Spiritualism and the Paranormal

[ The following story is a first-hand, cautionary account about the Ouija board and does not promote it’s casual use. It is NOT a game. It is NOT a toy. If you decide to use the board, please take spiritual precautions such as saying a prayer before use. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! All names are fictitious to protect the identities of those mentioned. ] During one summer when I was in middle school, my cousin from New York, Wilma, came to visit with her mom. They were staying at another aunt’s house in Port Orchard, Washington, where our Auntie Pat ran a berry farm. The early  part of the season was raspberry season, so my cousins and I would stay at Auntie Pat’s to pick berries. Considering that I have over twenty cousins around my age, this was free labor for my Aunt Pat. And, it was a good time to bond with the lost of them. In addition, it was a good time to get to know Wilma. Previously, I had met Wilma briefly when they first immigrated to the US in the late 1980’s be...

I’m currently writing a soon-to-be-released app for Android devices dealing with the I Ching or YiJing . But, the friends whom I’ve talked to are unfamiliar with the YiJing. (I’ll be using YiJing instead of I Ching because YiJing is based on Pinyin , the ISO standard for transliterating Chinese.) Summary The YiJing is a book also known as The Book of Changes , The Classic of Changes or the Zhouyi (“Joe-Yee”). It is one of the oldest Chinese texts and dates from the Shang Dynasty . It contains a system of fortune telling and is primarily used to tell the future. It consists of a collection of comments on, and interpretations of, a set of 64 symbols or hexagrams consisting of six lines. Each line is either “Yin” or “Yang”, represented by broken and solid lines. The YiJing can be consulted by opening a version to a random page and reading the interpretations. But, the more common method is to randomly generate the lines that compose a hexagram. The hexagram is built from the b...

At a party a few months ago, I met up with a fellow diviner. It all began when we were all sitting at my friends Jason and Peter's dining table. We started talking about what we were doing, or planning on doing with our lives. My fellow diviner, Denise, mentioned a few projects that she had in mind… and she mentioned that she was thinking about taking her Rune reading pro. At that moment, the old thought came back, "Is this a sign that I should start working on getting a Tarot business up and running?" I had done a lot of research. I, with my former partners, called around for what divinatory services that others offered, how much they charged, etc. But, all that information was just sitting there… somewhere. "Maybe, I should dig it all up?" I asked myself later. I mentioned to Denise at the party that I knew of a book that dealt with that particular subject. Although Professional Tarot  (ISBN: 0-7387-0217-X) by Christine Jette is specific to Tarot card r...