A sidenote to yesterday’s post about past, present and future…
Often what we most want to know is how to do something. How to be in a relationship, how to get through a difficult time, how to make the most of an opportunity, and so on. Then we start spinning stories around this desire, and convince ourselves that to be able to do this, we need to know what will happen, and when. And because of a weird cultural preconception that you’re not really using an oracle properly unless you’re asking for a prediction, we end up taking a strangely indirect approach. We aspire to know how to be now, and yet we persistently ask the oracle about what might happen later.
I think that the idea of “predicting the future” as such is misguided. Since we have free will, the I Ching can only tell us about the environment around us and the type of situation we are encountering. In other words, the oracle can only tell us “if you do X then you will get Y, if you do A you will get B”, etc. – it is up to us to decide if we wan to do X or A, and get the corresponding results. Of course, if we have doubts about how to do something that may have been recommended (and key word here is “recommended”) by the Oracle, then we can ask further questions.
The bottom line is that the future is no more set in stone than (to give a scientific simile) than the position of a particle in quantum mechanics (which is only a probability distribution that only becomes “actual” once you interact with the particle).