Is There A Case For Divination?
If one can make some sense, shed light on signs,
What can be made known?
Deep, explorable your nature,
You can only go so far
Interpreting a star.
There seems to be significance in divination,
Most of life interpretation anyway.
What, if any knowledge
Is no more than collage
When so much of memory is fanciful,
Wishful thinking, swishing round inside the brain--
Imagination.
Many hundred years ago
One of the first books ever printed
Was a book of divination.
Book, I Ching;*
Introduction by Carl Jung,
Annotation by Confucius
Translation: Richard Wilhelm, sundry others.
Rational and philosophical; precise results;
All based upon your own projections,
Circumstance. your mind, the generations…
Scientific, not a bit BUT…
With sincerity,
A mastery of modus operandi
Six throws of the coins produce
A grasp of future consciousness,
An understanding for success.
A case for divination?
Locked into the brain is something magical,
Some second sense, some second sight,
That seeks to make predictions
Out of dark and light
To give a sense of meaning
That controls the everything.
*Book of Changes
*Book of Changes
The "I Ching" is the oldest Chinese classic, written in the late 9th century BCE during the reign of Xuan, the 11th ruler of the Zhou dynasty. Originally known as the "Zhou yi" (Changes of Zhou), it was traditionally ascribed to Zhou Wen Wang ("the Civilizing King," whose son founded the dynasty) or his younger son Dan, the "god of dreams" who administered the kingdom after the king's death, elaborated the "Mandate of Heaven" doctrine that justified his family's royal rule, created the aristocratic yayue ("elegant music"), was credited with writing the "Shijing" (the Classic of Poetry), and founded Chengzhou (Luoyang). In 136 BCE Han emperor Wu renamed it the "I Ching" and called it "the first among the classics." Richard Wilhelm, who had been trained in its divinatory usage by Lao Nai-hsüan, translated it into German in 1923, and Carl Jung contributed an introduction. Cary F. Baynes, a Jungian psychologist, translated it, along with Jung's commentary, into English in 1950. Jung used the work as a diagnostic tool as well as an example of the principle of synchronicity, "a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance.... Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast.... The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure. The psychophisical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation."
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