Being Oracular (Learning to listen when the world is speaking)

Welcome to Belved philosophy, a revolt against the flattened mind, an invitation back to the sensuous, the mystical, the rigorous, where the abstract becomes tangible and the intellectual turns visceral. This is a sanctuary for those who refuse to be domesticated by the world. Today I want to explore the theme of becoming oracular. This is a form of knowing that predates the Cartesian split between mind and body, between subject and object, human and world. Let me start with Eraclitus, who said this once about the Delphiq Oracle. The Lord whose oracle is a Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign, neither speaks nor conceals just indicates. What does that mean? Hold that question. So in ancient times oracles were those who could listen to the gods, to the land, to the deeper patterns of the universe of existence. The Oracle Delphi, the Pythia, would enter an altered state of consciousness and speak with them that came through her, not from her. She understood herself as transparent to a larger intelligence. Today, we are called to become oracles ourselves through the radical and beautiful act of deep listening. Now this wasn't some fringed mysticism happening at the margins of Greek culture. The Delphiq Oracle was a central political institution, before wars, before major reforms, city states consulted her, kings traveled hundreds of miles, and entire delegations waited months for an audience. Why? Because the Greeks understood something that we've almost completely forgotten. There are questions that rational analysis alone cannot answer. Questions that require a different relationship to knowledge itself. Now, most people know the famous story of King Croesus. He asks the Oracle whether he should attack Persia. She tells him, "If you cross the river, a great empire will fall." So he attacks, an empire falls, his own. Perhaps you think, "Oh, she tricked him." But that completely misses what's happening here. The Oracle wasn't operating in the mode of propositional truth, the kind of truth that can be verified or falsified that exists independent of context or that claims universality. She was operating in the mode of relational truth. This is a truth that emerges in relationship, so it requires interpretation, and it is always situated. Think about the epistemological assumptions embedded in Western philosophy since Plato. We've been taught that knowledge should be universal, so true everywhere for everyone at all times. It should be certain. Beyond question, it should be clear, so unambiguous and explicit. It should be propositional, can be stated as declarative sentences, objective, independent of the knower. But oracular thinking or oracular knowing is situated. It emerges from specific context and specific moments. It is contingent, it is dependent on interpretation and relationship. It is ambiguous, it is multilayered, evocative, it works through resonance, not a proposition. And it is participatory, it requires the active engagement of the knower. The feminist philosopher Lorraine Codd has this concept that she calls "ecological thinking." knowledge that maintains its connection to the web of relations from which it emerged. Knowledge that doesn't pretend to transcend its conditions. The oracle never severes this connection. She doesn't extract truth from context and packages it for universal consumption. She creates conditions for meaning to emerge in relationship. Okay, so what actually happens in oracular consciousness? What is the lived experience? For these we need phenomenology, the philosophical study of experience itself. Edmund Husser wanted us to practice something he called Epoche, or bracketing, or parenthesis in Spanish. This means suspending all our assumptions, all our preconceptions about how things should be, all our interpretive frameworks and just pay attention to what's actually appearing in experience. He said to the things themselves, and this is already an oracular practice, because when you suspend your interpretive frameworks when you stop immediately assimilating everything into pre-existing categories, you enter a state of receptivity. Most of us go through life in what we can call conceptual overlay mode. So we don't actually see the tree, we see the concept of tree, and then move on. We don't experience the emotion, we label it anger or sadness and think that's it. But the oracular mode says, "Wait, look again, what if there's more here than your categories can hold?" When you suspend your interpretive frameworks, when you practice these Epoche, you enter a state of receptivity. You become porous to what's actually present, rather than what you expect to be present. And of course this is very difficult to do, our minds hate it, we're so used to knowing, to having everything figured out, to being able to name and categorize and move on. This not knowing feels dangerous. Where Loponti takes this further, he challenges a fundamental assumptions of Western philosophy that there's a clear boundary between subject and object, between the one who knows and what is known. He has this concept that I love called the flesh of the world. These primordial, intertwining where perceiver and perceived are not separate substances, but rather reciprocal aspects of a single living process. Do this with me right now, so touch your own hand, not really, do it. Right hand touching left hand. Which hand is the subject, which is the object? The boundary dissolves, you are simultaneously touching and touched, sensing and sensed. The distinction that seems so clear, I am the subject, this is my object, suddenly can get slippery. Where Loponti writes, "The seer and the visible reciprocate one another, and we no longer know which sees and which is seen." This is the oracular state, the dissolution of subject, object, dualism, and entry into what he calls "wild being," existence before it's been carved up by our conceptual categories. Think about the pithya entering her trans, or think about shamans on their journeys, or even those dreams you've had that mean something, even though you can't really articulate what, or you know that they're not delivering some clear propositional content. In those moments, you are in this mode, this wild being, this reciprocal intertwining, you are experiencing several things simultaneously. As a suspension of conceptual overlay, you're not immediately categorizing everything, you're letting experience be strange and ambiguous and multiple. You're experiencing a heightened sensitivity to appearance, you're seeing what's actually there rather than what you expect to be there. A tolerance for ambiguity and multiplicity, one thing can mean several things at once, and contradictions can coexist. There is a receptivity to pattern and resonance. You are noticing what echoes, what calls to what, what secretly rhymes with what. This is the opposite of our default mode, which is essentially assimilate, categorize, move on. The oracular mode is attend, receive, allow, and remain. The poet John Keats gave this a name, negative capability. He was writing to his brothers, trying to articulate something he'd be noticing about Shakespeare's genius, and he came up with that phrase, negative capability. He defined it as the ability to be present with uncertainty, with mystery and doubt, without reaching after fact and reason. So Keats is describing an epistemological stance that our culture has almost completely lost. This capacity to dwell in, not knowing, without collapsing into either dogmatic certainty or nihilistic despair. When we listen ceremonially, in a mean word, ceremonially, as in with reverence, with attention, with the understanding that something sacred is happening, we participate in the ongoing creation of the world. We become transparent to what wants to emerge. We allow ourselves to be changed by what we encounter. This negative capability that Keats identified is what many creative artists throughout history have understood and cultivated. Like when musicians speak of getting out of the way to let the music play itself, or when writers describe feeling like, scribes for stories that just want to be told. Teachers sometimes talk about colors that choose themselves or compositions that arrange themselves. And this is a description of what happens when we stop trying to control the creative process and instead become vessels for the intelligence that wants to move through us. Like when jazz musicians learn to listen so deeply to the music that they become, again, transparent to its movement. Miles Davis said, "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." He was describing these "oracular consciousness" attending to the silence, to the space, to the possibility. The poet learns to listen to language itself and lets the words choose their own arrangements and relationship. Composer John Cage created musical pieces designed to make us aware of the sounds that are always present. The ambient symphony of existence that surrounds us when we remember how to listen. He has this famous piece that is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, except it's not silence, it's an invitation to hear what's actually there. Breathing, coughing, rostling, the hum of the room, the sound of being alive in a particular moment. This is "oracular attention," noticing what's present when you stop imposing your agenda. And the journey from deep listening to "oracular presence" happens through what we might call "egotransparency," the dissolution of the small self that thinks it knows everything, and the emergence of what many traditions call the "true self" or the authentic self. This deeper identity that is connected to the source of all intelligence. And I want to be careful here, I'm not talking about transcending the ego in some hierarchical sense as if the ego is bad and needs to be overcome. I'm talking about seeing through the ego's claim to be the center of everything and recognizing it as one voice among many, not the master. The mystic poet Rumi wrote, "Be like melting snow, wash yourself, off yourself." Because when we truly listen, the ego mind that exists on controlling and analyzing everything begins to soften. We become transparent to the wisdom that wants to move through us. And this guidance is always available, but it requires a quality of listening that goes beyond the chattering of the ego mind. It requires presence, a state of alert stillness in which we can hear the subtle voice of wisdom. The same tradition calls these that don't know mind, approaching each moment without preconceptions, allowing reality to teach us rather than imposing our own existing categories upon it. This is the opposite of the colonial mindset that approaches the world as territory to be mapped and as resource to be extracted. The colonial mind says, "I already know what this is, and I will categorize it, control it, and use it." The Oragular mind says, "I don't know yet, teach me, show me what you are." See the difference? One is extractive and the other is relational. One assumes separation and the other assumes participation. This kind of listening requires epistemic humility. The recognition that your current understanding is always partial, always situated, always open to revision. And it's kind of paradoxic because this humility actually makes you more powerful, not less. And not the power of domination, the power of attunement. Because when you are not defending your existing knowledge, when you are not protecting your certainty or clinging to your interpretations, you become available to learn from everything. Again, transparent, pour us to wisdom. And I want to talk about where does this happen? The anthropologist Victor Turner gave us the concept of liminality, from the Latin "limin" threshold. The doorway between one room and another, so neither here nor there. Liminal spaces are a between, they are no longer one thing but not yet the other. This is a space of transformation. So think about dawn and dusk. It's neither day nor night, or shorelines, neither land nor sea. Even adolescents, either child nor adult. Think about this state between waking and sleeping. The Oracle is the ultimate liminal figure because the pithya sat suspended between the world of the living and the underworld literally. She was sitting in between. She inhabited this threshold. And I think neuroscience gets really interesting here. And some philosophers will say why are you introducing neuroscience because there's supposedly this feud between philosophy and neuroscience that makes no sense because they complement each other. But I find it interesting because your brain has multiple large-scale networks that organize how you process information and relate to the world. There is this default mode network, or DMN. And this is active during rest or mind wandering, like autobiographical thinking. And it generates your sense of self. It makes predictions based on past patterns and it constructs your narrative. And when this is overactive, it can become rigid and repetitive and can be the source of rumination and anxiety. And then there is the task positive network, or TPN, or also called the central executive network. This is active during focused external tasks, so analytical and detailed oriented and problem-solving. Executive control, right? Getting things done. And usually these networks are anti-correlated. And one is active, the other kind of quiets down, you're even in rest mode or in task mode. But there is a third state, the called transient hyperfrontality. And this is a temporary down-regulation of the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for self-monitoring, critical thinking, executive control, reality testing. This is the part of your brain that says, no, that doesn't make sense or way, that's not possible, or you shouldn't be thinking this way or I shouldn't be thinking this way. So when the prefrontal cortex temporarily quiets, something happens. The DMN and TPN enter a flexible coupling. The pattern recognition becomes fluid and remote associations become accessible. Symbolic thinking dominates over literal processing. And these states emerges during flow states or during deep meditation. It can also happen during creative insight through psychedelic experiences and inoracular consciousness. This is why oracles worked in liminal conditions like fasting or darkness or trans-rhythmic movement, sensory deprivation. They were neurologically optimizing for this type of cognition. The reticular activated system, the network of neurons in your brainstem acts as a gatekeeper, filtering sensory information and determining which signals are prioritized for awareness. But during liminal states, these tunes attention to match what's in your subconscious, reinforcing what you focus on and creating a filter for information that aligns with your intentions. To keep talking about this, we need to understand the difference between signs and symbols because this distinction is crucial to understand how oracular consciousness operates. So signs have fixed and conventional meanings. They have a one to one correspondence. They have closure, right? The meaning is complete. They have a utility, they serve a function. And once understood, like that, that's it, right? A stop sign means stop. And symbols on the other hand have open evocative meanings and they are one to many correspondence. They, their meanings can also unfold over time. They have this depth that they resonate with the unconscious and they continue to heal new meanings. Think about a mandala, a dream image, a poetic metaphor. These continue to speak the more you engage with them or the cross, the lotus, the serpent eating its tail. Carl Young understood this distinction deeply. He said that symbols emerge from what he calls the collective unconscious, not a repository of specific images but patterns of psychological energy or archetypes, he called them. The mother, the hero, the trickster, the wise old man, the shadow, the anima and the animals. And these are organizing principles of human experience that appear across cultures and throughout history. When an oracle speaks in symbols, she is tapping into this layer. The layer when the personal experience intersects with universal patterns. That's why oracular language feels simultaneously specific to you and timeless. It's speaking to both registers at once. One of my favorite examples or obsessions are dreams because your dreams are oracular. And in dreams, the usual boundaries of rational thought, the salt and deeper patterns of meaning can emerge. And again, Carl Young spent decades studying dreams and found that they often contain guidance that the conscious mind cannot access solutions to problems, warnings about future difficulties, insights into the unconscious patterns that shape our lives. He didn't see dreams as random, neural noise. He saw them as communications from the unconscious, messages encoded in these symbolic language and that require interpretation. And I find it fascinating because when you start paying attention to your dreams and when you begin to dialogue with them, they become more communicative. It's as if the unconscious recognizes that someone is finally listening and it has more to say. And a lot of situations where I'm not sure what to do, I will say that I'm going to sleep in it or in Spanish, because I swear by it. I am shown solutions, concepts, conversations, I mean, so many things in these dreams. Entire approaches that couldn't be accessed through deliver to thinking. And it's fascinating and paradoxical a little bit because literal language feels precise, but often falls flat. And symbolic language feels vague but resonates deeply. Why? Because the psyche speaks in symbols. Your dreams don't give you bullet points or action items. They give you images, narratives, metaphors, feelings. Your emotional life doesn't operate through propositions. It operates through embodied resonance, through pattern recognition, associative networks. Like when someone says, "I feel like I am drowning." The literal meaning is false, right? They're not underwater. But the symbolic truth is profound and your body knows it. You feel that drowning in your chest when they say it. The oracular speaks to this layer because your body is already oracular. Right now, as you are listening to this, your body is processing information that your conscious mind isn't aware of. It is sensing temperature gradients, air pressure changes, electromagnetic fields. It is tracking micro expressions in the faces around you, tonal shifts in voices or subtle changes in the atmosphere. Your body can sense weather changes before your mind notices the clouds. It can feel the emotional quality of spaces like when you walk into a room and immediately know something is wrong, even though nothing visible has changed. Your body responds to the faces of the moon, to the quality of the light, to the subtle energies that scientific instruments can barely detect. And this is a biological sensitivity and wisdom that we've been sadly trained to ignore. But your nervous system is constantly processing information below the threshold of conscious awareness. Your gut contains millions of neurons. Your enteric nervous system, sometimes called the second brain, that are in constant communication with your central nervous system. So when you have a gut feeling about something that's more than a metaphor, that's these enteric nervous system processing information and communicating it to you through sensation. Even your heart has its own neural network. That sends more signals to your brain that your brain sends to your heart. The heart brain connection is bidirectional and your heart knows things before your cortex does. And this is documented science. The heart responds to future stimuli before they are presented, what they call this cardiac present, your body is a sophisticated sensing instrument when you walk into a room and immediately feel uncomfortable when you meet someone and something feels off. Even though they're saying all the supposedly right things, when you are about to make a decision and your stomach clenches, that's your body, that's your nervous system detecting cues about safety, emotional temperature, relational dynamics, information that the rational mind hasn't yet consciously processed. Your body already knows. So becoming oracular, to become oracular also means to develop what we can call these pattern literacy, the ability to read these subtle signs and signals that reveal the deeper currents of life. This might mean noticing how your energy changes in different environments, paying attention to which people and situations train you in which ones nourish you, observing the natural cycles that your body wants to follow, tracking which thoughts create expansion in your chest and which create contraction. It means learning to distinguish between the voice of fear, which often masquerades as rationality and the voice of wisdom, which often arises as gentle knowing as images, as this felt sense. Fear says this is dangerous, contract, protect, control. Wisdom says this is aligned, expand, trust, move. Your lives in your amygdala, your ancient threat detection system. Wisdom lives in the coherence between your heart, your gut and your brain. They feel different in your body, once you learn to pay attention. And the signs and synchronicities that arise when you live in deep attunement are oracular. When you are aligned with the deeper currents of life, you begin to notice meaningful coincidences or these helpful encounters, the doors opening at the right moment. Like conversations with strangers that contain exactly what you needed to hear. Carl Jung called these synchronicity, meaningful coincidence that suggests an underlying pattern of connection and reality. And now skeptics will say, "Well, that's just confirmation bias. You're noticing what confirms what you already believe." And yes, the reticular activating system is absolutely involved. When you set an intention, your reticular activated system filters reality to make salient what aligns with your focus. But here's the thing, that's exactly how oracular consciousness works. You're not manufacturing, meaning from nothing. You're tuning your attention to notice patterns that were always there, but previously filtered out. This is the difference between magical thinking and oracular consciousness, because magical thinking could say, you know, the universe is sending me personal messages, and everything means something to me. But oracular consciousness is more like when I am attuned, I notice patterns I previously missed. I filter for what's relevant to my current concerns and questions. When you are attuned, then you notice the book that falls open to the exact passage you need it. Or, again, the conversation with a stranger that contains your answer, the bird that appears at the moment when you're asking a question, the song that plays with lyric that speak directly to your situation. Because the world is, yeah, always speaking, not metaphorically, actually. But we have lost the capacity to listen. The Oracle trains in this, in entering states where the boundary between self and world becomes permeable, where information flows bi-directionally, where you're simultaneously receiving and creating. I talked about this in the last episode, but I want to talk about it again because it makes sense for this as well. So Martin Buer distinguishes between two fundamental ways of being in the world. We have the eye-eat, so treating the world as object, as things to be used and analyzed and controlled. And we have the eye-though, entering into genuine relation, where both parties are subjects, where meeting happens, where something emerges that belongs to neither alone. The Oracular mode is eye-though raised to the level of epistemology. When you practice oracular attention, you're not extracting information from the world. You're entering into conversation with it. You're not subject studying an object. You are a participant in a relationship. This is what, I always say, the forest teaches if you let it. Because when I sit with trees and I mean sit with them, not just be near them, something happens. This boundary between observer and observed dissolves. And I start to notice patterns about how the light moves their leaves, how roots, I can feel them communicating, how the whole system is engaged in constant exchange. And slowly, if I stay long enough, if I quiet the chatter of my analytical mind, I start to feel my participation in that exchange. I'm breathing out carbon dioxide that the trees breathe. They are breathing out oxygen that I breathe in, so we are in a conversation, literally. And I am not trying to anthropormize or project. I think this is attunement, this recognition that I'm not separate from what I am serving, I am part of it. Robin Wildkiminer writes about this in brain sweet grass, a book I always recommend. She says how indigenous ways of knowing understand plants as teachers, not as resources. How listening to the natural world is a sophisticated epistemological practice. David Abraham in the spell of the centrist traces how alphabetic literacy actually severed our participatory consciousness, our ability to be in reciprocal relationship with a more than human world. Because before literacy, humans were embedded in a web of relationships with plants, animals, plants, weather patterns, everything spoke, everything had agency, everything was I though. The oracle is the recovery of that older relationship, that participatory consciousness. Becoming an oracular, I think, also means that you begin to live from what the Greeks called Eros. Not sexual desire, but the life force itself, the creative principle that moves through all existence. Eros is what the ancient Greeks understood as a fundamental drive towards connection and beauty and aliveness. It's the force that draws planets into orbits, that guides seeds towards light, that moves lovers towards each other. It is the organizing principle of the universe itself, the tendency towards greater complexity, beauty and coherence. Being from Eros means making choices based on what generates more life, more beauty, more connection, rather than what provides apparent security and status or control. It means trusting the intelligence of life itself to guide you towards what serves life. And this is radically different from how most of us were taught to make decisions. We were taught, by the way, I am absolutely pointing at myself, to analyze options, to wait the pros and cons, to calculate the risk, to choose what's most logical, most rational, most likely to succeed. But Eros asks, what is a life here? What wants to grow? What creates more beauty? What serves the larger web of relationships? These are different questions, and they require different faculties. Logic can tell you what's efficient, and they'll get me wrong. I am obsessed with logic as well, but only Eros can tell you what is a life. And here's what I've learned, the potion opens doors that analysis cannot. When you approach the world with the potion, with genuine care and attentiveness, with the willingness to be changed by what you encounter, reality responds differently. Not because you're manifesting it, but because you're finally paying attention to what was there, speaking back and you're speaking with. Remember the reticular activating system that I was talking about. So, this system filters reality based on what you've been primed to noticed, or what you've primed it to notice. When you set an intention, when you approach something with curiosity and care, your reticular activating system adjusts its filters to let through information that was previously screened out. When you bring the potion to your encounter with a problem, a question, a creative project, when you treat it as, though rather than it, you enter this genuine relationship. And in that relationship, something new can emerge that belongs to neither party alone. This is what Martin Boomer meant when he said, "All real living is meeting." The Oracle knows this. The Oracle approaches each inquiry as a meeting, a moment of genuine encounter where both parties, the seeker and the mystery are transformed. You're not creating the synchronicity, it's more like you're finally noticing the pattern that's been present. Getting attention to what calls, what resonates, what expands you. So now, when I am stuck on a philosophical problem, I use to only apply the analytical mind, right? But now, I take it for a walk in the forest, not to think through the problem, but to offer it to the world and see what responds. And inevitably, not always immediately, but, yes, something appears, a pattern of light, the way a tree has grown on their an obstacle, a particular quality of the noises and hearing. And with that, the problem shifts. The trees didn't answer my question, but rather I was in a state of receptivity where the answer could emerge. This is what the mystics have always known, the universe is not mute, we're just not listening. And this leads me to talk about manifestation because it's the start of the year and we're all thinking we're talking about it. And to me, manifestation is so, so, so much more than the so-called law of attraction. It's so much more than you just sit in your couch, visualize a million dollars and expect it to materialize, that's it. But manifestation is real when understood through this lens, because what's happening is from a neuroplasticity standpoint, right? Your brain changes itself based on experience. Every time you visualize your goals, every time you practice embodying a particular state, you were reinforcing specific neural connections. Related visualization and affirmations strengthen self-belief circuits in the prefrontal cortex. They reduce fear responses in the amygdala. They build resilience pathways in the anterior cortex. Your brain is literally rewiring itself based on what you repeatedly focus on. I love this quote, but we pay attention to grows. It doesn't work because it changes your behavior, because it changes this relationship that I was talking about earlier. Again, the reticular activated system manages your brain's limited attention on resources by filtering incoming information based on what it deems relevant for you at any given moment. This is selective attention, but captures your attention is determined by its relevant to current behaviors and goals, as well as your interests, your experiences and expectations. This is a classic example. You decide to buy a new car, a specific model, and suddenly you start seeing this car everywhere. The street, park near your house, right? So the more of these cars suddenly materialize, no, the car model has embedded itself in your consciousness, making you more alert to it. You're filtering experiences based on what you focus on, subtly guiding attention towards elements that resonate with your current thoughts. This is sometimes called the "bather main health phenomenon" or "frequency elution", but it's not an illusion. It's your brain doing exactly what you need and programmed to notice what's relevant. When you practice visualization, when you embody the feeling state of having achieved a goal, you are programming your brain to filter reality differently. You start noticing opportunities you would have missed. You make connections, you would have overlooked resources that were always available, but invisible to your previous filter settings. When you visualize achieving a goal, your brain activates many of the same neural pathways it would use if you were actually performing that action. This is why athletes who practice mental rehearsal see improvements in their physical performance. Your brain doesn't always distinguish between imagined and real experiences. If you are a fantasy reader, like me, you'll specifically know what I mean. And this has been demonstrated in different fields. The default mode network that is active during self-reflection and visualization lets you imagine and plan the life you want. And the salience network determines what's important, keeping your goals while filtering out distractions. The central executive network manages your focus, helping you solve problems and make decisions to achieve your goals. When you visualize with emotion, really feel what it would be like to achieve whatever it is you want. Positive emotions can activate a process called value tagging, where your brain prioritizes goals, it associates with these emotions. Now of course there are other frameworks for understanding manifestation that I find incredibly interesting. Some perspectives suggest that time isn't actually linear, that multiple versions of reality exist simultaneously and that what we call manifestation might be more like quantum leaping, tuning into an accessing a timeline or version of reality that already exists. In this view, you're not creating something from nothing. You are shifting your consciousness to a line with a parallel version or version of reality where the thing you're manifesting already is. And these draws from interpretations of quantum mechanics, the many worlds interpretation in particular, which suggests that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously in different branches of reality. So when you manifest, you collapse the wave, functioning in the direction of reality you are tuning to. Is this true? I don't know though, it sounds incredible and I like to think that it is in some point or at some degree. But honestly, I'm not convinced we needed to be true for manifestation to work. Again, we're not asking the right questions because whether you're rewiring your brain to notice opportunities, right, the neuroscience model, or you are tuning your consciousness to access a timeline where these opportunities already exist, the quantum model. Or you are co-creating with the universe reality as it unfolds in real time. That could be the mystic model. I don't know. The practice is the same. You clarify the intention, you embody the feeling state and you act as if and you pay attention differently. The mechanism we could debate it, are you changing your brain's filters, are you shifting between parallel realities, are you co-creating reality, etc, etc. And the phenomenology, the lived experience, is the same. And from an irracular perspective, the real question is not which is it? That is a wrong question. Maybe it's both and rather than either or. Maybe your brains, changing filters are how consciousness navigates between possible timelines. Maybe there are two languages describing the same phenomenon from different angles. What matters is this, your consciousness, your attention, your embodied state are, these are not passive, they are participatory. They shape what you experience as reality. Whether we describe it with the language that shapes neuroscientific terms, or quantum metaphors, or mystic language, or philosophical analysis, the core insight remains. You are not separate from what you perceive. We are co-creating it. Your brain needs congruence, though. If your behaviors don't match, your visualizations, then cognitive dissonance creeps in. When you're in stress or fear in the eye, eye, eye want mode, your central executive network shuts down. You limit your choices and decrease the probability of manifesting your orientation. So unless you have a calm mind, our relax and our present, you're going to be distracted and those distractions decrease the probability of manifestation. Real manifestation requires congruence across multiple levels. It clears your intention, somatic regulation, consistent action, and attention training. So how does manifestation connect to becoming an iriracular? What does it even have to do, what we were discussing? Because I think that when done properly and understood from these lens, manifestation is an iriracular practice. Think about it. Traditional manifestation says, "Specialize what you want and the universe will deliver it." And that is a transactional approach. You are ordering from this cosmic cattle hub. Your manifestation says, "Entering to conversation with possibility. Pay attention to what response and co-create with what emerges." See the difference when a transactional, the other, is relational. Again, one assumes you're separate from reality, manipulating it from outside. And the other understands that you're participating in reality, co-creating it through your attention and action. Again, one is extractive. The other is relational. One treats the universe as a bending machine, and the other treats it as conversation partner. When I practice iriracular manifestation, I don't start with, "What do I want?" I start with, "What wants to emerge?" I pay attention to what's alive, what has energy, what pulls me forward. I notice which visions expand my chest and which contract it, which futures feel aligned with the deeper currents of my life, and which feel like ego projects. And then I hold that vision with open hands, if that makes sense. I take action towards it, but I stay responsive to what emerges. I remain in conversation. Irregular manifestation is manifestation with epistemic humility, with receptivity, with willingness to be surprised. Okay, let's practice. I'm going to share three exercises to approach irraculating. The first exercise is biblio-mancy or irregular reading. For this you'll need a book with density. So poetry, philosophy, literature or something that has layers. And the practice is simple. First formulate your question. It shouldn't be just no question, it should be more like an open inquiry. Drop in your body, take three deep breaths and feel your feet on the ground, get present. Hold the question in your awareness for 30 to 60 seconds. Just let it sit there, while holding the question, open the book randomly. Let your eye fall wherever it lands. Read slowly, not looking for a literal answer, looking for your looking for resonance. What word, image or phrase catches your attention, what unexpected connection appears. You can journal for five minutes. How does this passage speak to your question? What emerged that you weren't expecting? Pay attention to what you dismiss as that's just random. That dismissal can often be your rational mind projecting or protecting itself from what the irracular mind is perceiving. What happens here? You are interviewing your own depths. The book is just a trigger. The meaning emerges in the conversation between your question, your own conscience and the text. The second exercise, it's asking dreams for guidance and this is my favorite. So tonight, before you sleep, write your question on a paper. You can put it under your pillow, even. Make it specific while keeping it open. So for example, what do I need to understand about these specific situations? And I usually like to create a simple ritual because rituals prime your own conscience. It could be light a candle as you write your question or think about it. It could be read the question aloud three times. Again, it could be placing the paper under your pillow or beside your bed. And then hold the question as you drift towards sleep. Don't try to problem solve it. Just let the question inhabit you. Let it be the last thing in your awareness. You can keep it journal by your bed. This is very important because the moment you wake, even in the middle of the night, immediately right. Don't interpret yet, just capture images, feelings, fragments, colors, words, any sensation. In the morning, practice or accurate interpretation, read your notes, ask the right questions. If this dream were answering my questions symbolically, what might it be saying? You can look for feelings that are often more important than the plot. You can look for recurring symbols. What do they mean to you? Not in a dream dictionary, right? Don't look it up on chatty pity. What surprising elements emerge? What was possible or impossible out of place? What was strange? Free right for five, ten minutes following associations. If you do this constantly with time, it feels like a superpower. I was talking to a friend about this, but I feel like this is one of my superpowers now. The last exercise is very simple, yet profound. It is listening to the body's wisdom. This, like we were saying before, your body knows what your mind doesn't know yet. So let's practice listening to it. For this, you would need to find a decision that you're facing, something with at least two clear options. Stand up. And this works better when you are standing up and you feel your body, your whole body. The first option is to close your eyes and say the option out loud. I will do X, then stand in silence for 30 seconds and pay attention to your body. What happens? Does your chest expand, contract, does your breath deepen or shallow? Do your shoulders rise towards your ears or drop away? Do you feel light or heavy? Don't analyze it. Just notice it. The second option is to shake it off, literally shake your body for ten seconds to clear the previous state, then repeat the process with the second option. I will do Y. Again, 30 seconds of noticing, compare the somatic responses. Your body is giving you information that your rational mind might be overriding. Of course, this takes practice, sometimes fear and excitement and anxiety feel similar dramatically. But over time, as you practice, you will develop discernment. You are going to be able to distinguish between the constriction of fear that is protective or the constriction of misalignment. The expansion of excitement that is anticipatory and energize versus the expansion of alignment when your system is saying, "Yes, but calmly." Your body is an oracle, but you have to learn its language and it takes time. So again, what does it mean to live accurately? It means developing a sense of capacities that take in together constitute a different way of being in the world. The first capacity is a systemic humility, recognizing that rational analysis is powerful but limited, that there are forms of knowledge or knowing that emerge through receptivity, through embodiment, relationship. This isn't anti-intellectual. I love rigorous thinking. I spend most of my time doing philosophy, but I've learned that some questions cannot be answered through analysis, along some forms of understanding require a different approach. That's why I say epistemic humility, knowing when to think and when to listen. I think that's wisdom. The second capacity is symbolic fluency, learning to read the world, to think metaphorically, to see pattern or other sea randomness, to understand that a dream about water might be speaking about emotions, that synchronicities might be just your brain-rebuilding patterns that the natural world was teaching you. The third capacity is liminal tolerance, a comfort with ambiguity, with not knowing, with threshold states where transformation happens. We are terrified of this liminality. We want certainty. We want answers, enclosure and resolution. But this threshold is where the magic happens, this between space, they're not yet knowing. So can you dwell there, without collapsing into dogmatic certainty, into nihilistic despair? That's the practice. The fourth capacity is somatic intelligence. Your body knows things that your mind doesn't, right? Oracular consciousness is fundamentally embodied consciousness. When you're trying to make a decision, then just think about it, feel it. The fifth capacity is devotional attention. This is the key that unlocks everything else. When you approach the world with genuine devotion, with care, with willingness to be changed by what you encounter, you enter the relationship. And in that relationship, reality responds. Use your finally paying attention to what was always already there. The final capacity is participatory knowing, understanding that you are not separate from reality, observing it from outside, you are a participant in reality, your attention, your intention, your action, they are part of the creative unfolding. Your knowing is ecological knowing, knowledge that never severed its connection to the web of relations. Once you have one of these experiences, once you trust the oracular voice within you and see how it guides you toward greater aliveness, it changes the way that you show up to everything. If this has happened to you, you know what I mean. If not, I encourage you to practice. You stop approaching life as a problem to be solved and start approaching it as a mystery, to be lived as curiosity. You stop trying to control outcomes and start learning to dance with the unknown. You realize that you're not just an individual trying to make your way in a random universe, but a unique expression of the same creative intelligence that governs galaxies and grows forests. You understand that your personal healing is planetary healing, that your individuality serves life, all of life, that you expand your ways of knowing to include forms of intelligence that pure rationality cannot access. I think it's also about remembering and being humble enough to admit that we are part of a larger universe that speaks through many channels. Not just through the mind, but through the body, through dreams, through intuition, through the natural world, through synchronicities, art, relationship, silence. All of these are channels through which we can be in participation with. And we are addicted to certainty, to mastery. We want to reduce everything into data, to metrics, to best practices. And this has severed us from our bodies from each other, from the more than human world. Oracular mode is resistance. It refuses that. It insists on complexity. It preserves space for the unknown. It honors mystery without romanticizing it. When you become oracular, you're not becoming less rigorous. You're becoming more precise about what different forms of rigor look like. You're expanding your epistemological toolkit to include more forms of knowing. You're in relationship, you're in conversation. This is what philosophy looks like when it remembers, it's also an ecological practice. When it remembers that we are nature. When it remembers that knowing is always relational, situated participatory. The Delphic Oracle's most famous pronouncement was inscribed on the temple itself. Know thyself, not master yourself, not optimize yourself, not modify yourself, know thyself. In all your multiplicity, ambiguity, and depth, you cannot know yourself in isolation. You can only know yourself in relationship with your body, with the natural world, with your dreams, with the questions that are within you and around you, with the mysteries that call you, with the life that moves through you. The Oracle teaches to live in dialogue, with ambiguity, with uncertainty, but with the intelligence of the world. The answers we seek are not separate from us. They're co-created in the asking. The world is always speaking. You just have to learn how to listen.