The Seer's Burden
(c) Cheryl Lynne Bradley 2002-6

"Belief is the burden of seeing...To see into the heart of something is to believe in it."
N. Scott Momaday, "The Man Made of Words"

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.
It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle
of true art and true science."
Albert Einstein

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."
Maya Angelou

"What thou seest, that thou be'st: dust if thou seest dust, God if thou seest God."
Edgar Cayce

That very seeing does not see Itself at all. How can something that cannot see itself, see another?
Nagarjuna

For those of us who have been given the Seer's gift one of the most painful discoveries of our gift is accepting the Seer's Burden. We move into the realm of mystical experience, epiphanies of pure understanding and complex experiences, while the struggles of our mundane life become increasingly more difficult the further we advance. We openly invite chaos into our lives, in order to stand in this place where all brilliant dreams are born and be a periscope for the soul. Your gift may overwhelm you and drive you crazy; you may disregard it completely as a mass hallucination. You may become fascinated with interpreting and analyzing all aspects of your gift, seeking more and more knowledge, and never use it as a means to take right actions. You may embrace the pure moral obligation of the divine experience and find your true measure of happiness in creativity, family and reverence. This gift is given to us but is not for us. We must be careful not to share it with anyone who would misuse or abuse it or us.

Most seer's have had a profound experience in their life, be it good or bad, and we will spend the rest of our lives seeking to understand the meaning of that experience. We need to find the light in or we cannot navigate the darkness which we will encounter in our lives and others. Seer's have to remember that we possess magnetic and charismatic qualities and wisdom based upon our experiences, that people will try to internalize and dissect. Seer's generate enormous energy - the temperature goes up in the room - and many seers perspire heavily during a vision or a reading. We must practice our mental and physical wellbeing, be careful of outside influences and outsiders, avoid bad habits, practice moderation in all of our habits of necessity, exercise, develop self-discipline, practice cleanliness and have faith.

Before you move fully into the realm of mystical experience you have had to make a conscious decision to heal the wounds of your embodied soul; seize discernment; balance your intellect and your emotion; trust your ability to know without knowing; respect yourself as a person; take back your personal power; assimilate the lessons from your past relationships and experiences; integrate your emotions; trust your intuition, yourself and the Divine; know your strengths, limitations and weaknesses; become comfortable in your solitude; develop your divination skills with proper information, eduation, tools and practice; aver bad bargains by not being drawn to people for what they need, or to those who mirror your pain, by establishing and enforcing boundaries; and walk in the light of Eternal Truth. The Light of God, however you conceive God to be, is Eternal Truth. This is an incomprehensible truth that can only be understood through myth, legend, folklore, fairy tale, dreams, poetry and song. Always a lie but always the truth, they are the refractions - The Prism or the Rainbow - of the Divine Light flowing through us, around us and to us.

In the Beginning, when God, in His desire to Be, called the world into existence, he created Adam to be the interpreter of His emanations. Adam didn't name the animals, he translated the emanation from God which called the animal into being. Poets and composers transmute ideas into sensations and turn observations into a state of mind. Mathematicians and physicists attempt to stabilize chance with calculation and probability by fusing pure understanding with intuition. By using institutional empiricism they try to achieve quantitative certainty. The Seer transmutes emanations and sensations, "The Word", into constructive ideas using appropriate "words" and transforming a state of mind into an insightful observation. We are trying to stabilize uncertainty with divination, omens, dreams, augury, magic, prayer, and meditation. By fusing pure understanding and sacred thought, we achieve spiritual unity with the Divine experience. A limited vocabulary is of little use to a Seer. We must learn to say negative things in a constructive manner and know when to be silent and listen. You cannot see something that someone isn't ready to know consciously.

One of the most important lessons is discerning between pain and suffering. If I break your arm it is really going to hurt, but the arm will heal and the pain can be managed. The suffering, "Why did she break my arm? I just don't understand. Why did she do that to me?", is a different matter. I did it because I could. "Why?" is the singularly most useless question in the Universe - it keeps you stuck in your suffering. Why do people do the things they do, good or bad? Because they can. Why does God allow good and bad things to happen? Because He can. If you stay stuck on "Why?" you will never uproot old pain.

We must clear the burdens of the past from our memory, be clear and in the present in order to be free in the future. We sharpen the acuity of our perceptions, noticing that which is subtle and seeing that which is hidden. We are the Ugly Duckling becoming the Divine Swan and are no longer on the outside looking in. Once we have quit trying to spit in the same part of the river twice when it is a flowing stream and stopped trying to push the river, we begin to dance the dance of life on the living water like a feather on the breath of God. We find the cadence of the ebbing and flowing of the tides and sense the essence of the drops becoming the ocean. We cannot perceive it as stepping into a void or an abyss but as an awe of the vastness of the All.

Will has three manifestions and I will use an analogy to explain them. We all respond to pressures of life's complexities and vagaries in three different ways. Take three pots of water and set them on the stove to boil. In one pot you put carrots, the second, eggs in a shell and into the third, coffee beans. Let them boil for 20 minutes. The carrots went into the hot water hard, solid and withstood being cut, chopped and broken, but once you add the heat, you can mash them with a fork. The eggs look basically the same on the outside as when they went into the pot. Eggs have a fragile shell and a vulnerable interior but a 20 minute hard boiled egg is hard, dry, bitter and black on the inside but on the outside, looks the same as it did before you cooked it. While you are contemplating these two, get your cup, because the coffee beans have changed the water. How are you manifesting will in your life? Do you go the hard way of the will? Do you act like life hasn't affected you on the outside, but inside you have gone hard, dry and bitter? Or, do you like your coffee black?

Surrounding ourselves with bright colour and listening to the sound of running water is particularly beneficial. A table top waterfall to watch and listen to would be most calming to the mind, like the water, our mind would flow to the path of least resistance. Orange attracts good energy and awakens our intuitive senses while yellow will enhance our gifts and clear our dreams. Dreaming is still the best way to tap into your gifts and is the purest channel for sacred thought. Most of us forget our dreams before morning and some theorize that this can be remedied by filling a glass of water at bedtime, focusing on the problem or question at hand and drinking half of the water. As soon as you awake in the morning, finish the water and this will help you to wake up with the answer you seek and aid in remembering your dreams. Keep a journal and commit your experiences to paper, not just words and thought forms.

There are days where it will be literally necessary and highly desirable to clean your house and lock your door. Eat properly, don't sleep in, walk regularly and talk to yourself and the Divine, learn to enjoy spending time alone - silence is a luxury for the seer and necessary for the gift to integrate with your personality properly. Time spent staring out a window is never wasted time. You need time to clear, cleanse and release your thoughts, especially those originating from our lower emotions or our mundane fears, anxiety and doubt. Strive for patience and, as our understanding grows, we find humility. Remember who you are by repeating your name over and over to yourself - your name is your mantra to God, however, you conceive God to be, and to the Universe.

Charles Renouvier, the French philosopher, defines free will as "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts." You see it, you are not creating it and we can change our reality with a conscious act of will. Our will is in our feet, so keep your feet happy and dance. You may feel sorry for yourself because you have no shoes until you meet someone who has no feet.

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go,
and you learn at once how big and precious it is." - Maxim Gorky

"To a poet nothing can be useless.
Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination;
he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast and elegantly little."
Samuel Johnson

"It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larvae into the butterfly. If the scientist has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, the confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist."
Erwin Chargaff, biologist




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This page was created on November 13, 2002 and updated on February 26, 2007.