Scrying
It involves gazing into a medium, hoping to receive significant messages or visions that could offer personal guidance, prophecy, revelation, or inspiration.
The practice involves diverse media, from reflective surfaces to shimmering mirages, and is often accompanied by rituals inducing altered states of consciousness.
Despite its popularity in occult circles and its portrayal in media, scrying lacks empirical support and is met with skepticism from the scientific community.
Scrying is neither a single, clearly defined, nor formal discipline and there is no uniformity in the procedures, which repeatedly and independently have been reinvented or elaborated in many ages and regions.
[5][6] Some practitioners assert that visions that come when one stares into the media are from the subconscious or imagination, while others say that they come from gods, spirits, devils, or the psychic mind, depending on the culture and practice.
There is neither any systematic body of empirical support for any such views in general however, nor for their respective rival merits; individual preferences in such matters are arbitrary.
[citation needed] Scrying media generally either suggest images directly (such as figures in fire, fluid eddies, or clouds), or else they distort or reflect the observers' vision confusingly, in the manner to be seen in crystals or transparent balls.
[7] One class of methods of scrying involves a self-induced trance, with or without the aid of a medium such as a crystal ball or, even via modern technology such as a smartphone among other things.
Many practitioners say that the scrying medium initially serves to focus attention, removing unwanted thoughts from the mind in much the same way as repetition of a mantra, concentration on a mandala, inducing the relaxation response, or possibly by hypnosis.
The technique of deliberately looking for and declaring these initial images aloud, however trivial or irrelevant they may seem to the conscious mind, attempts to deepen the trance state.
Practitioners apply the process until they achieve a satisfactory state of perception in which rich visual images and dramatic stories seem to be projected within the medium itself, or in the mind's eye of the scryer.
In the late 1820s, Joseph Smith founded the Latter Day Saint movement based in part on insights gained from the reflections of seer stones.
[8] Smith also said he possessed a pair of spectacles manufactured from seer stones, which he called the Urim and Thummim and which he said enabled him to translate the golden plates that are the stated source of the Book of Mormon.
Here, the motive is usually to test the adolescent gazers' mettle against a malevolent witch or ghost, in a ritual designed to allow the scryers' easy escape if the visions summoned prove too frightening.
It emphasized three levels:[12] Scrying is not supported by science as a method of predicting the future or obtaining information unavailable to empirical investigation.
