September 24th, 2004
Please take this quick 4-question survey.
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I Ching, Tarot, Runes, et al.
I don't believe that one can divine the future. Besides, even hard-core proponents of such systems will quickly point out that the very act of divining the future alters it. Well, duh ...
But you know, I do have a set of Tarot cards that I occasionally yank out for my own entertainment and edification, and I sometimes read a good translation of the I Ching, but only for the value of the words themselves ... not because I have a burning question that I want to know the future about. Predicting the future is a pointless waste of time--even if such predictions were true at the instant they were made. The very knowledge of a future, whether fictional or somehow true based on some ethereal magic, changes that future. So it is for the value in the present that I have such otherwise silly toys of my own.
What I have found with my divination toys is that I start to think of problems in different ways. A different facet of what I face in the present.
A simple example:
"Should I take that new job or stay with the old one?" One can sit down and write out all the pros and cons of each and weigh and balance them, coming up with some decision in the end, a lá Dale Carnegie or some other practical method.
But once I have done that, I still take a gut-check moment and see how I feel about it. Sometimes I am able to just make a decision and see what my intuition tells me about it. If my intuition says, "No! No! No!" then I change my decision and usually feel better. But that doesn't always work.
Cue the I Ching or the Celtic Tree Cards or whatever and go back to my example: I've got this binary decision about whether to take some new job or whether to stick with an old one. Well what does the I Ching say? Why, it's a lesson on modesty. Or the Tarot says that, in danger, one should immerse oneself in the waters of peril. One should carefully consider that jumping over the waterfall may actually land oneself in deeper waters.
Well, okay, so it's a new way of looking at the same problem, isn't it? The decision is no longer based on mechanical pros and cons, it is possibly based on a better understanding about what is motivating me. Let's keep the example going a little bit more: Let's say that my thinking reveals that, well, darn it, I am feeling inferior and under-utilized. I feel like a big fish being treated as a little tadpole.
Maybe my motivations are not so factually-based after all. And now I can evaluate my decision on a different set of criteria: Am I going to feel more utilized in my new job? Or, perhaps it is as John Lennon said in Revolution: "I think you'd better free your mind instead"?
So, don't hate me because I sometimes draw the curtains and sit on my living room floor with a deck of Tarot card toys. I'm not all that serious about them ... I'm just trying to find a different way of looking at a thorny problem. As long as I don't hang off the words with blindly awestruck obedience, it usually helps.
In a related vein from Greek mythology, Cassandra (daughter of Priam, King of Troy) was cursed with knowledge of the future, but that nobody would believe her. So, among other things, she predicted the fall and sack of Troy, but she was either laughed at or shunned. Now that's some kind of curse, eh?
On the other hand, thinking somewhat logically: Since (as I said above) a prediction of the future alters it, there is no other way that the response could have been for poor Cassandra. If people had believed her predictions of the future, she would have simply been weaving cautionary tales that people would have jumped and run to address. And then it wouldn't have been the future any more.
In another related vein, I have proven to my own satisfaction that travel backwards in time is not going to be possible at least within my lifetime. I know this, because I wrote down the winning numbers to an un-won 649 lottery jackpot of over 20 million dollars, vowing to never write down winning numbers to another one again. Then I filed the numbers away in several places, physical and electronic. And an older version of myself didn't pop in on my younger self and hand them over a day before I wrote them down, did I?