Design, Sideways On...

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I'm no more a believer in divination than the next rational human being; at least not in the sense that there are divine or otherwise forces at work behind any particular mechanical modus operandi of such practices. Tarot, i Ching, throwing bones, reading palms, crystal balls &etc., what have you. All carry a freight of superstition and arcane 'magickal-ness' akin to faith and/or religion: the unprovable 'proving' the improbable to the satisfaction of the naive. What I do believe, however, is the power of association of ideas, both the rational and the symbolic or rather, the concrete known, set in apposition to abstract ideas. What I mean by this, is that as a species, we construct our world from fragments of our immediate sensory inputs, memories of previous sensory inputs, and abstract constructs created from the combination of both plus the recorded history of our collective thought as humans; all mediated through our personal imagination: our own, personal internal narratives derived from our relations to the larger world. The beautiful thing about this process of mental synthesis of course is that it spawns great ideas and drives artistic, scientific and technological progress: it is the basis of humanity's history and its stamp on this world, for better or for worse.

But the key driver to all independent human thought and innovation is the free association of ideas from both within and without. Original thought is the synthesis of the empirically known and the speculative; but more often than not, it is a completely tangential stimulus that will coalesce a vague notion into a concrete and very real and original idea. I'm of the opinion that whilst divination in all its varieties holds no inherent cosmic clues to the secrets of the Universe, it can and does serve a purpose as a stimulus to thought, offering a sideways jolt that can divert monomania into originality of thought. Deal some cards, chuck a few yarrow stalks, toss a few animal bones, trace your palm's wrinkles or peer into a glass sphere: it matters not a jot. You could do as I do; just pull newspaper articles and books from the shelves at random, or stare into the fire or out at the middle distance at the sky: whatever sideways distraction from being 'stuck' always bears results, I find...

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