The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life (Jack Balkin, 2002)
“We might begin by distinguishing divination from fortune-telling.
Fortune-telling— at least in its most primitive forms—is an attempt to determine what will happen in the future.
It is premised on the notion that people have destinies or that certain events are fated to occur.
Divination, by contrast, does not presuppose the same degree of fixity to events.
It is an aid to understanding one's situation and one's self.
It tries to recognize tendencies in events as well as in one's own patterns of thought and behavior. (…)
Second, unlike simple fortune-telling, divination, as its name implies, is an attempt to communicate with the divine.
Some forms of divination— both ancient and modern—identify the divine with entities outside the self.
They view divination as an attempt to communicate with gods or spirits.
But the divine need not exist external to the self.
It may refer to features of the soul or self that we have lost ordinary contact with and that must be regained through special methods.
Under this second interpretation, divination is a method of introspection whose goals are self-cultivation and self-knowledge.
What one divines is the nature of the situation, the nature of one's self, and the relation between the two."
