Divination

For a non-spiritual Atheist and science-based thinker, I’ve long been fascinated by divination. While I don’t think there is any sort of divine or universal power driving it, I rationalize its value as an associative trigger for the brain. In that struggle between what we think we should do, what we think we want to do, and what we don’t know we want to do… I believe that cleromancy techniques can help bring our thoughts to the forefront. It won’t tell us anything we don’t know, but like other creative activities it can help break our normal thought patterns to create new neural pathways.

This brings to mind the Radiolab episode, On Repeat, in which a woman suffering from transient global amnesia relives the same 90 seconds over and over again. It begs the question of how much free will or even consciousness we have if the reality is that our thoughts and actions are reproducable given the exact same parameters. Of course normal life has an infinite amount of variables that create different situations for us so that we don’t actually live on repeat, but are we merely a complex algorithmic response to a large number of environmental inputs? As a computer scientist, the thought is not so far fetched for me. AI may be in its early stages, but I can very much imagine that our brains are just computers of exponentially more complexity than digital machines.

Anyway, all that to say that I’ve always been interested in card reading and fortune telling. As a child (even while atheist) I spent time studying Taoism and using the I Ching. Astrology is too rigid for me, I like the variability and randomness provided by card draws and dice rolls. I like that the results are open to interpretation and you have to work at it to find a meaning that makes sense to you. There are some beautiful cartomancy phone apps that I’ve found, although their UX design tends to need some work. Labyrinthos Academy and Golden Thread Tarot are from the same creators and both focus on the classic tarot deck. Seventh Sphere is simple and has great graphics as well, and uses the Lenormand deck.

The daily spreads have been interesting, and I’m usually able to find a meaning that reflects on what I’m going through. Today’s Lenormand reading gave me the Moon and the Ring. The Moon represents the subconcious and the intuition, hidden emotions, fears, desires, and fantasies, the opposite of the logic and truth that comes from our rational minds. The Ring represents commitments, binding connections, linking two things together, and cyclic events. It applies to people, organizations, ideas, or values in love, business, and everything in between. With these cards combined, my I reflected on how I tend to go overboard with setting goals. There is so much I want to commit to, attend, do, not do. Some of those things come out of a rational thought that it’s something I “should” do. Some things reflect my hidden fears and fantasies. Whatever the source, I should think deeply about my commitments or else risk repeating the mistakes of the past and thus set myself up for disappointment. I originally wrote ‘failure’ but realized that it’s not failure I should fear, its regret.