Divination II

I'm quite fascinated with the concept of Mediums.  As someone once put it, people are low level beings, those who have passed on and those who supposedly inhabit the spirit world are high level beings, and a Medium is in theory a person whose consciousness is elevated or is aware of both plains and is able to bridge the two.  That's the theory at least and from what I gather this is where the concept originates.  Mediumship and Divination are two distinct concepts but they are viewn by people in general in much the same way.  Whereas Mediums are concerned with spirits and being or consciousness, Divination is concerned more with the extraction of knowledge and information from objects and places which traditionally aren't considered capable of holding that information.

Ultimately both endeavours seek the same goal, to find answers to questions without direction, to be able to ascertain accurate information without prior knowledge.  Most people when confronted with people who claim to possess these abilities will offer alternate explanations such as prior knowledge that was forgotten but recalled, or intuition, and most often educated guesswork - that is to say, guessing with statistical information that skews probability in favour of accuracy.

What I find fascinating about both of these concepts is that they can be seen in most peoples' lives if you stop and pay attention, those explanations offered don't always suffice as reasoning for such abilities.  I recently experienced this when I was exploring dark magic.  I know that sounds odd, but bear with me.  I've had an interest in the occult for as long as I can recall but I've never had much success with it.  Not much of what is claimed by those who study it or those who profess proficiency in it when you actually subject it to scrutiny.  However through my research I did stumble across something interesting, an article that discussed a group of concepts the specifics of which aren't relevant here.  What is relevant however is that this article was accompanied by essentially a framework of suppositions which are remarkably close to a novel I wrote but never published when I was a teenager.

Some of these suppositions I can easily dismiss as coincidence and some can simply be explained as logical conclusions that people would naturally draw.  However the wording and the terminology used within others touches very closely with what I wrote - which I must stress was written at a time when I did not yet have internet, was limited to a handful of TV channels, and had not yet read about many of the subjects that I have since explored in greater depth.

Dismissing the supernatural explanations for a moment, assuming these conclusions were influenced by popular culture, TV, Movies, Games, and Books etc, I do wonder where and when those seeds of knowledge were planted.  This isn't a concept I only associate with the occult, I associate it with knowledge in general, there is a lot of information that I know but I have no idea nor recollection of how I know it.  There are so many random facts inside my head at some point my mind concluded that citing sources wasn't important.  This inability to trace what you know to a moment of discovery is something that intrigues me because without being able to account for the source of everything you know, how would you actually know what was learned and what was divined if such a thing were indeed possible?

Names are perhaps one of the more interesting pieces of information that crop up from time to time.  There are moments when a name will enter my head for no apparent reason and I will ask myself how or why I know that name, and often after googling that name and looking through their Wikipedia page or their IMDB profile I am still left wondering how or why I know their name when nothing I read is anything familiar to me.

To be clear, I am sure there's a reasonable explanation as to why these things happen, but I think the concept of divination and mediumship ultimately evolved from this inability to trace the source of our knowledge.  Still of all I do find it fascinating when you can explain certain concepts you never studied and knew nothing about and those explanations then prove to be accurate.  Human Intelligence as I have written before, I believe, is marked by its ability to process priori and a posteriori knowledge, that is both knowledge that is derived from what is already known and knowledge that is independent of what is already known and has no evidence or experience yet to back it up - the latter of which artificial intelligence can not yet accurately model.