Zap Oracle Instructions/ Credits and History Instructions: Create an account for yourself with a user name and password. Your information is kept private, but we do have a rarely used function called "Collective Theme Tracker" that anonymously does a statistical analysis of all cards chosen by the entire oracle to look for deviations from chance.  This information will not be associated with your name or account  I f you fill in your name (first name or a nickname is fine) then when you do a General Life Reading your name will appear in each card position in stead of "querent." At the reading screen there is a notes field where you can add anything that may help you identify the reading or its context after you save it.  For example, "Reading on the first day of my trip to Australia."  Clicking ...

Mechanical Resistance Matrix © 2006,  2008 Jonathan Zap Edited by Austin Iredale “Mechanical resistance” is one of the great defining aspects of the matrix in which we are presently incarnated.  It is a force in our lives as powerful as gravity or mortality, and it overlaps and influences almost any area or parameter of our incarnation we can possibly think of---corporeality, illness, aging, money, sexuality, time, objects, consumerism, computers, technology, art, travel, etc.  I’m trying right now to think of an area of my life that does not involve mechanical resistance, and I can’t think of a single one.  If instead I try to think of areas of my life where there is mechanical resistance and where I wish there was less, the list ...

Other Intentions -----What are my/your intentions toward the other? photos and text © 2007, Jonathan Zap Edited by Austin Iredale Someone recently asked me to state what my intentions were in relating to them.  What a great question, if only it were asked and answered more often and more honestly!  Sometimes we question the intentions of others, but forget to question our own mixed intentions, which are even more important for us ...

You're Only as Old as You Are: The Six Noble Truths of the Zap Philosophy of Aging © 2007, Jonathan Zap, age 49     Revised 2008   Edited by Austin Iredale “You’re only as old as you feel!” The problem is that expression got old by the twentieth time I heard it, back in 1973.  And now, after hearing it an additional twenty times a week in the ensuing thirty-five years, I have come to find this particular cliché to be very, very old.  In fact, if this cliché were as old as my feelings about it, it would probably be able to remember a time when the Big Bang was a mere twinkle in God’s eye.  And that’s just another way of saying ...

Path-Finding and Day-Mapping text and photo © Jonathan Zap 341 Jonathan path finding in Escalante Canyon, Utah This image relates to a very practical and grounded way to navigate your pathway through a chaotic world. I have a very poor natural sense of direction, and yet I was able to use ordinary map and compass skills to navigate myself, and a small group, through a maze of canyons with no marked paths (Escalante Canyon, Utah). The method is fairly simple, but profound in its proven effectiveness. You have a topographical map which you can orient to the visible landscape. You know that the map is not the territory, some features have changed, and some things may have been mapped wrong, but most things will correspond. You know the overall direction you want to go, and you use your compass to locate ...

Imagine Getting More (Zap Oracle Card # 332)   copyright 2007, Jonathan Zap One of the most potent of spells or enchantments that can bind you into the matrix is to live under the compulsion of always having to imagine getting more in the future.  Under this spell you become a donkey forever hypnotized by an imaginary carrot just up ahead. The carrot, the “more”, that ever glitters in your mind’s eye like a ring of power, could be many things-----sex, money, power, fame, looks----often the imagined more is a vision of that more perfected life just up ahead, the one in which you have realized your ideal weight, made your first hundred million, and have an ...

photo and text copyright Jonathan Zap 2006 I've been getting a lot of messages from people that reflect a deep unhappiness with our present condition and a tendency to cling to unnourishing things to support themselves through the difficulties.  For example, a woman in New York City sent the following: I listened to you on X Zone tonight.  Re: 2012, my life has really become sitting around and waiting for 2012.  My job, my relationships, etc.  have all become "something to do while I wait."  I really don't like what I've become, because I feel that I am not living my life to the fullest NOW.  I am just waiting for something better to happen, waiting for something to save me. I am beginning to think that a lot of people feel the same way, ...

Brokeback Mountain and the Value of Laconic Brilliance copyright 2005, Jonathan Zap This will be sort of a movie review or two, but mostly a tangent on laconic brilliance.   I saw Spielberg’s latest last night, Munich, and I must say that many of the missing gaps in my knowledge of what life was like for a Israeli assassin in the early 1970s have now been filled in.  It was pretty tight, but not exactly a feel good type of movie, since it is all about moral ambivalence. Next holiday I hope we can get more of an optimistic feel good movie about early 1970s Israeli assassins. Their job is to ...

Recent email dialouge between me and John Jenkins about the nature of time: Zap: Hey John, Sometime before Monday I want to talk to you about your concept of the "center of time." It think that is one of the most incisive, rhetorically effective statements, "It's not the end of time, it is the center of time." Last time we discussed whether time can be seen as a circle or is there a teleology that can stretch that circle toward a spiral if the universe, as Terrance and I believe, seeks an increase in novelty, self awareness? Is there an arrow in time, an evolutionary goal? Teilhard de Chardin seems to make a good case for this. This of course is hard to reconcile with a more Eastern, eternal ...