Importance Self-Knowledge in Divination and Spirit work

Knowing yourself as a concept within a magical or spiritual practice is more than knowing your name, your likes and dislikes, your history, your values, or your goals.

Knowing oneself is the most important self-development and magical work we can do. It encompasses deep knowledge of the inner workings of our ego, our minds, our desires, fears, tendencies, and protective mechanisms.

Within a magical practice, this knowledge becomes deeply practical to help us distinguish the divide between where we begin and end, and where the outside world, other people, their energies, and the spirits, deities, and divine flow touch and interact with us. In divination, this deep knowledge of the self helps us see and discern what is our own confirmation bias, projection, or intrusive thought, and what is actually a part of the divinatory message, communication, and dialogue.

If you enter a ritual or a divination session without this knowledge of yourself, you will never be certain about who it is you are speaking with. Is it your patron deity? Is it the plant you are sitting with? Or is your mind just feeding you what it thinks you want to hear? The ideal state of things is to work towards being able to still your mind and rumination completely. That work is done through the practice of meditation, breathwork, and teaching your mind that it does not have to produce stimuli at all times. At the same time, you must learn that not every thought it produces will be followed up on, expanded upon, or fed.

But until then, let's work on recognizing the patterns with which our mind operates. What words or images does it use? What does your inner voice sound like, and how does it react? What kind of thoughts does it bring? What expectations does it carry with it?

When you start building an idea of this, then you can begin noticing the difference in how visions, sensations, and messages come to you in spirit work when you communicate with spirits, deities, or the divine in general. Maybe those are sensations on the skin, such as warmth or tingling. Maybe the images move instead of being static. Maybe the language is poetic or the tone is kind.

The ego is neither a translator nor a filter. The ego and our minds are closed vessels designed to protect themselves from outside influence. They will do anything to keep us in our bubbles of comfort and perceived safety. The unknown, even if it is mere silence, is a danger to them. That means interference in ritual and divination, either through worry and expectation or by directly or indirectly cherry-picking what seems to be the answer that affirms our own beliefs.

The way to begin distinguishing between what is ours and what is communication or a dialogue with a second party is to become familiar with what it looks and feels like when we are alone in our heads. We must give ourselves space to become bored, without any outside stimulation, in silence, and observe what happens then.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of overstimulation where boredom is a taboo. We scroll, we listen to endless streams of podcasts and music, and we watch hundreds of videos. The space to be with our own thoughts is increasingly a rare commodity. Many young people have no idea what is their own thought process and what is just their brain processing the terabytes of information we are subjected to every second of the day. Every short video has to have five different hooks in the first 0.5 seconds. It has to be ideally 10 to 15 seconds long and feature a mid-roll hook or two. That is 36 eye-catching stimuli every minute if we watch every video offered to us to its end. If we keep mindlessly scrolling, that ramps up to 300 hooks every minute. There is no place or space to even process what we have seen, let alone have the capacity to register our own thoughts and feelings about the content we are offered. Should we find ourselves in a time where there are no longer 300 stimuli every minute, we become restless, time turns to honey, and we do not know what to do with ourselves.

No wonder we depend on manuals, guidebooks, and external resources when practicing magic or divination. We are no longer used to using our own resources and do not trust that which happens in our heads because we do not know who we are. We do not know what we think. We do not know how we think and, hence, have no way of knowing on our own whether the information we are receiving is legitimate communication or not.

We have given away our power and agency to the "New Gods," and it is time to take it back.

The first step to taking back the trust in our own ability to connect and receive information, or our intuition, is to learn to tolerate silence. In that silence, we learn to recognize and, in time, control the thought processes that happen in our minds.

The second step is to learn to tolerate boredom. You do not have to listen, watch, or do something at all times of the day. Take that silence you have learned to tolerate while doing things and try not doing anything for 10 minutes. Sit down in silence, close your eyes, and just exist for a while. It will probably be the most difficult thing you have done lately, but it is worth it.

The third step is to learn to acknowledge a coming thought. By now, you should already have a good idea of the "flavor" of your thinking discussed earlier. You acknowledge the thought popping up and immediately dismiss it. Do not ruminate; do not develop it into a train of thought. Let it go and begin to cultivate an empty mind.

The fourth step is to practice meditation, where you implement all these steps and practice being open to the flow of the divine, your guides, and your deities.

Now you should have the tools to be able to distinguish your thought processes from other things. You will be in control of your mind enough to have it open to receive communication and participate in a two-sided dialogue with the other side.