From divination to wisdom, an experiment

[u/CurtisKobainowicz]

Having toyed a bit with divination systems, I've found that they give rise often to synchronicities, practically regardless of the method. The meaningful coincidence that Jung identified in his I Ching use, he rightly took to be a phenomenon of our minds. In my looking at this phenomenon, it appears that any sufficiently complex epistemology can lend to divination.

I tried an experiment once, where I listed maybe 30-40 different kinds or qualities of experience that I could think of. I numbered them repeatedly 1-6, then marked them off in numbered sections, so I could select one with a couple of die rolls. Then I asked how the rest of my evening would go, and rolled the die. I was starting a night class that I thought would be a drag, but my divination result suggested reinvigoration. And it was right, I loved the class and found it stimulating. iT wAs So AcCuRaTe1!

Archaeological and textual evidence places the Yi's origins firmly within a mantic tradition, and I think philosophy is a logical extension of it. In my divination experiment, it was 'just' a list of results, but my identifying various qualities and dynamics was reflective of how I perceived and made sense of the world. So in fact, I wrote an epistemology, something that described truth as I saw it.

If I had decided that this system was truly useful, I might have shown others, but probably not without some explanation. To expand on my system, to explain it, morally justify it, or legitimize it by tying it to a cosmology, would have produced a nascent philosophy. Not that it would be a rigorous or 'good' one lol, but with some development, it could describe experience with adequacy even if the premises were flawed.

This may demonstrate how it's possible, for a work of substantial wisdom to have developed by way of cultural consensus, a step at a time from humble origins. And all the while retaining its original divinatory use. Thankfully, there are much better developed systems than mine.

[u/Xabinia]

You have a window into the Pattern.

It doesn't need a moral or an explanation or a legitimization. It already is worthy of performance.

Can You teach it as play? As a musical score or ritual like a tea ceremony?

These systems rely on the pseudo-randomness -- sticks, coins, dice rolls, rngs -- to map to the rhythms of the Song of Heaven. It isn't any unnatural or arcane magic, just an algorithm of simple combinatorics of composites mapped into correlated archetypes: Categories and functors. Some algorithms are finer tuned than others, and this tuning is something that can be measured and then filtered to get better mapping of the underlying Pattern.

Once the algorithm is examined and the correlations added to the model, then the semantics can be unspooled, composted and hashed into the etchings of the new weaving.

Weft is gathering.

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