In times of uncertainty, chaos, or even catastrophe, we would be hard pressed today to believe that a real government, let alone individuals, could take dreams, oracles, or portents seriously enough to rely on them for navigation through the gathering darkness. Yet there was such a government which did just that, and in the 20th century!
The Tibetan government had a trusted advisor, a spiritual being known as the Nechung Oracle. The Tibetans made a clear distinction between this spiritual being and the human being, a trained monk, who harbored the Oracle when the Dalai Lama sought its advice. The movie Kundun (1997: Martin Scorsese, dir) captures this distinction beautifully. In 1959 things were desperate in Lhasa following the Chinese 1950 invasion and the Oracle told the Dalai Lama to act now, this very night, against all rational considerations. There was a window of time, hours only, in which they could act successfully. And they did. The Dalai Lama got out, only just, never to return to his beloved Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s escape came about not from any plan or careful consideration of likely scenarios but IN SPITE OF THEM. He was wise enough to act on the basis of his trusted advisor, a purely spiritual being who told him to act now, without any of the usual considerations and preparations. To give you a sense of the qualitative difference between an oracle’s pronouncement (“act now to make it through!”) and a human prediction under the same conditions of uncertainty, we can note that the Dalai Lama said at the time that, “as to the future, I stated my belief that, with truth, justice and courage as our weapons, we Tibetans would eventually prevail in regaining freedom for Tibet”. His prediction was quite mistaken, whereas the Oracle was correct.
For us today, in our time of huge uncertainties, making a distinction between the way an oracle, portent, or augur “speaks” and our ordinary predictions of the future, based as they are on our human desires, is critical, it seems to me, to help us navigate this dark time. Can we moderns make such a distinction? One thing is sure, there are very real consequences to living a life in accord with portents, once we can recognise and then privilege them. Further discussion and examples of living such a life can be found in my book, Living in Uncertainty, Living with Spirit, now available in pdf at the link below. It shows how my life unfolded from (a) recognizing the phenomenon of portents and (b) acting on them with the same seriousness as did the Dalai Lama.
Go to Living in Uncertainty
