I have an unusual attitude toward oracular technologies. (I’m using the word “technology” in the pre-digital sense, to mean any systematic and equipped method.)
I focus in on the descriptive languages embedded in their systems and methodically bracket all thaumaturgic practice. Whether chance-based methods produce meaning or randomness is an important question, but a question toward which I exercise fastidious incuriosity. Let us call these technique-stripped oracles “oracular languages”
Two oracular languages I have studied and value for their powers of spiritual description are I Ching and Tarot.
Both describe, in different ways, spiritual situation: the situatedness of some situated being within some situating being. Or alternatively the situation of some spiritual participant who participates in specific way in a some partially-known whole.
Of the two, I Ching seems to have the most grammatical precision, and I have a clearer understanding how it works. But this might be insufficiently uninformed, becauseI have spent very little time studying Tarot spreads, which are unmistakably grammatical. I Ching might have sharper mathematical structure, where Tarot might have more linguistic complexity that makes its structure harder to grasp. As I write this I feel that I believe that this is the case.
I am saying all this because I have an idea for a therapeutic application for oracles. In principle it could work with any oracle which claims to provide a snapshot of a present situation with a futural trajectory, which, unless I am mistaken is what both Tarot and I Ching claim. Each claims to be a snapshot of a scene. In the shot, frozen in mid-action is some occurrence. Some of the image is stable and some of it is obviously in motion. Some of the image is foreground, and some of it is background.
Imaging an image of a high school football game. A player is in mid-jump reaching for the ball, and it seems possible but not certain that he will catch it. Behind him is a player on the opposing team who is mid-lunge, and clearly a fraction of a second from bringing him down with a tackle. Other players from both teams scramble in the periphery. Behind this action are cheerleaders who are frozen in hope. Behind them is a blurry crowd. The scene is lit by stadium lights and a drizzly mist is in the air. The helmets might be wet.
Nothing in this image moves, but the image is of motion, and we can anticipate how it is likely to continue. This is what oracles communicate.
An I Ching medium will say that the coins or yarrow stalks work like a camera to pick up or respond to or configure (in Charles Stein’s sense of the word) the subtle realities in play in the situation in question, and make it legible to those making the inquiry.
A very brief account of how these situations are captured in the parlance of I Ching.
The I Ching describes a situation by a hexagram of six lines, or yao. Think of the hexagram as a statement. Each of the six yao is a unit of meaning analogous to a word. But in the I Ching, both sentence structure and vocabulary is mathematically rigid. It is more like a mad libs fill in the blank than a real sentence, with each blank having a fixed significance within the whole sentence and the words that fills in those blanks being limited to four.
Let’s start with the four word vocabulary. There is yang, which denotes action, positive closure, light, clarity, resistance, resolve, conscious awareness, all of which in I Ching philosophy are manifestations of the essential reality underlying these qualities, yang. There is yin, which denotes receptivity, negative openness, darkness, concealment, yielding, questions, unconsciousness and unknowing, all of which are manifestations of the essence, yin. Then there is changing yang — yang which has run its course, in mid-transition to yin. And there is changing yin — yin which has run its course, in mid-transition to yang.
Shifting to grammar, each of the six positions of the hexagram is occupied by one of these four possibilities of yin, yang, changing yin and changing yang. Obviously, there are myriad gradients in this cycle, but I Ching divides them into four categories. As with any sentence, the meaning of the whole hangs on the relationships between the parts.
A hexagram is constructed of two trigrams — a lower trigram that describes the situated being, the subject of the situation, and the upper trigram, the enveloping being in which the subject participates and in which the subject is situated. The hexagam gives the structure of each and puts them in relation.
The trigrams also have a set structure. They are read from bottom to top.
Earth yao describes the objective character — the What or That or Is — present or absent in the situation.
Man yao describes the participatory character of the situation — the How or Can the doing or being done to — active or passive in the situation.
Heaven yao describes the value character of the situation — the Why or Ought or better or worse or beautiful or ugly — giving moral purpose or resistance or lack of meaning in the situation.
So the complete hexagram describes situations by giving us (from bottom to top, so reverse from this list)
- Lower earth yao — the What of the situated subject
- Lower man yao — the How of the situated subject
- Lower heaven yao — the Why of the situated subject
- Upper earth yao — the What of the situating being-context
- Upper man yao — the How of the situating being-context
- Upper heaven yao — the Why of the situating being-context
One last note: any hexagram with any changing yao is understood to lead to another hexagram. The changing yaos are developed to their changed state. So a hexagram with a changing yang in the lower earth yao leads to a hexagram with yin in that same yao.
I’m out of time, so I need to wrap up too fast.
The therapeutic opportunity is in the lower trigram, because it is here that we have some degree of control over the described situation.
The control we have in this lower trigram is rate of change. We can accelerate or slow each yao’s development toward its next stage. But we cannot reverse it.
- Yin can remain yin, or it can be willed toward changing-yin.
- Changing-yin can remain changing-yin, or it can be willed toward yang.
- Yang can remain yang, or it can be willed toward changing-yang.
- Changing-yang can remain changing-yang, or it can be willed toward yin.
Each yao in the lower trigram can be slowed or developed independently.
We can look at future hexagrams that might develop from the current one, changing none, all or some combination of the three in the line of development, again, by selective acceleration and deceleration of yao, the constraints being 1) only the lower trigram can be changed, only rate of change can be influenced, but development cannot be reversed.
Returning to our image. We can slightly change the football players rate of forward motion by extending his hands, or easing back on his forward stretch. But he’s going forward at some range of motion and there is no use in attempting to reverse it. The ball and the other players are going to respond to the player, so his control is indirect. The crowd, the stadium, the weather and the lights are entirely beyond immediate control. Perhaps cheering and booing will follow, but that is later.
The goal is to focus on influencing only what can be influenced, only within the range of possible change, and accepting as given constraints what cannot.
In a way, this is similar to how I use Enneagram. Most choices can be analyzed in terms of choices between integration or disintegration. As a 5, I can be pretty sure I’m making a worse choice if I am moving toward 7 (more freedom and pleasure) and a better choice if I am moving toward 8 (intuitive mastery, mission and unsparing destiny). This method gives similar guidance by identifying the most possible options and giving specific strategies for accelerating or braking, and taking all less possible strategies off the table. We can’t reverse changing-yang into yang without becoming inert columns of salt.
There is a ton more to develop, but sadly I must end here.