divination

#wip

• tarot
• I Ching

how is divination related to poetry? there seems to be some resemblance; both activities call forth a sort of lateral thinking from the practitioner

divination is related to randomness--incorporating into practice some elements outside of "rational behavior"

Steelmanning Divination

• “One performs divination and only then decides on important affairs.” Often one is faced with a challenge that is “above one’s pay grade,” and having a prescribed ritual for what sort of cognition needs to be done encourages reflection and popping out of the obvious frame. Simply thinking about a situation in the way one naturally would doesn’t correct for biases, while attempting to make sense of a situation from a randomly generated frame does help expand one’s conception of it. #annealling

• comment 1

  • The point, in other words, is not simply the fact of using a random table. The point, rather, is: just what exactly is on that random table, and what is not on it; and what is the distribution of the listed things. Not all random tables are created equal; not all are equally ‘fun’. The details are everything.

• comment 2

  • Xunzi sees rituals as social forms that support social order, so there's a rich conversation about how the I Ching may or may not be related to that domain, which the OP barely touches upon.

• my take

  • This post is less about divination in general and more about the I Ching specifically--see comment 1 about the importance of the underlying content of the system which you're randomly sampling. i.e. it's a nonlinear narrative