Rereading this post, I’m a bit struck by how much effort I put into explaining my history with the underlying ideas, and motivating that this specifically is cool. I think this made sense as a rhetorical move—I’m hoping that a skeptical audience will follow me into territory labeled ‘woo’ so that they can see the parts of it that are real—and also as a pedagogical move (proofs may be easy to verify, but all of the interesting content of how they actually discovered that line of thought in concept space has been cleaned away; in this post, rather than hiding the sprues they were part of the content, and perhaps even the main content. [Some part of me wants to signpost that a bit more clearly, tho perhaps it is obvious?]
There’s something that itches about this post, where it feels like I never turn ‘the idea’ into a sentence. “If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune.” Sure, but that leaves much of the work to the reader; this post is more like a log of me as a reader doing some more of the work, and leaving yet more work to my reader. It’s not a clear condensation of the point, it doesn’t address previous scholarship, it doesn’t even clearly identify the relevant points that I had identified, and it doesn’t transmit many of the tips and tricks I picked up. A sentence that feels like it would have fit (at least some of what I wanted to convey?) is this description of Tarot readings: “they are not about fortelling your inevitable future, but taking control of it through self knowledge and awareness.” [But in reading that, there’s something pleasing about the holistic vagueness of “proper form”; the point of having proper form is not just ‘taking control’!]
For example, an important point that came up when reading AllAmericanBreakfast’s exploration of using divination was the ‘skill of discernment’, and that looking at random perspectives and lenses helps train this as well. Once I got a Tarot reading that I’ll paraphrase as “this person you’re having an interpersonal conflict with is 100% in the wrong,” and as soon as I saw the card I burst out laughing; it was clearly not resonant with my experience or the situation, and yet there was still something useful out of seeing myself react to that perspective in that way. Other times, it really is just noise. Somehow, it reminds me of baseball, where an important feature of the game is that the large majority of at-bats do not result in hits. Demonstrating the skill of discernment is present in the original post—but only when I talk about sifting through the sections of Xunzi, giving the specific reasons why I dismissed some parts and thought that the quoted section was a hit that justified additional research, contemplation, and exploration. The ongoing importance of that skill to divination is basically left out.
I also hadn’t realized until reading AllAmericanBreakfast’s exploration how much it might help to convey that the little things mattered; my translation of the I Ching surely impacted my experience of doing divination with it deeply, like my Tarot deck impacted my experience of doing Tarot readings. I make a related point in passing (“the particular claim made by a source is what distribution is most useful”), and SaidAchmiz’s excellent comment explains it much more fully. When I think of where to go from here, matching the ‘advice distribution’ to some mixture of the reader and the world feels like a central point.
Expanding on that, I think the traditional style of Tarot reading mostly cares about which cards end up in which positions, drawing on the mythical associations of the card’s name more than the features of the cards themselves. Whether or not cards are ‘reversed’ is significant, but as an orderly person and a longtime Magic: The Gathering player, I can’t stand shuffling methods that randomize the orientation of the cards. The tableau defines the relationships between the cards and constructs the overall perspective.
So the way I do Tarot readings is often quite simple: three cards, one for me, one for the other party, and the third for the relationship. [Another common three-card spread is ‘past, present, and future’; this page that I found while writing this review suggests a few spreads and questions that I am excited to try. As is perhaps obvious, the questions seeding how to relate to the cards you draw will have a huge impact on the variety and usefulness of perspectives you will generate.] But this works in part because my deck is so beautiful and detailed; as an example, I’ll do (and ‘live-blog’) a reading about my relationship to this post.
I am the “princet of ground”; in a cave, his staff planted firmly behind him, a glowing triangle (the symbol of ground) floating in his hands. The clear story is that I’m delving deep into the past, looking for treasure while maintaining my grounding; the subtler point is that I initially wrote “holding a glowing triangle” and then realized that it in fact wasn’t being touched by the princet, in a way that rhymes with my sense that I don’t actually understand this fully, or haven’t distilled it crisply enough.
The post is the 3 of wind; three swords piercing a heart in the middle of a storm. The meaning of this is, uh, obscure. And yet, perhaps that obscurity is the relevance? The post is not clear—it is three ‘stabs at the heart of the matter’, which while they touch the point, they have not cleared away the stormclouds or lightning or rain.
The relationship is “The Fountain” (or “Wheel of Fortune”); a fat figure eats and drinks at a party while their reflection is emaciated and surrounded by flame. Water pours from the fountain, causing ripples in the pool. I try out a few stories here, and none of them resonate strongly; am I the fortunate figure, reaping the rewards of having written a solid post? Is the reader the emaciated figure? Is the reflection the illusion of transparency, where there’s a sense that they got it, but actually they missed it, or the post itself is insight porn? [As I say in a comment, “if someone is going to get something out of the I Ching, they’re going to do it through practice, not through a summary”.] The fountain resonates with gradual change, with water moving, in a way that seems hard to articulate but somehow rhymes with people reading this post, seeing things more clearly, or having more tools to see things more broadly and understand more perspectives. [One of my favorite comments about this post was posted by a friend to Facebook, where she attended a Red Tent event that involved someone doing a Tarot reading, and reading this post gave her a clear affordance of how to relate to it in a healthy and connective way, instead of being forced into a dilemma of whether to suppress her disbelief or cause a conflict with the other women there.]
The perspective that seems most resonant, after thinking about it for a few minutes, is that the relationship is a mixture of pride and shame. I like this post; I think it’s good, I think it’s an example of one of my comparative advantages as a rationalist, I am glad to have written it, and I am glad that people liked it. And also… I am ashamed that this is a 2019 post, instead of a 2015 one; that it is just an advertisement seeking to “open a door that was rightfully closed on the likes of fortune cookies and astrology to rescue things like the I Ching, that seem superficially similar but have a real depth to them,” instead of having much depth of its own. And while I still pull out the deck or the I Ching for some major instances, the regular habit never quite stuck in a way that made me suspect I wasn’t being creative enough, or pushing enough towards my growth edge. [‘If you are bored of reading Tarot cards,’ that perspective says, ‘you are not asking spicy enough questions.’]
Rereading this post, I’m a bit struck by how much effort I put into explaining my history with the underlying ideas, and motivating that this specifically is cool. I think this made sense as a rhetorical move—I’m hoping that a skeptical audience will follow me into territory labeled ‘woo’ so that they can see the parts of it that are real—and also as a pedagogical move (proofs may be easy to verify, but all of the interesting content of how they actually discovered that line of thought in concept space has been cleaned away; in this post, rather than hiding the sprues they were part of the content, and perhaps even the main content. [Some part of me wants to signpost that a bit more clearly, tho perhaps it is obvious?]
There’s something that itches about this post, where it feels like I never turn ‘the idea’ into a sentence. “If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune.” Sure, but that leaves much of the work to the reader; this post is more like a log of me as a reader doing some more of the work, and leaving yet more work to my reader. It’s not a clear condensation of the point, it doesn’t address previous scholarship, it doesn’t even clearly identify the relevant points that I had identified, and it doesn’t transmit many of the tips and tricks I picked up. A sentence that feels like it would have fit (at least some of what I wanted to convey?) is this description of Tarot readings: “they are not about fortelling your inevitable future, but taking control of it through self knowledge and awareness.” [But in reading that, there’s something pleasing about the holistic vagueness of “proper form”; the point of having proper form is not just ‘taking control’!]
For example, an important point that came up when reading AllAmericanBreakfast’s exploration of using divination was the ‘skill of discernment’, and that looking at random perspectives and lenses helps train this as well. Once I got a Tarot reading that I’ll paraphrase as “this person you’re having an interpersonal conflict with is 100% in the wrong,” and as soon as I saw the card I burst out laughing; it was clearly not resonant with my experience or the situation, and yet there was still something useful out of seeing myself react to that perspective in that way. Other times, it really is just noise. Somehow, it reminds me of baseball, where an important feature of the game is that the large majority of at-bats do not result in hits. Demonstrating the skill of discernment is present in the original post—but only when I talk about sifting through the sections of Xunzi, giving the specific reasons why I dismissed some parts and thought that the quoted section was a hit that justified additional research, contemplation, and exploration. The ongoing importance of that skill to divination is basically left out.
I also hadn’t realized until reading AllAmericanBreakfast’s exploration how much it might help to convey that the little things mattered; my translation of the I Ching surely impacted my experience of doing divination with it deeply, like my Tarot deck impacted my experience of doing Tarot readings. I make a related point in passing (“the particular claim made by a source is what distribution is most useful”), and SaidAchmiz’s excellent comment explains it much more fully. When I think of where to go from here, matching the ‘advice distribution’ to some mixture of the reader and the world feels like a central point.
Expanding on that, I think the traditional style of Tarot reading mostly cares about which cards end up in which positions, drawing on the mythical associations of the card’s name more than the features of the cards themselves. Whether or not cards are ‘reversed’ is significant, but as an orderly person and a longtime Magic: The Gathering player, I can’t stand shuffling methods that randomize the orientation of the cards. The tableau defines the relationships between the cards and constructs the overall perspective.
So the way I do Tarot readings is often quite simple: three cards, one for me, one for the other party, and the third for the relationship. [Another common three-card spread is ‘past, present, and future’; this page that I found while writing this review suggests a few spreads and questions that I am excited to try. As is perhaps obvious, the questions seeding how to relate to the cards you draw will have a huge impact on the variety and usefulness of perspectives you will generate.] But this works in part because my deck is so beautiful and detailed; as an example, I’ll do (and ‘live-blog’) a reading about my relationship to this post.
I am the “princet of ground”; in a cave, his staff planted firmly behind him, a glowing triangle (the symbol of ground) floating in his hands. The clear story is that I’m delving deep into the past, looking for treasure while maintaining my grounding; the subtler point is that I initially wrote “holding a glowing triangle” and then realized that it in fact wasn’t being touched by the princet, in a way that rhymes with my sense that I don’t actually understand this fully, or haven’t distilled it crisply enough.
The post is the 3 of wind; three swords piercing a heart in the middle of a storm. The meaning of this is, uh, obscure. And yet, perhaps that obscurity is the relevance? The post is not clear—it is three ‘stabs at the heart of the matter’, which while they touch the point, they have not cleared away the stormclouds or lightning or rain.
The relationship is “The Fountain” (or “Wheel of Fortune”); a fat figure eats and drinks at a party while their reflection is emaciated and surrounded by flame. Water pours from the fountain, causing ripples in the pool. I try out a few stories here, and none of them resonate strongly; am I the fortunate figure, reaping the rewards of having written a solid post? Is the reader the emaciated figure? Is the reflection the illusion of transparency, where there’s a sense that they got it, but actually they missed it, or the post itself is insight porn? [As I say in a comment, “if someone is going to get something out of the I Ching, they’re going to do it through practice, not through a summary”.] The fountain resonates with gradual change, with water moving, in a way that seems hard to articulate but somehow rhymes with people reading this post, seeing things more clearly, or having more tools to see things more broadly and understand more perspectives. [One of my favorite comments about this post was posted by a friend to Facebook, where she attended a Red Tent event that involved someone doing a Tarot reading, and reading this post gave her a clear affordance of how to relate to it in a healthy and connective way, instead of being forced into a dilemma of whether to suppress her disbelief or cause a conflict with the other women there.]
The perspective that seems most resonant, after thinking about it for a few minutes, is that the relationship is a mixture of pride and shame. I like this post; I think it’s good, I think it’s an example of one of my comparative advantages as a rationalist, I am glad to have written it, and I am glad that people liked it. And also… I am ashamed that this is a 2019 post, instead of a 2015 one; that it is just an advertisement seeking to “open a door that was rightfully closed on the likes of fortune cookies and astrology to rescue things like the I Ching, that seem superficially similar but have a real depth to them,” instead of having much depth of its own. And while I still pull out the deck or the I Ching for some major instances, the regular habit never quite stuck in a way that made me suspect I wasn’t being creative enough, or pushing enough towards my growth edge. [‘If you are bored of reading Tarot cards,’ that perspective says, ‘you are not asking spicy enough questions.’]