The two-faced Janus, gatekeeper of the gods, spirit of passages and transitions, who looks into the past and the future, is a symbolic image of the two main kinds of divination. In healing divination, the face of our intention and attention is turned to the past, tracking along the time lines to find the cause or origin of a problem. In visioning divination, the face of intention-attention is oriented to the future, tracking the time lines to identify possible and/or probable outcomes. The Janus diagram models the central process of the divinations, whether done for oneself or for others. “Past” and “future” simply provide two different directions of awareness from the present point of view, the present field of awareness. The cusp between past and future is a threshold between different times and experiences that we can learn to cross in either direction, intentionally and consciously.
The one significant difference between past and future, in the otherwise symmetrical arrangement of time lines, is that the past is determinate—it happened the way it happened; whereas the future is probabilistic—pregnant with multiple possibilities. Some people believe that the past can be changed—but my view is that we change it virtually, not actually, when we change the way we hold the story and tell the story to ourselves and others. Some people also believe that we can track and “remote view” the future the way it will actually happen—that is, predictably. Instead, my view is that we are constantly cocreating multiple future scenarios, with varying probabilities, out of the matrix of all possibilities that the universe presents to us.
As described in chapter 2, the complete divination cycle always involves a double movement of perception and integration, in both healing (past) and visioning (future) divinations. Memories, whether painful or pleasant, may be recalled or reexperienced, and then brought back, re-membered into the present field of awareness. This present field, which is our world, our sense of self, then expands to include that new perspective on our history. The traumatized person is healed, made whole, when he or she can say, “This happened to me, it had these effects on my psyche, and now I can get on with my life, without being blocked by intrusive flashbacks or nightmares.” With positive memories also, when we have retrieved and integrated them, we have a deeper and more complete sense of how and why we became the person we have become.
The integration of visions of the future also involves a return movement to the present—a movement of communication and realization. The young person who has had a vision of becoming a healer has an expanded sense of their present identity. He or she may say, “I’m going to be a doctor,” and then proceed to realize the vision by undergoing the necessary training. There are also “course-correction” visions, where we see the undesirable probable outcomes of a present course of action. Such visions are an essential component of recovery from addiction: the alcoholic or drug addict may, in a visionary state (perhaps induced by a psychedelic), “see” the probable ruinous outcomes of their behavior and thus feel empowered to make different choices. In situations of conflict, if someone can articulate a vision of possible peaceful future relations, this can inspire the participants to make different choices in the present. Always, the realization of the vision, the cocreation of our future, begins in the present moment. In the words of the old Chinese saying, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”