an omen

today, the Australian government voted in a bill that will massively hurt disabled people, which disabled people have been arguing against, and they rushed it through.

being a disabled person myself, i decided i was going to ask my oracle dice (a divination tool, like tarrot cards) about it, how it will effect me etc.

I get up to go get them and discover on the floor one of the dice had managed to escape being put away last night. the actions die. and the face it had rolled was sacrifice.

it definitely feels like an omen.

i did later go and do a proper reading, and it mostly just reflected my emotions but it was good to see them confronted at least, and that will help some with what i do going forward.

and it doesn't have to be a bad or a good omen, it could mean i should join in protests, at the sacrifice of some of my health, it could mean we will loose the whole ndis, or it could mean many other things. the dice are meant to be read together, so its sort of like finding a single tarot card on the ground, it has little context.

detritus

oracle dice

I am interested in this, at the expense of your more pressing issues, could I bother you to tell me more about these oracle dice?

As for a single tarot card, each card has a meaning of it's own, so a lone card without further context still provides quite a bit of information and could be considered an omen in itself. I do remember once I pulled a book and the Hierophant (or was it the Hermit? bad memory) fell down from it's pages.

"Good" and "bad" are just tags that we attach to an omen, a reading, etc. Of course, "sacrifice" may be a bit of an uncomfortable kind of omen, for one thing, I could interpret it as it meaning that the bill itself will cause you to sacrifice something in your life. I have no idea what that bill is, so I may be way off, but it seems like a natural sort of interpretation. On the other hand, sacrifice by itself is not a "bad" thing, for sacrifice implies some tradeoff, or perhaps a change in lifestyle or habits, I don't know. There may be other forms of sacrifice you (and others) may take to turn this issue to advantage. Are you sure it is worth sacrificing your health in order to join some protest? Protests are a good way for people to voice their concerns and for politicians to completely ignore them.

inquiry

I like the idea of "tarot cards" and "oracle dice" kinds of things as potential tools in reducing what might be called "the delusion of free will scourge".

But then it occurs to me (lol... originally typed "I occurs to me"...) such tools might constitute unnecessary complication, as in instead of shuffling/dealing cards or rolling dice, why not simply "roll with the (life) punches", i.e. as though unfolding events are themselves omens?

It seems to me the key/goal with respect to the potential benefice of ascertaining "omens" is to become free of the aforementioned scourge by learning to accept everything that comes one's way, thus avoiding of the frustration of things "not going one's way", i.e. "not going the way one would have willed them". To me, adding cards/dice atop what is going to unfold anyway is just extra work.

Or is there some kind of net gain the cards/dice provide?

detritus

why not simply "roll with the (life) punches", i.e. as though unfolding events are themselves omens?

I think there's a lot of value in this. For starters, and this has happened to me, one can end up over-relying on divinatory devices to make sense of what life throws your way. The more you do it, the less it seems to give those kinds of abundantly clear answers for which they have an uncanny ability to provide.

On a more fundamental level, I think these divinatory devices are ultimately a crutch of sorts. Like glasses for what could be described as "etheric astigmatism". Ideally, one should be able to see all that divinatory systems reveal without the need for such devices, instead just reading it from the events of life itself. Of course, this goes beyond mere intellectual understanding of the events and their cause-effect relationships.

A good example may be Plum-Blossom numerology for the I Ching, which takes on the (chinese) calendaric marks at the moment in question to construct a hexagram for the moment, which then goes on to give the divination for an action to be taken. Same with horary astrology. As you can probably guess, these all rely on somewhat arbitrary interpretations and significations on specific times that construct a sort of system that allows one to work out, synthetically, a symbol or set thereof from which to derive a "divination", a more or less educated guess on the currents underpinning a moment or action. Back to I Ching, ultimately what counts and underlies the whole system is the interplay of yin and yang tendencies in the different aspects of our environment and ourselves, such as the season, the state of the moon, the time of the day, etc. Ultimately, they are also bound to the imposition of the diviner of yin-ness or yang-ness on a chosen phenomenon of observation, phenomena which is also somewhat arbitrarily chosen by the diviner. Before going into materialist-rationalistic objections on this practice, one must not forget the very modern discoveries by which the observer plays a crucial role in influencing the turn of events merely by the act of looking and interpreting. Thus, divinatory systems are a sort of peek into the "schrodinger box" of our fates!

inquiry

How does one come to certainty about whether a given device is reliable, versus imagining it is? Is faith involved? If so, wouldn't any device sufficiently believed in work/"work"?

detritus

certainty

reliable

I think you're poking the wrong concepts here, we are talking about divination, an inherently subjective and unreliable practice.

But to answer your question, yes, I would think faith is involved. It is likely that "any" device might work. Usually, I think tradition is involved: The I Ching enjoys some 3000 years of tradition to "back it up", tarot is a lot younger, but still draws on an older tradition: that of the qabalah.

Tarot cards are a bit representative, though: they are "just" a pack of playing cards.

- - -

Even without all the mystical stuff and significance of divination systems, I like them as a sort of book or maybe an algorithm if you will, that will produce new stories each time, so that it is inexhaustible!

inquiry

Story generators. Fascinating! I mean, that's not something I'm interested in, because I'm anxious to lose my own personal story, because I see it as wool I've pulled over my own eyes/heart. But there was a time when I was really into stories, so... fond memories.

detritus

back to you original inquiry (ha), I do think ultimately the best approach is, instead of relying on divination, to do as ol' Jim used to say and... 'take it as it comes'.

inquiry

Oh, wow, I've not thought about that one in quite a while, and now taking your reply as divination that I ought listen to it immediately!

detritus

You know what, you're right!

*approaches the jukebox*

beefox

yeah maybe not the best analogy hehe

oracle dice you usually roll a handful of them together, each with its own set of faces, and the reading comes from the interactions between the die more then the dice themselves, you typically would use at least 3 in a reading. in my later reading i did 6 dice and got stuff like the journey face, the performance face, the water face. each has its different meanings and they all relate to each other, as well as their location relative to each other and the mat.

they are very fun and interesting, "The publishing goblin's oracle dice" if you want to search up more!

and yeah, i do usually heavily weigh if it is worth my health to protest, im a very opinionated person and would attend many if i was able to, but i am physically not. however due to this being a direct impact on me and my community, a direct attack, it seems right and worth it.

in america, the way disabled people got their rights was the capitol crawl. where many people including disabled folk literally crawled up the steps of some american monument to dramatize how bad the accessability standards in america were. i am feeling like here in aus we need something similar. that feels like the only way we will get their attention.

a tiny but similar thing happened just yesterday in parlement in fact. during the voting on the bill, the greens (our only good party but a minor one) all stood at the back of parlement with the only disabled politican, as there is no accessible seating in parlement. there is no way for the disabled politican to actually get to the parlement floor. so the greens stood by them as part of represnting the inequality this bill would introduce.

but yeah, its all interesting and good/bad are definitely just descriptors. in the end, the sacrifice dice doesn't mean bad things inheritly. in fact in a normal reading it can mean many good things, its just more the thoughts i was thinking at the time and the chance that i had dropped the dice the night before and it had lannded on that face, only to be discovered when i was thinking about what had happened.

inquiry

But what if it feeling like an omen is due to seeing it as and/or assuming it is an omen, and you might have seen/assumed differently, and then that would have seemed the reality.. and so maybe the way out is to take not a single thought seriously, including this one...?

It's hard to say, because saying things implies thinking about them, which seemingly strengthens/prolongs them, which makes them seem more "a thing" than merely a thought whose seeming grip is actually one's own clinging.

My condolences on your several major difficult cards dealt.

That said, it seems that in this world, if it's not one thing, it's another, and our own things always seem bigger than others', even when we try to empathize. Like I have this ongoing mania, and I don't know that there's a more accurate term, or psycho medical diagnosis, or whatever. And it could all be "just" (my least favorite four letter English word..) imagination run wild, words fanning word flames.

The only solution I've found is to vehemently attempt to find from whence said thoughts arise. That search invariably finds *nothing*, which is oddly comforting, because I believe that suggests that what's being emitted therefrom (thoughts) must be nothing too - including the thought that seemingly makes something of them....

Does that make sense?

Maybe a good analogy to thoughts is poison ivy itch, where scratching makes it worse instead of better....?

Anyway, I've been on a bit of a crusade in the direction of less thinking - which, of course, is at odds with this here word/thought-centric activity, which makes me a little sad, because I've spent decades hoping/wishing something other than frustration would come of it. But for the most part I mostly sigh, feeling somewhere between avoided and misunderstood. This activity has, in fact, been very much a poison ivy itch for me. I guess I just need to make the big leap into being done with it altogether, using the damned computer just for practical things like banking/purchasing, and writing the occasional Lua script.

beefox

i think yeah, an omen is definintely an interpritation of the chances of reality. the logical order of events is that i somehow dropped the dice the night before and happened to find it right then, but also that's part of how the universe works to me. an omen is just random chance that coencides with life that helps you reflect on it.

i also can't really ignore this. even without the omen its plain to see how bad this is going to be for disabled folk in my country, myself very much included. its more a reflection of that and something to encorage me to look at it from different perspectives.