'm not taking credit for the work. So I hope, I hope that comes through. When I when I get information, I always get it through helping spirits, I'm not doing the work, I'm just sort of translating it and receiving the message and passing it on. So it's not my information. So I hope it doesn't come across as a brag, but I want to give a couple of examples. I will say that when I started in shamanism, I started studying shamanism. You know, however, many years ago that was now you know, and I was going through, I was going through an apprenticeship with my teacher. And, you know, it was it was not something I wanted to do. You know, I don't want to do divination work. And they think what held me back at that time, was that I was afraid of being wrong. And if I were wrong, it would tell me that I didn't know what I was doing, or that what I was doing was fake, or, you know, that sort of thing. And I also didn't want to give really generic stuff, right? Because you can, you know, there's this, there's this thing with people who are fake psychics, or fake readers, or whatever. And they'll say, there's somebody in your life whose first name starts with a letter J. And of course, everybody knows Jason, john, Jennifer or you know, whatever in whatever is common in your hair. Yeah. Oh, yes, I do know a person in my life of the letter J. Oh, you know, I don't want to do that either. But, you know, I surrendered to it and turned out to be something I was fairly, fairly, fairly good at. And not, you know, I don't put any again, I don't put any of the skill. There's not a skill, this skill for me is to get out of the way and not try to think I know more, or interpret the information that comes in. So when I say See information in journey for a client I just relate it and it doesn't necessarily always mean something to me I don't know you know oh I see I'll give an example and with one client you know I was

this person you know lived in an area of the world that is doesn't have a lot of turtles right? And I was like I keep seeing this turtle like almost like swimming around and I don't know if that means anything to you. Well, you know, my grandmother who passed away a few years ago collected turtles and she even had turtles which is weird in this part of the world and you know, there was there was a connection for her there and it meant didn't mean anything to me so I was able to you know, sort of get out of the way and just relay the information and she could do with it what you know, she could she could take the information and and use it in whatever way made sense for her. So you know, with divination, the person who's who's providing the information, no matter where it comes from, that is that is really the key. And so there are all kinds of different tools of divination. So this morning, just out of curiosity, before I started recording this podcast, I looked up the Wikipedia page for methods of divination and if you if you want to you can do the same thing and it is fascinating Lee huge so there's all of these different words that are relate to different types of divination, a lot of them end with the word Mansi like Abba Mansi is you know, like the using birds the movement of birds to as a form of divination. biblio Mansi or, or charter Mansi is, you know, using using books, you know, usually you would turn to, you know, grab a book off the shelf, turn to a random page and point and then read that read whatever was under your finger as a way to answer a question. But there's tons and tons I mean, hot, probably hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of different forms of divination from throwing bones throwing dice. There's also you know, augury are seeing when you see people look into a crystal ball or look into fire or their stories of people using like looking at their thumbnails some sort of reflective surface to to see things and so you know, I just I find it interesting that that this is so common and forms of divination they're sort of forms of divination that show up over and over again you know, like reading the end trails of animals. Sorry for that you know, a bit of disgustingness but reading the entrails of animals is pretty common in lots of cultures you know, whether the animals were hunter hunted or ritually sacrificed or killed for food that seems to be you know, super common you know, throwing bones or lots or you know, some kind of thing where you throw things on the ground and see where they land I know there are cultures where they throw cowrie shells, little sea shells out and read those so there's all kinds of methods and you know tools for divination. There are a few that I like besides doing journeying I do like cartomancy I, and my current preferred deck is Lenormand deck, as I said earlier, and I like it because I can get I can do you know, I can pull nine cards and get a huge amount of information from it and very specific, and really hone in on the information. You know, I like Tarot as well. And I like some of the traditional decks like the rider Waite tarot deck because there is lots of alchemical symbolism, and astrological symbolism and all kinds of stuff in there. So I just, you know, I like that stuff. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of depth in Taro, where Lenormand is very simple. The symbols are very simple, but the combinations and the positions that the cards come up in Are you know, less A lot of nuance to the, to the meaning. So regardless, you know, it shouldn't be a surprise that the reader or the person doing the divination is really the important factor here, right? So

you know, anybody can get a, you know, deck of tarot cards and a book on what the, what the cards mean and throw out a spread. But really good readers Sears, what have you are using the cards as sort of a springboard for their intuition. And I would say that's true for most forms of divination, you know, divinatory work using outside tools, whether that be throwing bones, or rocks, or, you know, whatever there are, you know, there are some simpler systems where you, you know, it's very technical, there are the, there's a form of throwing these discs of coconut shells, and, you know, the way they land gives you Yes, or no answers. Or, you know, throwing, throwing coins for eaching, reading, for example, would give you very specific technical answers to things. But I still think interpreting that stuff falls into the realm of intuition. And somebody who's going to be really good at any of those things is going to come through intuitively. So let's, you know, let's talk a little bit about what, you know, what I think is going on, when somebody shuffles a deck of tarot cards, or throws bones or, you know, that sort of thing. So I think the, you know, the way that it works is that there's a certain amount of chaos and randomness. And if I'm holding, if I'm holding a deck of cards, and I shuffle it, you know, I am not a machine that's doing, you know, that is, you know, going to shuffle the same way every single time, there is amount of chaos entered, you know, physical chaos entered into the system. And if I, you know, have a, you know, have an intention about the question I'm asking, or the person I'm reading for, or that sort of thing, you know, will say that I, you know, my system of chaos, my body can interact with these cards, so that they will come up in a certain order. And I think that is true for lots of sort of lot casting, ways of divination, throwing bones, throwing coins, you know, rocks, that sort of thing. So we're looking at systems of chaos, where there can be all kinds of different answers, and, you know, so then the cards, you know, then I pull the cards or throw the lats or whatever. And then that's where the interpretation starts, right. And, you know, good a good reading, you know, if I was working with a person and working with deck of cards would have the person cut the deck of cards. And the reason is, I'm using their intuition to know where to cut the cards so that the reading is tailored to them. And so that there's intuition working there as well. There's intuition telling me how many times to shuffle, and I feel there's a point at which I feel Okay, that's enough. You know, the deck is the way it's supposed to be. And then, you know, the person I'm reading for would, would use their intuition to decide where to cut the deck. And then this is where the work kind of begins, you know, it would lay the cards out. And there are, you know, specific meanings of the cards, but, you know, I would tailor them using my intuition to the person, the person that I'm reading the questions that are coming up the situation, you know, gather more information and that way I would be able to, you know, slip into the space where my intuition is coming through.

Now I do here in my home state of Maine, I have a spot on the radio once a week where listeners call in and have me interpret their dreams I do that is only romancey Which is divination by dreams. You know, and some of that is divinatory, where I'm like, Okay, this is, you know, this means this for you. But very frequently people just want like the meaning Why am I dreaming this or that? And, you know, I could be one of those people who looks into looks in a dream dictionary and decides what a dream means based on you know, x, y, z, you dreamed of a baby, that means you are I don't know, I don't even know, because I don't own a dream diction. But whatever, you know, you've seen them, there are books that say, this is what this dream means. All of that, all of it is hogwash. Because everybody's dream system of symbols is completely different. They're there, there are commonalities, right, there are commonalities, a few commonalities, there are some symbols that are somewhat universal. Very frequently, for example, water is symbolic of, sort of the unconscious, the unconscious parts of ourselves, but not always. And so there is a tremendous amount of contexts. And when I interact with these people, you know, over the, I'm on the phone, they're on the phone, there, there is a point at which I get just intuitive information from helping spirits to interpret their dream. And, you know, there was one last week where no a woman kept getting in her dream, which is recurring, people kept handing her other people's babies and she was dropping them and this and that, and, you know, I got a clear, a very clear message that she was, this was about her shouldering too much responsibility, taking things on that were not necessarily her responsibility or taking too much responsibility for, for what was going on. And in, you know, she admitted that she was a, you know, small business owner, and she was kind of a perfectionist where everything had to be run her way. And so she, she was doing everything, and her life was kind of crazy. And then I also said, You know, I get the feeling that you're worried about either gossip, or what people are, are thinking about you, and she's like, Oh, my gosh, I am so worried. Now, you know, only the smallest part of that came from the dream symbolism, you know, the larger part of that came intuitively. And, you know, it would have been, you know, I might have been able to get more, you know, these segments are like, five minutes long. So I don't get a tremendous amount of time to spend with the person who's calling in. But I know, if I were sitting across from the person, I would be looking at their body language and getting information that way. And that's not, that's not cheating. That's not cheating. It's taking in all of the information that I have, which includes intuitive information, information that I haven't gathered from physical senses, but also the information that I've gathered from physical senses, right? Because, um, you know, if she just called in and they said, okay, she had a dream, what does it mean and I didn't have any of the information. Um, you know, I most likely wouldn't have been able to get anything without going into journey. I could potentially journey and get some information from her, but I do like it. It's very helpful for me to combine what I know with information that's coming to me from spirit and I think that's true and all divination and I don't think it's cheating it's not it's not cheating it you know, anything that gives you better information. If you're just reading somebody's physical body and not providing intuitive information that would be not, you know, that would be not divination, it would be something else. And maybe it's fine in a certain context, right? So for example, therapists, I was talking to someone I know who is a therapist, and

I, you know, I don't have a background in therapy haven't been trained in it, but they are trained or they know both when somebody is lying to them, right? They can tell when somebody lying to them by reading body language and voice cues and that sort of thing. And, and they can tell, like if somebody is hiding, like has hidden anger or like there are their feelings that they're not talking about. And some of that might be intuitive, but there is, you know, there is training, there is experience that comes along with that there's there is reading body language, and you know, they're able to do that, because of the work that they do with people that are, you know, that is not the way that we, you know, we normally interact one on one with people. And they, you know, they interact at a, in a different way. And it gives them insight information. And the use that to provide better therapy to their clients, you know, to to, you know, see when somebody is being untruthful about something, and try to figure out why that why that is maybe or if somebody is hiding anger or some other feelings? Why are they hiding that? Why are they suppressing that? What's going on there? What's the problem there? So at least therapists who are good, who are really good do that? Which is why I realized, you know, nowadays, you know, with TV with COVID, there's a lot of remote therapy, and I think that's fine. Over video. I don't know, I mean, there, there are services out there where you can get just text based therapy where you're texting back and forth. And I don't know how maybe it's useful. Maybe it's useful to some people. I don't know how that I don't know how that is, but you're missing, missing some big components there. So So divination, and let's talk about predicting the future a little bit. And again, you know, I'm going to tell a couple personal stories, and this is not I hope you don't take it as a brag, I'm not trying to brag and say, hey, look at me, I'm this big psychic, I can get I'm not. And I'm not, I'm not particularly psychic. I don't. You know, when I'm when I'm in a space, and I'm doing work with somebody, I do get intuitive information. But most of my information comes from journaling. And it all comes from somebody, it all comes from helping spirits that I work with, none of it comes from me, I'm not generating the information. And so I give all credit to helping spirits. But I do want to talk, you know, I'll talk about how I think predicting things in the future works. And if we could, if we can predict things in the future, why can't we avoid things like terrorist attacks? Or why can't we avoid school shootings? Or why can't we win win the lottery, that's a great example winning the lottery. So this was a few years ago, I was working with a client who was living in a different country, I work with people all over the world. And she contacted me and said that she was having problems with the place she was living, she was living in an apartment in the city, where she lived. And there was, I believe, there was a rodent problem in the apartment, and there was a mold problem. And so she was she had to move out for health reasons. And, you know, when understands that it was causing health issues for her. And so she wanted some information, if I could gather information about where she might look for places to live, or where she was going to wind up or, you know, that sort of thing. So I said, Well, you know, I I don't know, I will do my best, I will try to see what I can see. And I, you know, haven't tried to predict the future a whole lot. But I'll you know, I'll look into it. So I, you know, it's a journey for her. And I kept seeing a red farmhouse out in the country.

And so I talked to her after the journey, and I said, Yeah, I see a red red farmhouse in the country. And she said, Well, I don't know, you know, I don't know what that means. I live in, I live in the city. So you know that, that not really helpful. I said, Well, you know, I'm sorry, I just give you the information that I get, and I don't know what it means. It might be metaphoric. You know, there might be an apartment with a picture of a red farm. house in the country, I don't know, you know, I don't know. But just take that information in and you know, something will come up that's related to that, I'm pretty sure that something will come up that's related to that, that will give you an indication of where you're supposed to be. And so I don't know, about three months later, or so I get an email from this woman. And she said, I want you to look at, I'm living in my new house, and I want you to look at the view out my living room window. And she sent me a photo, and our living room window was a red farmhouse out in the country, she had moved out of the city, she had found a house to rent that looked out over a red farmhouse. And it you know, and I will tell you that it was exactly as I had seen it in my journey. And so this was, you know, for me, like a real, a real hit, obviously, like a really accurate information. So we call that a hit, right? Um, but again, you know, the information didn't come from me, and I didn't know what to make of it. And the person at the time was like, I didn't, you know, I live in the city, I don't know, and I'm, you know, so my reaction to that as well. You know, I'm just happy, I'm telling you what I saw, and you can you believe it, just believe it, take it in. You know, but this is just, this is just what I saw, and I'm not gonna change, you know, I'm not gonna if I changed, oh, you know, no, no, no, now that I think about it, I saw an apartment two blocks away. That would be not, that would be not honest. And I'm not not going to do that. I do have, you have very strong ethics about the work that I do. And so when I journey, I always tell people, when I tell people, what I see, there are exceptions, where I hold things back from people, when I feel like it's going to be harmful. But other than that, I tell people exactly what I see. And they can make whatever meaning out of that they want to make, I don't interpret. That's not my, it's not my job to interpret. It's just to provide information. You know, although you know, in some divination work, if I'm working with cards, there's a level of interpreting, interpreting the cards, but even then, the person has to take the information in and figure out how that applies to their life. So what's going on with predicting the future. And this is, this is my take on, this is my take on how things work timewise. So first of all, you know, we experience time, in a very consistent way, you know, movement, we only move forward through time. And we, you know, we, you know, in time travel, you know, goes at the same pace, constantly, like a minute as a minute, although it certainly can feel like much longer than that, if you're waiting in line or something along those lines, or can go much faster if you're doing something you enjoy. Time flies when you're having fun, the old expression. So, you know, our experience of time can be very relative, when we're talking about measurement, and scientific, with scientific instruments, even just clocks, it's very consistent. Second, Second Amendment is a minute, and it only moves forward and that sort of thing. So we don't generally jump forward in time and jump back and that sort of thing. on a physical level, time and space are very, excuse me, very much linked to matter to mass. And, you know, E equals MC squared, right? Hmm. energy and matter are interchangeable. And, you know, time works differently in space than does on earth because of the mass of the Earth and gravity, you know, gravitational time dilation. And, you know, I won't go down the physics rabbit hole, but

time is very much linked to matter, to material things to mass, time and space. And so, Spirit does not have any mass in this world, in the middle world. And so spirit is sort of outside of time. I remember one time, it had been, I had finished, I'd finished training in my apprentice to ship my shamanic apprenticeship with my teacher and then I went out. She was teaching you know, there's about a year or year and a half later, she was teaching a soul retrieval seminar at a big retreat center and I had gone out, I sign up for that and going out there and met up with her, I saw her there, and she came up, and she gave me a big hug. And I said, you know, it's been a really long time, and she goes, time doesn't exist, and walked off, just kind of left me with that. Um, so, in the realm of spirit time, is a little loosey goosey. It's a little more flexible, it's a little it's a little more timeless. This is where prophecy and things like that come from. Um, but that leaves us with a bit of a conundrum, right? It leaves us with the idea that we have freewill. And how can we have freewill if the things of the future are already determined? And the answer to that is, I don't really think they are. I think when I get information about the future, it is probable probabilistic meaning there is there is probability not certainty. And I think there are many, many different timelines and we exist on, you know, many, many different dimensions. And we have parallel lives. And every time we make choices, there's a split off from the timeline. And so what people who are looking into the future are looking at our probabilities. If I continue down this path, what is the most probable outcome, right? If things stay the same, if things stay the way they are, what is likely to happen? And, you know, you can hone in on that a little bit, right, you can hone in on that, like, if I continue to eat pizza, three meals a day, I will get heart, you know, I will get heart disease in you know, the next five years, that's probably a really good prediction based on the way things are going right now. Um, but people who can, you know, travel in spirit or, you know, do predictive work or intuitive are tapping into the spiritual realms, which are, you know, following that the probable time following the probable timeline to bring back more accurate information. You know, that, you know, if you remember the the play Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare, beware the Ides of March, right, something bad is gonna happen the Ides of March. And, you know, being warned of this, Caesar still goes to the Senate and gets stabbed by everybody, and dies. So, the idea is that we still, we still have choices, we still have, you still can change your future if you get some divinatory work done. That says, you know, you are going to meet the love of your life at your current job. And tomorrow, you go quit your job. Well, you are going to intercede with that probable timeline. Um and, and so you can, you know, you can change the future outcomes. So, why then, if we can look at, you know, these probable outcomes, probable futures, why can we, why can't people just, you know, people who are psychic, why can't they just read, you know, win the lottery every single time? Well, you know, I don't know that that hasn't happened. But you know, when you think about the lottery, as a system of chaos, right.

You know, you take a Big Lottery like we have, we have a lottery called Powerball here in the in the US, and the odds of winning that are something like one in 200 and something million. That is a huge, you know, that is a huge probability to try to predict a huge set of things and the way that Powerball is cheap. In his, you know, they have a hot, you know, hopper full of ping pong balls with numbers on them. And those balls get, you know, pulled in. So there's, you know, there's this there's, they're stirred up and so there's a bunch, a whole lot of physical chaos that's introduced to the system that makes it very hard to predict, you know, you're predicting something with the accuracy of one and 200 million. If you could do that, that would be pretty amazing. You know, to follow, you know, the probability, you know, each timeline, the way that the, you know, the balls are sitting in the machine now, and the machines are moved out, and, you know, they just long and there's airflow and all kinds of things that go on chaos, right, chaos. So systems with a tremendous amount of chaos are really hard to predict. Look at the weather. Now, technology is making weather prediction. better, more accurate, but it's still not 100% still not on all the time. Because weather patterns, even though they can be very huge. And you can say, Okay, well, you know, we think this hurricane is going to travel here, but it might turn here and turn it because there's too much chaos in a system like that, to be 100% accurate with it, everything is probable. And, and you know, frequently hurricanes do things, or large storms do things that we that are not predicted. And that can cause significant problems. So weather is a thing. You know, that can be that can be very difficult because the amount of chaos in the system. There are things with, you know, there are certain things with less chaos right there, you know, like, I'm looking for a job, or I'm looking for a new place to live. Well, there are only so many places that I could look. And even though you know, in my example, it was very improbable that you know, this person was going to be looking in the country somehow that was on her timeline that she was going to move out of the city. And that was a that was a probability and the way I think the information came to me is my helping spirits said this is the most probable outcome based on a bunch of factors that I could have no idea about. And I realize like I'm trying to break a definition down into you know, a really scientific way but this is how I'm I'm fairly scientific. And the way that I think about things even though I'm, you know, a spiritual person and believe there are you know, that worlds exist that scientific instruments cannot measure at this point in time. And spirit is real and there are limits to, to what we can measure and understand with current science. So this is where I think divination can can flourish in this is where people that the person who is providing the information can, you know, as they get better and better. What we know is there are certain brainwave patterns that make people better at doing divinatory work or even doing shamanic journey. So when I journey when I do a shamanic journey, you know, it's basically like, an active meditation I close my eyes. in spirit, I go on a journey, but I use rhythm like drumming, or a rattle or, you know, a soundtrack with drums and rattles, normally how I journey and that's common all over the world using different types of rhythm. And what we discovered when we invented you know, electronic brain scanning and you know, brain monitoring equipment like e Gs.

It is that people who were journeying and who we're good at it and we're bringing back good information, as well as people who were getting hits, reading, you know, reading tarot cards or doing psychic reading. we're generating what we call theta brainwaves, which are, I believe, four to four to eight cycles per second. So these waves, you know, they go up and down, four to eight times a second, relatively slow compared to our normal waking state and even slower than when we're daydreaming or just falling asleep. So it's, it's a little paradoxical because you're wide awake, but your brain, your brainwaves, hat brainwaves have slowed down, but the amplitude becomes higher, right which means that the height of the waves the power of the waves, becomes higher. And for whatever reason this this brainwave state makes us more intuitive it makes us more in touch more in tune. And knowing that knowing that now is interesting because we can you know, if I put together a drum like a recorded drum track for example, I can do it at exactly the right timing to drive the exact brain waves that I want to so in fact I do there are if you go to my website, there are shamanic drumming tracks available there for free. You can you can listen to those and you know, if you I would say you can't Don't you know, don't try to journey on your own please seek out response, you know, responsible instruction on that because there are there are ins and outs to that but but you can you can find those and listen to those on my website. They're freely available under Resources and but those are tuned to the exact rhythm of the brainwave states that we want to use for journey. But people who are very good at divination, psychic reading or tarot cards, or reading bones, or whatever, generate these rhythms naturally on their own, or, or as, you know, as many as we have tested with, Eg equipment. I would definitely like to see more of that I would like to see more crossover with sort of science and science and spirit, I think it's, I think those things don't have to live in different worlds and deny one at one another. You know, I think there are there's this bogus idea that if you are a scientist, you have to be a material, material realist atheist or something. And that's not true. I know, lots of people who are scientists or in scientific fields who are spiritual. But they're, you know, those things live very frequently in separate worlds. There was a very recent somebody wrote a thesis on you know, quantum did some quantum physics testing to do with shamanism. I have to dig it up. It's very, very interesting stuff that we're using quantum ease and I don't exactly know how that works.

To see what was going on with shamanic healers and with, with the clients they were working with, and, you know, lots of interesting results there. You know, one thing is that their brainwaves would synchronize. So when the shamanic healer was working with the client, their their brainwaves started to go in sync. And that's pretty interesting phenomenon. But there's a lot there's a lot of really cool stuff there. And I do like that intersection of science and spirit. You know, and I do I understand that there are things that I experienced empirically that cannot be measured, or understood by science at this point in time. And that's fine. That's fine. But you know, I, I do have a scientific mind and I try to look at things like how does divination work? How do we predict the future but not be able to grab lottery numbers? And you know, I will journey about it, I'll ask my helping spirits, why can't you know? Why can't you give me the lottery numbers? Well, because you're not meant to win the lottery. And, um, you know, there's too much chaos in the system, we can give you some probabilities, but you know, it's one in one and 200 million. And you're more likely to get hit by lightning three times in your life than to win the lottery or two, you know, all kinds of things are much more likely than that probability wise. So having some understanding of probability is is I think, helpful as well. I think it's helpful for most people, we tend to us under we have cognitive bias Is that are we under estimating overestimate probabilities of things based on informational biases, cognitive biases, right? So there's one called the availability heuristic, which says that we overestimate things that we can, the occurrence of things that we can remember more easily. So things that are dramatic, like a plane crash or a crime, you know, some really horrible crime being reported or, you know, something like that those those stick out to us because they're dramatic. And so people that are exposed to news about those things tend to over estimate the occurrence of that, and that's called the availability heuristic. And so to counter that, you know, understanding a little bit about probability. So the thing with the, you know, the thing that the Coronavirus, you know, that's going on right now, this is a real tangent, I'm sorry. But the thing with this that's going on right now is there are there are a lot of people in United States for whatever reason, who are resisting, getting vaccinated and resisting getting into doing things that they should be doing, like wearing masks and that sort of thing. And they will frequently throw numbers around, but not really understand what they're talking about. And they'll say, Well, you know, if you're, you know, if you are vaccinated or unvaccinated, you have just as much chance of passing the virus on to others. So you know, the virus, you know, the vaccine is useless. And that's not true. I mean, it's 100% not true, you know, vaccinated people get the virus at a rate that is four times less than people who are unvaccinated. And so if you are vaccinated, you're four times less, you're four times less likely to become infected, and so you're four times less likely to be able to pass the virus on to anybody else. You know, that being said, you know, they are saying with it, you know, with the new variants that, you know, the viral load for somebody who's vaccinated or unvaccinated is very similar during a certain phase, and so it is, yet when somebody has an infection, there isn't much difference, however, you're just less likely to get infected, and be able to pass the virus on. So, you know, whatever your feelings about vaccination are, that position is just not true. It's a false position based on a real misunderstanding of probability. Very basic probability, not even, you know, not even really complex problem.

Right. So you know, if you're four times more likely to get get a contagious disease that you can pass on to others, you're four times more likely to be able to pass that on. Very simple, very simple. Um, and then people who are vaccinated are, are, you know, they tend to have fewer symptoms, and, and don't, you know, don't aren't sick for as long. So they may, they may be but we don't know yet contagious for a shorter period of time. And the viral load may reduce, you know, there's some statistics so but, you know, these people are going to latch on to ideas that support their firmly held beliefs, which is another cognitive bias. So, you know, it's called confirmation bias when we, we place more weight on evidence that supports our, our firmly held beliefs. And that is true for everyone, myself included. I'm not, you know, saying that I don't have biases, we all have biases. But that's just what's going on with what's going on here. I do, you know, I do try to look at data and try to allow allow information to change my mind about things certainly has with in shamanism where I was like, I don't, I'm not going to do divination, and I'm not going to be good at it. And then when I got into it, it turned out to be something. Something that I was good at, and something that I wind up doing quite a lot of. So taking in new information and changing your beliefs and opinions about things based on new or better information. That is a way to grow in this world, that is a way to understand things better. And honestly, just live a better life, you know, to not just deny everything that, you know, come comes across, that isn't what you already believe, take everything, take everything for checking, which is a statement that Lester Levinson, his spiritual teacher, I really like, used to say, take it for checking, meaning, you know, even when I, you know, tell clients something that I see in journey, or, you know, somebody reads your cards and gives you some information, it's, you really don't want to just place full weight on that, you always want to check on that and see how it plays out for you. Right, like, like, the person with the red farmhouse in my journey. You know, at first she was like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense, because I live in the city and XYZ. And, you know, it did, it did eventually turn out to be a thing, and she had to email me about it, which I was grateful for, I was happy for that. Because, you know, when I, when I can get a confirmation about something that that's, it makes me feel good for one thing, so there's that part of it, but it's also helpful for me to understand going forward, like, Okay, this is a, this is a probable future, and you might not see how you're going to get there. But something, something like this is very likely to show up on your path. You know, and, and that is, you know, that is precisely precisely what happened. You know, so there was a probability that she was moving out of the city, even if she hadn't accepted it, and there was a, you know, probability based on this house becoming available. Now, I don't know how many houses outside the city or in that area we're going to be up for, for rent, and it happened to have a red farmhouse outside of it, which is what I saw, that was the property, you know, these probabilities kind of lined up. And so it was a bit predictive. But can you predict the weather or maybe without equipment, you know, and there are people who are better at this way better at this than I am, I have had some unbelievable readings before where people got, you know, descriptions of people in my life and,

you know, like, what they're, you know, could even tell what their power animals were, and all kinds of stuff, all kinds of really cool information that could not have been, you know, the probability of guessing all of the information would have been very, very slim. So, yeah, I've had some very uncanny, uncannily accurate divination readings on my behalf. with people who do that sometimes for a living. And, you know, it's always pretty cool. When that happens. I'm not a person who goes to get my tarot cards, read a whole lot or, you know, get psychic readings a whole lot, or that sort of thing. You know, there are people in my life who will read my cards once in a while, you know, like, as a favor, or, you know, or for fun, or, you know, see what, see what's going on. But, you know, and I and I do my own divination work very frequently. But yeah, when it's, when it's on, it's kind of cool. Like, it feels it feels cool when when it's on. You know, and you get some really good information about that. You know, and I've been given, I've been given some warnings about some people doing some nefarious things in my direction, and that's helpful as well. So I can prevent some problems, which I've done, and we're, you know, and worked out really well. You know, I'll wrap up with one thing. So you know, if you are if you are into divination in any way, if you're into readings or scrying, or doing cards or you know, what have you there's a little piece of ethical advice I want to offer, because I like these. I always like to have at least one thing that is sort of useful. In my world in the demonic world, we people who are behaving ethically Do not do work on behalf of people without their permission. So I would not do divinatory work for somebody without them knowing. So I am not going to, you know, read a friend's cards to see what's up for them, if they weren't knowledgeable about it, and gave me their explicit permission. Um, you know, there, there's some things that can happen, where, you know, I've done readings for people, and I say, you know, oh, I see something happening, I see something happening for your son. And this is this is coming up. And this is a problem that you need to be aware of. But I'm not actually doing the work on behalf of the son who's not in the room, I'm doing the work on behalf of this person. And it's a fine line. But I'll tell you that I was I was at I was at a class I was at a drum making classes making my own drum, I have a lot, I have a lot of drums, but was making my own demonic drum with you know, Native American Crafts person who spiritual crafts person who took us through this whole spiritual process of building a hoop drum, and it was very cool event. And whenever in on one of the breaks, I was talking, just talking to a woman chatting with her and she's like, she was a professional psychic, she did readings for a living. And all of a sudden, she started diving into personal stuff about me, you know, she was going into some stuff from my past some traumatic stuff, as a matter of fact, she's like, Well, you know, I do psychic readings for a living and I can see that this happened to you when you were this age and this and she was right, but what a violation. For one thing, she could have risked re traumatizing me, but for the other thing, I didn't give her permission to do that. And it's sort of like rifling through someone's underwear drawer. That's what it felt like. So, you know, ethically don't mess around in other people's business. You know, you frequently if you do divinatory work, you'll get information about other people that are associated with the work that you're doing. So if I'm, you know, I'm writing a book right now and I, like, you know, did did a reading a card reading of,

you know, some information about pub, you know, publishing and that sort of thing. And some some information came up about you know, an older and older woman who's a personal friend, and, you know, in business and dah, dah, and I was like, okay, you know, so there was some information about somebody who I think is, is going to wind up helping me helping me with this book and so but I wasn't during the reading on them or about them. So it was information that came through in relationship to myself. So don't go rifling around in people's underwear drawers. That's my one piece of advice. Figuratively or literally, yes don't belong there and it can be very violating and in the demonic world your you know, ethical violations, you're helping spirits may decide to stop working with you, or leave you for a while leaving you in the dust you know, and they'll usually give you some kind of warning like um, you know, you got to stop this or, you know, I'm not going to give you this information anymore. And so you know, it's important from that perspective as well that but just from a straight up ethical perspective. So I would encourage you, I think, you know, there's so many different ways to do divination and you know if you want to like I love doing pendulum work for yes and no answers and I have located items that I have lost with pendulum obviously I do a lot of divination work in Germany you know, because I'm, you know, Mr. monic practitioner, and that's my forte. But I I like cards cartomancy as well. I've done some things where I have I have a divination bundle, where I, you know, I, I drop the items onto a cloth and then I go into journey and read them while I'm in journey. There's all kinds of ways you can do divination, you can explore it if it's something you're interested in doing. You know, you can, everything from palm reading to Iris reading to. But really, you know, you got to focus on developing, if you want to be good at divination, you have to focus on developing your intuitive skills. Because that's where the rubber hits the road. It's not just about pulling the right card out, it's about how do you relate that card to the person, or to the information or to the question. And that's where that's where your intuition comes in. And that's really, really the, you know, the key to the whole thing, the tools are the tools, there's no there's no magic, there's magic in everything, but there's no special magic in deck of cards. Right? You know, that is mass produced, and, you know, comes here, yes, as you use your cards, you will imbue that you know, if you're reading tarot cards or whatever, you will imbue them with much more of your spiritual energy. And over time, they will become more more useful tools to you you will have, there will be more in sync with you, they will vibrate at a at a at a, you know, in a way that is more akin to your energy. Which is why you don't really want other people reading your cards, because it screws the energy up. And I know people who, you know, smudge their cards or clear their cards, I don't do that a whole lot. But I also don't let people handle my cards a whole lot. Most of my cards, I'm the only person who handles them. You know, if I'm doing a reading for a person, with cards, which isn't very often I will have them split the deck. So it's like one, you know, one touch and that's it, but I don't let people shuffle. I don't let them look through my decks. I don't let them you know, do readings with my decks I don't lend lend my decks out with very rare exceptions, that sort of thing. But again, you know, just to remember that these are, these are tools. And the, the important tool is your mind in your intuition, your intuition feeding, feeding information into your consciousness that you can read and determine and get information from whatever method of whatever method of divination you're using. So with that being said, I will wrap up this, this podcast episode. I love you all.

I hope that you will if you have not subscribed, you can subscribe to this podcast and anywhere you're listening to it. And come to my website and send me a message if you have topics that you're interested in or questions that you would like covered in future episodes. I love to hear from people. And with that, I hope you stay safe and sane and healthy. And I love you all.

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You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, john more. For more info or to contact john go to MaineShaman.com that's maineshaman.com