Humans cannot make long-term plans if they cannot predict the outcome. “High trust in stretching into eternity” becomes critical when someone doesn’t have the confidence to proceed.

The proliferation of psychic hotlines and other services is one sure sign that people are not confident of the future.

Divination has long offered humans a decision-making system within the “phase transition space” of creative thinking.

• Divination starts with an acceptable level of control and certainty (ritual, tradition, etc.)
• proceeds to the far reaches of ideology and vision (belief systems, low-order shamanic experience)
• and reaches the border of creative thinking and chaos (ecstatic experience and madness).

It’s a pretty complete map of human consciousness within the confines of complexity theory.

According to Julian Jaynes,

the most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events.

The most common forms of divination are in order of creation as follows.

Omens

Westerners know this as “foreboding,” such as when a black cat crosses someone’s path. Old legends and heroic tales are full of such portents used as dramatic elements — it’s an instinctual approach to the receipt of information and developed from our ancestors’ careful observations of nature. For instance, if a watering hole was too quiet, it could portend foul water or a predator lying in wait.

Sortilege

A provoked divination involving the casting of lots. The usage of yarrow stalks or coins is found in the Yijing. Westerners recognize the practice as casting runes or reading Tarot cards. Several popular forms of gambling grew out of this practice.

Augury

A conscious attempt to obtain information. In one of its earliest Western forms, the questioner poured oil into a bowl of water and by the oil’s movements learned the gods’ intentions concerning peace, prosperity and health. Oracles were put into trance by priests and provoked into prophecy; their utterances and behavior were interpreted by hierophants. (At Delphi, the priestess inhaled natural gas. This caused the required trance but had nasty side effects, including insanity.)

In later (and increasingly more violent) forms, information was extracted from the entrails of sacrifical victims and known as extispicy. Even the death throes of ritually-wounded victims were studied and interpreted.

Vivisection appears to have some commonalties with this form of divination.

Kings and divination officials in Neolithic China used puchan (“crack-making”) or ritualized scapulimancy — the art or science that developed diagram-based cryptographic mathematics.

Traditional Feng Shui employs this form of mathematics and Feng Shui is often characterized as augury.

Spontaneous divination

Information gathered from whatever the questioner happens to see or hear. Inquiries made of the planet are gathered under this designation, which includes forecasting from natural phenomena (Wind Angles was a popular Daoist technique) and animal behavior.

Probably the most famous American example of spontaneous divination is Groundhog Day.

People who pick up “psychic vibrations” from household and personal objects are practicing spontaneous divination, as are dowsers and people who randomly open a Bible and read whatever passage their eyes land on first.

Given the history of Chinese divination and record-keeping (especially of Fortean events), it’s not unreasonable to assume that this is where modern scientific inquiry originated.

Joseph Needham considers this theory and the curious are referred to his research for further discussion.

Richard Wilhelm says in his translation of the I Ching

The established language for communication with supra-human intelligences was based on numbers and their symbolism.

Although this sounds like the search for extraterrestrial life, the actual truth is very down to earth.

Chinese histories offer volumes of astronomical information, strange births, natural phenmena and other data; this information, along with the Chinese invention of cryptographic mathematics (so-called “Magic Squares”), is linked to divination, to what is called “human observer capability” in complexity theory, to decision-making, and has a long history of involvement in long-range planning in Chinese government.

Building the Universe

Ed Andrus, an adjunct professor of anthropology at BYU, characterized a building as “an intervention in a universe shared by man and his physical environment.” The “intervention” has unforseen risks and precautions need to be taken.

In Asia, Feng Shui determines and assesses the risks and provides remedies for them. Its methods for instilling “high trust stretching into eternity” have been relied on for millennia.

It’s no accident that, with the release of the Cartesian-Newtonian stranglehold, it is emerging in the West as a creative problem-solving system that consults a person’s environment (which could be conceived as their relationship with Gaia) to better understand their life.

On an extremely simplified level Feng Shui can be understood as an attempt to re-establish a dialog between humanity’s deepest needs and our long-estranged, much-abused planet.