bgruagach said:
I'd love to hear people's thought about where they think the information comes from in divination.
Does the information come from different places depending on the type of divination tool you're using? Is the info you get through the tarot different in source than the info you get from the I-Ching, or a dream, or the Ouija board?
Do you think the information comes from outside us or is it really just our own subconscious speaking to us?
If the messages are coming from outside us, is it from the Divine, from spirits, ghosts, or what? How can you tell? How do you know for sure?
I'm going to give an answer that may sound a little flip or irreverent here, but I think it's true.
"Answers" in divination come from different sources, depending on the method, the person, and the nature of their interaction with the divine and the spirit world. I do believe that sometimes divination expresses something from Cosmic Coincidence Control, or as Jung would have it, it's sychronicity.
Other times, I think that answers come from a divine source. For those who don't believe in the divine, or the spirit world, perhaps those answers do come from the subconscious.
There are moments when I think that divination "answers" come from various spirits.
Frequently, I think that any divination method is subject to our wishful thinking, and reflects (depending on our basic personalities) either our best-case or worst-case scenarios regarding the question asked.
I've been doing divination for over 30 years, with a variety of methods. Sometimes I've asked the same question during the same reading, of different types of oracles/methods of divination and received the same answer, simply couched in different symbol sets. When this happens, I believe the answer is coming from outside myself, that it's more than simply coincidence.
I believe that proper divination requires the right attitude to both the act of divination and to the handling of one's tools. If divination is done through the interpretation of dream or vision, I believe it requires recourse to the internal and/or cultural symbol sets of the individual whose dream or vision is being interpreted, and that books on symbols in dreams are irrelevant -- what the appearance of a spider means to me (an arachnophobe) will be very different that what it means to someone with a deep connection to Spider Grandmother or Arachne. A dream book would only give you one biased interpretation. A study of the individual and what is important to them spiritually will give you a variety of answers depending on the appearance of the spider, the setting, what the spider was doing, and any number of other factors.
When dealing with closed symbol-sets like the Tarot, it's important to remember that each deck and each reader will have their own interpretations. I believe it's both experience and spiritual influences that guide a good reader to the particular interpretation that fits. An experienced reader pays attention to what they see in the reading or the image, as opposed to relying on a rote memorization of what a particular card "means." Context is important, as what a card means by itself will be different than what it means in relation to the other cards nearby. For most good readers, a Tarot deck or other divination tool is really only a focus for reading the person or situation, and giving a reading that isn't exactly what a book on the cards would say about the cards that fall may well be far more accurate than one going by the book, because the reader may be hooked into the person and reading what's happening around them. The cards may simply be a kick start for the reader's intuition.
When I did an ogam reading for a friend, I got a very strong impression that the person was going to resolve a situation involving a disability claim, within a couple of months. At the time of the reading, I didn't even know the person had filed for disability, but that was what I was being told by spirit, with the ogam fiodh as a trigger for that intuition.
