No Matter What You Are Doing, Ask For Guidance

Guidance, Desire and Apocalypses

I’ve mentioned Florence Scovel Shinn in the past few videos I made on YouTube. She was an early-20th century artist and New Thought metaphysician.

It’s interesting to look at her work or Neville Goddard’s work with animist eyes. This, for instance, is from Shinn:

No matter what you are doing, ask for guidance. It saves time and energy and often a lifetime of misery. All suffering comes from the violation of intuition. Unless intuition builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Get the habit of hunching, then you will always be on the magic path.

Why does all suffering come from the violation of intuition from an animist perspective? Because there are other agencies in the cosmos seeking to world in a particular direction. You get the update. You get the inner pull in the direction of that worlding. And yet -typically because you try to allow reason to prevail- you go in another direction.

And it doesn’t work.

If you have done any form of fortune telling for any extended periods of time (I teach tarot and playing card reading in the Rune Soup Premium Membership), you will be familiar with the extreme frustration when the cards tell you one thing and you say or do something else. They are always right. And you are left swearing, “I knew it! Fuck. Does anyone want to buy these live goldfish and rock tumblers I no longer need?”

From a Báyò Akómoláfé perspective, always asking for guidance is a good way to make room for the more-than-human. This is true even if you are ‘just’ making room for thought beings. You can be materialist as the day is long and taking moments regularly in your day to quietly ask for guidance and then listening for that ‘still, small voice’ will dramatically improve your life.

But it is often not a matter of ‘belief’ that gets in the way of us remembering to ask for guidance. Our trust in the cosmos is, initially at least, largely determined by childhood trauma patterns. Avoidant attached people learned as babies that wanting support or affection never seemed to result in getting any, so they learned to stop wanting it. Anxious attached people received it unreliably or conditionally, and thus learned never to trust whether the support was genuine. In either case -in any case- you don’t heal these patterns and then ask for guidance. You heal them by asking for guidance. The obstacle is ever the way.

In a recent video, I discussed the optimal magical combination for the workplace as sigils and tarot— or really any high-volume, easily activated enchantment and reasonably accurate method of fortune-telling. Plainly, this is not only for a corporate environment; it’s just that such places tend to be ever-shifting and filled with brazen liars and ulterior motives. (The company credit card was nice, though.) What this combination does, over time, is builds out the confidence and fluency of the language of your inner world expressing into your outer, and your outer world responding in a way that is comprehensible to the inner.

Want to know what this looks like in full flight? To be honest, it looks like Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: an unshakeable understanding of the cosmos’s interconnection and a confidence in your own capacity to follow the luminous (And usually wacky) thread of sacred ‘coincidence’ to your goal. Or the famous, recurring line from one of my favourite, very heterosexual films, Shakespeare in Love. The debt-ridden owner of The Rose Theatre, Philip Henslowe, played by Geoffrey Rush, says, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery” when asked why the show will actually be alright, despite its many disasters. How will things turn out okay? I don’t know. It’s a Mystery. But it always does.

How can I say that, given that we are mere months out from the start of World War III proper? What if my heart’s desire was to open a hair salon in Kyiv? Well, firstly, there is always a tension between how you experience what you want, what you had planned and what the world is going to do. The whole cosmos is a community of beings working this stuff out as it goes along. That’s what it always feels like, war or no war.

Secondly, if you are reading posts like these, you didn’t come to Earth just to be vaporised in a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange. That may still happen, but you didn’t just come here for that.

And so we come back to guidance. To inner listening. Your authentic desire is actually God expressing into Creation. The great Neville Goddard writes:

“God speaks to man through the language of desire.”

Your desires are God speaking to and through you. Desire is a promise, not a request, a shofar sounding out in Creation. The most important thing you can do is listen and honour desire as the beginning of prayer. Reframe its felt sense from one of lack to guidance. Then, trust, trust, trust. Then ask, ask, ask for guidance.

If this has lit you up at all, I will be offering some extensive desire work as part of the remastered Ultimate Sigil Magic Course coming out next month. So subscribe to stay up to date, or forward this along to someone who may need it.

For now I will just say that you did not come to Earth to have your desires thwarted by neocons.

But you may need to listen a little softer, moving forward.