My experience of divination:

Divination works. Full stop. I cannot now imagine living without using divination: my health would suffer, I would not have access to the insights and understanding about people and the world about me that I do now (and that I did not have previously) and much more besides.

By divination I mean: dream interpretation, interpretation of signs and portents, interpretation of oracle/tarot card readings, of events that happen to me and so on and so forth.

Insert:
I wrote this yesterday, but last night I had a dream which pointed out some extremely important omissions. Below I describe some benefits of divination, but I did not make clear what is required in order to be able to do divination. First, you need to want to know the truth, no matter where it takes you, no matter how unpalatable it will be, you MUST hold truth above everything else --- this may mean giving up career, losing social status, inviting intellectual and social censure etc --- but you WILL fail if you falter in your adherence to truth.

Second; you must come alive. Our world of science and academic intellectualism is a world of sensory deprivation; the intellect is all and the senses are allowed wither and die. So you must bring your senses alive until you are in full sensory engagement with the world.

Third: you must develop detachment. That is, you must refrain from taking things personally or even from being affected emotionally by what you do.

Finally, the major benefit is that you become gifted. This is because you have to develop your mind such that it can do the things you want to do. So, rather than using computers, say, you allow your mind to develop the abilities you require. Thus you become gifted. For example, you will become gifted with foresight and with healing and you will have the ability to detect when a person is lying. There are more many gifts you will develop.


Back to my original piece:

Although divination is a way of life for me, thus far I have not written about it; this is my first attempt. Having had some difficulty organising my thoughts on the subject, I had a dream the other night which helped me (thus revealing one of the functions of divination: to help you with projects you are working on). I will use this dream as a worked example, interpreting some of the main points about divination that it raised.

Note, however, there are many reasons why readers will not have the first idea about how the following interpretation is arrived at. In the first place, you would have to have some familiarity with the language of dreams. Dream language is not like, say, French or German, which can be learned by memorisation and which uses symbols. Dream language is a language of metaphor, so to use it, one must have the ability to interpret metaphors. But, to quote from Lord of the Rings and Galadriel: “some things which should not have been forgotten were lost”. That is, people’s minds have degraded to such an extent that they have lost the ability to think using metaphor. There is hope, however: one’s dreams can, and do, help one develop that ability. Thus another function of dreams/divination is to help you develop your mind such as to enable you to interpret dreams.


Dream:

I am accompanying a coach party to the Faeroe Islands. Once on the islands, I intend leaving the party to travel alone. Upon reaching the customs area of the departure terminal I suddenly find myself with the coach party in the Faeroes (the method of travel is unclear, but making a journey of some sort is the important point).

The coach stops at several places. In one I enter a wooden house and I see a woman dressed in Faeroese ethnic costume. The last stop in the dream is at a bank which is in a tiny annexe of a wooden building. I enter the bank to change money. Some of the coach party, some teenage boys, enter with me. Their behaviour is disruptive such that they are preventing me from exchanging money. I evict them from the bank and am thus able to complete my business.

Interpretation:

One key ability here, so lacking in people today and getting worse by the minute, is the ability to identify the significant from the mass of detail. So, to interpret the dream, I need to be able to identify (a) what it is about and (b) identify key aspects of the Faeroe Islands which are relevant to the topic of the dream.

Divination also depends a great deal on intuition. One learns to work by intuition. This is not the world of science or philosophy. Using divination will, in fact, result in leaving the rational/logical mindset behind, moving on to a much more sophisticated way of thinking e.g. using intuition. So, to the interpretation……….

Topic: divination --- the dream is describing some of the benefits of using divination.

Key aspects of the Faeroes:

1: I have been to the Faeroe Islands, which is a prompt to think about my personal experience of these islands. (Dream images, therefore, are very personal to the dreamer; they have no fixed/universal meaning --- and that’s a very hard one to get your head around when in this society your mind has been trained to run along tracks like a train, rather than allowed to grow and develop naturally.)

2: The Faeroes are islands – this interprets as self-sufficiency, individuality.

3: The Faeroes are still (I think) part of Denmark, although they want independence. This interprets as, literally, independence. Denmark is a country I associate with social conformity, therefore the Faeroes represents a desire for independence from social conformity.

4: The Faeroese refuse to kow-tow to public opinion and censure: they still hunt whales for food. And pilot whale steak is very tasty, I might add.

This interprets as (a) developing self-respect with the willingness to stand one’s ground against the tide of public opinion (and as readers know, pantodragon WILL stand her ground) and (b) having a “whale of a time”.

(Another purpose of dreams/divination: to ensure that you have a “whale of a time”.)

5: In the dream I am in a wooden house and see a woman in ethnic costume.

This image is personal to me in that the house made of wood and the type of clothing the woman wears are particular likes of mine. However, the image raises the general point that divination will help you identify your likes. This helps you fulfil your personal dreams and ambitions as well as supplying your mind with the right kind of “food” essential for your personal health and well-being.

(You may think that (a) identifying your likes is trivial and (b) you already know what your likes are. Wrong on both counts.)

6: At the bank: when I visited the Faeroes for real, I had the option of taking either Danish or Faeroese currency --- both were accepted. As a matter of courtesy, I opted for taking Faeroese currency.

This interprets as developing cooperative behaviour, which is the natural state of human beings, unlike the un-natural competitive behaviour they exhibit today and which is a symptom of the sickness of modern society. (And for goodness sakes, don’t anyone try to tell me that human society is cooperative. It is highly competitive, red in tooth and claw, a struggle for survival. Full stop. It is the NATURAL world that is cooperative.)

The disruptive boys in the bank interpret as re-defining what is good and bad behaviour --- inevitable once one obtains independence from social conformity.



Finally, a summary of some of the benefits of using divination:

Divination offers practical advice about projects, about your health, about what is going on in the minds of other people as well as their motivations; it helps you understand the world; it teaches you how to use divination i.e. dream language; it restores your mind to its natural state where it grows and develops naturally; it develops cooperation, the natural, healthy state of mind, as opposed to competitiveness, a “sick” behaviour; it helps you identify your likes and thus fulfilling your dreams and ambitions; it develops your intuition, your self-respect, your independence and self-sufficiency e.g. you will no longer need to rely on doctors or other outside authorities; it develops the ability to communicate; it helps you enjoy life --- you will never get into a rut.

There are countless other benefits which arise from using divination. In short, using divination is vital to leading a healthy, interesting, fulfilling, rich, highly enjoyable life.

What I should also make clear is that IF YOU DO NOT DEVELOP YOUR OWN LIKES AND DISLIKES AND ESCHEW PUBLIC OPINION, IF YOU DO NOT DEVELOP INDEPENDENCE, IF YOU DO NOT HOLD TRUE TO YOURSELF AND YOUR OWN SPIRIT IN FACE OF SOCIETY CHALLENGING YOU AND TELLING YOU YOU ARE WRONG, TELLING YOU YOU ARE A FAILURE, THEN YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO LEARN HOW TO INTERPRET DIVINATION OR TO INTERPRET DREAMS. If you do not do all these things, your dreams will stick and so will your mind; if you do these things, your dreams will develop and your mind will develop and grow along with them.

Lets see, Divination indeed works. In Baldur's Gate II its a whole school of spells.

Level 1 "Protection from Evil", "Sanctuary" and "Remove Fear" are probably the only useful ones. "Detect Evil" is worthless.
Level 2, " Silence 15' Radius", "Resist Fire/Cold" and "Hold Person". No to "Know Alignment" and "Good Berries".
Level 3, "Animate Dead" (Skeleton Warrior fuck yeah!), "Dispel Magic" and "Summon Insect". Forget "Rigid Thinking" and "Remove Paralysis" (bugged)
Level 4, "Call Woodland Beings" (tricky but fun), "Death Ward" and "Defensive Harmony". Skip "Cloak of Fear" and "Mental Domination".
Level 5, "Insect Plague" (fire at caster and forget, well .. kick ass), "True Seeing" (against illusions) and "Iron Skins". "Repulse Undead" and "Greater Command" are garbage.
Level 6, "Wondrous Recall" (freebies!), "Heal" and " Blade Barrier". "False Dawn" against vampires for lulz

Thats about it. Thats what I use divination for.

Cool story.

I think most people use divination to make themselves appear mystical when in reality they're all just talking bollocks. That's the standard use. Others use it to make money from idiots who think that divination actually works.

Can this be moved to the appropriate (sub) part of the board?

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Can this be moved to the appropriate (sub) part of the board?

And merged with the other Weather forecast 'divination' thread?

Funny that when digging, or searching for, vertebrate fossils i used my sense of sight. Even more strange was touching the matrix, and bone, to my tounge in order to determine sediment clastics, possible cehemical markers and surface porosity. When I smelled 65 mya amber i must have been hittin' some killa.

Without those sensory inputs, and practiced employment thereof, paleontologylogy would be a bitch!

Perhaps I wasn't really doing scince.

RS

Posted from work to bookmark for further comment.

How tasty are those coprolites?

I had a dream once that my penis was made of burek.

pantodragon wrote:My experience of divination:

Divination works. Full stop. I cannot now imagine living without using divination

And therein lies the hook.

Because you can't imagine it, does not mean that those who don't are any worse off. You've built up this dependance on an irrational belief and now live in the prison of your own creation.

Step on a crack = break your mother's back. Believe that and forever fear stepping on cracks.

pantodragon wrote:My experience of divination:

Divination works. Full stop.

Confirmation bias is a wonderful thing.

If it works, why does it fail EVERY time that it is tested under controlled conditions?

pantodragon wrote:I cannot now imagine living without using divination: my health would suffer, I would not have access to the insights and understanding about people

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!

Understanding?

Have you even read your own shit?

You have exhibited NO understanding of ANYTHING.

I've used divination and discovered many things........