The Excitement of What We Don't Know

Why are the things we don't know so exciting? People always come to readers to either validate something they know but want confirmation on, or they want to know about the unknown.

Actually, since the beginning of mankind, people have wanted to know what they don't know. From the cavemen who cast bones to find out how the hunting would go or how they would fare in battle with their enemies, to the ancient Greeks who made pilgrimages to the Oracles at Delphi to Nostradamus and Madam Lenormand to Jeanne Dixon, Linda Goodman, Sylvia Brown, James van Praagh and John Edward to your favorite neighborhood tarot reader, palmist or astrologer, people want to know what they do not know.

This, to me, is an endlessly fascinating part of human nature. For many of us, it is not enough to simply get up every day and do whatever we have to do, with no end in sight, no dream to move toward. If we thought that all there was to life was to have a job, pay the bills and have some food and entertainment in between, then we naturally find ourselves asking if there is not something more exciting, amazing or great that we are destined to do.

It just seems too limited to think that there is not anything greater or more mysterious going on here. We all like to think that there is a special purpose we serve, or a special task that we have to do before we die, or some other great adventure that is just around the bend, whether it is the love of our life, writing the great American novel, making our own independent movie, playing and singing in a band or whatever. There must be something coming up for us that is more than just our every day job.

The notion that amazing and exciting developments can happen to anybody, with just a twist of fate, is the very root material of most popular movies and novels. The idea that life can present us with something really jazzy just up around the bend, is what makes people want to take a look around that bend, so they ask a reader to help them see.

Sometimes what they see inspires them to do something different and change their life. Readings can let people know they have other choices that they may not have seen. Readings can help people recognize patterns in their life that they were unaware of until the reader pointed them out.

Precisely because a tarot reading, astrology, runes, palmistry and other kinds of reading are considered by many people to be mysterious, people are willing to open up to the experience. After all, it takes a different kind of seeing to see what our normal sight cannot see.

Validation, Not Fortune Telling

People sometimes come to me for a reading to get validation about something going on in their life, rather than revealing something they do not know. That may sound simple, but it is very valuable. Why?

Many years ago, when I started reading at fairs and festivals, I would often wonder why a total stranger would come to me and ask if they should marry the person they are thinking about marrying.

Consider the situation. Maybe all of her friends are telling her to go ahead with it because the guy is good looking, has money and a big house. But something inside her might be warning her off. And perhaps I am the only person who tells her that the match might not be a good one.

Of course, her free will makes the decision whether to marry this person or not.

There are other situations in which this is valuable as well. Sometimes people want a validation about a career change and when a reader simply uses their abilities to identify something that would agree with the querant's own research and decisions, once again, the validation feels real good. A neutral source just confirmed that you are on track.

Other times it may even be in the area of an activity a person enjoys just because it lifts their spirits, such as music, writing or some form of art. If a person gets validation that this really could be a good way for them to express themselves, whether or not it is about making money, that also validates their feelings about what works for them.

The important thing is that sometimes we feel like we might be crazy, especially if someone else is telling us we are because we know something we cannot prove. That validation tells us that we are not crazy. And that feels good.

Especially if the reader is neutral and does not know all the people involved or have any inside information, then the reading simply draws on the reader's abilities and the help of their tools, such as their cards.

I have seen many occasions when simply receiving that validation let the person feel supported in going ahead with what they were going to do anyway. And there is value in that.

Soothing the Throat

This evening my throat was feeling a little raw, so I knew that I needed to do few things to address it. First was the old standby, gargling with warm salt water. Then there were cough drops, cough syrup and then a few mugs of hot tea.

A hot bath with Epsom salts, eucalyptus oil and hyssop oil really felt good as well. Then I felt like something a bit more gentle for the spirit would help as well, so I chose a biography of the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton to watch, and kept getting these little surprises throughout when they featured comments by Buddhist monks he had dialogue with, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.

There was also a sequence that made me smile when Merton's publishers said that they were not sure that his books would sell, and they were amazed at how well they sold. That shows a difference in the way commercial publishing works these days. Then, if the publisher thought that the author had something worthwhile to say, they would publish it even if they were not sure it would be popular. Today, the trend in publishing is to try and only print what is popular. But that does not always prove to be a winner either, because the public's taste can be fickle and ephemeral.

It was also interesting that some people who knew Merton commented that people were not always happy with what he wrote when he spoke out about subjects like peace. He had the clarity of mind to point out that his church had no problem taking a hard line stance on abortion, because they see it as the death of a person, yet they took no stand against using nuclear weapons which could kill millions of people at a time.

There, of course, were also people who had to stretch themselves to understand how or why a Christian monk could find such common ground with Buddhist monks.

In some way, the peaceful spirit emanating from this story helped calm my throat as well. I finished off the evening with some classical music which was very soothing, and then it started to rain, which is always a healing sound for me.

There are a lot of ways to help soothe physical discomforts, using resources from within and without. Healing often works in mysterious ways.

It is important to do more treatments of this sort tomorrow as well, since I will be talking a lot Friday, Saturday and Sunday, doing readings and giving a talk. My voice is important in my work.

So this is a time of charging up the batteries for a large amount of activity, so that I am ready when I need to be.

Peace of Mind

There are many ways to get peace of mind. There is a certain feeling that comes to a person finally achieves something that was difficult for them to do. When something we have worked hard on proves out. Satisfaction.

There are also times when we feel vindicated because something we advocated or predicted came true.

We can also achieve peace of mind by simply not worrying about things so much. Sometimes what we worry about turns out alright and would have turned out alright even if we had not worried about it. Notice how the power of something that had us worried often dissipates quickly when we just quit worrying about it?

Another way to peace of mind is when we simply resign our self to a situation that is not of our liking rather than fight a tremendous uphill battle. Some battles are absolutely worth it, because a great wrong has been righted. But there are other battles that would not win us any great victory, maybe just the hard feelings of others. So maybe we get to feel vindicated, but we do not win any prize.

The wise person chooses their battles and avoids as many battles as possible if there is another solution.

Peace of mind comes through wise choices, not just sitting quietly. Meditation and reflection are good. So is conflict resolution. There are so many ways to get there that I am sure I will think of more as soon as I post this piece.

In a word I guess you could say that common sense makes peace as well as anything else. Peace of mind is not as difficutl to achieve as it might appear at times. We just have to remind ourselves to stay on track.

How We Relate

Often, we find ourselves hooked on forms that we follow because they are familiar, even if our own experience with them has not been successful.

Often times when people have relationship questions, they are thinking about getting married or divorced. It is common for a person to be looking for a third marriage even if they have been married and divorced twice already. But if your experience has been that way, a new idea might work better.

One woman came to me for a reading and when the question of two lovers came up, she announced that she would not choose between them, she would simply keep them both. Of course, some people might not agree with this approach, but trying something different is for the person looking for a different solution.

Last week, when a famous movie star died they noted that he had been married six times. And I am sure you have also read about other actors and actresses who have been married that many times. You would think at some point they would just acknowledge that that model of relationship is not working for them and stay single. But I think what is happening there is that they are really so used to seeing relationships through the context of that form, that they cannot imagine a relationship in another form.

I have met other people who are not movie stars or pop stars or celebrities who also have a track record like that, so the idea is not just about famous people.

Some people who travel a lot for their business end up separated from their partner for frequent or long periods of time. Some people enjoy it that way, some just accept that it is part of the job, and others don't like it and it ends up tearing at the fabric of the relationship.

Once again, it is how people relate to the forms. Where one person might find the absences intolerable, another welcomes them.

We are at a time when many different kinds of relationships exist simultaneously. Within this article I am not trying to discuss all forms of relationships, just the most common.

Expanding our concepts of relationships seems to be necessary. About 1 out 2 marriages ends in divorce, but 50 years ago, getting a divorce was considered a disgrace and could prevent you from getting invited to certain groups and events. So the divorce rate was lower, but that was because some people stayed in a lousy situation rather than fight the social stigma.

Today, we have more choices. In most cases, people would not think twice about whether a person is divorced before inviting them to a social event.

Now when people are meeting and discussing themselves, disclosing that they have been married and divorced before is no big deal.

It all has to do with how you see your possibilities. Years ago, it just came to me when I was filling out forms that asked me about my marital status, I thought about checking divorced again. Then I thought that choosing that word to define myself is like saying that my status is all about my failed marriage. But that is not true. I now choose the word single whenever I have a form to fill out.

Why? If you are legally divorced and available for dating again, doesn't the word single define your current state?

Use a parallel example. Would you define the rest of your life as the person who used to work at XYZ Corporation but lost their job to outsourcing, or would you present yourself to new people as what you do now?

Certainly presenting yourself as who you are now and what you do now will further you progress in creating a new career path.

So give it some thought when you consider your options and what works for you. Maybe just continuing to date will serve your social needs better than another marriage. Maybe we have set stumbling blocks in our own path if we fail to consider other options.

Maybe the woman who chose to keep both lovers is going to thrive with her choice, instead of letting one go and marrying the other.

What made me think of all this in the first place? The idea of a person having six marriages. Plus the fact that so many people express a desire to marry again even if they have had a number of unsuccessful previous marriages.

We all have to make our own choices, it's just that sometimes we offer ourselves to limited a range of choices and then insist that it must be that way.

Perhaps the person who allows themselves more or different choices will cope with the ebb and flow of life and the ebb and flow of relationships better than those who confine themselves to the limited options.

That is for each person to decide. I am just offering this observation.

Love Lessons

Why are some people in our lives? Why is it that there is a sense of destiny in some relationships? Karma? Maybe. Or maybe there is another word for it.

Because of the chemistry between individuals, some are uniquely suited to teach us lessons about love. Others may be uniquely suited to teach us lessons about wisdom.

To be a teacher of love takes a special strength because sometimes the lessons we may present our teacher would make another person run and hide. When that person mirrors back love to us, there is a resilience and determined open heartedness that shows us the true nature of love, forgiveness, and kindness that is always possible, but not always practiced.

Those lessons are really the lessons that all of us can use, but because sometimes we are stubborn or thick headed, we might only be able to accept those lessons from some people, not others.

In a perfect world, I guess everyone could be a teacher for everyone else, but realistically, we have to be open to receiving those lessons. And the chemistry between us and other people might not inspire us to be open.

Some teachers might go so far as to say that all lessons are lessons about love, even if the lesson is about wisdom, or craftsmanship, business or relationships, the lesson is always about love.

To some degree that is true. If you love your work enough to do it well, that is craftsmanship. If you love the people you do business with, you show them love. If you care enough to study a subject to learn it well, that is also a labor of love.

And relationships? There are some people who insist on showing us love even when we screw up, either deliberately or accidentally. That love is quite amazing to behold and to experience.

Are those people who can show love born with that ability or do they learn it? I would say both, although it is fair to say that we all at least need to be reminded once in a while, and pick up a lesson, whether it is the hard way or the easy way.

Babies are born simply as givers and receivers of love. What they learn along the way in life influences how fluently they continue to give and receive love. There seem to be millions of variations in how much people are able to give and receive love. Since we are not all uniform in any other way, I guess that is just natural.

This piece is to thank those people who showed me the way to know this.

Written in Stone?

Last night I was listening to an interview on the radio with John Anthony West who has done a lot of controversial research on ancient cultures. For example, he says that the sphinx was actually created by some civilization the preceded the Egyptians and that the erosion on its exterior was done by water, not wind. Of course, people who have a vested interest in their theory of the past don't even want to discuss this.

This type of reaction is not new. I was raised in the Catholic church and went to Catholic schools. We were taught that Catholicism became as big as it did because whenever people were introduced to it, they regarded it as so superior to whatever came before it, that they just abandoned those old ways and joined it. Of course, later in life when I read other history books, I discovered that this was not actually how it all happened.

Göbekli Tepe, located in Turkey, is the site I heard them discussing, so I looked it up and saw the photos. It appears to have been an ancient temple made of stone pillars 10-15 tons each, carved in raised relief with figures of various animals and people. Ground penetrating radar shows that there may be 18 more similar structures adjacent to the one that is unearthed. They estimate these sites to be older than the pyramids of Egypt or Stonehenge. Much of this work was done under the direction of the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt.

Such a huge endeavor had to be organized and directed by a powerful person. A powerful vision must have been behind this work, and either the people agreed with this vision and worked toward it, or they were forced to work on it. The other obvious fact the stones give us is that these people had to be very skilled to carve raised relief figures into the stone columns at a time when other historians and archaeologists would not credit people with having tools to do such work.

Now the next amazing thing about this site is that someone then buried it under tons of dirt, which actually helped preserve it.

So the question we are facing is this. Why would people spend the immense amount of time and energy necessary to build such a complex, and then cover it over with dirt and abandon it?

A possible explanation could be this. Perhaps the political or religious structure that caused its creation later fell out of favor and people moved on.

Compare that to the structural changes in our society right now. At the beginning of the US, everyone was a farmer, craftsman, merchant or trader. Cottage industries were how most people made their living.

That was until the industrial age, when factories became the major employers and people quit working on farms or in home based businesses to go to work for the large employers. And that structure stayed in place until our present time.

However, as we now see major corporations closing down their US factories and offices in order to hire cheaper labor in other countries, the US workers are now left to create new ways of making a living.

Some people have gone back to farming, some in specialized organic farms or farms that raise heirloom varieties of plants that can command higher prices. Other people are inventing and marketing their own products. Others are creating specialized services that they can personally offer.

Although some people may be forced into these roles because they cannot get other employment comparable to what they used to have, it is, in essence the return of cottage industries, or home based businesses. Self employment and small businesses will be the wave of our future.

In a way, this may be like the ancient people covering up their old constructions once they have decided that they have moved beyond that model. Just a short time ago, people in the US grew up thinking that getting a job working in a large corporation was their career, their livelihood. Now people are looking at creating their own work, their own business, as their path in life.

Religions are following the same path as many of the churches which used to be full to capacity are now being shut down for lack of attendance, or hobbling along with a fraction of what they used to have. Meanwhile, although there are new megachurches replacing some of these, there is an increasing percentage of the population that chooses to not to belong to any organized religion, as many as one quarter of the population according to some surveys. There too, as individuals no longer are part of large organizations, their spiritual path or religion may be a self directed, home based activity.

These archaeological finds, contrasted with our current situation suggests that human history and the evolution of our societies and civilizations has been more of a rise and fall than a steady forward march. These excavations clearly show that humans were capable of great feats during the time of hunter gatherers, predating the rise of agricultural societies and the changes they engendered. Then after demonstrating they could do such things, people chose to abandon them.

We are now riding the cusp of another rise and fall era. Old structures are falling and new ones are rising. How we proceed from here will be the result of millions of individual decisions, which may look more organized to people looking back on us many years from now.

We can choose to ride this cusp coming from either love or fear. Be aware of what motivates your choices. We are already inhabiting new forms. Can you feel it? How are you navigating this ride?