Episode 40

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Published on:

1st Dec 2021

Divination and Free Will

If we can predict the future, what does that mean for free will? Is everything that's going to happen to us predetermined already, or can we change our future?

Maine-based shamanic teacher and host, John Moore discuss the topic of divination and how it relates both to manifestation and free will.

Can we predict the future and, if so, why don't psychics always predict the lottery numbers? Can we intervene with our free will to change the probable future?

What about parallel universes and decisions we make?

Transcript

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:

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

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About the Podcast

Speaking Spirit
Uncover ancient wisdom, deepen your spiritual practice, and transform your life.
Welcome to Speaking Spirit, a podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your spiritual power and transform your life. Our host, spiritual teacher John Moore, will explore ancient wisdom and spiritual practices in each episode, from magick and meditation to mindfulness and the divine feminine. Listeners will gain profound insights to help them deepen their spiritual practice, realize abundance, and create a life of joy and fulfillment. Dive into this podcast to uncover the secrets of the divine and unlock the power of your true self.

About your host

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John Moore

John Moore is an irreverent spiritual teacher and shamanic practitioner. Having spent over two decades in the corporate world as a computer scientist, John entered a "dark night of the soul." This manifested as a mental, physical, and spiritual crisis. This crisis, as John would learn later, was an archetypal call to shamanic initiation.

John dove headfirst into the practice of shamanism, looking to his Celtic and Norse ancestral line. He has explored altered states of consciousness, becoming a certified hypnotherapist and meditation instructor.

John considers himself a guide, not a guru - helping people find the path towards their own connection to the divine.