You do, that's who.

Consider the opening paragraph of Sue Grafton's N Is for Noose (1998):

Sometimes I think about how odd it would be to catch a glimpse of the future, a quick view of events lying in store for us at some undisclosed date. Suppose we could peer through a tiny peephole in Time and chance upon a flash of what was coming up in the years ahead? Some moments we saw would make no sense at all and some, I suspect, would frighten us beyond endurance. If we knew what was looming, we'd avoid certain choices, select option B instead of A at the fork in the road: the job, the marriage, the move to a new state, childbirth, the first drink, the elective medical procedure, that long-anticipated ski trip that seemed like such fun until the dark rumble of the avalanche. If we understood the consequences of any given action, we could exercise discretion, thus restructuring our fate. Time, of course, only runs in one direction, and it seems to do so in an orderly progression. Here in the blank and stony present, we're shielded from the knowledge of the dangers that await us, protected from future horrors through blind innocence.

I love all of Sue Grafton's books, and I think she's a fine writer.  But the above paragraph is just about as wrong as it gets.  Any human being who has learned the practical art of consulting an oracle can easily "catch glimpse of the future" any time they want.  This isn't something which is odd or impossible or available to a select few.  Each one of us can easily, rationally, and deliberately discover out what is "looming" in our lives, and then make the necessary intelligent choices to choose the good and avoid the bad.

Now I am well aware that in our allegedly enlightened post-modern age, the idea of consulting an oracle flies in the face of progressive scientific rationalism.  Humanity is supposed to have evolved well beyond such nonsense by now.  Fortune-tellers ought to be a thing of the past by now, right?  Well, I would agree that taking money for a psychic reading is a terrible idea--this has always been a sleazy racket and always will be.  On the other hand, learning how to consult an oracle on your own can be one of the most valuable skills you can acquire in your life. 

Consider for a moment all those problems which frequently stymie us and about which we can never think with any kind of clarity.  Should I buy that house?  Should I start looking for another job?  What does my boss really think about me?  Is it a good idea to go to take a vacation next winter, or should I save my money?  Should I end this relationship or try one more time to to make it work?  Is it worthwhile to pursue a degree in nursing?  Will that new diet really help me lose weight?  Does that new software contain spyware which will damage my computer?  Is she really telling me the truth? 

Well, if you knew how to consult an oracle in a rational and pragmatic manner, you would be able to find answers to questions like these any time you wanted.  I used to be the sort of person who made one disastrous mistake in her life after another--I can't even begin to count all the bad decisions, wrong turns, incredible goofs, and stupid blunders I used to make.  You name it, and I did it.  Things are very different nowadays, now that I have learned to work with my oracle of choice, Tarot cards.  Of course, the mistakes in my life haven't stopped completely--I still make them and I'm sure I always will.  But the interesting thing is that the stratospheric bad decisions I used to make don't happen any longer.  My life actually started to get better once I learned how to consult an oracle.  This has probably been the single more important talent I have acquired in my life, and I only wish I had learned how to do it when I was twenty years old instead of forty.

What follows are a few lessons I have learned over the years about working with an oracle:

Forget the Occult

The first thing you need to do if you want to work with an oracle is forget about all of the occult crap which has been associated with them from time immemorial.  You don't need to know anything about spooks or goblins or hidden Templar secrets or the mysteries of Atlantis if you want to consult an oracle.  Indeed, if you approach your oracle on a rational and practical basis, you will get the most out of it.

What You Can Expect

The next thing to understand is that you will only receive limited and probably not very clear information from your oracle of choice.  Also your oracle will most definitely not be able to predict the future with 100% accuracy.  The main thing that you will be able to pick up on will be energies and patterns in the present moment.  These are the kind of hidden energies which people cannot always discern with any kind of clarity (usually because of emotional turmoil or willful blindness and so on).  This is the great blessing of an oracle--it will show you those forces in your life which are not always obvious to you. Once you do start to pick up on these energies, you can make much better decisions about whether to pursue one action or another.

Consider Sue Grafton's above account of the avalanche on the ski trip.  Could you expect an oracle to tell you, quite specifically, that you would be caught in an avalanche if you actually went ahead on that ski trip?  Well, of course not.  If your oracle of choice is a deck of cards, there is no specific card which indicates an avalanche.  And it is even more unlikely that you would form this word in your mind while examining your cards for information about your proposed vacation.

But if you did ask your cards an "energy" question, such as whether there were positive energies for you to have a good experience on your ski trip, I can absolutely guarantee the only kind of cards you would pull would be very negative cards.  You would either pull a lot of reversed cards or perhaps some of the most gruesome cards in the deck, such as the Ten of Swords (the luckless idiot with ten swords stuck in his back).  You might even get the Tower card, which shows several wretched souls falling through the sky.  Over the next few days, should you continue to ask the cards about the energies of your proposed ski trip, you would continue to see only negativity.  If you have learned to trust the cards as I have, you would realize that you had better stay right where you are and forget the trip.  You would be able to see quite plainly that something was not quite right about it, even if you couldn't exactly figure out what.

I cannot begin to count how many times I have repeatedly asked the cards for information about a given situation and gotten nothing but negative cards every time I asked.  Once for a period of several months I sat down every evening and asked the cards the same question, night after night after night.  A few times I saw something positive, but on most nights I invariably pulled reversed or negative cards, usually the most dismal cards in the deck.  Needless to say, the cards were eventually proved right:  the situation did not develop as I wanted it to.  If you repeatedly see only negative energies about a given situation/person/alternative, the cards will continue to show you this negativity over and over and over again, day after day, week after week.  Not all the time, mind you, but consistently enough for you to realize that something is very much wrong with what you are hoping for.

The secular rationalist reading the words in the above paragraphs will be snorting with derision by now.  Am I trying to say that you can actually get a clear picture about a prospective event from something as trivial as a deck of cards?  And get this picture not once, but repeatedly?  Well all I can say is, don't knock it if you haven't tried it. 

Learn How to Trust Your Oracle--and Yourself

This brings us to another point about consulting an oracle, namely that it is a matter of trust.  One thing I have learned over the years is that whenever I ask the cards if I should do something, and all I pull are negative cards... boy, oh boy, do I ever not do it.  Of course trusting your oracle is not always the easiest thing in the world, but if you start working with the cards on a daily basis and see how they relate to the circumstances of your life, you will start to see that they are indeed accurate more often than not.  As time goes on, you will learn to trust them so much that you won't want to live without them.

Remember that the Present Is What Counts, Not the Future

This brings me to my final point, which I have written about elsewhere.  Never forget that what may or may not be coming in the future never matters as much as your ability to live fully and contentedly in the present moment.  The present is the only reality we ever know--the future will never be more than a fantasy.  The secret to happiness lies not in foreseeing the future but in experiencing as fully as we can all the wonders and the richness of the precious present.

At any rate, I'm sure the above statements won't convince everyone.  That's okay. Sue Grafton probably wouldn't be convinced, either.  She puts a tarot reader in one of her other books O Is for Outlaw (1999), but the woman comes across as a low-life nitwit.  This is just as well.  If Grafton's detective Kinsey Milhone would pause every few pages to ask the cards whether (for example) the current suspect is telling the truth, we wouldn't have much of a plot--and the book would be over almost as soon as it started.  As a matter of fact, if all fictional detectives started consulting an oracle, there wouldn't be any more mystery novels--there would only be mystery pamphlets.  That wouldn't be any fun at all.