(Photo by iStock/gremlin)

Sometimes we meet people who seem to live in the space between worlds. Their bodies are more transparent, diaphanous, vacillating in the liminal fascia between many planes of reality. They see and fall in love with unimaginable potential. They try to whisper it to us, even if we don’t understand. They are loyal to a different kind of clarity and integrity. When they communicate through silence, strange riddles and koans, it is with gravity and power that stirs something profound: a memory of the future.

Be a be oracular East:

To open your soul-body away; to become a porous channel of temporal flows and currents.

Meet latent potential; to wave and connect with stealthy futures who imbue you with vision.

To express from this indescribable place of paradox; to declare your visions to the world, transforming your body into a portal of potential.

Oracular beings are deeply sensitive and porous, strange and wise. But today there is a demand for oracular beings to enter the public sphere to become guides in this period between worlds and to assume positions of “visionary leadership” for a collective metamorphosis. These oracular beings mobilize, even when they prefer to dance at the edge of the forest. The public eye can be harsh on these organizations. It’s a costume that binds them to expectations and projections. Yet these beings work hard, devoting their minds, souls, sweat, blood and tears.

Oracular bodies began as a research/art project exploring the phenomenology of those sentient beings who may be considered visionaries, shamans, mystics, oracles or prophets in this period between the worlds. Historically, an oracle is a person with clear senses and the ability to speak and provide visionary insight, guidance, and prophecies. In a time desperate for guidance and foresight, oracular beings are called to become beacons to heal, inspire, and guide others in collective transition.

It is a work that is born out of tender love and fierce guardianship of the oracular beings in our lives. We wish to provide infrastructure for the care of oracular beings and protect the intergenerational transmission of this nascent but ancient capacity. We want to prefigure the vital patterns of oracular culture, a future that sees and foresees a collective capacity that must not be limited to an overburdened few. It embodies a living hypothesis that humans are inherently porous and interconnected creatures in our radical reactivity to other living beings and to a living world. Oracular bodies help us remember the intimacy that is our collective birthright.

This work is used to design programs that can support these oracular beings and propose transition practices, another kind of foresight – a forecast that can only come from these particular bodies.

Read more stories by Cheryl Hsu.