To be honest, I don't feel I wrote this post out very well, because I was looking less to breakdown by own practice and more to just gain some insight into what other people are achieving with divination
But regarding me specifically:
LoneWolf wrote:Well, what kind of questions are you asking?
Most of my questions (in fact, more or less all that I can remember) have been to do with the direction of my spiritual path. "Should I take up such and such system of practice," "should I study under so and so teacher" and so on. Sometimes a little more specific ("what is causing X problem with my practice,") but mostly very generic.
In the most recent case, which is what inspired me to create this thread, I performed a reading asking about what the results of resuming training with IIH would be (for context, I've had a chaotic couple years, in terms of spirituality, working through some serious barriers to progress and also leaving the school I had been studying in for 2 years, and was looking to re-establish a firm path).
I don't have the specific results on hand (I'll go through my journals later and dig them up, if I can find them - I know I wrote them down), but the general gist of it, as I remember interpreting it, was that I was beginning to get back on track and regain some focus (and this has been corroborated by other experiences, so I don't think it's just wishful thinking), and that there would be an emergence of a teacher or guide.
This latter part was especially strong in the reading, over multiple interpretations of the cards, but I couldn't see any opportunity for such a thing to happen, and figured either I'd botched the reading or that the reading was being metaphorical, in the "you are your own teacher"/"the system will guide you" kind of sense. Especially since it seems pretty obvious to me (and others I know with experience in such things have agreed) that Bardon put a little bit of juice into his books when he wrote them out to give a nudge to those utilizing the training.
Anyway a month later and I'd settled into working my way back through the early Steps of IIH, supplemented with some prescribed pranayama exercises and some qigong. And, somewhat out of the blue, I ended up striking up correspondence with the lineage holder of a system of qigong which I had been engaged with in the past and strongly drawn to, and over this correspondence I was not only offered the opportunity for some personal training and guidance, but it emerged that the teacher in question was uniquely qualified to help me with some of the specific barriers which have been impeding my practice.
Looking back on such a situation, it's actually pretty hard to see how the reading could have been an actionable one. Perhaps I just allowed myself to limit the interpretation by not expanding my scope of what I thought was likely to manifest within my life? But it got me thinking about divination, and about how I'd never actually had a reading which changed the way I acted out a situation even if it proved to be accurate after the fact, and I became curious if other people were getting such readings :p
Sometimes that last bit is easy, and sometimes it's damn near impossible - it depends in part on the nature of the situation (whether or not a particular relationship will last is much easier to read than, say, who will win the next lottery or election), and also on the personal skill of the Diviner. A) How well are you connected to the Oracle you are using? B1) How much practice do you have reading the patterns of fate, and comprehending the threads of those patterns B2) as they are expressed by your Oracle? C) How good are you at formulating questions that penetrate the heart of the matter?
A) Not very. As I said, it's something I bust out on a whim a couple times a year. I also don't feel that I connect to the symbolism of the Tarot very well, especially as my spiritual path has strayed away from conventional Western Hermetic praxis and worldview over the passage of time,
B1) In general terms, I feel I've developed a decent capacity here on a deeper/instinctive/intuitive level, in terms of picking up on where things are at in my life and interpreting why they are the way they are, where they are likely to be headed and what needs to be done to alter the latter, if it is desirable. With the caveat that,
B2) I don't think the divination method I've been using is particularly conducive to good results at this point, for reasons mentioned in A.
C) Not very, but again, this is an aspect of the practice which I don't feel I put a lot of thought into.
I don't use the Tarot much, or any of the other common methods of Divination either, but I have had plenty of success achieving practical results as a Seer. I don't usually need to consult an Oracle to see the patterns of a situation, and really only do so for fun or to get another point of view on a situation, because I usually See them myself. Often to my detriment, because I can't exactly tell good friends that the person they dearly love and wish to marry is going to damn near destroy them in a couple of years, or tell someone to not go to work on a particular day because danger is about to strike them. Even people who are open to the occult don't like to hear such things. They like to cling to their own version of reality. "He'll be such a good husband!", "It's such a beautiful day, nothing will happen." They have to go through the motions, feel the heartache and have the car wreck before they accept the truth. Perhaps such things are necessary.
In the spirit of what I said earlier, I'd be really interested in hearing some specific cases, as well as more about what kind of cues you're picking up on and what the experience is like on a subjective level.
Nobody listens to the Wizard, dammit. [tongue]
Perhaps you should consider a pointy hat
Or a big, rune-graven staff.
TLDR: just practice, man.
Mm, yeah, I probably should. I think one of the problems is that it feels like I'm trivializing if I bust out divination for every small thing, so I end up leaving it for suitably "meaningful" questions, except those don't come along often enough to qualify as practice.
The more I think about it, the more I think a shift in tools is probably a good first step, if I decide to engage in divination in a more dedicated, day to day fashion. Something like the I Ching would be more in line with my current philosophical and practical engagements, and the symbolism feels a lot more precise and scientific to me than something like the Tarot.
I've had more luck getting practical information from the I Ching. Usually, though, I get what I need from dreams and meditations. The tarot has helped me in the past but it became very frustrating to me and seemed to give me contradictory information many times.
One thing I've noticed, and this may just be me and my poor technique or it may be a quirk of the Tarot specifically, but it seems that the cards are as likely to pick up on microcosmic/internal sources as they are macrocosmic/external sources. I remember many of my first few readings almost universally turned out to have very little to do with events as they actually played out, but to be a spot on representation of my anticipation regarding future events and the associated emotional states.