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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, I had a friend who became addicted to I Ching divination and wound-up making every major and minor decision based on I Ching dice rolls.

For him, it worked out terribly, in the sense of pushing closer to a psychotic state.

From that experience, it's hard for me appreciate the poetic vagueness of this stuff given that same poetic vagueness helps sell Western Astrology.

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That sounds like something out of a novel called "The Dice Man"[1], in which the protagonist decides to base all of his actions on the roll of the dice.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Dice-Man-Luke-Rhinehart/dp/0879518642

When I was in high-school, reading a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Stoics, I got the idea that if you thought hard about a difficult issue and couldn't decide on your stance, then you should just throw a coin and go with it as if it was coming from your heart. It worked pretty well.

The fact that the Yijing pushed him towards a psychotic state, means that the process WORKED or was beginning to show results.

Psychosis and mystical experience are after all closely linked if not objectively identical.

The Yijing, when used properly (as a tool for self-exploration and psychonautics and not for fortunetelling or the chasing of idle fantasies) works similarly to the Tarot or other symbolic systems that operate on the human psyche. There comes a point (with repeated use and appropriate conditioning/reinforcement) that these systems really open up the subconscious and can lead to mystical unions or profound annihilatory experiences (ego death).

So it sounds to me that your friend had no idea about these things and simply could not handle the "results". When you play with fire, you take precautions or you get burned..

My friend was actually very aware of all these wider implications - well informed on Buddhist and Western Philosophy, modern magic and whatever - at one point at least he was moderately known in the world of avant guard art.

He had a theoretical understanding of "ego death" and perhaps he experienced that.

That problem is that none of this quite had a cut-and-dried, desirable effect. He didn't reach the final stage like Friedrich Nietzsche - no wait, he kind of reached the final stage more or less like Nietzsche.

not sure why this has been downvoted, it's important to consider divination systems as fundamentally about exploring the psyche and its parameter space (which Jung – one of the fathers of psychology – characterised as archetypes)

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