Somewhat to my surprise, I found one of my favourite ‘personal growth’ writers, Charles Burke, blogging about a day he spent doing palm reading, of all things. Here’s his article, with pictures. I get the impression that he doesn’t take the ‘fortune telling’ aspect especially seriously, but is moved by the opportunity to connect with so many people.
Like anyone working in or observing divination, he found the same questions kept on coming up:
“Some people were just curious, but most came with specific questions. Should I take this job or that one? What kind of person should I marry? Or will I ever marry again? Is a particular business a good idea for me?”
Relationships, career, relationships, decisions, relationships…
The common factor he found in all of these was “a profound need for more confidence”. I think he’s spot on. Many people come to a diviner because they’re looking for certainty – often because they’re not quite sure whether to trust in their own gut feeling, or because they’re hearing such an inner clamour of arguments that they can’t distinguish their own inner voice from the hubbub.
So Charles spent his day answering questions about marriage and suchlike, but trying at the same time to discourage dependency, and squeeze in a ‘primer’ on confidence when he could. The question is, where does the kind of confidence people look for in readings actually come from?
It seems Charles’ customers were looking for confidence ‘out there’: someone to answer their questions, tell them what will happen or what they ‘should’ do. But if they left his booth with true confidence, it didn’t come because he gave them an answer. Any diviner will know that there can be an answer without confidence: the querent will be polite, thankful to have received the answer they requested – and back to ask a variant on the exact same question in next to no time.
Divination only gives true confidence when its answer opens a clear connection to the querent’s own answer. The oracle talks the querent’s own language, gives voice to their concerns and image to their latent understanding. As Ron Masa puts it (in his introductory I Ching audio), it acts as a ‘megaphone for the still small voice’. Then we can escape the realm of ‘fortune telling’ and get back to the heart of the present moment, the only place where we’re likely to find truth or confidence.
Thanks for the mention — and you’re absolutely right. I don’t conssider myself any variety of psychic or intuitive. Just the opposite. I read the lines on the hands, just as they’re presented, then use experience, common sense and a big dose of compassion to try and communicate to each person a bigger vision of themselves.
Virtually everybody walks around thinking they’re far smaller than they really are, so this bigger self-vision is a huge need in all of us.
And by the way, I love your comment that “it acts as a ‘megaphone for the still small voice’. Then we can escape the realm of ‘fortune telling’ and get back to the heart of the present moment, the only place where we’re likely to find truth or confidence.”
Yes! Yes! That describes it exactly.
Again, thanks for your comments.
Cheers from sunny Japan,
Charles
“The question is, where does the kind of confidence people look for in readings actually come from?”
It comes from developing strengths in yourself and eliminating energy drains and pollution. If you do that, your being will change and your understanding will change parallel to that. When you understand things better you’ll have less reason to doubt your own decisions because you’ll be less of an automaton and more able to control your life. For the average person, sound guidance is a real issue because conditioning keeps us from what we really are, so we don’t know what we really want, so we don’t know what to choose.
But people don’t *need* more confidence. More confidence just makes you feel better, but you don’t need it. What you need is more awareness and will.
Charles –
“Virtually everybody walks around thinking they’re far smaller than they really are, so this bigger self-vision is a huge need in all of us.”
It isn’t this simple. On the one hand you’re right, cuz there are many, many people suffering from wounded self-esteem, damaged self-esteem, undeveloped self-esteem. But on the other hand, the ordinary conditioned human mind thinks it’s way more important than it actually is – it’s typical for most people to be focussed on the gains and losses, tensions and releases of their little lives as if these things were terribly important, when in fact they’re not. So, in relation to the cosmos, most people are inflated; in relation to a standard of healthy psychology, most people are suffering from perceptions and feelings of inadequacy, wrongness, smallness, badness.
So, where you say people need ‘bigger self-vision’, I’d say they need bigger vision (meaning ‘perceiving a larger context for their lives’). See, it’s the falseness of the perception that’s the problem – the ego thinks it’s important, which ironically is why it thinks it’s inadequate. But if I know my self-image is an inflated lie, I can let go of feelings of inadequacy, cuz I know it’s just my lying bloody ego at work again.
Maybe the question is what we mean by ‘self’? The little one, that we inflate, or the big one, that we’re mostly unaware of (since the little one’s trying to persuade us that it’s as big as it gets)?
About needing more confidence – I’m inclined to agree that what we really need is more of what confidence comes from – ‘awareness and will’, or perhaps it all follows simply from awareness. But what most of us are conscious of wanting is more confidence. So the diviner meets the want, and hopes it can be a conduit to answer the need.
“Maybe the question is what we mean by ’self’? The little one, that we inflate, or the big one, that we’re mostly unaware of (since the little one’s trying to persuade us that it’s as big as it gets)?”
The little one’s the problem – it feels inadequate, it inflates itself; it feels stepped on and unappreciated, it steps on others and happily invites them to get lost. And when we say ‘I’, it’s the little self that is being referred to. Most people are unaware of the big one, and even if they know about the big one, they’re still stuck in their experience of the little one; it’s really hard to get beyond it. The only way beyond it is by means of what’s called spiritual development, which is a matter of interest, work, luck and finding the right people. In the meantime, we reach for the oracle.
“About needing more confidence – I’m inclined to agree that what we really need is more of what confidence comes from – ‘awareness and will’, or perhaps it all follows simply from awareness. But what most of us are conscious of wanting is more confidence.”
Most of us experience lots of fear and uncertainty because we identify with the little self. So yeah, we want more confidence. But as soon as you see the huge disadvantage of this, as soon as you start to learn how to let go of the little self, you start to access a depth that provides either confidence or an acceptance of lack of confidence lol. You know, I heard a really good line in a movie the other night (the movie, ‘Solaris’, was okay, but the line was really good). The hero was desperately trying to understand a very mysterious situation, and a character who had been through the same process before him gave him this bit of wisdom: “There are no answers; there are only choices.” People lack confidence cuz they don’t know what’s going on (that’s why we consult the oracle, right? Cuz we want to know more…) But even if we know more, it doesn’t really change us, it doesn’t change what we are, so we’re still unconfident people. But it does give us a bit more information so that our *choices* are a bit more in tune with the situation, a bit less ego-driven, a bit less likely to be pissing in the wind.
Anyway, what I’m saying boils down to this:
* Feeling a need for confidence is typical of being an ordinary human.
* That feeling is what drives Yi consultation.
* Consulting the Yi gives you a slight advantage in terms of decision-making, but it doesn’t change you – you don’t evolve out of that rather pathetic lack of confidence until you do the spiritual practice and get the spiritual training.
“So the diviner meets the want, and hopes it can be a conduit to answer the need.”
Sure, as long as both diviner and querent understand the limits to the exercise that I’ve described above. Consulting an oracle is like watching CNN when what you *really* want is a good two or three hours perusing the Guardian. It’ll do until the real thing comes along.
Are you sure??
I’m pretty sure, yeah. At the time of going to press, my understanding is that when we make changes (according to the Yi or just using our own judgement) we’re doing the equivalent of moving to a different place in the room but still staying in the same room. Or perhaps: when we make changes we’re moving to a different room, but staying on the same floor of the building. We’re like fish in a river: we move around, but we’re in the same river which carries us along according to *its* course.
The kind of real change I’m talking about is a change of awareness and being. That’s pretty rare.
Hm. I’m pretty sure that mindful divination can in itself be a spiritual practice, and lead to real change – both in the moment of divination, and imperceptibly in the longer term.
When I first moved to Adelaide, I had no money. Someone grabbed my wallet before I could.
So having no food to eat, I set about thinking ‘what have I got thats legal, or semi legal to make a small amount of cash, enough to eat with, that I can offer as a ‘service’ to passers by. So, off to the mall where I wrote on a piece of cardboard in Texta, a large yin and yang, with I CHING READINGS, TWENTY FIVE YEARS EXPERIENCE DOING HIGHLY ACCURATE READINGS FOR PEOPLE. Within five minutes, there was a quew and getting larger. I mean they all hear about Tarot Cards, but what is the I Ching. I just tell them its a similar version of the same idea, but in a much more consice package. Then I said, “I don’t want to know your question, but I will calculate the hexagrams exactly and there is a choice of books here you can read the answer from. I was not interested in the Interpretation side for people then realising all kinds of problems can happen from that, including being sued.
But one woman insisted on telling me she had asked if she should divorce her boring husband who had as much social get up and go in him as a mouse in a cheese trap. The police drove by several times, but the quew put them off moving me on. I was going to look into doing it as a bit of a job, but found Adelaide Council doesn’t want readers in the mall but down in the East End trendy markets along with all the other Tarot Readers, Astro Computer readings and God only knows what else you could get read. But it was too expensive so I deleted the idea from my life, but hey, fancy asking the I Ching, “Should I divorce my boring husband”? And thats why I don’t want to be responsible if the advice I give is wrong. So, I gave them all a card with the information on it on which hexagram to look up and said you may find the I Ching in the Library, or on the Internet, or go and buy a copy of your choice from any good Cosmic Bookshop.
Hilary –
“Hm. I’m pretty sure that mindful divination can in itself be a spiritual practice, and lead to real change – both in the moment of divination, and imperceptibly in the longer term.”
Sure, it’s a spiritual practice. But leading to real change of being of the sort I’m talking about? Well okay, as long as it’s in the longer term you talk about, and as long as you’re getting help (cuz you can’t do it on your own, no matter how hard you try) and as long as you’ve got a ‘map and method’. The Yi isn’t the sort of map and method I had in mind; it’s what you use until you find one.
What are you doing when you cast a hexagram ‘at random’ and receive truth in response, if not getting help?
I do know what you’re getting at, I think. But as I see it, Yi is a conduit for the original kind of help (that allowed people to create those maps and methods in the first place). It can complement more mediated help or maps, but it’s not necessarily deficient without them.
No, that’s not my view. My view is that the Yi is no substitute for real map and method. It’s what we use when we’re desperate for an input other than our own conscious mind. It’s a good friend and advisor, but no substitute for a teacher, because it speaks to *us* and we always interpret what it’s saying in terms we understand, which by definition do not offer us the support and the kicks in the backside which we need. In other words, it is necessarily deficient without those helps. The Yi is like Bach flower remedies or something – it helps me tune my system, but it doesn’t bring about major changes.
all his life my brother-in-law looked for a magic pill that would allow him to eat anything he wanted without consequences. he was told that there was none, but he kept eating what he liked. He died from diabeties.
greetings
i think one should look to i ching as a person with complete information or someone who just looks at a situation in toto.
Many times one will get to know a different perspective which ordinarily get ignored or overlooked.