As magicians, I think it is a given that we believe that the future is not set in stone. We can create a future that we want based on our rituals and actions.
On the other hand, some magicians who also classify themselves as psychics say that they can see into the future. Some will qualify their claim by saying that they can see things as they are going to happen if nothing changes. However, that gives them an easy way out regardless of how many of their predictions fail. They can simply say, “Well, your actions changed that particular outcome.” So there is no real way to demonstrate that they are frauds or inept, etc.
So my question is this: In what sense can a true magician know the future?
You can look at likelihoods and probabilities, no system of divination is fool proof and all will have a degree of inconsistency, it’s the nature of the beast. Your actions very much change the potential future, that’s just the way it is. If I do a reading about your health and say you will be healthy in the forseeable future that doesn’t mean you can swim in sewage and be fine.
A skilled diviner should be able to give you 75-90% accuracy on an event, very rarely does someone get every minute detail right.
The usual disclaimer about personal opinion based on current beliefs applies. That out of the way, I believe we can’t know the future with any certainty. I feel there are certain events in everyone’s life that are, indeed, written in stone. We can postpone them, or bring them about earlier, but we can’t avoid them. Think of them as teaching lessons. I also believe these things are few in number, with the majority of our future being in constant flux.
I disagree with your statement that psychics use “if nothing changes” as a backdoor escape route. Maybe phony psychics do, but I believe a genuine psychic says this with the realization that the future is dynamic, ever changing, fluid. Turn left at this intersection instead of right, as you had planned, and you change future events. Pick the green one instead of the blue one, and you change future events. Maybe in some cases, they change events minimally, and the predicted future still occurs. In other cases, it sets off a cascade effect, and the future is changed radically.
It seems to me that an expectation of divination always being 100% accurate, is a negation of free will. In other words, you’re a puppet on a string dancing to someone’s tune. No matter what you do, you’re doing what someone has predetermined you will do, if that makes sense. There are of course those who believe this is exactly how things work, but I disagree.
For these reasons, I believe divination is best used as a “probability calculator”, or for guidance, rather than foretelling the future. Another way of looking at it: if the future could be foretold easily, you and I wouldn’t be on this board. We’d be too busy enjoying life on our privately owned tropical islands, being waited on hand and foot by scantily clad young women, all courtesy of our winnings from the big lottery games.
In the Kybalion model, everything is a giant mental creation; in my working model, entropy frays the intention/observed flow of events as it goes “forward” in time, and this fraying is caused by the “observer-effect” of other independent observers possessed of Will (within The Mind, but not YOUR mind) plus cosmic laws like cause & effect, gender, vibration, polarity, etc.
Shield the entropy whilst working and you have powerful magick, shield it while reading/casting and you should have perfect prediction, the small models of the universe used in poppet/sympathetic magick, and the small models used to predict could merge, and actually become/simply BE the same, with the only difference being whether the person who lays them out is asking or commanding the future of their reality.
[quote=“The Cusp, post:5, topic:6023”]I think creating the future and predicting the future are the same thing. The only difference is how you conceptualize it.
There’s just no way to tell the difference between the two.[/quote]
Read somewhere the Norse had a warning about the Runes, saying that reading the runes for a question can mske the outcome predicted happen. I always took that as if someone chooses to follow a predetrmined “fate” they will unconsciously make decisions to see it happen either for good or bad.
I know this all depends very much on our individual and personal experiences, but mine have led me so far to consider the tarot cards still as symbols, but the runes more as forces.
Take Ed Dames with his Killshot prediction, talking about it in front of millions of people on Coast to Coast AM. Is he predicting the future, or is he stacking the deck for that possible outcome?
If we each create our own realities, are there people out there who were so focused on that outcome, their reality diverged from our own, and they are now living in a parallel killshot world?
