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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