Good ideas from tarot

On his TarotTools site, Mark McElroy keeps coming up with creative suggestions for tarot ‘exercises’ – which, with the minimum of adaptation, could just as well become questions for mind-stretching I Ching readings.

A recent article of his, Make Better Choices, suggests questions such as,
‘What core value might I focus on?’
or
‘What can I use as a guiding principle?’
– you set the timescale.

The one before that, ‘evaluate something’, suggested using divination to ‘review’ something – maybe a book or film, maybe a date – and see it in ways you’d never imagined.

As always when translating the good ideas of tarot authors into the world of I Ching divination, I wouldn’t want to simply substitute an I Ching reading every time he suggests drawing a single card: that way lies hopeless information overload. Where a tarot reader might decide for himself what angles he wanted on a subject, and draw one card for each, an I Ching reader would make a single reading along the lines of ‘What do I need to know about…?’ – and leave the oracle to choose its own angles. But the benefits are the same in the end: weaving divination more closely into life, getting to know the oracle better, getting to know yourself better…