Contrary to widely-held beliefs, divination was originally aimed at understanding the present and not the future. Natural cycles demonstrate that Yin and Yang alter their relative proportions all the time, i.e. active and passive combine differently in seasons, relationships, encounters etc. The oracle enabled one to discover the mother figure who ruled over a situation and revealed the type of association which existed between Yin and Yang, Heaven and Earth, authority and freedom etc.

Once the structure of the present had been assimilated, speculation could take place about its repercussions in the future. Not before. This obsession with the future is a sort of modern disease, but traditional societies, by contrast, were determined to know the Present and its primordial forms of manifestation according to the balance of Heaven and Earth.

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