Wish Bones and Other Oracles

Call it natural. Call it foolish. But whatever you call it, realize that the desire to know the future has always been with us.

In prehistoric times, sages assembled bits of burned bones to read the future. These "wish bones" comprised the divination art known as "scapulimancy." Over time the practice evolved into the examination of tortoise shells, and later still, into understanding the message in the positions of sticks as they fell from the hands of the shaman. During the Classical Age, the quest for foreknowledge took pilgrims to Phocis, at the foot of Mt. Parnassus in Greece, where the curious listened with reverence and rapture to the Delphic Oracle which spoke in riddles.

For the past few centuries, seekers of insight have turned to card readers, astrologers, and others with ability to read the future.

More recently, in our world without walls, the curious have been able to pick up a phone and dial into what is called a "psychic network" for insights into the future.

And very recently, computers, and especially the Internet, have allowed us to satisfy our need to know the future more quickly and conveniently than at any other time in history. We can say that the Internet is the shaman of the late 20th century, satisfying our desire for instant gratification, bringing us all closer together, and answering our seemingly limitless questions.

An innovative Lake Tahoe Nevada company has taken oracle reading to a new level with The Psychic Internet ^tm, a fully interactive divining site, offering a variety of readings as well as numerous pages of interesting information. Anyone with a World Wide Web browser can dial into The Psychic Internet to read about various types of divining tools, such as the tarot, the I Ching, and astrology, and to order a personalized reading from a professional, highly experienced psychic.

Does such a site have a place on a network servicing highly literate and educated people?

Despite the power of oracles in predicting the future and analyzing present circumstances through the ages, skeptics deny the compatibility of divination with the character of our contemporary culture, reacting from one of two positions: scientific or religious. The scientifically inclined claim that science has obliterated the need for speculations of a mystical or metaphysical nature, a position that surprises many scientists. No lesser a genius than Einstein himself said in "Strange is Our Situation Here upon Earth," "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."

The other skeptics, represented by the religious fundamentalists, adamantly maintain that all divination is occult, and, therefore, evil by its very nature. By condemning "occult" studies as "the Devil's work," these people fail to realize that "occult" is from the Latin "occulere" meaning simply �hidden." But working with hidden information and efforts to bring these powers within human control by scientific methods is threatening to some.

The medieval concept of occult properties included only those properties that may be revealed by experimentation. The alchemists, astrologers, seers, and others who practiced this �science� of experimentation were a small group, usually in conflict with orthodox theology. Consequently, their work was considered mysterious, and the term occultism gradually came to denote the study of supernatural forces. Nevertheless, all the so-called natural sciences stemmed from occultism, and early scientists were frequently called magicians and sorcerers because of the mystery attributed to their investigations by most of their contemporaries.

Modern occultism is generally considered to have begun with the concept of animal magnetism, first developed by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century. Mesmer believed that certain individuals possess occult powers, comparable to the powers of the magnet, that can be used to invoke the supernatural. In the mid-19th century occultism took the form of spiritualism, a belief that the spirits of the dead may manifest themselves through the agency of living persons called mediums. After the turn of the century occultism included serious investigations of extrasensory perception (ESP) including mental telepathy. Although still not considered mainstream science, occultism is studied extensively at universities such as Duke, Yale, and Stanford. In fact, several branches of science today are hot on the trail of identifying, classifying, and measuring energies that have eluded all but traditional belief systems and esoteric philosophies through the ages.

I knew nothing about the Tarot, a popular card oracle, until I was introduced to it by a "reader" who also happened to be a systems analyst in California's Silicon Valley. Later when I happened to be investigating some concepts of organizational science, I was surprised to learn that one of its undisputed masters, Mr. Matsushita, the CEO of Japans huge Matsushita Electric, drew his lessons and ongoing counsel from the I ching (The Book of Changes), a divining tool which originated somewhere between four and five thousand years ago in China.

According to Dr. Glenn Williston, co-founder of The Psychic Internet, "oracles, like the tarot, do not represent magic, and their incredible accuracy does not come from mysterious or supernatural forces. Rather, the power of oracles comes from very natural energies that surround us all the time. Like radio or television transmissions, the energies of life are available to anyone who can "tune in the right station." An intuitive person, often called "a psychic" has a particular talent for tuning into these energies through either inherited factors and/or training. Thus some psychics are born while others are made, but most of the best are a combination of both.

How can scrying (reading) oracles like the Tarot and I Ching possibly be accurate in assessing past, present, and future since the selection of cards by a "reader" seems like the product of chance?

"Like most oracles, the images of Tarot are archetypal; that is, they reflect the experiences and mind of man throughout the ages. In order to understand how the Tarot 'works' (that is, why it seems so accurate in describing our situation and predicting the way we will respond to people, places, situations, and events), we must adopt a new understanding of the world and of our own minds," Dr. Williston states.

When an oracle is consulted, the reader views a "slice of time," a slice of what quantum physics calls the "time spiral," with all its co-existing probable events. We might say that the future is created out of the interaction of various, often contradictory, probabilities. Factors not present in the "slice of time" may enter the mix and become apparent "along the way." Thus another "slice of time," viewed just minutes later, can reveal new and/or different information. Some probabilities are much stronger than others and these change very little, if at all, while the weaker probabilities can and do change radically minute by minute.

Interestingly, with each change in attitude or perspective, with each new decision, probabilities shift, and, amazingly, some scientists say that the past changes too!

Thus, an oracle reading by a skilled, intuitive person can produce surprisingly accurate and insightful directives and suggestions to help us reinforce what we want to happen, and change what we want to avoid.

"To be forewarned is to be forearmed."

It is an error to assume that our science and technology has created a world, like Venus from the half-shell, disconnected and unrelated to all that has preceded it in our human culture. It is worth reflecting again on Marshall McLuhan's illuminating words:
. . .the "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.

We carry our humanity with us into every successive environment we create. All lamentations to the contrary are futile; and misguided efforts to make it not so can be tragic. Stalin's attempt to stamp out religion, for example, may have destroyed a multitude of unrepentant lives, but today's resurgence of religion in Russia shows how small was his success.

Ultimately, the value of oracles cannot be decisively evaluated. Science does not posses tools sufficient to the task of proving or disproving most of the hypothesis it labels as paranormal, although studies at Duke University and other schools have proved time and time again that predicting the future is possible. Reliance on skeptical experts may provide a certain smug comfort to those dependent on certainty, but it also blinds us to the kinds of experiences that make the world a richer, more diverse place. Certainly, there can be no substitute for personal experience when it comes to such things as a psychic oracle.

The Psychic Internet ^tm is a marvelously enjoyable way of getting to that invaluable personal experience. At this new World Wide Web site, two very highly sensitive and articulate psychic-intuitives with more than 50 years of proven experience, respond to their clients on personal issues of all kinds, in an interactive on-line interplay of questions and answers.

Even more delightful for the open-minded peregrinator are pages of information and commentary on a wide variety of New-Age topics and metaphysical research.

The Psychic Internet is developing and maintaining a New-Age Directory with pointers and links to similar resources all over the Internet, and therefore promises to be an important central site for all those whose interests tend toward the marvelous and the mysterious.

This selection is provided as a courtesy to interested parties. Neither WholeARTS ^tm nor The Psychic Internet ^tm is responsible for the accuracy of the information.