Oracular Co-Creation of Reality

Jul 03, 2021

Hey everyone, sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new. I’ll blame it on a series of weekends traveling and the arrival of a new puppy. Getting a new puppy tends to have you spending all your time following said puppy around to make sure they aren’t chewing everything in sight, or peeing on the rugs.

Obligatory puppy tax below:

This is Rainy, she’s half dog and half land shark.

Earlier today I was driving over a bridge on the interstate, and the rhythmic bump bump bump of the bridge sections first made me remember how my parents always said there was the sound of a horse galloping stuck in the bridge every time we’d cross one, but secondly spurred me to think about how information is all around us in our environment. We can give the bumps a total number of bumps per unit of distance, and derive information that way. There is also frequency —perhaps there was one per second, giving them a frequency of 1hz. Maybe they were spaced evenly, or perhaps not quite so. Parsing information like this is exactly what we do as magicians when we use divination. Usually, we limit ourselves to cards, dice or maybe even just the flip of a coin, but in every instance, we are just using a set of rules to interpret the information being presented to us in a way that we can makes sense of. Even silly information like bumps on a road can be given meaning in the right context.

How is it that we assume this information even can be interpreted in a coherent way? Couldn’t it all be random? Very often we don’t pause to examine that one fundamental premise before we split the deck and lay out the first cards in our spread. We act as if the cards we shuffle somehow do hold within their order the key to our question. The thing is, it works and they do tell us something relevant about our question. Even if we change the rules by which we interpret the results, we can still receive meaningful information from the deck. The question is, why?

Reality is strange. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler1, who studied with Niels Bohr, proclaimed the universe is participatory2. Wheeler made popular the idea that everything in the universe is information in one way or another. Every particle, every field, every atom was made up from what fundamentally boiled down to a yes or no binary piece of information. He called this the “it from the bit.” Every it, as in every physical manifestation of a thing, deep down at the most primordial level is just a bit of information —a yes or a no. The thing is, experiments show that the yes or the no doesn’t congeal into a definite yes or a definite no until it is observed3.

The well-known double slit experiment4 that you might remember from grade school science shows that light and matter can act as both a wave and a particle. In this experiment, a coherent light source, like a laser, is aimed at a barrier with two slits. The photons act as a wave when they pass through the two slits, creating an interference pattern, but act as a particle when one of the slits is closed. Wheeler created a modified version he called the delayed choice experiment5, where he decided after the photon had already passed through the barrier whether or not he would close off one or both of the slits. The result followed what he decided, even though he made the decision after the experiment had technically already been performed, but before the observation was made. The decision to do it one way or another somehow influenced how the particle acted retroactively. According to Wheeler, “The past has no existence except as recorded in the present.”

The implication, so far as it is useful to the magician, is that systems of information can react to decisions and variables imposed upon them in the present moment. The delayed choice experiment is very much like what happens when we perform an act of divination. I shuffle the deck and I read the cards. The order of the cards has reacted to my future thoughts imposed on them during or after the shuffling has taken place. As Wheeler’s mentor Bohr said,

...it...can make no difference, as regards observable effects obtainable by a definite experimental arrangement, whether our plans for constructing or handling the instruments are fixed beforehand or whether we prefer to postpone the completion of our planning until a later moment when the particle is already on its way from one instrument to another.

If we take this statement as allegory, our instrument is the oracular materia such as a tarot deck, the experiment is the question, and the particle is the answer. We participate in the divination, in fact there is no divination without the imposition of a question upon the set of data we are measuring. Until we observe, the answer is in flux, both a wave and a particle so to speak.

If everything we encounter has inherent measurable data waiting to be observed, then in a sense that data did not concretely exist until we observed it. It requires our participation. In this model6, the past does not exist except as a point of reference in the present, and time then becomes a personal set of footnotes in the eternal now.

So, can we use this information to inform best practice for our own divinations?

We can boil down the process to these parts: creation of data, determining a frame of reference, imposition of the question, and subsequent observation. With these basic building blocks, we are no longer limited to typical divinatory methods. Instead, we can make space for the oracular anywhere and everywhere we go.

Creation of Data

Creation of data is a little bit of a misnomer, since data is a fundamental facet of matter and energy. Instead, perhaps it is more accurate to say curation of data. Everything contains data, but obviously we cannot utilize every point of data that crosses our path, so we must cull it down to the relevant bits. Where we look for the data and how we parse it is only limited by our creativity. With traditional divinatory methods, we gather data from the numbers, signs and images on our tarot cards, or from the movements of the planets and stars. These data sets are pre-made, so to speak. If we want to think outside the box, we could perhaps use the number of birds flying by, or the number of seeds contained in a seed pod in our garden. Unlike the tarot deck, these types of data can be of limited use. You can only count the number of seeds in the pod once. Once the data has been observed and there is no other answer that can be obtained, the data becomes a footnote of the past and unable to change to reflect the present. Because of this, these type of oracles are one-offs.

Oracles that have more than one possible state are of more use to us. The higher the number of possible states, the more versatile it can be, up until a certain point. A data set with an infinite number of possible states is close to useless. This brings us to the next requirement, the frame of reference.

Frame of Reference

Just like a singular point in space, the data set has no depth or breadth until another point is added from which we can draw a frame of reference. In this case, we are talking about how to judge the data we have previously curated. In a tarot session this would be equivalent to the spread, and in astrology that would be the chart itself. The frame of reference supports the data with a coherent structure, making it accessible. In our example from the previous section, if we are counting the number of seeds in a seed pod, we must first decide how we will quantify the answer, such as even or odd, big or small, etc.

Imposition of the Question

Perhaps the most important step of the process is the question itself. The question must be able to be answered by the data via the frame of reference. If you ask a yes or no question, a picture of a seagull isn’t going to necessarily answer your question sufficiently, but if you ask whether or not you should go to the beach or the mountains this weekend it would be a fine answer. The asking of the question is an act of participation with the unfolding of reality. Make sure it is clear in your mind what you are asking.

Observation

Finally, we get to the good part where it all comes together! In the normal sequence of things, it is important that you do not observe the data itself until after you have imposed the question. The answer to the question must live in the liminal space of possibility until you have observed it, after which it becomes concrete. We know from the delayed choice experiments that we can play around with this sequence if we wish. The important thing is that we are creating a space for the oracular to happen, and we are participating with the universe to co-create reality.

Praxis

Try finding the oracular in the everyday. Create data sets from flocks of birds, the number of petals on a flower, or the paintings hanging in a gallery you are visiting. Now flip it, and decide the answer to your question ahead of time and find confirmation in the world around you. Play with the steps and see what happens, there is no right or wrong way to do it, we are here to play.