Zap Oracle: General Life Reading

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2. An Influence from the past that may be affecting the querent right now.

Reflecting on the Past


text and photo © Jonathan Zap		477

Bernice Zap, age 86, Bronx, NY
Card URL: http://www.zaporacle.com/card/reflecting-on-the-past/

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Memory is shadowy, but sometimes it holds the seeds of new life.

Conscious reflection on the past can deepen the soul and even provide revelations of great value for the present and future. On the other hand, returning to the past obsessively out of emotional addiction can be a massive, massive draining of vitality needed for full engagement with the present. The past is not fixed or irrevocable. Memories are continually revised. Even neurologically, when memories are recalled, they are always reinterpreted based on current values and point of view. The memory is an artifact of the past that, like an antique, resonates with the past but exists in the present where it can be re-experienced and reinterpreted.

Also, occurrences in the present or future can drastically alter the meaning of the past.

For example, an alcoholic man is driving drunk. He causes an accident that maims an innocent person. While the man is blacked out from a concussion that occurs at the accident, we split the timeline so that there are two identical copies of him in two separate timelines.

The B version of him has a transcendent near-death experience, but the A version is just unconscious till he wakes up from the concussion.

The A version, which is identical until the concussion, continues his downward spiral, and his life ends in a few years due to alcohol poisoning.

The B version sees the indelible sin he committed but also the possibility of service and a spiritual warrior path. He devotes the rest of his life to helping alcoholics with recovery. His own earlier alcoholism and tragic mistake give him enormous street cred and empathy with the alcoholics he helps. They've all made seemingly indelible mistakes, but most have not severely maimed someone in a drunken accident.

The accident is an indelible mark in eternity. When it occurs, there is only one person, as it is just before the split. After the split, though, this past event is dramatically altered based on the future actions of persons A and B. The MEANING and butterfly effects of this identical, supposedly indelible past event dramatically differ between persons A and B. The future can alter the past.

The accident is an "indelible" mark and a turning point, beginning a cycle of change. But in A, it is a turning point toward accelerating death and darkness, while in B, it is a turning point toward life/light/love. The "indelible" event was not indelible because it was one scene in a continuing story. Since the protagonist, the conscious agent, continued, the story he wrote after that scene massively altered the nature, meaning, and consequences of the identical scene supposedly indelibly fixed in the past.

The past is still alive, but like the present or future, how we relate to it determines whether it inspires or entraps us. Consider this an auspicious time to heal your relationship to the past.

Extremely Relevant:
Adhesions and the Timelines of the Unconscious

For those of you willing to read more, a key to healing your past is to employ what I call "interpretive magic." If, for example, events from your past were interpreted from a victim point of view in the past, it may be extremely empowering to reinterpret them as empowering lessons that helped you to learn what you needed to know to be the person you are now and to move toward the person you are becoming. Here are some thoughts on interpretive magic:

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It is a common and limiting assumption that only one interpretation of an event or situation is correct. But the phenomenal world is rarely so cut and dried.

Interpretation may often be more usefully regarded as a choice rather than flattened into what is believed to be the single correct answer. For example, I recently had to send in my laptop, my only computer, for repairs. Due to some improbable mishaps, it had to be sent in two more times, and the problem that should have taken days to fix has taken weeks. An extremely reasonable and plausible interpretation is that I have been meaninglessly inconvenienced due to mechanical forces beyond my control. An alternate interpretation is that the improbable mishaps were "meant to happen," and that I needed space to open up from a long period of laborious editing I was doing.

Which of these interpretations is most likely? The first explanation easily passes that classic test of logic, Occam's Razor, that would have us prefer the simplest, least fancy explanation that accounts for all the facts. By contrast, the "meant to happen" point of view is often used in ways that seem glib and reeking with sentimental rationalization. Mysterious forces, or the principle of synchronicity, would have to be employed to justify this interpretation, and that means that this hypothesis is significantly fancier than the first. But in some cases of interpretation, likelihood and strict rules of logic are not the most useful when choosing among possible interpretations.

In the case of the improbably prolonged laptop repair, both interpretations are potentially valid. Instead of deciding which of these interpretations was "right," I recognized that it was much more helpful to choose the interpretation I intuitively preferred. When I tried the first interpretation — the mechanical forces beyond my control interpretation — I found that it did nothing for me except increase stress and a sense of helpless frustration. I could feel my blood pressure rising and my jaw clenching. I realized that this interpretation adversely affected both my body and psyche. The second interpretation provided a sense of space opening up, a sense of serendipity and unexpected possibilities. By choosing the second interpretation, I entered a different timeline than I would have if I had chosen the first one. I decided to read a couple of books I probably wouldn't have had time to read if I had access to my laptop. Some parallel realizations of my own accompanied these two books, leading to a vast, life-changing breakthrough in an area of my life that I had struggled with for decades. In this case, choosing the interpretation that felt more empowering and life-affirming seemed to lead to a much more positive outcome.

The act of consciously choosing an interpretation of an event or situation is an example of what I call "interpretive magic." The creative interpretation of life elements is not merely a matter of passive perception.

Once you realize you have the right to interpret and reinterpret certain elements, you usually need to act on the new interpretation to establish the timeline it opens up.

The opposite of interpretative magic is fundamentalism or orthodoxy of any kind, where one's right to interpret or reinterpret is judged by orthodoxy as sacrilege or heresy.

I have found that many people who are not overt fundamentalists fall for a similar delusion I call the "museum curator fallacy." Such people view everything, especially things found in nature, as sacred and never to be touched or interfered with. Such museum curator types often have a hands-off attitude toward people, especially from an exotic culture, as if they were members of a Star Trek away team with an overly orthodox interpretation of the Prime Directive (cultural relativism often contributes to this blindspot). Intruding their will on anything seems to them like a sacrilege and an interference with a divine plan. They don't recognize that they incarnated as human beings, the most interventionist organisms we know of, an attribute that is as much a part of nature as everything else.

On the other hand, there are cases where we should not apply interpretive magic. For example, when trying to solve a homicide, there is probably only one correct answer to the question: "Who was the shooter?"

Scientific methodology and interpretive magic should obviously not be mixed. If you need to create a falsifiable conclusion and test it, you don't want to apply interpretive magic. While you may be justified in reinterpreting your personal history to transform victim consciousness, if you did this to collective history, your reinterpretation should be based on evidence, not politically convenient revisionism, etc.

Arnold Toynbee, the great historian who studied the lifecycle of civilizations, concluded that a civilization was in decline when it no longer had a ruling mythology. Your personal mythology is the aggregation of your significant choices of interpretation. Keep your interpretive choices creative and life-affirming so that you have a healthy personal mythology. If you don't have a positive ruling mythology, then your life will be in decline.

Consider the occurrence of this card an auspicious time to boldly and creatively apply interpretative magic to some area or areas of your life.

4. Archetypal situation most ascendant in the life of the querent right now.

Stoking the Fire


text and photo © Jonathan Zap		343

Michael stoking a fire at a national Rainbow Gathering.

CARD URL: http://www.zaporacle.com/card/stoking-the-fire/

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"I used to work in dangerous places, and people who moved survived, and those that didn't . . . Movement is life. Movement is life."
— World War Z

There are times when it is crucial to stoke your inner fire, to summon as much energy as you can. In the ancient Yoga Aphorisms of Pantajali, it's written, "Energy is like a muscle — it grows stronger through being used." Depression (and so many people today are clinically or subclinically depressed) is largely a crisis of energy.

When the icy winds of depression blow across the landscape of your soul, get up and get moving! Summon your inner fire — the force keeping you alive. If you don't feel the inner fire, act as if you did. Don't allow yourself to become paralyzed. Don't fall asleep in the snow. You can summon the fire by engaging in physical movement. Get up and do some physical work like cleaning the house — simple work that brings tangible results. The more resistance you feel to doing that work, the more sure you can be of transformation if you do it anyway. Will grows when you get yourself to do needed things you don't feel like doing. Research shows that waiting to be motivated before taking action is a huge mistake. Take action when unmotivated, and motivation often follows as the work gains momentum.

When the inner fire glows, you can move toward intrinsically meaningful work. Meaningfulness blows on the fire, and the smoldering embers of your soul catch fire as the temperature of meaningfulness rises. But practical accomplishment, no matter how mundane, is also valuable. Cleaning and ordering your living or work space builds morale.

Eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, and not poisoning yourself with smoke, pills, inferior foods, and toxic relationships are crucial for stoking the fire.

In the photo, the fire grows as Michael blows on it through a narrow copper pipe, the end near the fire partly flattened to focus the airflow. Focus builds fire. Pick your target and hit it. If you feel overwhelmed by lethargy or stress, begin with nearby, easy-to-hit targets ( e.g., dishes, laundry, house cleaning). Focus on the work immediately at hand, the rubber-meets-the-road plane of action. For example, focus on your posture and movement as you work with broom and dustpan, and do the work as gracefully and efficiently as possible. As the fire rises, you can bring your focus to more challenging tasks. Don't let resistance — mechanical, bodily, interpersonal, financial, circumstantial — extinguish your fire. Use action against resistance to stoke the fire. Walking briskly on a cold day can raise more inner fire than walking at the same pace on a very warm day.

Yes, there are times to back off, times to relax, or even surrender. And fire can easily become focused on the wrong thing, on a dark obsession. Some focus all their fire on the hot pursuit of the hottie, and the results can be tragic. This card indicates a time that cannot be met passively or with your fire focused on illusions. This is a time to focus and intensify your fire on something (mundane or intrinsically meaningful) that needs work.

Consider this an auspicious time to stoke the fire by taking useful action.

See: Working with Momentum

Working with Focused Intensity

Winter Pathways

Awakening from Depression

Writings in the Warrior category in the categories section of this site.

9. Where things are trending for the querent. (This is not predictive of the future as your free will may alter the outcome, it is an indication of current trends likely to shape the future.)

No Fate but What we Make


text and photo © Jonathan Zap		572

Jonathan, wearing free dream interpretation sign in front of his tent, at the National Rainbow gathering in New Mexico, 2009. Although this tent was fully invented, many other temporary resting places in life are not.
Card URL: http://www.zaporacle.com/card/no-fate-but-what-we-make-2/

"No fate but what we make." Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Often we tend to think that the answer to what troubles us lies fully formed somewhere, and we need only seek out that fully formed answer through an oracle or some other means. But perhaps we are, as George W. Bush would say, "The Decider." It is not for something outside of us to supply the answer; it is for us to choose the answer.

Sometimes there really is an answer "out there" to a fateful dilemma or difficult situation we are living through. This is because many situations are close variations on classic situations for which there are classic solutions. For example, we might be in a difficult situation that is the result of our stubbornly trying to force progress in some area of life. In such a situation we may make the classic mistake of hubris, arrogantly presuming upon a power that we don't really possess, and often we suffer for this. Alternatively, we could consult an oracle, a wise counselor or ancient literature, and find a ready-made classic answer to our situation, such as: relinquish prideful ambition, submit humbly to fate and work with it rather than against it. But in other cases, the classic solutions are insufficient, and we must either create or cocreate a novel solution.

This card is the result of a series of dreams. The dreams seem to show that my essential life situation has deep ancestral roots. In one of the dreams, a holy and wise ancestor seemed to give me acknowledgment. The man was blind, a quality I understood as indicating that his vision was bound before the unformed future, a future I would need to help shape. In the last of this long series of dreams, I received a unique tent that seemed to be designed with ingenious precision. I only had to turn a crank on a cylinder and the tent would erect itself. Once the tent was set up, I realize that I needed to restore it to my backpack and continue traveling. However, there were no instructions on how to break the tent down. Somehow I knew that the tent had been produced by a married couple, the husband of which was an entrepreneurial inventor. I noticed the wife of the couple and asked her how to undo the tent. She responded evasively, telling me to ask her husband. I realized that as ingenious as the tent seemed, the inventors never invented a way to undo the tent once it was set up. I became very annoyed and a bit angry. After a time I realized I might be able to figure out a way to unmake the tent myself, but the dream ended and I awoke.

Not long after I awoke, I realized that the dreams were acknowledgement of the fact that a lot of precision, intention and ancestral momentum had gone into creating my life situation, but that there were no preformed ready-made solutions to it. Part of my fate is that I have to create my own solutions, or cocreate them, because although fate has unformed aspects that give some room for my free will to operate, it still has formed aspects as well, and therefore my ability to find solutions also depends on the good will of other free-willed persons involved. A solution has to be cocreated in a situation of creative interdependence.

The essential insight of Gnosticism is that nothing is more crucial than gnosis, the direct, inner spiritual knowing. Many people, however — fundamentalists would be the extreme example — feel they have to consult an outside authority, a savior, a religious or governmental functionary, a parent, a divine text or rule book, to find solutions. But it is gnosis that is the essential guide through largely unformed, novel situations.

Some people fall for what I call the museum curator fallacy. Perceiving that there is something sacred about the universe, they feel that they don't dare touch anything or change anything or interfere with anything. They become like a member of a Star Trek away team with an over-fussy sense of the prime directive. What people caught by the museum curator fallacy forget is that they are not outside of the glass case, they are in it, and that they were designed by nature to be interventionist alchemists.

On the other hand, gnosis does not always provide you with certainty on how to intervene. Nor does it provide a grand, encompassing solution to a difficult situation. Deng Ming Dao, a modern Taoist sage, points out that one should never underestimate the value of a partial solution. Often we are navigating through a murky, misty sea and cannot see the distant shore of the land we are heading toward. When this is the case, we engage point-to-point navigation; we aim at the nearest point we feel sure of.

In other cases, gnosis calls us to intervene drastically. Rather than flowing with things, we are called to pierce through to the source code of the matrix and shift things fundamentally. For example, in Star Trek mythology, prospective Federation captains are tested in sophisticated simulators with a no-win scenario called the "Kobayashi Maru," a tactically impossible situation where every possible strategy and series of actions will fail. Captain Kirk's response when he was tested by the Kobayashi Maru simulation for the third time was to reject the no-win scenario. He did this by reprogramming the simulation computer.

Consider this a propitious time to reprogram, to cocreate novel, life-affirming solutions to an unformed fate.