A life without guidance?

A life without guidance?

From the moment we are able to crawl, walk and talk, we are guided by our parents, grandparents, teachers, and friends. This guidance has a nurturing and protective quality and continues until we reach the age when we go out into the world on our own, to make our way in life. At that time, we are expected to have developed an ability to be our own guide, and to have an ability to make good decisions about the direction of our life. It is as if we have to take all of the things we have learned from the guidance we received as children, teenagers and young adults and finally put it into practice.

When we are out in the world on our own, we use that prior knowledge to guide our life. We are expected to make decisions, sometimes ones of profound importance, that may influence the rest of our life, without any real guidance from outside, having to rely on our memories of our earlier guidance to inform our decisions. The problem with most of the guidance we receive is that it is often, in a sense, second hand, it reflects other people’s life experience. The nature of the world is ever changing and the guidance which was appropriate and relevant for a generation or more before is no longer useful, so sometimes we are faced with situations where we have no really useful guidance to base our decisions upon.

At these times we have no inner sense of the direction we need to take, and so we are confused. We don't know what decision to make, and in this situation we often turn to friends or colleagues and ask their advice. Their advice sometimes isn't helpful either and so we are often left adrift, and unsure of the decisions we need to make, and the direction in which to guide our life

What we really need is somebody who has an insight into the situation that we find ourselves in, a level of insight that just doesn't exist in friends, colleagues, parents, grandparents, or other mentors. We need advice and guidance from someone, or something, that can see the whole picture, the totality of the situation and knows to a large extent, what is going to happen in the future.

Ultimately, we are always hoping that we make good decisions or the right decision. Of course, it's debatable whether there is any such thing as a good or a right decision. There are simply decisions which then lead to a hundred more decisions, and it's only that cascade of the decision-making process that determines whether the path of action, be it the road less travelled or a more familiar well trodden path, is the best route to take in life.

It is at that point that we often turn to psychics, clairvoyants, mediums and other kinds of soothsayers as we seek to access the kind of information that would allow us to make the decisions that we hope will take us to where we either need or want to go.

Perhaps the most common way of trying to penetrate the veil that separates us from the information that we seek is through the use of the various divination systems such as the I Ching, Tarot, Runes or the plethora of other types of card readings that are often used by psychics and clairvoyants. We hope that the person who is doing the reading has a unique connection to the significance and meaning of the cards, as well as the ability to penetrate the veil that separates the present from the future, so that the guidance that they offer is both meaningful and helpful to us. We may even acquire a set of cards ourselves and try to be our own psychic guide.

In medieval Europe there was another approach that arrived through the influence of the Middle Eastern world where it was called the ‘sign of the sands’. It was renamed in the West as Geomancy. Geomancy arrived in medieval Europe in the early twelfth century and quickly took root becoming a sister art to astrology, and the two were often practiced together. It is important to remember that astrology in the middle ages was a predominantly a horary art, and not the psychological astrology of the modern era, and so the use of geomantic prediction became an easy fit.

The true origins of geomancy are lost in the mists and sands of time, yet it has elements that come from ancient Greece, Egypt and Babylon.