Home  Why use Oracles? Begin    

In the wrong hands oracles are useless, or worse, even dangerous. 

If you are sick don't use Oracles. Get help. 

To use an oracle as a predictive tool without the appropriate meditative practice can be, for some, lethal.  It behoves one for the sake of survival in an increasingly uncertain world to train one's self in the fine art of observation and speculation. If a person  places no value on what they already know and does not trust their own judgement when making decisions, then they are sorely in need of counselling. For they have missed some essential elements in their maturation - essential research, if you like, in the processes of decision making which are so necessary in the simplest of actions. This person is perpetually being exploited by charlatans because they are always palming off responsibility for themselves onto others. Becoming in action childlike. The negative parts of childlike. Children should not operate heavy machinery. and life can be like a heavy machine. Encumbered with all its reciprocal obligations and arrangements like an overburdened truck with a child at the controls. What you get is Speed meets Lord of the Flies.

That said, oracles are of use to the meditative.

Know this. Every moment is your last moment replicated with a change. Endlessly on. Interrupted by neither Death or conscious decision. So long as there is replication life goes on. Nor is it just life, but time itself. For time is measured in the increments of change in the referents by which a thing's place, therefore existence, is measured. 

What is to come can usually be inferred from what has come to pass.

People have consulted oracles for as long as people have been aware of their own existence. To divine from the confusion of the senses something akin to the truth. Oracles are like history in reverse. That is as history is a thing which is written by victors, an interpretation of events past seen  through the cultural lens of the historian, so oracles are an account of events to come interpreted through the Present of the supplicant; the listener. Oracles make sense only to the person who has cast the question which begat the oracle. 

It can be argued that the oldest oracles of all are the Creation Myths which presuppose the question of where did all this come from?

What is the difference between an Oracle and a Prophesy?

An oracle is God (the future) speaking in response to a question posed by the supplicant. A prophesy doesn't need a question. Nostradamus, Paracelsus, John of the Revelations all made prophesies. The appearance of the burning cross above Milvian Bridge, that was an oracle, because Constantine had prayed for a sign, received it and acted.

Enduring texts all have the same thing in common, Relevance. 

Proverbs of the old Testament have relevance to any situation, Sun Tzu's Art Of War contains dictums which  are relevant in all fields, not just to War. Shakespeare's tragedies are relevant because we all know the experience of being mistaken and the sometimes dire consequences arising from mistaken decisions. 

Change is the sole enduring factor of the entire universe. All other factors are subject to it. All physical principles and laws seek to explain it. Equilibrium is a yearning, no more. All perpetually passes through the eternal gateway of  the Tao, all is disorder yearning for order. 

This is as true for Chemistry as it is for Civilization. The Greek Philosopher Pythagoras must have had some contact with the ancient Chinese for him to have chosen the symbol for pi which was identical to the symbol for the Tao, the principle of the eternal change, the gateway wherefor all is never the same, the never ending number forever growing once unleashed, or uttered. There is something truly profound about the conjunction of notions encompassed in Pythagorean theory. The music of the spheres reflecting a sinusoidal harmonies to be found in  the very molecular structure of the universe, and the necessity for using pi in arriving at the mathematics of those waves only deepens the mystery. Trigonometry is a pythagorean acquisition, and the maths sounds good to the ear. Our musical scale comes from the fretboard described by Pythagorean math. 

The Mandelbrott set actually expresses Change clearly in the equation  Z=z² + C where z is a circumstance and Z is the result. C represents Change. The fractal this equation generates is  a thing of beauty, as true in its parts as it is in the whole. Aperfect reproduction ad infinitum of something changing and growing.

The most recent physics says that the universe is growing at an ever increasing rate and that it is spreading outwards. The very action that a fractal describes, the movement, and change which is the dynamic of life. 

Why use oracles? The ancients did not conceive of history in the chronological sense that we  think of it but rather as a genealogical continuum with no beginning, no end.

In a rational world where everything has to be explained, observed, derived and logged, where the characteristics and dispositions of the minutiae that make up any event; molecular, genetic or behavioural has to b, why would anyone use an oracle rather than the empirical evidence before themIndeed, why?

Who has used oracles

In a deep dark cave away from the sight of  people, columns of calcium carbonate change in the onion skin accretions of the calcium, out of sight and mind. A tree lays on rings, the stars loose mass, the universe rockets outwards at an increasing velocity. If you are terrified by change then the book of changes will be a soothing

 The I'Ching as with all the great documents in the library of humankind bears up to repeated meditation upon, and with each new approach something different is revealed. Like Proverbs, the Tao te Ching, Sun Tzu, The Sutras of the Prophet,  Mahavira's Jainist precepts, Shakespeare each reading at each age reveals something refreshingly new. Insight has a tirelessly pleasing quality. Pleasing because insight is calming. Insight is knowledge - personal, won out of a wildness of reaction and emotion, a fleeting moment; a pellucid, calm understanding. To be remembered.     Some documents actually assist in the achievement of such moments.

    In this writers experience  there are some constants in existence experienced by all humans, this attested to by the universality of the questions posed by sages of all persuasions and cultures. Underlying questions, the why, the where. Carl Jung describes it in the opening paragraphs of Memories Dreams and Reflections in the way he places himself on the African savannah in a hunting pack, smelling the wind. Once in a cave on northern Tasmanian coast, a place where all one had to do was reach down and pick up one of  thousands of discarded stone age hand tools, looking out across Bass strait which had been an open plain during the last Ice Age, it was easy to see and smell the experience of hunching in a cave above a plain on a windy day, ten thousand years ago. Holding the sickle shaped tool, it fitted naturally and comfortably in the palm of my hand, I was cold, a little hungry, and very alive, it was easy to imagine that time, it was like a resonance down the long strand of connection between me and an ancestor who had done exactly such a thing.

    That strand resonates in all, and certain semantic concatenations will trigger memories. The great documents have an extreme poetry about them. Couched in metaphor, a fantastic imagery filled with  a bestiary of dark psychological archetypes. Like a  glass ball no two people looking into the same document see the same thing. The experience is personal, and with some effort, calming even ecstatic.

    The I Ching is one of them. It can be used, like a philosophy, as a tool for analysis, since the underpinning precepts, those of  the Tao are fundamentally humanitarian and come to saying that In the end all things are natural, can and often do fit into some natural order, all things, that is, except cruelty.  

The resonance begins with holding three coins in your hand and thinking of the question which concerns you. Then throw the coins and note how they fall.

Each three throws gives you a trigram. 

Two trigrams (i.e. six throws) gives you the hexagram.

The hexagram is the gateway to contemplation. Reflected in its form and the form of the images associated with each line the whole six conjugate, like a key in a lock barrel, to engage the tines of the unconscious. Or nothing will happen and it will mean nothing. Divination, by its nature is what you bring to it.

The Hexagrams is the trigram resulting from the first three throws known as the lower trigram starting at the bottom and going up. The next three throws describe the next trigram, the upper. Taken together they make a hexagram.

upper	Ch'ien	Chen	K 'an	Ken	K'un	Sun	Li	Tui
trigrams
lower
Ch'ien	1	34	5	26	11	9	14	43
Chen	25	51	3	27	24	42	21	17
K'an	6	40	29	4	7	59	64	47
Ken	33	62	39	52	15	53	56	31
K'un	12	16	8	23	2	20	35	45
Sun	44	32	48	18	46	57	50	28
Li	13	55	63	22	36	37	30	49
Tui	10	54	60	41	19	61	38	58