Category Archives: Divination

PAD 3/18/2013 – Impossibility

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

What are the six impossible things you believe in? (If you can only manage one or two, that’s also okay.)

I have lived too long and witnessed too much inexplicability to not believe in astrology, Tarot cartomancy, and the subtle presence of magic in our world. It’s always a soft arrival too, if you try to force it or put it under a spotlight it evaporates as if it was never there. I don’t think that any of it will ever be in any way “explainable” by science. These things really can only be apprehended by faith. When I write of faith, I don’t really mean religion. I’ve always found religion to be stultifying and so I try to live without it as much as I can. The faith for these impossible things has been borne out by event after event where upon reflection the accuracy of all of it, any of it, is utterly remarkable.

I even run into it in my workplace. I have lost count of the number of times I have received notices from my coworkers that the systems that I support have failed them. When I walk in, even just walking by, the problems appear to evaporate. It’s just my presence that seems to do it and after a while you start to notice this remarkable phenomena and after a while I got to thinking that one possible explanation is that my office is beset by gremlins, brownies, manitou, or domovoi, or they are all there and acting in collusion with each other. I fancy that my presence scares them off and so the technical systems that I support, when I use them, work perfectly fine for me pretty much all the time, but when my coworkers try to use them, it’s a crapshoot for them. Until I appear, and then it’s back to being perfectly fine. I suppose there might be a more rational explanation about why this is, perhaps something to do with my bioelectric field or something subtle and clever and measurable like that – but I prefer to live in a world where everything is slightly tinted by the mayhap of the hidden world of magic. I select to live with a world that is enriched by tiny mysteries, because living in a world where everything is a field, particle, or wave is just too banal and bankrupt for my ability to endure such a stark emptiness. I think, for me, it comes down to the hidden pleasure that comes from the doubt that we may all live in a world more complicated and wonderful than we can ever possibly know and more complicated and wonderful than we will *ever* be able to know. I find value in that little layer of maybe that hides right underneath the surface of our mundane world. Skeptics and debunkers would claim that all of this is so much fantasy and magical thinking and that it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to encourage ignorance and the folly of a false make-believe world. In response to them, I embrace the bunkum. If you can’t prove it really isn’t there, then what is the harm of belief? Wouldn’t it be a right hilarity that the world is exactly the way I think it is, a mechanical universe with a touch of mystery overlaid on top of it. You could swap out magic with God and then Voltaires comment that there is no proof for God doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in him, on the off chance that he does really exist. Perhaps magic really does exist.

Impossible things are important.

PAD 3/26/2013 – Deja Vu

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Have you ever truly felt déjà vu, the sensation that you’ve already had the experience you’re currently having?

It comes in fits and spurts. There are moments that feel like they have happened before. It’s like the experience of the unfolding events align around a pivot. The nagging feeling starts and then you start feeling very strange. At first it’s not clear what the feeling is attached to because you are approaching the pivot and nothing looks like it does, until you’re half-way along and then what you experience rings with your memories, the memories of the future that became crystallized in that one moment. When it strikes me I have to stop what I’m doing and respect and witness the event coming to pass around me. The feeling of Deja Vu is so powerful sometimes that I become almost paralyzed with the novelty of the situation. I don’t know exactly where the memories of the future come from, perhaps I dream them and in that there may be some untapped clairvoyance active within me that I can only access when I’m dreaming. My dreaming world is very rich and I remember many of my dreams and I write them down before they evaporate under the assault of too much consciousness.

Almost always, when I have this feeling of Deja Vu I will stop and I will remark to everyone around me that it’s happening to me. I don’t consider it to be a very private thing and since it paralyzes me with it’s marvelousness I feel it’s important to explain it to others as quickly as possible so they don’t worry that I’m having some sort of stroke or attack.

Week 9’s Tarot Theme

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This week the Two of Pentacles has appeared over and over again. Even after some mad shuffling and even shuffling and cutting I end up with this card. Sometimes it’s right ways up, sometimes reversed, but there it is. Always with the juggling.

Another series of cards that pop up are high-order swords suit cards, you know the ones, the ones with a lot of pain and unhappiness linked to them. My most popular cards are these: Eight, Nine, and the most hilariously bad card in the entire Tarot, the Ten of Swords.

Sometimes at work I think of my querent card is the Ten of Swords.

12/21/12 6:14am

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I’ve been thinking about what might be tomorrow. I’ve talked about it with coworkers and friends and family and everyone is at least popularly concerned as I would expect. The natural assumption to make is the null hypothesis, that is, that tomorrow nothing remarkable will happen and the world will continue to spin on it’s axis and life will go on.

Except that the Mayans were so good at constructing really good calendar systems and they were so accurate. When the long count calendar expires, supposedly on the Winter Solstice, which is 12/21/12 at 6:14am it’s an event that is remarkable. What will happen? I’ve heard the most popular response that people have to this millennial event: “If anything will happen, it’ll be a huge move forward for people and those feeling good feelings will reap the rewards of those good thoughts and the others will end up elsewhere.”

I love this idea as it’s very tidy. I can’t help but think about some other possibilities that might come to be as well. The Mayans drew out their calendar and built in the terminal point (which is coming along) and I’ve read various theories, including an ancient astronaut theory that a Mayan God will return to earth when their exacting Calendar expires. I’ve found that my suppositions follow two distinct paths – a positive angle and a negative one.

Under the positive angle what may come of tomorrow?

1. Reappearance of Magic in our world. Imagination becomes easier to impress upon our material world, perhaps.
2. First Contact. This one actually has some feet to it. The Mayans were quite particular about their Gods returning someday and why not tomorrow?
3. Cures for modern plagues. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find the magic bullet that cures AIDS or switches off Cancer. This one could also go hand-in-hand with the previous point and be something we learn from First Contact.
4. Expansion of consciousness. We all see ourselves as individuals. Perhaps tomorrow will start a new spiritual development in humanity and help us connect to each other in more meaningful ways.

While the positive things are wonderful to think about, there are more entertaining and more dramatic negative events that may happen.

1. The Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. This would change the shape of North America and put a serious dent in America.
2. The New Madrid Fault could break and release a huge amount of earthquake energy, although this would be really scary for just the southern states.
3. A nearby star could have undergone a violent supernova and that fact could be enroute to Earth and arrive on 12/21/12 at 6:14am. We’d see a new star in the heavens and if it was close enough, it could raise radiation levels across the planet. It may be that our Sun and our own planets magnetosphere protects us from the worst of it, if it’s inbound at all. The problem with this is that nobody would know, there really isn’t any early detection for an event like this that I’m aware of.
4. Captain Trips – There has been some talk about H1N1 and other super flu viruses that just would require some generations to spread to humanity and then only a few more to become airborne. What would be worse? A Captain Trips event, or perhaps a re-emergence of something as nasty as the Spanish Flu of 1918?
5. Failure of the magnetosphere. Earth is protected from a lot of nasty space-based radiations by our atmosphere and our magnetosphere, to say nothing of the more impressive magnetosphere of our Sun. What if these fields failed for some strange reason? There would be less to shield us from solar radiation to say nothing of the stray cosmic radiations that come from space all the time.
6. First Contact. Just because a Mayan God was nice to the Mayans when they were developing doesn’t necessarily mean that any first contact event will be a positive one. One of the big lessons that popular science has been saying for a while is that a future First Contact event may not be a peaceful event but one fueled by hunger or some resource conflict. Instead of civilized explorers making first contact with us, they could be carnivores looking for a new food source.

One of the biggest things I have noticed while thinking about these things has been that people have clustered their thoughts around this event. Some are rooting for it, some are afraid of it, and some have even let the event change their natural way of behaving. Preppers getting ready for an event that may be impossible to dodge while on Earth. We just don’t know the scale of the event, or if there even is one. One thing is definitely for certain, this is a fantastic source of dramatic storytelling. The fear and the hope that battle over what is coming, or not, in a few short hours in the future make for great smalltalk and water-cooler conversations.

So, as the inaugural post for my relocated blog I will post this entry and invite people to write comments to this post. What do you think may happen in a few short hours? Will it be good, will it be bad? What do you think?