Wang Yangming was asked, "Zhu Xi believed that the I Ching focused on divination, while Master Cheng Shuo believed that the I Ching focused on elucidating principles. How should this be understood?"
Wang Yangming said, "Divination is also heavenly principle, and heavenly principle is also divination. Is there any principle under heaven greater than divination? It is merely that later generations came to understand divination exclusively as casting hexagrams, and thus regarded it as a trivial craft. They did not realize that the questions and answers exchanged between friends today—broad learning, careful inquiry, prudent reflection, clear discernment, earnest practice, and so on—are all divination."
The I Ching was a way of seeking guidance from Heaven. People had doubts and lacked confidence, so they used the I Ching to consult Heaven. The human heart might still be biased, but Heaven tolerated no falsehood.
Foreknowledge was not some superpower possessed by humans. It was unreliable and impossible to control. Humans were especially fond of Divination because they were filled with fear and uncertainty about the future, hoping to find an effective way to face the unknown.
Every time the imperial tutor of the Ming dynasty, Liu Bowen, performed a divination, the result was more or less the same: Zhu Yuanzhang should govern diligently and cherish his people. For Zhu Yuanzhang, what need was there to divine that?
If it had been Georgiana herself, she would not have dared casually advise Bonaparte to make any decisions again. People were often blinded by knowledge and selfish desires, and thus made mistakes. She loved peace and had racked her brains to devise a plan to run a beer business in Belgium. She had thought it would be good for everyone.
Fourteen years later, in 1816, if another natural disaster truly erupted as Cassandra had said,