Divination
From a natural precise position – reality, given in sensations – the only thing that can be done when predicting the future is to be mistaken.
The only thing that can be controlled here is the scope and measure of the error.
The future (like the past) is a concept of the mind. Past and future sensations (aftertastes and foretastes) are imprinted in the perception, and, sensing the future with the past, we feel these very imprints.
Predicting the future can be described as shaping a sense of the probable future or reforming it.
But, since the sensation from such a forecast will always be different from the sensations when the moment of the forecast comes (in the first case, the source is the internal model, in the second, the external world), the forecast will always be perceived as erroneous. The sensations are quite different.
Therefore, no matter how many modern technologies and complex formulas are used for forecasting, it will always essentially be a fortune-telling.
People want the divination – to find out the future – after past shocks; scared – cause the old pain has not yet passed.
And «divination» is consonant with the word «division» – i.e. in the process, the predictor initially acts as someone «divided» from the person asking a divination: due to the fact that he or she is given full trust, he or she can break it. And, if we talk about the accuracy of the forecast – on an emotional level, even have to do it. To confront a person with his painful and terrible past experience and let pass through it.
Therefore, any prediction can be emotionally reduced to a couple of phrases similar to the inscription on the ring of King Solomon:
«Yes, sometimes it’s scary and painful. And then it passes. And then it can be again. And if you haven’t learned a lesson from the past, but simply ran away from it, in the future, when this happens again, it will be worse and more painful for you. But if you learned a lesson, and accepted that experience, you can even benefit. And then this will pass: there will be other fears and pains, experiences and benefits.»
The foretellers of the ancient world often used rather terrible things for divination – for example, the bones or entrails of animals – because, apparently, they felt: the main purpose of divination is not to tell what will happen, but to remove the fears of a person that block their own instinct.
Each of us has a brain, and therefore is a predictor, fortune-teller, divine one. But, if fear paralyzes the perception, and one «does not want to hear smth» – no correct prediction can be made. Correct not in the sense that it will come true 100%, correct – in the sense of discerning the actual existing tendencies and being able to react to them.
It can be predicted that it will rain. But one cannot predict whether a person will get wet. From the outside – it is possible that it will work out; but the person himself is a secret for himself, simply because he has the freedom to change the outside world and change the inside world. And life itself is free to change itself too.
If a person is afraid of rain, one will get wet regularly. But if you remove the fear of rain (change the inside world) and take an umbrella with you (change your external behavior), the «bad fate of the doomed to get wet» will immediately retreat.
To do this, you just need to cast aside fear and find out what the rain actually is.
And after the sight of a shaman fingering bird guts with a painted face – any «bad weather» may not seem so scary...
This is how a «divination» can «dive» you into the good fortune. That's the point.
P.S. Yes, of course, in the given example, the house of this «man of no rain» could be raised by a storm and carried to the Sahara Desert or the Land of Oz, where there will be no rain. But it is usually easier to take an umbrella than to adapt to the greatly changed contexts of an arid wasteland or fairy land (and a strongly changed context usually gives this «inexplicable magic» feeling from the external environment).