In a previous post I discussed the power and utility of divination as a tool for both esoteric practice and life more broadly. One of the most fundamental, and most overlooked, skills required for effective divination is learning how to ask useful questions.
A well-formed question leads to a clear, actionable reading – providing the information needed to inspire confident action. Such readings help you chart a course through uncertain waters. In contrast, a poorly framed question results in a reading that is murky or ambiguous. It may identify a problem, but provide no guidance on solving it. It may tell you only things you already know. It may provoke feelings of helplessness or decision paralysis.
So how do we build clear and effective questions for divination? The following tips can help craft better questions, resulting in clearer readings.
At a high level, we want to be framing our questions in a way that is both specific and flexible. Divination, somewhat ironically, doesn’t read your mind. It is important to be specific in your question, including detailed contextual information which might inform the answer you are seeking. What actions are you considering? What outcome are you hoping to get? What are you trying to optimize for? Any of this can be stated clearly to strengthen the question.
The challenge here is the more specific you are in your question, the more possibilities you’re pruning away with assumptions already baked in. Asking about the relative outcomes of two different courses of action doesn’t give you any information about other possibilities. It could be there’s a third option that would result in a better outcome than either of the two you’re asking about. There is an art to asking questions that are detailed enough to be meaningful, while remaining open-ended enough to allow creative solutions to emerge.
Include a time horizon
Related to specificity, it’s often valuable to include a time horizon in your question. Take, for example, a question like “what will happen if I take this job?” What time scale are you interested in? A week? A year? Your entire lifetime? The answer could be different for each.
If the question is instead reframed as “what will the outcome be one year from now if I take this job?”, you’re much more likely to get a concrete answer.
Align “yes” with positive outcomes
This tip is specific to asking binary, yes-or-no questions. The vast majority of the time, affirmative signals in a divination system also have positive connotations; negative signals are, well, negative.
In cartomancy with playing cards, for instance, red cards generally mean “yes” and black cards generally mean “no”. The red cards are also largely positive – full of symbolism related to wealth, power, and strong relationships – while the black cards are largely negative – with imagery related to toil and trouble. If you were to ask a question like “is my car going to break down this month?” and get a card like the Five of Diamonds, which traditionally means “good luck” or “laughter”, what does that mean? Is it “yes, your car will break down” because the card is red? Is it “no, you’re in luck”? Does it mean your car will break down but you’ll laugh about it? It’s hard to interpret.
In contrast, if you were instead to ask “is my car going to keep running this month?” and get a card like the Four of Spades – a black card with connotations of being stuck, either literally or physically – the answer is much clearer: your car will stop running, leaving you stranded. Framed this way, the cards have a much bigger vocabulary to work with when providing a nuanced answer.
Avoid asking “What should I do?”
Divination should be a tool empowering you to take more agency in your life, rather than less. When divination becomes a substitute for decision making, it loses its capacity to empower. Further, when asking what you should do, the guidance you get can be muddled because it’s not always clear what you’re trying to optimize for.
Let’s say you have a job offer on the table. The pay is excellent and will let you save a significant amount each month, but the hours are long and the stress levels will be high, giving you less freedom to enjoy life outside of work. Should you take it or not? The answer depends a lot on you, what you value, and what your priorities in life are at the moment.
Reframing the question “should I take this job?” instead as “what will the outcome be if I take this job?” (or even better “what will the outcome be a year from now if I take this job?”) makes it more likely you’ll receive a clear reading. You’ll uncover information like this being a particularly high stress job. You can even pair it with a second question like “what will the outcome be a year from now if I don’t take this job?” and see the contrast between the two. Armed with such information, you can then make an informed decision in accordance with your values.
Ask about what you can control
There’s a lot in life beyond our control. While it can be tempting to ask about things you have no control over, it doesn’t actually provide a ton of value. It can lead to worrying about the outcome of something that is always going to be beyond your ability to change – say, the course of a pandemic, or the outcome of a presidential election.
Instead, it’s better to focus readings on the things that you actually have some degree of influence over: your own choices and actions. Rather than asking “is X going to happen?”, you might instead ask “what can I do to minimize the impact of X, if it does happen?” This puts the agency firmly back in your hands, and gives you some concrete steps to take, irrespective of the outcome of that particular event.
Look for patterns in complex issues
If you find yourself in the same challenging situation over and over again, there is likely some habit or pattern of behavior that is enabling such a situation to arise.1 No one-off fix, be it magic or divination, is going to resolve something if the rest of your life is pointed in the other direction. Asking about what kind of exercise will make you healthier, while at the same time smoking a pack of cigarettes every day, limits how much value a reading will provide.
Instead of asking about specific choices, sometimes it’s better to ask about underlying patterns or root causes. What habits or behaviors are leading to this situation in the first place? What do you need to change in yourself first, to allow an external change to occur? Understanding the answers to those questions will give you a much firmer foundation to effect change in your life than any specific one-off action you could take.
All together, this is a lot to keep in mind. Not every question needs to conform to every recommendation; even after years of divination, I still find myself sometimes breaking these guidelines. But the more care you can put into constructing your questions, the more value you’re going to get out of any divination. Even small improvements in framing can wind up making a big difference to your results.
- If all your romantic relationships fail because your partners get crazy and controlling, maybe the issue is – at least partly – with you. ↩︎
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