The Untrained Intuitive

A Modern Epidemic

thus continues my “ghost school 101” mini-series…

What are Qualities of a Healthy Oracle/Intuitive?

Artist’ Interpretation of Machig Labdron… but don’t put anybody on a pedestal

• has an on/off switch they can activate at will.

• has discernment. this is the key word to think about whenever someone says any of these words: oracle, channel/channeling, intuitive/intuition, psychic, medium, “past lives”, etc. DISCERNMENT.

• understands the difference between a ghost pretending to be not-a-ghost and actually useful information. see discernment

• the ability and capacity to use their intuition/oracle ability in many different ways in many different contexts, not just high-dopamine situations of “channeling for others”, etc.
  some examples are using intuition to budget finances appropriately. navigating traffic. has clues about changing habits or adapting conduct. able to concentrate/focus using light trance states. able to “change the radio channel” or turn off the spirits.

• has daily or regular practices/rituals that are controllable and have multiple adaptive uses. practices that ground/center them, allow them to listen to others and listen to opinions that contradict their own ideologies without collapsing or becoming aggressive. able to deal with their emotions and reactions equitably and sanely.

• and that they practice these practices regularly, not just when they “feel bad” or something.

• has strong and healthy community/family/sangha relations. able to maintain relationships over time. values community. not “isolated” (but still may require solitude to regulate, that’s okay if they can come back to a community/family or possibly even strong mentor/teacher relationships.)

• able to learn new things, be correctable and take directions appropriately.

• can focus on positive things easily without “whitewashing” the negative and can focus on negative things without becoming negative.

What are Qualities of an Afflicted or Haunted Oracle/Intuitive?

RUH-ROH RAGGY!

Disclaimer: Someone may have aspects and qualities from both lists. in this case a thorough examination and accounting of a person’s life needs to be studied, as the person themself may be an unreliable narrator of their own experiences, behaviors and conduct.

the ratio, timing, concentration and context of their symptoms is necessary in order to make good use of the information towards the goal of unraveling fate and/or exorcising ancestral ghosts. what constitutes unraveling fate may look very different to different kinds of people with different qi characters and fate patterns. your goal, for instance, may not be the other person’s goals. this is why it’s good to cultivate caution in all areas.

• weak kidney qi - symptoms may include:
  - poor circulation (almost a dead giveaway),
  - inability to make strong decisions (weak will),
  - cold or cold damp conditions (always feels cold),
  - overweight, low muscle tone, spacey/space-cadet, severe ADHD type symptoms,
  - negative symptoms that move around the body and change frequently (known as “wind symptoms”),
  - easily “swept up” in flights of fantasy such as daydreams, dreams, “inspiration”, anxieties, nightmares, abstraction, “past life” stories, things that can’t actually be proven and thus a strong idealism concurrent with ideas such as belief, faith, trust, hope, etc.

• poor boundaries

• inability to detach from their own ideas, ideology, stories, narratives (esp. around metaphysical concepts like “good vs evil”, heaven/hell, ascension, transcendence, salvation, specialness, gods/demons/devils, etc.)

• seeks high intensity or peak states as a kind of raison d'etre

• is actually selfish though talks endlessly about helping others, has a kind of “main character syndrome” but they say they hate people like that.

• is “arrogant about how humble they are”

• is like an open wi-fi hub that is affected by everything in a kind of negative way - the pitfalls of being too sensitive and not regulating that sensitivity properly.

• has an intense victimhood story that MUST be confirmed and validated

• overly fascinated with their inspiration (likes to talk about it, instead of acting from it)

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A Brief Overview of the Oracle Throughout History

The Oracle is a community-sanctioned (trained, elected) medium that goes into trance to get USEFUL information from the dead.

If the information isn’t useful, then that person isn’t considered to be an oracle. It’s somehow afflictive and must be remedied.

In any intact culture, intuitives must be trained and go through some version of initiation in order to determine where and how their intuition is best placed in the greater context of the community.

i know you allllll think u wanna be this bitch - artists interpretation of the Oracle at Delphi

Not all intuitives would be clear enough to become “state oracles” for example. Many would become part of a priesthood if the society had such an organized system. In more rural places, lineage would pass from elder to apprentice students who would “take over” for the village, perhaps as part of a team. Usually there is a male and female sect in a village, each in charge of certain rites, skills, ghosts, deities, etc. (The gendered nature of these roles is often culturally specific and can’t be easily placed into a modern neo-liberal idea of gender.)

In a well-organized society, intuitives would be distributed and use their skills as adjunctive to their given role in society or family. Not everyone would be clamoring to be seen and acknowledged as a shaman, oracle, seer, etc. These jobs were often seen as a kind of curse or ancestral affliction, often disabling the person even if they survived long enough to perform the task for others/the clan. Mediums don’t live every long in the history books, and that’s because any kind of spirit possession work eats up a person’s kidney qi. Often any shamans or witch doctors would be chosen by force by the spirits and ancestors, often developing serious illnesses and injuries which are tests they must overcome to become useful to the community. Much of the pre-dynastic, pre-agricultural folk healers of this vein would be killed if their magics and prediction didn’t work. This was not seen as a hobby or as a thing people “wanted” to do, but as a non-consensual directive from ancestors, the dead, the spirits. There was no guarantee of a happy life, pleasure, etc.

This is an hour-long documentary on the state oracles of Tibet for $3 on Vimeo that’s very good.
The Oracle: Reflections on Self
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tibetoracle

Modern Problems, Ancient Patterns

So, why is there such an uptick of psychics, intuitives etc. in the modern, western, colonial mercantile age that we are in?

Let’s try and break it down. (by excessively using bullet points which i’m told are part of how we hook readers)

• ancestral backlog due to leaving homelands in some violent way, resulting in ancestral lineages trying to get modern descendants to re-connect to “lost” homelands.

• lack of an organizing overall culture which is shared and which functions adequately for 300 million people. leading to intuitive qualities being unmoored from structures of restraint and training.

• warfare produces many ghosts and the last hundred or so years has seen the invention of weapons of mass destruction which kill enormous amounts of people quickly. this creates far more ghosts, far more quickly then perhaps ever seen before in history.

  

  i mean, u should know what this is

• more living humans on the planet than ever before, leading to more “opportunities” for unresolved ancestral karmas to be passed on in hopes of being resolved.

• potentially more “mixed heritage” people than ever before, often without the necessary rituals that would harmonize the clan/family spirits/ghosts.

• widespread misinformation and disinformation on what intuition, channeling, mediumship and psychic phenomenon actually are. mixed with the American dream narrative which fosters a kind of individualistic narcissism (main character syndrome) and rebellious attitude towards tradition and “the past”.

• extreme uptick in the amount of new age cults, including the western appropriation and cherry-picking of Buddhism and Hinduism in the last 100 years.

  

  it’s not like i had a lack of pictures to choose from

Now then, if those are the modern set-ups, how can we relate this to the full history of humanity and how intuitive capacities are part of the human inter-relationship with nature?

• we can say that intuition is a natural function of human birth, and that all human characters have a relationship with intuition.

• we can say that throughout human history, the seemingly random events of time, place and human lineage have precedent, therefore have patterns that can be discerned. we discern these patterns through a wide variety of subjects that we can lump together as “innovation”, which includes the so-called sciences such as maths, geometry, anatomy and physiology, medicine, etc AND the so-called arts/humanities which would be things like astro-geomancy (astrology & Feng shui), spirit possession, dreams, etc. The main thing to remember is that innovation is innovation and is all in a sense, oracular in nature.

• we can say that all humans have needed to have a healthy relationship with their families in order to survive, which includes the dead ancestors. These dead create an amalgamated body of wisdom, knowledge and pattern recognition — far greater than can be held by any single human.

• we can say that through this pattern recognition library, all variations on a theme have been glimpsed before. Therefore, the dead can see our shared commonality easier than we can.

• we can say that because time is cyclical, that patterns repeat continuously, and that this cyclical continuity is what nature is and thus what we are.

• we can say that aligning to this cyclical continuity allows a bridge between living humans and the dead in order to continue adapting together through time and space.

• we can thus say that oracular activity is all-pervasive and distributed amongst peoples/nature in different forms, but all sharing the same basic qualities of communication, connectedness, inseparability and reflection. This includes the inevitable potential for resolution even within acute disease, affliction and conflict.

• finally, training in the ability to communicate (with discernment) with this library-of-the-dead would inevitably produce similar results over time, regardless of the superficial differences and diversity of context.

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“64,000* ghosts and i can hear them all!” - The Afflicted Oracle as Infinite Ghost Magnet

*In Daoist/Confucian/Buddhist history, they had a taxonomy of ghosts. One could also say this was their version of daemonology. In their taxonomy they classified 64,000 different kinds, or variations of ghosts.

Since all this is “just-so of itself” and now that we have more of a shared understanding of the ORDINARINESS and distribution of human intuitive capacity, we can dive a bit deeper into the afflictive or haunted symptomology of modern untrained intuitives.

Keep in mind this is not a deep dive into the various 60 character types (celestial stems/branches) constituting polestar astrology and tongshu lunar almanac studies. Suffice to say, everyone’s qi character combination (year plus hour, etc) is going to have a different relational access to intuitive capacity and that will further be diversified via the natal placement of various star combinations in the different houses/palaces, as well as the current day/month/year qi.

If we can generalize some of the most obvious afflicted archetypes of the oracle in modern culture, it would be one of “hearing voices” or “frequent partial possession” which would be categorized as various mental illness in modern western psycho-medical parlance.

Or “The Ghost Magnet”.

This is someone whose sensitivity is a great burden to them because they have not learned how to truly BE sensitive. They are like an open gate, letting anyone through. A magnet in daily life, taking home all manner of things. Perhaps even attracting these things during sleep. All of this is happening out of the conscious and deliberate control of the person.

This “unconscious” or “random” phenomena can even be considered being “chosen” or “special” buy “the gods” or “fate” in some fantasy pop-culture daydream.

It’s here where the ancestral karmic backlog of colonialism enmeshes with the natural function of ancestral oracles to potentially re-create the conditions for ghostly karma that some ancestors may have experienced which led to the very present-day issues the person is facing.

The first step in healing a problem is admitting you have one. And that problem may very well be an addiction to the addiction itself. Feeling “Special” even though you are essentially disabled from leading a truly generous and productive life that exhibits stability, constancy and caution.

Your sub-culture may even further entrench you into this miasma. Feeding your heroic-victim narrative with wild ideas and dopaminergic co-dependency.

You can see this all over the internet with many of the micro-cult sub-cultures that all share many of the negative symptoms listed in the first part of this article. It often takes more than one person to create an entrenched tangle of double-binds and addictive defenses. Every two-bit psychic medium NEEDS desperate clients after all.

The main point i want to make here is that if a person doesn’t want to change this dynamic, then they won’t, and trying to help them will also open you up to various ghostly possessions they carry with them.

Even if a person complains about being a ghost magnet, you have to discern how attached they are to some of the side effects of that condition. For instance, they may also enjoy complaining about it. They may have self-identified with the arrangement of their setup. They (or their ghosts) may just want you to act as a sympathetic voyeur. You have to walk into these situations with all your wits and protection available. You can’t just give anyone the benefit of the doubt at face value when these kinds of situations are at play.

From my own experience of being haunted and a kind of ghost magnet, it takes years of self-determined dedication to truly change the terrain (physical and spiritual) that would allow real positive transformation to occur. This also means potentially “losing” phenomena that make you feel special. Developing radiant integrity is often not about appearing more exceptional!

It is also very rare that these kinds of ghost magnets can find authentic helpers that are trustworthy and skillful enough to assist you. Often there are ghosts involved who attract other kinds of ghosts and bring about the worst in relationships.

If one has steeped in wisdom practices long enough, then these conflicts can be useful, but only if one has trained long enough to be able to use pain, fear and hunger to reveal untapped wisdom.

It’s also not everyone’s job to specialize in the kinds of situations I’m talking about in this article.

Often, the people who are afflicted this way are very poor and marginalized and many are not the best use of time and generosity.

It’s often better to help those who have more potential to help others, than someone whose ancestral fate is very uneven and maybe barely useful.

I’m not advocating further ostracization, but this is very much like a situation of a drowning person putting the lifeguard in danger.

It takes skill, precision, protection and often a kitchen sink approach to begin to confront the issues present in a person who is very entangled in this way.

It’s not something you should feel called to do.

If anything, I’m just outlining this to better educate and so that we can know when something like this may have entered your sphere. If you deal with clients in any capacity, you will run across people like this. You should have more knowledge about it, knowledge that definitely isn’t shared in any MFA counseling or social work program.

However, if you are one of these haunted intuitives, and somehow, you’re reading this with an open mind, you should ask yourself what kind of person you really want to be in this world.

Your intuitive capacity may not be a gift, but a cry for help from an ancestor that seeks resolution. Can you see a good end to your situation? Can you even imagine it? How much are you infatuated with your afflictions? How often do you create wild narratives about “what’s really going on”? How often do you hear voices that you can’t shut up or turn off?

If you experience this, you need to be willing and able to focus your life on resolving it and going through the often-confusing process of transformation. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility but yours.

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The Oracle & The Exorcist - Two Different Roles

To finish up this article, I will briefly attempt to explain the differences between an oracle and an exorcist, and how anyone can engage in easy, compassionate exorcism regardless of if they feel like they are doing any oracular work.

The Oracle Asks Questions of The Dead.

The Oracle themself isn’t developing the answers per se. They are asking and listening.

This is why, throughout history, all serious oracles had teams of people and training to mitigate this “open” asking quality.

This is also why, over time, people developed systems of mathematics and symbology that allowed oracular activities to occur without serious trance possession. When we filter our open questioning through a structured system, we can protect ourselves from a lot of negative side effects.

Basically, you should be very very careful of just “listening” to random voices that you hear, especially if you feel really good or really bad when you hear them, based on what they say to you or how you feel about the fact that they “chose you” to talk to.

And as always, you and your hungry dead can desire to repeat a cycle which makes you food, in which case, you hate everything I’ve written in this article anyway, without any critical engagement.

The Exorcist Organizes The Dead.

ceramic of Zhong Kui, mythic Daoist Exorcist

Often, this has been a responsibility of whatever priesthood is trained in the society. Sometimes, there is an oracle on the team of the priests, in case there is a need to know more information so that the organizing can happen. These priests have a deep understanding of death and post-death processes, as well as various protection techniques in addition to the “exorcistic” techniques. However, in a functioning society, families would be doing a regular hygienic practice that would serve as basic exorcism, and thus priests would only be needed in specialized circumstances, funerals etc.

Exorcism is a wide-ranging ecosystem of practices, many of which are not “Hollywood style” bullshit.

Easy Exorcisms:

• offerings of incense, water and/or fresh fruit for the ancestors

• offerings of incense in front of a plaque for specific unsettled dead

• offerings of prayer, song/dance, art, ritual, etc on certain days, for certain classes of beings.

• being kind

• having dignity, even with things you don’t like, like pain, fear, “evil” etc.

• maintaining a sense of natural elegance and receptivity

• practice hygiene daily, in every sense of the word

• making sure the food/drink you ingest, and the words you speak, are based on the right story and view teachings (seasonal accordance, how to die well, how to bring benefit to others/the dead, manners, protocol, caution, animism, etc.)

• learning a discipline which is not the same as a compulsion or obsession

• cultivating clarity in self-reflection

• not behaving excessively in any direction

• respecting other beings that are all around you

• distancing yourself from your personal narratives

• learn to stop your negativity bias

Something I can’t quite stress enough is that once you start assigning objective truth to any narrative that can’t actually be empirically proven, you take a step closer to madness and delusion. It’s okay if you have weird experiences, you should just have a way to step outside of them and see those experiences in other contexts.

Ok final list of this article!

Some useful associations:

• Gods have Glamour (grandiosity, artifice, pretentiousness).

• Ghosts are Confused all the time (weak, undermining).

• Demons are Compulsive all the time (similar to ghosts but with better weapons).

• Gods, Ghosts & Demons are all, in their own way, still chained to fate, thus, they are Unresolved & Unliberated.

• Liberation is the “loss” of Identity, History and compulsive Habituation.

• Liberation & Freedom are the same, in that Freedom is the power to make choices that aren’t based on Fate. We can use our Freedom to create MORE Fate, more Identity, more History, more Habituation.

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Housekeeping

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all claims are my own based on my current understanding of the subject matter and are also subject to being updated as new and more accurate information becomes available to me. I am not arguing with your religion, personal or otherwise.