Be Your Own Fortune Teller

🌱Dharma #6: A Buddhist View on Uncertainty and Choice

Who do you go to when you feel uncertain, yet curious about what to do?
Whether you’re unsure about your career, your relationships with colleagues, or someone you recently started seeing, or you are stressed from family issues.

Humans hate uncertainty and difficulties (most of the time!)—in a deeply physical, biological way.

When life becomes unpredictable, unstable, or unclear,
our nervous system doesn’t interpret that as “mystery.”
It interprets it as danger.

The body tightens.
The mind speeds up and closes.
Our vision and perspective narrow.

We start searching—for answers, for control, for something to hold onto.

And sometimes, we look for those answers… outside of ourselves.
It’s almost ironic that we instinctively search outward without even considering asking inwardly.

A country of fortune-telling

After K-pop, K-drama, K-food, and beauty,
I’ve realized K-fortune-telling might be the next wave.

There was a fortune teller who predicted an event about a member of the globally popular K-pop group BTS, and suddenly global fans began exploring this cultural practice in their own ways. Now they travel to Korea for fortunetelling.

Quite an ironic movement and trend about Korea. A Buddhist country, yet also a country where fortune-telling is everywhere.

Corporate leaders consult fortune tellers when hiring employees.
Couples check compatibility before marriage—even fertility.
Business owners ask for timing and strategies before launching or pivoting.
Families visit readers when conflicts arise—between partners, in-laws, neighbors.

Whenever life feels uncertain, heavy, or stuck—people go.

Tarot readers.
Saju readers.
Shamans.
Energy healers.

Some are known to be incredibly “accurate.”
Some are booked out weeks in advance.

Of course, I went too.

Reading New Year’s fortunes was almost a cultural norm—an unofficial tradition we all quietly participated in.

Sometimes, it felt helpful.

Not because they knew my life, but because, in moments when I felt weak, uncertain, or lost, having someone speak with confidence—even if it wasn’t grounded—felt stabilizing.

It functioned almost like therapy.

A third-party reassurance when your own inner voice feels too quiet to trust.

But did it actually work? Did everything they said unfold as predicted?

Short answer, nope.

Not even close.

What’s real is what we’re experiencing

Over time, something became very clear to me.

I knew more about my life than anyone else.
I was the one who knew myself the most.

Not because I was smarter or spiritually chosen by some higher authority like a mudang*, but because I was living it.

Feeling it.
Processing it.
Conditioning it, moment by moment.

And eventually, I realized something even more uncomfortable:

Many people don’t go to fortune tellers for truth.
They go to escape responsibility.

The Buddha saw this very clearly.

In the Kalama Sutta, he says something radically rare for a spiritual teacher:

Do not believe something simply because it is:
tradition,
widely accepted,
spoken by authority,
or even taught by a teacher.

Not even by him.

Instead, he points back to one place:

Know for yourself.

Test it.
Observe it.
See it directly.

This is not a belief system.

This is a system of ownership.

*A mudang is a Korean shaman who acts as a mediator between spirits or gods and the human world, performing rituals (gut) to cure illnesses, tell fortunes, and resolve misfortunes. They are often "chosen" through a spiritual possession experience (kangsin-mu) or inherit their role, serving as central figures in Korean indigenous religion.

So where is your life ownership?

Ownership is uncomfortable.

Because it means:

If your life is unclear, you cannot outsource clarity.
If your decisions are difficult, you cannot fully hand them to someone else.
If your patterns repeat, you have to look at causes—not predictions.

From a psychological perspective, this is not surprising.

Research in cognitive science shows that when humans are under stress or uncertainty, they are more likely to:

defer to authority,
seek external validation,
reduce decision-making burden.

In simple terms:

When life feels overwhelming, we want someone else to decide for us.

And that is exactly where fortune-telling becomes seductive.

But there is a deeper layer to this.

Because not all of these traditions are “wrong.”

Shamanism, for example, is one of the oldest human spiritual systems.

It includes:

ritual,
symbolic meaning,
spirit communication,
energy-based practices,
forms of channeling.

These traditions exist across cultures—Korea, Japan, Tibet, Southeast Asia, Indigenous communities, and across the African continent. Wherever human civilization has existed, some form of shamanic practice has emerged.

And they have their place.

The confusion begins when we mix frameworks without understanding them.

As Buddhism spread across regions, it naturally encountered these local traditions.
Over time, they blended.

So today, it’s common to see:

people praying for wealth at temples,
seeking blessings to fix their lives,
performing rituals to remove suffering.

It looks spiritual.

But if we return to the Buddha’s teaching, it is much simpler—almost uncomfortably simple.

Suffering arises from causes.
And it ends by understanding those causes.

Not by negotiating with fate.
Not by predicting outcomes.
Not by controlling unseen forces.

But by seeing clearly.

There is also a concept in Buddhism called Māra.

It is often translated as a demon.
But in practice, it refers to anything that pulls you away from awakening.

Distraction.
Attachment.
Fear.
Ego.
Even spiritual experiences.

During meditation, you start seeing visions, or feeling energy, or experiencing something unusual—even beautiful.

If you become fascinated—
if you chase it, identify with it, attach to it—

that itself becomes Māra.

Because now you are no longer observing reality.

You are getting caught in another layer of it.

So Buddhism, at its core, is not about becoming mystical.

It’s not about gaining special abilities.
It’s not about predicting life.
It’s not about controlling outcomes.

It is about something far more grounded:

understanding your mind,
your reactions,
your suffering.

Be your own fortuneteller

Over time, I realized I didn’t need a fortune teller.

Because life itself became readable.

Not because I could predict the future,
but because I could understand the present.

And the present—when seen clearly—
already contains the direction of the future,
and the traces and continuity of the past.

So what do we do when life feels uncertain?

We come back.

To something very simple.

The breath.
The body.
The immediacy of experience.

Because when attention stabilizes, the nervous system settles.
And when the nervous system settles, clarity returns.

Life is not meant to be fully known in advance.

It is meant to be lived.

Sometimes messy.
Sometimes unclear.
Sometimes difficult.

But it should never be lived
by someone else’s decisions.

Not by fortune tellers.
Not by systems.
Not by algorithms.
Not even by something that sounds convincing.

Be your own fortune teller—
not by predicting your life,
but by understanding it so clearly
that you no longer need to.