I had a quick but interesting exchange of emails with a reader of this blog, and they asked me my perspective on the ethical side of prediction. One of the questions was if I share the belief that we shouldn’t answer questions that don’t directly relate to the querent and their actions, especially if they involve reading other people’s mind (e.g., “Is he thinking about his ex?”)
The Three Types of Diviners
First off we must recognize that, nowadays, there are many diviners who do not even think that prediction is possible. Then there’s those who think it’s possible but not desirable. And then there’s those who think it’s both possible and perfectly legitimate. If you know me, you can guess which camp I belong to.
The one thing almost all diviners of almost all strands can agree on is that divination should leave the querent with more information than before the reading took place. It is the nature of the information that is controversial. Many (most, perhaps) contemporary diviners believe the information should be of a mystical/ethical nature and should guide the querent’s action rather than foretelling future events or things the querent has no control over, such as other people’s thoughts beliefs, which is seen as prying. The idea is that to do otherwise is to disempower the querent by putting the center of power outside of them.
To which I say: We are not discrete atoms living each in its own self-made, self-referential reality, no matter what the manifesting girly-pops on Tiktok say. The center of power is not within us, at least not in the sense that most people think.1 We exist enmeshed in an infinitely complex chain of actions and reactions, and our degree of control over them is objectively limited.
We seek to steer our life through the chaos of existence by levereging the information we have, including our knowledge of what (we think) other people’s beliefs and motivations are. In so far as divination gives us information and knowledge, it helps us increase the degree of control we have on our life (though this control can never be absolute). As such, it is perfectly legitimate to want to know what other people think.
The idea that we can only tell the querent what to do as a discrete, atomized individual is faulty for a variety of reasons. As said, the first reason is that we are not atoms. Only first world people with first world problems can seriously believe such postmodern crap (try to go to a starving child in a war zone and tell him he just needs to manifest harder). In reality, how other people think and act has very much to do with how the querent will or can behave, and so the querent’s expectation of being told such information is understandable.
The Two Should’s
The second important reason is that the idea itself that there is an objective cosmic measure of how we should act which the diviner must relay to the querent is silly. How people should act is between them and their god, and diviners are well advised to stay out of it instead of trying to play the role of ruler-wielding metaphysical pep-talkers (whenever you find someone who acts like this, run! Those who can live their life, do. Those who can’t, become life coaches.)
The word “should” has two different meanings: technical (“you should take the bus now if you want to get there on time”) and moral (“you should think about those less fortunate than you”). In the first sense, divination has some use, but only in the sense that the diviner, after assessing the situation as it emerges from the cards or chart, and taking what the querent hopes to achieve into consideration, gives them advice (I’ve talked about this here). In this sense, knowing what someone else thinks can be valuable (“he is not thinking about you and he won’t for the foreseeable future. Maybe you should start thinking about putting yourself back on the market”).
From a moral standpoint, divination’s use is very limited and it can become a dangerous tool of delusion or deceit. Example: “Should I have an abortion?” there is absolutely no way of answering that question. Some quick research online will show that there are all kinds of stances on abortion, ranging from believing it should never be had even if it means the woman will lose her life to believing it’s a moral duty of every woman to have one to stick it to the system, with a variety of more moderate solutions in between.
Since there is no consensus, such question essentially translates to “what is your stance on abortion?” Why you should regulate your life based on the personal moral beliefs of someone shuffling pretty cards on the internet is a question the answer to which is probably found somewhere in California.
“But isn’t divination a form of communion with the divine? Shouldn’t the divine know what’s right?”
Divination is most definitely a form of communion with the divine, but the idea that God has any kind of moral preference is, as far as I am concerned, questionable. People tend to patch their idea of God together from their moral and political prejudices. Somehow the God of the reactionary is always a hillbilly and the God of the revolutionary is always a hippy.
Divination lets us partake of a small share knowledge that one would usually get only if he were God, but this knowledge is very practical and is a tight condensation of that which happens, has happened or will happen in real life: Dante, in describing God, imagines it almost as a compressed version of all that happens in the created world, apprehended in the single blink of an eye.
The above doesn’t mean that it is always wise to answer any question the querent puts to us. “Is he thinking about someone else?” can be two very different questions depending on whether it is being asked by a person looking for closure or by a crazed monomaniac bombarding the diviner with the same query over and over. That divination tends to attract a less conservative clientele is not an earth-shattering revelation, so we do need to exert caution in choosing the questions we are comfortable answering.
Caring For Others
My one guiding principle is that divination implies care for another human being. But what does ‘care’ mean here? Does it mean caring for their ‘evolution’?
Well, no. First off, I think it is very questionable that the concept of evolution should be applied to spirituality. It is generally brought up to make pseudospiritual gibberish sound scientific–it’s a trend that dates back to the XIX century–yet those who use it end up employing a concept of evolution that is more Lamarckian (the giraffe stretches its neck to reach the leaf, thus evolving) than Darwinian (the giraffe born with the shorter neck simply starves, thus ridding the gene pool of its inadequacy, and can do nothing about it), and therefore completely unscientific.
Secondly, again, who am I to tell the querent what the next step in their evolution is supposed to be, especially since there is no consensus on objective standards? Divination can point out shortcomings in the querent’s behavior, but not in a moralistic sense. The cards, for instance, can say, “he left you because you tend to spread your legs more than a ballet dancer” but that’s a mere explanation of the causality behind an objective situation: Y derives from X. The cards are no bead-clutching confessor and I don’t aspire to be one either.
For me caring for another human being means seeing them in their struggle to reach their goals and offering them a bit of additional information that they are at liberty of using or leaving. The main question I ask myself when asked to do a spread is: am I offering information? In the example above of “Is he thinking about someone else?” the person looking for closure is asking for information, while the monomaniac isn’t. It is that simple.
I will certainly talk more about the issue in the future, but I think so far the main point is that divination is a tool for intelligence-gathering. As long as it offers intelligence it is a form of communion with the divine. If it doesn’t, it reinforces destructive trends and is best avoided, but this depends less on the question and more on the querent’s attitude.
MQS
- From a philosophical standpoint I can accept the idea that the ultimate reality resides wholly within me, but if we accept this, then it is present just as much inside everything else, including in the people and situations that make my life miserable. ↩︎
