Divination dreams and determinism

Divination, dreams and determinism

Michael Graeme

Divination

When I first became interested in the subject of divination, around 2002, I told myself I was approaching it in a fairly rational, and therefore "respectable" way. If pressed, I was able to say that, even for a rationally minded sort of person, divination methods are sometimes useful for opening up different angles on an hitherto inscrutable problem, angles that the conscious mind alone can sometimes be too narrowly focused to see.

I was introduced to divination through the Chinese Taoist text known as the Book of Changes, or the I Ching, and this has remained my personal guide to all things esoteric since those early days, but there are many other methods that might be termed divinatory: Astrology, Bibliomancy, Tarot, Tasseomancy, Palmistry, Channelling, Dowsing and trance states (induced or spontaneous) - to name but a few. Every culture has its own traditional method dating from some pre-rational time in its history. Some methods involve nothing more than a glance at a seemingly random pattern, while others require a subtle and fascinating blend of numerology and mathematical calculation.

Someone of a rational frame of mind might defend their interest in divination, as I do, by calling their oracle simply a "psychological tool", thereby attempting to cloak it in semi-respectability, in the hope that we will not attract criticism from hardened sceptics or the reductionist establishment. I have done this in numerous writings on the subject, but always feel as if I'm being a little disingenuous, both towards others and myself. The reason is this: anyone who has touched upon the subject of divination, rationally or otherwise, sooner or later finds it hard to avoid being drawn by first hand examples of situations where one's chosen method has been able to accurately predict future outcomes that were "counter intuitive". Thus, aside from it's psychological uses, as time passes, it becomes harder to reject the apparent ability of divination to provide valuable, and consistent information regarding possible future outcomes, over many years, or indeed a lifetime that one could not possibly have gleaned by any other rationally accepted means.

Here then is an attempt at a serious look at divination, in the context of my own emerging world view, one that has itself been hinted at by testing my thoughts against the sounding board of an oracular device, namely the Book of Changes, or I Ching.

Parlour games, prophecy and precognition

I was recently reminded that my maternal grandmother was an adherent of Tasseomancy, (reading tea leaves) a divination method that was a popular parlour game in Victorian and Edwardian times. With Tasseomancy, it is the pattern of the tea leaves, and the images they conjure up in the mind of the practitioner that are important.

Tasseomancy is less popular these days, possibly on account of the fact that tea now comes mostly in little bags and ladies who might have taken an interest in such matters now prefer to watch soap-operas on TV. However, it is still practised here and there, both in Western Europe and the United States. It is a simple, yet reputedly powerful method for those gifted with the right sort of imagination, and it is a method, I believe, that also contains many clues to the workings of all other divination techniques.

The fist thing to be aware of is that regardless of the method of divination, the counsel, the prophecy, or the answer to that burning question, comes not from some supposedly external agency, like a spirit or a god, but from within the mind of the diviner. It is an intensely personal business.

The usual criticism of divination is that if it works, then why aren't all diviners millionaires? This question is understandable and must be politely excused on the grounds that it reveals an ignorance regarding the process and the practice of the art. To most of us the future appears not to be knowable with any degree of certainty. For an individual human being, conscious of their own self, existing at an apparent point in time, anything that might possibly happen could happen, depending upon the free choices the individual makes and, the dynamics of the environment in which they decide upon those choices.

However, a study of one's path through time can also give clues to the probability of future events occurring, and can guide us into making choices that will lead us into meeting the future in a way that is most beneficial. One does not, for example, knowingly set sail from the safety of a harbour into the teeth of a storm. It pays to listen to the weather forecast first. This kind of divination is not the same thing as predicting lottery numbers in that it is not as specific. It is more like glancing at the sky in the morning and wondering whether or not to take your umbrella.

It is late winter as I write and the trees are bare and black, but I can easily predict they will be in leaf in another month or so. This is not particularly clever - I simply understand the underlying pattern of a tree's annual cycle. But there are other cycles in nature that are more subtle and of which we are more intuitively, rather than consciously, aware. Intuitions come to us through our imagination and our emotions and can give rise to powerful feelings that certain things are more likely to happen than others, influencing what a diviner sees, for example, in an otherwise random pattern of tea-leaves. Any method therefore that encourages the imagination to create spontaneous images, might be described as potentially divinatory.

Some methods of divination rely upon the chance fall of certain numbers, others on the turn of a particular card. With the I Ching, we perform a random manipulation in order to arrive at one of 64 possible divinatory texts, each with up to a possible six attached sub-texts. Where's the pattern reading in that, you ask? Well, aside from the seemingly random outcome of a particular text, it is the reading of that text with one's query in mind that releases the insight. This again requires imagination and an abstract rather than a literal approach - the insight is the one that that jumps out at you, a bit like the image of a face in the tea leaves that only the practitioner can see. One never simply reads the words of the I Ching and takes them at face value.

Some adherents of divination though will say the diviner's mind goes further and actually influences the outcome, determines the text that is delivered up, determines the turn of the cards, or the patterns in the tea-leaves. From my own experience with the I Ching, I would have to say that this "feels" like it might be true. The fact that an answer to a query can be both "spot on" and yet seemingly random is the key attraction, and the mystery of the book.

Thus far we are dealing only with generalities - the I Ching will describe a general picture and where we stand in relation to things. It does not give an accurate word for word forecast of future outcomes, and the pictures it creates are not premonitions. Will I win a million pounds? That's a specific question and the I Ching will not grant us much of an insight. However, if you asked why is my girlfriend being evasive at the moment, that's a more open ended sort of question and allows the I Ching to paint a picture of the forces at play - possibly to do with relationships and some of things you need to be aware of in that instance. It is when we couch our questions in such terms, the I Ching becomes a very powerful device.

In short then, divination does not grant us a clear picture of a future event. It is more of a weather forecast, predicting the subjective quality, mood, or humour of the present situation or of the coming times, and by implication, suggests to us a course of action that may be beneficial, or provide a warning of actions that might prove unfortunate. Divination is not a looking glass to the future.

There are other, possibly related phenomenon that occasionally allow us to be more specific and obtain an image of future events that are startling in detail. I'm talking about dreams and other dissociative states like reveries, or trances.

For as long as people have been capable of recording their lives, they've been telling us about precognitive experiences, and one of the most common of these, and seemingly open to anyone, whether they claim the gift of foresight or not, is the precognitive dream. Precognitive dreams suggest we can glimpse the future, and thereby predict specific future events, as opposed to divined generalities.

et's say for a moment this is possible. It's a startling concept but one that immediately presents us with a paradox. If precognition shows us doing or witnessing a certain thing in the future, this would tend to suggest the future is set, and we are unable change it. Our lives would appear to be pre-determined. Our actions, and the events we bear witness to are all inevitable, and even our precognitive dreams are somehow written into the script. In other words there is no free will!

But free will - the ability of the individual to choose his or her own way through life, through time and space, is axiomatic to the spiritual assumption that every individual life is important, and uniquely meaningful. Now, to the rationally minded, while they may reject the existence of precognition, the question of free will is not as important because in the rational world view the individual is not invested with any particular significance at all, and a human life to a materialist is no more remarkable than that of the simplest of beasts. It is curious then that only those thinkers who seek to put human experience at the centre of the mystery of the universe are legged up from the very outset by a phenomenon that only they would be open minded enough to accept as possibly valid.

Precognitive dreams force us to consider the business of free will very seriously.

Precognitive Dreams

In respectable scientific circles the precognitive dream is not to be taken seriously at all, and no one of a rational frame of mind will ever admit to having had one. I became interested in this subject, around ten years ago, having serendipitously encountered a book called “An experiment with time” by J.W. Dunne. Dunne said that if you recorded your dreams in as much detail as possible, every day, then it was more or less certain you would eventually turn up dream images that you would subsequently encounter in real life – accurate to such a degree that they would startle you into an instant recall of the dream experience.

I was already recording my dreams with a view to carrying out some psychological self-analysis, but I kept an eye open for any possible images apparently being borrowed from the future, and these duly turned up in a fairly unambiguous way. I therefore have no choice but to conclude that precognitive dreams do occur, though I recognise it's hardly proof as far as anyone else is concerned. My own experiences were quite trivial, and would be just a few more curious anecdotes in a long list of far more dramatic anecdotes from other sources. For a comprehensive list of the more remarkable precognitive dreams, I would suggest reading J.B Priestly's “Man and Time,” and of course J W Dunne's "Experiment with time".

The people who relate such experiences are either liars, deluded, or they are telling the truth. A sceptic assumes they are liars or delusional. My own experiences will not permit me to take the sceptical view now, and my conclusion therefore is that such stories are probably substantially true. This permits me to take a further step and to analyse these stories for any common factors, and a quick study of them does indeed suggest one curious similarity: we experience precognitive dreams in an entirely unpredictable way. We cannot dial one up - they come in their own time, or sometimes never, which, of course, makes the phenomenon impossible to test.

A person might have one precognitive dream in their whole life which, although startling for the individual, is meaningless in terms of the probing narrowness required by the scientific method. It becomes just one more scientifically irrelevant anecdote. Other people will have many precognitive dreams, but the timing of the subsequent events is not predictable, and may occur days or years afterwards. What's also interesting is that we might dream of startling things, so lucidly and alarmingly portrayed we feel certain they are prescient, but which in fact do not subsequently occur. Also the events depicted may be dramatic, such as a natural disaster or a terrible accident, or they may be as trivial as the precise arrangement of flowers in a vase.

It strikes me as odd that one's unconscious might present us in dreams with an image of the layout of the breakfast table, yet neglect to warn us of the motorway pile-up, half an hour later that might threaten our life. It also strikes me as unhelpful that we might be deeply disturbed by an imagined premonition of our involvement in such an accident, only for it to gradually fade from memory when the event does not occur. Dreams then are not a reliable guide to the manifestation or the timing of future events, because sometimes the events do occur, and sometimes they do not. But that they sometimes do provides further evidence that the future is set, that there is no such thing as free will.

Or do they?

Experiments with time

J W Dunne was a pioneering aircraft designer in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and he was perhaps more successful than anyone else in bringing this phenomenon into the open. Dunne professed no paranormal abilities, yet found his normally rational mind deeply troubled by repeated precognitive dreams and reveries. He gave an account of his experiences in his book "An Experiment with Time," which is still in print and essential reading for anyone interested in this subject.

By adopting an admirably pragmatic approach, he was able to show that dream precognition is not so much of the events themselves, but of our own subsequent experience of those events, which is a subtly different thing. We do not precognitively dream of an event taking place unless we subsequently bear witness to it ourselves – either first hand, or indirectly by reading about it, being told about it, or seeing it on TV. The key incident for Dunne was a dream that informed him of the eruption of Mount Pelee on the island of Martinique in 1902, before it actually happened. Crucially though, Dunne realised he had dreamed, not of personally experiencing the disaster, but of picking up a newspaper bearing news of it. The dream of picking up that newspaper, subsequently came true.

Those of us who take notice of our dreams soon become aware that they are peppered with illustrative references to events that have happened in our recent past, or with a little imagination, we can recognise pictorial allusions to things that are currently preoccupying us. Dunne's work showed however that if we pay sufficient attention, we will also find references to events we have yet to experience. Why is such a phenomenon not more widely known? Well, most of us simply forget our dreams on waking, and so are not aware of it. Our rational upbringing also makes us suspicious of any such claims and we become naturally disinclined to waste valuable time investigating a phenomenon that cannot possibly be true. It also requires a conscious effort and considerable patience to go on writing an account of the apparent dross contained in our dreams, and most people simply do not bother. If you are interested in this kind of thing, though, it's easy enough to check it out for yourself - you just need to write your dreams down in as much detail as possible, every day, and be patient. You must also be prepared for the feeling of falling headlong down the rabbit hole when you eventually encounter something that you will probably never be able to explain.

Dunne thought deeply about what might be going on and he came up with a theory based upon the "seriality "of time. In his book,"Experiment with Time", via a series of initially logical, but I have to say increasingly incomprehensible diagrams, he sought to explain that while the conscious mind experiences time linearly, the unconscious can plunder images from any point in our life from birth to death. We therefore exist, he said, for all time as an infinite number of moments whose direction lies at right angles to the familiar direction of time's arrow, a series of "serial" moments if you like. We never die, argued Dunne, because although we exist somewhere at the point of death we are also still young, somewhere in “serial” time.

Dunne's critics were severe in their condemnation, in no small part perhaps due to his popularity with the general public at the time, whose imagination he managed to capture. Perhaps most telling though is the fact that the so called theory of "seriality" was insufficiently robust to outlive the man himself and it has few serious champions these days. Also Dunne's acerbic doggedness in the face of much philosophical, theological and scientific orthodoxy, gained him the reputation of being a bit of a crackpot.

Reading Dunne now with the eyes of a twenty first century man, one has the feeling that his analysis may have been flawed, like an heroic stab in the dark, but one cannot argue with the validity of his empirical observations It is a pity he has been so neglected. Dunne should be remembered as the man who pointed out that we do dream of things that have not yet happened to us, and that all things cannot therefore be explained in purely rational terms, within a framework of linear time.

Precognition and Divination

Is there a link between precognition and divination? Well, from what Dunne has taught us about precognition, it would rule out the divination of anything other than those occurrences we ourselves witness. It's possible that we could predict good news for a friend, and tell them of it, in anticipation of the time when we actually hear the news of our friend's good fortune. We would then be divining something from our own experience, and this would not break the rules, if rules there be.

However, this would not work for a stranger we met just the once, and never saw or heard of again, also it would discount those fairground or on-line psychics - which should perhaps come as no surprise to us! The suggestion then is that the only valuable seer or shaman, or psychic, is one who knows us personally, and in whose sphere of experience we more or less permanently reside. Dunne's observations then, regarding precognition, do seem to posses some insights into what might be going on with divination and his work raises interesting questions regarding the nature of time. Divination, like precognitive dreams, seems to bend the rules of time, and both seem to be suggesting there is no such thing as free will. Where was free will when Dunne dreamed of the eruption of Mount Pelee? Surely the future from that moment was fixed!

Not necessarily.

But we need to look again at our concept of time and reality.

Time and reality

One of the suggestions supported by Dunne's work is that in some way, not clearly understood, the notion of linear time is a function of the human mind, one that merely enables us to make sense of the world that we live in - that the true nature of time and therefore "reality" is somewhat different to the way it is perceived by our senses. His notion of the sereality of time – the possibility that everything we have ever done and will do exists already like a string of beads – has some similarities with a more recent world view called Conscious Creation.

This is a school of thought that suggests, by our own thoughts, we are responsible both for bringing the entire physical universe into being, as well as partly existing in it ourselves as consciousness, or spirit, given physical form. It's an idea that's been kicking about for a long time and was originally born out of "idealism" a philosophy first espoused by Antiphon around 500 BC, and much argued about by philosophers ever since. It forms the cornerstone of much New Age religious and mystical thinking. The argument runs that we cannot be physically aware of anything other than our own selves and that all things apparently external to ourselves, including time, must in fact be creations of our own minds. It's a spooky concept, and we'll look at this in more depth. But for now lets not forget science and see what it has to say on the subject of time and matter.

Quantum mechanics has been around now for over a century, and for much of that time, scientists have known, and what's more can demonstrate unequivocally, that our rational view of the universe, when applied to the sub-atomic realm, simply doesn't stack up. I parted company with the academic study of scientific matters many years ago, so my knowledge is somewhat rusty and I no longer look to the basic, rational science I learned as a young engineer in order to explain the meaning of my existence at all anyway, so you must take this into account when evaluating my reliability, but reading some of the paradoxical ideas being seriously upheld by our most respected scientists, are as fantastic and as challenging to one's credulity, as it is to read accounts of paranormal experience,... or for that matter a belief in conscious creation,.. or divination.

At the most microscopic levels of the physical universe, sub-atomic "particles" seem to exhibit a dual nature. We talk about light waves, for example, and much of our understanding of the nature of light comes from thinking of it and measuring it in terms of waves. But light can also be explained in terms of quantities of particles - photons. So which is it, really? It must be one thing or the other, surely? Well - yes and no. We can set up an experiment to measure light as if it were a wave and sure enough, we would detect the presence of a light-wave. However, we might then set up a different experiment in order to measure light on the assumption that it consisted of particles - and we would detect the presence of particles. So, you say - if you're still with me - light can demonstrate both properties at the same time? Well, no; if you set up your experiment to detect particles, and then, having detected particles, simultaneously try to detect light-waves, there will be no waves. The light will behave either as a wave or a particle, depending on how we first choose to measure it - but it will never demonstrate both properties at the same time.

This seems impossible - and cannot be true - yet it seems it is. Let's say we have a box, and we want to know how big a box we have. Like the light experiment, we can measure it in two ways - we can either put a ruler on its three dimensions, or we can measure the volume of it by filling it with sand and then tipping the sand out into a measuring jug. Both methods will tell us how big the box is. What's more, if we put a ruler on it, we can still fill it with sand and attain a measure of the size of it in both ways. That's fine for boxes, or elephants or cars, or anything we can see and feel in the world around us - but when we begin to look very closely at how these things are constructed - at their fundamental nature, at the building blocks that make up the world we see - the world begins to run counter to our rational intuitions, to the extent that we cannot really say for sure what it is made of at all.

Now, at the risk of stretching things a bit too far, Conscious Creation also allows the scenario whereby for every individual, there are an infinite number of possible ways our paths through time might evolve, also an infinite number of lives through which those paths have already evolved, sometimes in ways only fractionally dissimilar to the path the individual is aware of, sometimes vastly different. For these infinite lives with infinite possibilities, all events occur outside of time, and therefore, from our own frame of reference, they occur simultaneously. Which brings us back to Dunne again! A prescient dream might easily be explained then as an example of getting our wires crossed in serial time and obtaining a glimpse of our future. But which future?

Ah,... finally, the unassailable edifice of determinism and our lack of free will begins to look a bit crumbly!

Let's take a closer look at Conscious creation and see what else it might suggest to us.

Conscious Creation

As we've already seen, Conscious creation is a relatively modern packaging of an ancient Greek philosophy, which suggests the world is the way it is because that's how we imagine it to be. The world and all events are said to be the manifestations of our thoughts. While many modern, rationally minded people are unable to accept such an apparently absurd notion, it is a difficult one to dismiss, philosophically. It has an explanation for each of the paradoxes its critics care to come up with and for this reason it has managed to survive the centuries since its inception, to be given a fresh impetus by the so called New Age movement.

I first encountered Conscious Creation through the works of Jane Roberts. Jane Roberts was allegedly the deep-trance channel of a character called Seth, who, presented between 1961, right up to Jane's death in 1985, a view of reality that was breathtaking in its depth and complexity, while managing to remain both coherent and plausible. Although captivated by the works of Seth/Jane Roberts, I remained deeply sceptical of the whole thing, until a strange occurrence got me thinking. I was holidaying in a quiet corner of the Yorkshire Dales and had adopted the habit of walking each evening through a valley. Most evenings I encountered no people at all. I was half way through reading one of Seth's books at the time, which informed me, much to my surprise, that I had the ability to influence my environment and the events that occurred in it, simply by thinking about it. As absurd as this seemed, I decided to conduct an experiment, and told myself that if indeed I was creating my own reality, I would see, during my next walk, a black Labrador dog. The possibility, given how quiet the valley was, seemed sufficiently remote as to provide a decent test. Sure enough on my next walk I encountered a man, walking a black Labrador dog. He was the only person I encountered all evening.

The next day I decided this time I would encounter a very pretty girl, and without any effort on my part we would speak to one another - though I was vague on the details [I was probably pushing my luck this time]. It seemed so remote a possibility as to be almost impossible. On the subsequent walk, I came across a portly middle aged woman ,who got me thinking, but I decided she didn't really qualify. However, she had a daughter, about five or six years old, an uncommonly pretty and articulate child who spontaneously engaged me in the most charming conversation. All right, I was hoping she might have been a few decades older, but perhaps my unconscious was teasing me!

Intrigued, though not entirely convinced of course, I decided to try to "manifest" other things. First of all I told myself that before the week was out I would come across a marble - not exactly out of this world, I know, but I couldn't remember having seeing one around for a while. The approach to this kind of thing is quite important and involves deciding upon an outcome, then putting it from one's mind, except for having complete confidence that it will happen. A marble duly appeared on my dressing table within a matter of days. I'm not saying it came out of thin air, more that someone put it there, that the path through time and space of that particular marble, and my own, were drawn together, possibly, by my thoughts. I decided however that, in the case of the marble, the experiment was invalid because there were probably too many marbles around in a house also inhabited by children, not to come across one eventually, so I decided to manifest a threepenny-bit instead.

For those of you living outside of the UK, or those of you born after the nineteen seventies, a threepenny bit was one of the British coins of the realm, prior to the adoption of the decimal system, and though they are by no means vanishingly rare, they have by now been relegated to the old curiosity boxes that haunt our bottom drawers or the darkest corners of our cupboards. This was a fair test, I thought. I could probably have found a threepenny bit if I'd deliberately set out to find one, but the chances of stumbling across one seemed most unlikely. I gave myself a week but nothing turned up and my bubble of expectation burst. Of course not! I told myself - it was a stupid idea. Are you losing your mind? And other such reproaches. Suitably chastened I tried to forget about the whole thing until, about a month later, my father-in law brought a whole bag of them round to show my children. In spite of the lateness of their materialisation, this was still a most striking event. Finally I was persuaded to try the same thing with a short story I entered for a competition. I duly convinced myself I would win and carried the sense of its absolute certainty for several months until of course,... someone else won. The bubble burst and so ended my own experiments on the subject of manifesting objects and outcomes.

All of this is a while ago now, and I look back upon it as a period of intellectual drunkenness from which I eventually sobered up. My rational senses have almost persuaded me it was all a matter of coincidence and have steadfastly prevented me from experimenting further in this direction. They do however seem prepared to sit by and an humour me in my continuing use of the I Ching, provided I still call it a "psycological tool" and play down the mystical aspects. Certainly, I remain to be convinced that my "hits" were anything other than a curious coincidences, but the significance of the experience and it's impact upon what I knew of divination could not be overlooked. It begs the question: In divining the future, are we predicting an outcome or are we constructing one? If all things are possible, in divination, are we selecting a probability, or at least increasing the chances of it happening?

Possibly, but before we rush out and try to change our futures for what we think are better ones, we need to take a deep breath, because there are a few obvious paradoxes with Conscious Creation that tend to get glossed over.

We need to tread very carefully:

The Paradoxes of Conscious Creation

A very narrow interpretation of the ideas of Conscious Creation can lead us down the dangerous path of self-inflation. The central tenet is that we are the creators of our own reality and, taken to extremes this can result in people being as rude and egotistical, self centred and brutal as they like in the pursuit of their own material goals, because, hey, it's their world - they made it and no one else has any business in it. It can, and indeed has, spawned an industry selling books and seminars that try to convince vulnerable individuals that there's no need to be poor because – hey – you can just imagine yourself some money. No money yet? Hey, it's your fault – you're obviously not thinking about it hard enough, sucker!

My own understanding though is that the philosophy runs a little deeper than this, that we are definitely not alone in a personal universe, that we do share it with myriad individual souls, all of equal merit, that I am real, but so are you, dear reader, and we somehow mutually agree on the nature of the reality we share. We cannot merely "think" others out of existence when they are troublesome. They are really there and we must cooperate. We achieve this, according to the theory, by being constantly connected to one another via a sort of telepathic internet, one that works on an unconscious level, so we are all unconsciously aware of one another's intent and purpose – even though we've no conscious notion of any such thing.

Five people enter a railway carriage at a particular time on a particular day. Those five people all exist at that time in that carriage, though their individual perceptions of what the carriage looks like, and indeed the appearance of their companions may not exactly tally. Their individual realities overlap, and the journey in that carriage is, for each individual, a reality. But what determines their proximity to one another is down to probability. If one had lingered to buy a cup of coffee that morning, it would have changed the identity and number of people in the carriage. All other probabilities can and do exist somewhere and some-when, but each individual is unaware of those other possibilities.

What happens then if two people are going after the same thing and the event is mutually exclusive - if one succeeds, the other fails. For example, two vehicles approach a traffic signal from different directions - both drivers want the light to be green but they can't both succeed. If we make our own reality though, and both drivers desire it equally, then the light must be green in both directions! Clearly that's impossible, but remember at an unconscious level we are more cooperative than we appear to be at a conscious level. So, at the unconscious level it is agreed which driver will succeed, based upon the degree of their emotional needs and self belief. One driver has a more compelling need than the other, a more convincing self belief, and so he succeeds. Like my short story entry for that competition, it made no difference convincing myself I was going to win if I was up against others with an equally convincing belief in themselves, and a more urgent need.

This business of an emotional element is quite important, I think, and brings in another factor, namely Syncronicity.

Synchronicity is a significant coincidence. Significant, how? Well, Carl Jung, who first coined the term, identified an emotional element. A synchronicity is the manifestation of an event seemingly against chance, that has personal meaning. We desperately need all the lights to be green - the odds are a million to one against, but we get through. It's a busy market day in town and the car-parks are always full to bursting, but we desperately must park in order to get to the dentist with the toothache that's killing us - a parking space seemingly materialises out of nowhere. We haven't seen an old friend for years, we find ourselves having fond memories of the times we spent together - then they ring us up out of the blue. There was always a chance these things would happen anyway, no matter how slim, but the emotional element in ourselves somehow secures the connection,... or so the theory goes.

Life then, could be a collection of “probable” occurrences, a linear path through a timeless, dimensionless matrix of infinite possibility. Each moment is simultaneous, but our experience of those moments is ordered by consciousness into a linear sequence that we can understand. And free will? Yes,.. all things are possible, but some things are more probable than others. Our lives are predetermined only in so far as the fact that all possible outcomes have occurred, both the dead certs and the 1000:1 outside chances. Where we have free will is in making the choices of which probabilities to include in this version of our "selves", either consciously, by making informed choices, or unconsciously by attracting certain probabilities - if we expect the train to be held up, then the chances are it will be - we "tempt" fate. Expectation runs hand in hand with belief - and though we don't always get the things that we specifically want,... we do tend to get the things we believe in, or we encounter the things that support our beliefs.

It's a fascinating concept, if a little disturbing, and it's far safer of course to have nothing whatever to do with these things,... to pass one's life entirely under the safe umbrella of purely rational thinking.

Dull though!

The downside of conscious creation

I've already touched on one of the nastier downsides of Conscious Creation and the pedalling of the message that if you're poor you can simply “will” yourself some money. I managed to effortlessly will myself a whole bag of useless threepenny bits, but I think gold bars would have been a different matter. This would have run foul of the greater collective will that denied me such a lucrative opportunity.

Another problem I have with Conscious Creation has to do with illness. According to the theory the only "real" part of ourselves is our consciousness, which, in its "natural" state, is a discarnate entity of infinite longevity, and which forms for itself a body along the lines of a general blueprint common to all human beings, but with certain modifications depending on our personal selves, our thoughts, and our beliefs. Healthy mind - healthy body and all that. Unhealthy mind and,... well - it's a natural leap for adherents of Conscious Creation to suppose that if we aren't particularly good looking ( in accordance with the prevailing popular standards), or we fall seriously ill, or we are injured in a serious accident, then it's somehow our own fault, our own defective "thoughts" that are to blame.

I can go along with this to some extent - for example, I've known people who were bitter and cynical and eternally pessimistic, and whose physical appearance tended to betray their frame of mind, being somehow bent and sour and sickly - but then I've also known people who were well balanced, robust, eternally optimistic and deserving of the best in life yet who were struck down by circumstances that they did not deserve. Jane Roberts' Seth personality repeats time after time that we do not have an accident or fall ill unless we have secretly wished it in order to fulfil some larger need in ourselves,... and that our recovery, or our death are equally in our own hands, and that no one dies unless they have already decided to do so [all be it unconsciously].

I can only accept this as true in a very subtle sense, and with the proviso that there may be aspects of it I have not fully understood. Without such provisos, a too literal interpretation of Conscious Creation can lead to a certain callousness, if we believe that the suffering of others is somehow their own fault. It can lead us to disengage from the apparent madness of the world and absolve ourselves from any responsibility for its upheavals. The word "victim" becomes somehow derogatory: Don't be a "victim", said the advert on this morning's radio,... get your house security sorted by our professionals! the implication being that if you didn't you risked becoming a "loser" or a "victim" because of your own stupidity: Victim = loser = inferior human being!!! you brought it on yourself, loser! Similarly, don't get ill because it's inconvenient and depressing for others to have to hear about, and all you need to do is pull yourself together, think the right thoughts, and you can be conveniently normal again.

It's a fine philosophy that might hold good while you're young and healthy, but what about later in life when your body starts to splutter a bit?

I do believe a robust frame of mind can overcome or possibly even avoid certain illnesses. The placebo effect is a mysterious one and even the most hardened, rational medical professional cannot deny that it exists - that for certain medical complaints, if we expect to get better, that belief in itself can be as effective as medical therapy.

So what's the defining factor here? What determines those paths we can open by our thoughts, and those that remain firmly closed, no matter how much we might wish otherwise? Well, I suspect that while we can significantly influence the probability of certain things occurring (like winning a short story competition), or not occurring (like falling ill), such things retain an element of chance, and are not always controllable by an individual mind because they have a deep seated rhythm of their own.

King Canute knew he could not turn back the tide, because there are certain patterns in nature that we must be content to work around. People who are ill, injured, or victims of horrendous circumstance are fully deserving of our compassion. And if someone falls "victim" to apparently avoidable circumstances, it's our collective responsibility to make amends, our collective failure to prevent someone else's misfortune, and not the individual's alone - it's not his "fault" for example that some low-life broke into his house. It was the low-life's fault, and the existence of such low-life's is a social phenomenon that its our collective responsibility to resolve as best we can. But to return to my subject, while it's important to maintain a positive frame of mind at all times, there will for ever remain certain misfortunes that we cannot avoid – there can be as as much wisdom in the way we submit ourselves to the nature of the times as there is in avoiding the times altogether.

Conscious creation is a vast subject, not without controversy, and not for the faint hearted, but it's a philosophy that does seem to contain valuable insights that explain many of the non-rational phenomena that persistently crop up – including things like precognition and divination. However it contains also many a pitfall for the unwary, and one must tread carefully here. It does not mean life is "just a dream". We exist in a reality in which matter or energy (same thing) takes on a very dense form. This means that when we injure ourselves we bleed, and when we call people names, we really do upset them. Reality, however it's constructed, physically and temporally, whether it be by Newton's clockwork or the conscious minds of people, is real. It's a place where the blurry stuff of the universe seems pathologically intent on coming into being, though for a reason that remains entirely mysterious to us.

Free will and the density of probable experience

I've explored the idea that our time reference may be a function of the conscious mind, that consciousness, rather than being the function of a self-ordering universe, might actually be its genesis, and that divination, rather than predicting an outcome, might be selecting a probable event, which we subsequently cause to come into being.

In this context then, we must view the notion of free will as something of a compromise - it does exist and is an essential part of our experience, but not all paths are open to us. It is possible I will win the lottery this weekend, but not very likely, because the number of scenarios whereby that might occur (including my actually bothering to buy a ticket) are rather thin on the ground. What's more likely is I will lie in bed as late as I can get away with, and hen take my family shopping, because that's what I usually do. The possibility of the shopping trip is rendered more likely by the sheer density of probability, and the converging will of others (i.e. my family). Can I cause, by virtue of my imagination alone, a specific event to come into being this weekend? Well, yes, I'm tempted to think that I can, but only if it does not interfere with the desires of others who have a greater emotional need of that event not occurring. Neutral outcomes like the appearance of a marble on my dressing table, or a black Labrador dog, whilst out walking do nothing to compromise the collective flow of the universe and it seems I might indeed be free to include them as part of my life's experience, if I so choose. However, turning up a gold bar or two would take some explaining and bring about a change in ways that are too significant to fit in with the natural ebb and flow of things.

So, can we predict a future event by precognitive dream? Well yes I'm persuaded by my own experience and by the sheer weight of anecdotal evidence that we probably can, but equally, we could also dream or divine a circumstance which might occur, but which ultimately does not. Dreams pay no heed to the probable – they scan the entire spectrum of possibility and, when potentially prescient, they are presenting us with a picture of a possible future path. Given then our conscious ability to select or manifest, under certain circumstances, a future for ourselves, it might be that we influence whether or not that dream event occurs on our life's path, simply by the way we react to it – whether or not we consciously, and unconsciously come to “believe” it is true.

The wide sweeping randomness of dreams however is rather unhelpful if we're trying to plot the best course for ourselves through life. There is a mystery to them, and an intangible quality that seems to put them them beyond such utilitarian use. Our conscious experience might provide the dream imagery, but the narrative of the dream and the choice of which images to present is not constrained by notions of linear time, or the density of probable outcomes. The dream goes it's own way and for its own purposes. Studies since the 1900's suggest the dream's purpose is more to ensure the psychological well-being of the dreamer by a process of inner compensation, like a theatre show using stage props borrowed or derived from waking experience. Whether that experience is past or future, probable or improbable is irrelevant to the dream – it's purpose is to keep us sane and balanced and fully operative in waking reality.

Divination is different. We perform some physical act in real life, and this provides us with an interface to the same unconscious processes responsible for our dreams. This act – be it tossing coins, as in the I Ching, or turning over the Tarot card, connects us with the same atemporal matrix so freely ranged by the dream. The difference is that there is a conscious element here. We are firmly fixed in our waking reality, we have not succumbed to sleep, we have not plunged ourselves into the healing waters of the unconscious sea on which our timeless being floats. We remain time-bound, we hold ourselves aloof from complete surrender, and somehow straddle the divide, planting one foot firmly in both worlds, the seen and the unseen. Then, provided we are not too specific in our questioning, divination seems able to gauge the density of probabilities at a given moment, thereby eliminating all the unlikely scenarios and giving us an “idea” of what is underpinning the present moment, and how that is likely to lead off into the future. In divination, there is also an emotional “rush”. When we connect with an answer or a view of a particular scenario, the feeling is one a psychological avalanche – like a back-cloth on which the future scenery of our lives suddenly unfurls and in recognising its correctness, it may be that we make the connection and from that moment freeze our future in accordance with the picture we momentarily glimpse through the act of divining it.

To stretch the metaphor a little further, divining the quality of the times is a bit like drawing a picture. We sit down with pencil and paper in front of a scene, or a person, and we attempt to capture its likeness. Some people can do this easily, even without any formal training, producing say a portrait that conveys not only a good likeness but one that also captures an element of the sitter's character – so that everyone who sees it nods in recognition. It seems like a gift, while others can't produce anything better than an infantile scrawl.

The American artist and author, Betty Edwards however, suggests that we all have the ability to draw a good likeness and came up with a very plausible explanation which she delivered in a series of books on drawing (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). The difference, she says, seems to be in the way one actually views reality and what part of one's mind is allowed to guide the pencil. The left side of the brain is the rational calculating side. It is concerned with pattern and number and when it looks at, say, an eye, it does not actually see an eye, but a symbol, a shorthand representation of an eye, and the mind says: "you want an eye? I'll give you an eye - it looks like this," and our pencil becomes stuck in the groove of the analogue of our faulty perception - the result is a childish looking eye, or at best an eye that looks nothing like the sitters'. A person who can draw does not listen to the left side of the brain, but to the right side. The right side does not come up with an explanation for what it's looking at, but merely sees what it sees, allowing the pencil to capture the truth of the line, and therefore the likeness.

In divination I suggest it is the same. If we are to be successful as diviners, we must draw upon the right side of the brain for the information, shutting off for a moment the chattering flow of the left brain's rational interpretations, and its often unhelpful, though well meaning, explanations. In divination, the conscious will is directed in an impartial manner and what it gleans are clusters of the most likely outcomes for our life, and it may be that we freeze those outcomes, or those connections with the future that contain the most emotional significance for us.

The "likeness" of our future from that point is set.

Or is it?

The moral and the spiritual dimension

If we are susceptible to such ideas as these, and believe that by our thoughts alone we are able to set the future for ourselves, we run the risk of self-inflation. What does this mean? It means we fall victim to a belief that we are more in control of things than we really are. We've already looked at the idea that our future is something of a compromise. Not all scenarios are likely, and in addition to engaging the right side of the brain, we must also be able to approach the subject with humility, with a sense of our own smallness. My manifesting a marble and a three-penny bit, may have been delusional, but they were done anyway out of a humble curiosity, and a desire to test the nature of the universe in ways that ran counter to my intuitions. The universe may have obliged. However, trying to manifest a short story competition winner was clearly egotistical. It was done out of a desire for self aggrandisement, and the universe did not engage. Humility might enable certain seemingly impossible connections to be made, but an egotistical approach severs those connections from the outset, renders them unavailable to us, and then our future is anyone's guess.

We're introducing a new element here, namely one of “moral attitude”.

If you read up on the subject of morality, it can be a bit off-putting. It's a highly complex and, if you'll forgive me, “subjective” topic, one that generations of philosophers have devoted their lives to exploring and is a subject that a good many professors have built their careers and reputations upon, but that should not deter the rest of us ordinary folk from having a stab at defining “morality”, at least in so far as it relates to us personally, and our life's path. Indeed, though we many not know the philosopical “isms”, I'm sure we all consider moral questions every day of our lives. It's simply a human thing.

In a deterministic universe, a universe governed entirely by rational principles, there is no moral dimension – no concept of right or wrong. A machine is amoral, it simply “is”, but when you bring human beings into it and begin to discuss such issues as consciousness, questions of morality arise naturally. Do I feel good or bad? That's the basic question. Am I happy or sad? In a deterministic universe, once a human being has taken care of his physical needs, his happiness should be guaranteed, but this not so. A well fed, well rested human being, free from harm's way, can still pass through life largely unfulfilled. He can still feel sad, when he has no apparent reasons for being so. What's wrong with him? There can be no answer when its couched in purely deterministic or rational terms. The birth of every human being, then, the awakening of every consciousness is proof, if proof were really needed, of the non-deterministic nature of the universe, that there is indeed more to life than we can see or touch.

The universe is not a mechanism. It is not a purely physical system – it's physicality, like the human being is partly a manifestation of the creative nature of the universe. Creative systems are constructive, adaptive, inclusive, and benign. They reside on the “good” side of the moral spectrum. Goodness is creative and supportive of everything. Badness however – whilst it can be creative, even transformative, it is ultimately destructive in nature. Morally then – we might assume the universe is of good intent, simply because of its sheer diversity and it's drive to support such a bewildering array of living and non-living systems in total harmony. Creativity is likewise at the root of our own natures, so much so that even physical needs can take second place to the mysterious compulsion to create and to express mysterious, wordless concepts. Although somewhat woolly and no doubt vulnerable to sustained attack by hardened materialists, these are among my reasons for supposing the universe, if it alive, or conscious in some way, it is of good, rather than bad intent.

Of course there are two ends to the moral spectrum – one that is wholly bad and the other that is wholly good, but the reality, the action, if you like so far as we're concerned, all takes place somewhere in the middle, where things are neither black nor white, but every shade of grey in between. This is where we live, in the physical world, a milieu where the study of greyness to its infinitesimal degree can be spiritually overwhelming, spiritually bewildering and emotionally crushing. Welcome to planet earth, human.

What has all of this got to do with divination? Well, though it might seem as if we've wandered off topic, this expansion into the moral stratosphere has enabled us to draw in the “S” word. Spirit, spiritual, or if you prefer, the “P” word, the Psychical – the part of ourselves that retains its place in the transcendental realms of experience.

If we treat divination like a materialistic trick, then we will fail, because we lack the necessary spiritual or psychical connection with whatever intelligence inhabits the atemporal matrix. I have grown increasingly amenable towards the idea that by virtue of our consciousness alone we are partly responsible for constructing at least our little corner of the universe. I'll go further and say that it might even be possible to manifest outcomes, or to predict them, but unless such things are carried out with humility and a view to one's spiritual, rather than one's material development, it's most likely you're deluding yourself.

The practise of any form of divination is a spiritual business. It has to do with matters of psyche and spirit, rather than material well being. The psychical, or the spiritual quest therefore about manifesting wealth or attaining the heights of material success. If I were of a particularly obtuse nature, I might believe to the very depths of my soul, that I would be the happiest man alive if I could take a particular Hollywood actress as my lover. Were I of a nominally spiritual frame of mind, I might even pray with all my heart that this unlikely scenario could be brought about. If I read a “self help” book about the phenomenon of manifesting, then I might go to extraordinary lengths to manifest the situation, all to no avail.

Had I a spark of humility however, was serious in my desire to better myself psychically, and had the good fortune to consult something like the I Ching on the matter, the I Ching would point out my shortcomings in no uncertain terms, and suggest to me that taking the actress as my lover was not exactly what I needed right now. Having a moment's humility, would enable the I Ching to engage and guide me away from a scenario that was neither correct nor even remotely likely. I might sulk over the answer. It might be the last thing I wanted to hear. I might not take any notice and persist with my self destructive delusion.

Or I might wise up, and start to listen.

Divination requires a spiritual approach, rather than a materialistic one. All too often, even in those fringes of society where such things as divination can be openly talked about without ridicule, the difference between the spiritual and the materialistic is sometimes confused. And that is why the best spiritual adepts are not all millionaires. They do, however, tend to be happy, laid-back human beings. And if that's not a definition for real success, I dont know what is.

Michael Graeme

Index

m_graeme@yahoo.co.uk