A cycle for diviners?

I wanted to see what you thought of this blog post from James Warlock, who was part of last year’s Festival of Change: The Magickian’s Cycle.

It begins:

The magickian’s cycle is, in essence, as follow:

• Become very enthusiastic about magick
• Practice magick in a regular and dedicated fashion
• Have an crisis – either external or existential
• Sulk
• Stop practicing magick
• Rest
• Repeat

Don’t know about you, but this sounds familiar. A diviner’s cycle might go something like…

• Have some amazing readings and become very enthusiastic about Yi.
• Divine regularly with complete trust.
• Have a crisis.
• Optional additional steps: argue with book out loud, scowl at book, shout at book. Feel entirely sane.
• Sulk.
• Stop divining.
• Rest.
• Repeat.

…which is wordier, but not so different. What I’m wondering is whether what James describes as lying behind that magickian’s cycle might also be somewhere behind the one I know.

The ‘crisis’ for diviners seems to take the form of going from having readings ‘work’ for you beautifully, naturally and quite predictably, answering your questions in the way you need, to abruptly having readings make no sense to you whatsoever. It could be that questions that used to ‘work’ for you now lead to impenetrable answers; you could be left feeling that Yi’s led you completely up the garden path. Somehow, the lines of communication broke altogether. What happened?

I don’t know. It’s easiest to say that we just got out of synch, confounded the signal with too much personal noise, or too much sense of entitlement and regarding the cosmos as our personal ‘slot machine for answers’. Yet after reading James’ article (and remembering things Sparhawk wrote on the forums a few years back, here and here), I wonder whether maybe we tripped some kind of cosmic circuit breaker for our own protection.

James says that,

“The thing about magick is that it induces change – and not always the change you intend.”

and

“But over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re practising regularly and nothing much is changing in your life then you aren’t doing it right…

…well, either that or you are actually, genuinely, in harmony with the state of your life.”

And again for ‘magick’ you could read ‘divination’ quite easily. In theory there is a clear distinction between the two: one wants to change how things are, and the other wants only to discover how they are. But maybe the distinction is not quite as clear as we imagine. Certainly if you go back to the roots of ancient Chinese divination, the line between performing magic to invite good weather and divining to discover what weather you’re getting is a very blurry one. We call these things we do with coins or yarrow stalks ‘readings’, but is it really just a pure, hygienic, ‘read-only’ process?

Is the experience James describes as ‘pushing the accelerator on life’ a familiar one to you at all? I find it’s faintly echoed in my own experience when I’m doing weekly readings: it’s not that a bunch more stuff happens, necessarily, but that I find myself about ten times more awake in the midst of everything. Habit and routine become much less of a factor, and the dominant guidance system is living communication rather than auto-pilot.

But this idea that as we engage with Yi, and hence with the whole, we’re inviting more energy to flow through the contours of our own stuff, and hence we might experience a bigger, more charged version of it… that grabs me. And like I said, I wanted to see what you thought. Here’s the link again –
http://www.weirdshitnotbullshit.com/the-magickians-cycle