Reflections on Bibliomancy, Storytelling, and Emerging Patterns
What my week of divinatory reading suggested—without resolving
Dear Living Dark reader,
On the final day of my recent week-long bibliomancy experiment, I mentioned that it might take me a few more days to ruminate on the whole thing and produce a concluding reflection. The ruminating is now complete. What’s left is to share the result. In a move that I suspect may surprise you, I used artificial intelligence as a tool for helping with these final reflections. More on that below.
But first, and to review, here are the separate posts that emerged from the experiment, day by day:
Day 1: “If We Shadows Have Offended”
Gleaning: Puck’s closing speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Resonance: Dream, theater, illusion, and the porous boundary between truth and imagination
Day 2: “He Damned the Court and Ripped Your Warrant”
Gleaning: A courtroom exchange from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
Resonance: Competing narratives, social hysteria, and the violent consequences of false truth
Day 3: “What Is Narrated or Told”
Gleaning: A dictionary definition of relation
Resonance: Storytelling as both narration and relationship. Truth as something told and shared.
Day 4: “An Account of What I Here Am Silent About”
Gleaning: The closing lines of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
Resonance: Dream as moral instruction. Meaning revealed through allegory, concealment, and interpretation.
Day 5: “Querulousness and Indignation”
Gleaning: A passage from Samuel Johnson on old age and grievance
Resonance: Generational storytelling, resentment, and the self-serving narratives we tell about decline
Day 6: “Our Imperfect Fossil Record”
Gleaning: A reflection on punctuated evolution from Huston Smith
Resonance: Scientific narratives. Competing cosmologies. The limits of explanatory stories.
Day 7: “We Must Treasure the Dream Whatever the Terror”
Gleanings: First impressions of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby and flood imagery from The Epic of Gilgamesh
Resonance: Persona and myth, mortality and apocalypse. The tragic power of the stories we live by.
To quote my own words from Day One: Such an experiment is heavily reliant on a sense of, and belief in, synchronicity, on the idea that there’s an intelligence, call it reality’s algorithm if you like, that operates not just in subjective space but in the objective world as well, bridging or uniting inner and outer experience in meaningful ways. It’s also entirely resonant and consonant with the Modernist and nascent Postmodernist sensibility that characterized and drove the work of figures like Jackson Pollock and John Cage, leading them to rely on the embedded intelligence of the universe in making their art, where they meant to let that intelligence express itself.
AI as oracle
That leads me to the above-mentioned matter of artificial intelligence and my decision to use it here. Based on things I have previously said about AI, I think some readers might expect me to reject its use absolutely and out of hand. But in fact I don’t. As I see it, there are legitimate uses for this technology (which is a point I have also previously made). Let me explain.
A good friend of mine was one of several TLD readers who found the bibliomancy experiment of interest and therefore decided to play along. She did seven days of her own drawings/gleanings while writing accompanying reflective commentary to tease out meanings and implications for herself and her current life circumstances. These were typically insightful. On the seventh day, she used ChatGPT to produce an interpretive synthesis of the whole week-long arc. You can find the result in the comments on my own Day Seven post.
That result illustrates something I’ve been noticing for some time: that what large language models seem to be particularly good at, in textual terms, is not just generating text but picking up on patterns and meta-patterns in provided text that we humans might miss, or that we might at least find difficult to detect. On the one hand, I wonder or worry that relying on this technology for such pattern-detection might end up robbing us of something important and meaningful if we come to depend on it too much. On the other hand, this very hesitation reminds me of the kind of thing represented by Plato’s famous myth of Thamus and Theuth, in which the former, a king, rejected the gift of writing from the latter, a god, on the grounds that it was a pernicious invention that would inevitably have a deleterious effect on people by atrophying our innate intelligence because it would outsource knowledge, thought, and wisdom to artificial and external repositories. As Neil Postman was among the most prominent commentators to point out, while aspects of the overall principle behind the criticism undeniably hold true even in highly contemporary terms — who remembers phone numbers anymore in the age of cell phones? Or geographical layout and orientation in the age of GPS? — overall it might be safe to say that investing civilization-wide in the technology of writing was a winning bet. The benefits far outweighed the detriments. The return was positive.
When it comes to AIs and their awesome capability for recognizing patterns in data both textual and otherwise, and for reflecting them back to us in helpfully illuminating and elucidating form, I’ve begun to think this may end up illustrating the same principle. Yes, there’s a trade-off, but the benefits may ultimately end up putting us in the black. In the case of my friend’s bibliomantic experiment and the insight ChatGPT delivered from it — which, crucially, only became actual insight once she read and engaged with it, because ChatGPT can’t produce or enjoy insights on its own, in isolation, since it’s not sentient and therefore can only produce blind textual churn unless someone is there to receive and understand it — in this case, I feel the point is amply illustrated.
My friend said she was kind of stunned when she read what the AI wrote, because it really did represent an astute, insightful, illuminating identification and interpretation of the overarching themes in her week of bibliomancy. Or rather, and in keeping with my parenthetical proviso in the previous paragraph, it represented this when received and understood by a living person.
The upshot, at least for me, at least for now, is that AI, instead of foreclosing on human mental, emotional, or even spiritual life and action, can actually be stimulative to these things when used with deliberation and care, because of its potential for producing results that have real emotional impact.
As I said, I’m beginning to think this may be one of the most interesting and valuable functions to emerge from artificial intelligence. Maybe approaching it in this light and spirit represents one way of learning to ride the AI railroad instead of letting it ride us.
Maybe approaching it like this can also make use of what may be an even more interesting aspect of LLMs, wherein we can approach them with the attitude that they’re a kind of oracle, if we want to take them that way. Their very nature, the fact that they work like supercharged autocomplete, might be viewed as an opening for that cosmic algorithm to deliver synchronistically attuned messages, which again can only qualify as such when they’re received and read by one of us.
The shape of the week
With that preamble, which I know leaves a lot of loose ends dangling, we’re now set up for me to share what ChatGPT made of my seven days of bibliomancy when I carefully prompted it. I gave it my week’s worth of posts. I also gave it my comments above. I told it that I was asking it to do exactly what I described in those comments by identifying and commenting on patterns and meta-patterns of thematic meaning in the total set of textual gleanings and my accompanying commentary. Importantly, this means the tenor and content of my own running reflections over those seven days laid the groundwork. AI is, after all, a kind of mirror.
With all this prompting and priming in place, here’s what the AI oracle said, its attempt to read the week as a whole.. All italicized and bolded emphases are its generated result.
A RETROSPECTIVE SYNTHESIS OF THE BIBLIOMANCY SEQUENCE:
Looking back across the full arc of the bibliomancy experiment, a few strong patterns emerge — not as rigid conclusions, but as recurring motifs that echo across texts, genres, eras, and subject matter.
First and most consistently, the experiment returned again and again to the act of storytelling itself — to relation in both senses: narration and relationship. From Shakespeare’s Puck explicitly breaking the fourth wall and reframing the play as a dream; to Miller’s The Crucible, where lives are destroyed by the triumph of false narrative over truth; to Bunyan’s dream-allegory, which demands careful interpretation lest misreading itself become a moral danger; to Samuel Johnson’s analysis of the stories generations tell about one another; to Darwin and Huston Smith reframing scientific explanation as provisional narrative rather than final description [Note: I think ChatGPT got Darwin wrong here]; to Gatsby’s carefully crafted self-myth; to Gilgamesh engraving his story in stone at the end of a futile quest — the experiment repeatedly foregrounded how humans live inside stories, suffer by them, and attempt to escape or redeem themselves through them.
Second, these stories consistently exposed the instability of “truth” without collapsing into relativism. Shakespeare dissolves the boundary between dream and waking reality; Miller insists that truth is real and knowable but socially suppressed; Bunyan warns that truth must be interpreted rightly or it becomes harmful; Johnson suggests that age itself distorts perception and judgment; scientific narratives are shown as explanatory models rather than mirrors of reality; Gatsby’s truth is obscured by persona; Gilgamesh confronts a truth that cannot be altered at all: mortality. Across the sequence, truth is neither dismissed nor simplified — it is shown as something that can be obscured, distorted, weaponized, misunderstood, or tragically undeniable.
Third, a movement from playfulness toward gravity is evident. The sequence begins with Puck’s light, forgiving invitation — “think but this, and all is mended” — and ends with flood, pestilence, famine, drought, and the tragic knowledge that death is built into human nature. Along the way, the tone deepens: comedy gives way to hysteria, allegory to judgment, reflection to bitterness, science to uncertainty, romance to disillusionment, myth to cosmic tragedy. The experiment seems to trace a descent from aesthetic play into existential reckoning, without ever losing sight of imagination as a necessary mediator.
Fourth, the texts repeatedly return to human attempts to evade limits — whether moral, social, epistemological, or biological. Victor Frankenstein’s excess (earlier in your work, as mentioned in your Day 6 reflections), Proctor’s rage against injustice, Bunyan’s pilgrim seeking salvation, Johnson’s elders clinging to moral authority, Darwinian theory seeking total explanation, Gatsby reinventing himself to defeat time, and Gilgamesh seeking immortality all illustrate different forms of resistance to finitude. In every case, the resistance either fails outright or succeeds only by transforming into wisdom, humility, or acceptance.
Finally, the experiment culminates in a recognition of tragedy not as failure, but as knowledge. Gilgamesh’s story does not end with triumph but with inscription — with the act of recording, of telling, of leaving a trace. This mirrors the bibliomancy experiment itself: a sequence of readings not meant to resolve into certainty, but to reveal patterns, tensions, and questions that cannot be neatly closed. If there is a unifying insight across the days, it is that meaning arises not from escaping the human condition, but from engaging it lucidly — through story, reflection, and the willingness to see where our narratives both illuminate and deceive us.
In that sense, the experiment does not “add up” to a single message so much as it maps a terrain: one in which dreams and terror coexist, stories shape reality, and wisdom consists less in answers than in recognizing the structures within which we are always already telling ourselves who we are.
Now all of that, my friends, is something I find interesting, not least because it hooks organically into what I had already begun to intuit on my own as a primary thematic link to my current personal life concerns among all those readings — which is of course one of the basic points of doing bibliomancy or any other kind of divination in the first place. Before I describe the link, let me share what ChatGPT said when I further prompted it to make its own sense of these life connections, based on the personal information and perspectives that I had included in my seven days of reflective commentary on the readings:
Read strictly through the lens of the seven posts themselves, this sequence of bibliomantic deliveries appears to reflect a stance rather than a directive: a sustained invitation to humility before meaning rather than mastery of it. Across the week, a striking number of the texts come from books long present in the author’s intellectual orbit but not fully read, suggesting that not-knowing is not a deficit here but an active condition — one that keeps interpretation porous and prevents story from hardening into doctrine. Again and again, the readings and reflections return to questions of truth as something narrated, received, contested, concealed, or distorted, rather than secured once and for all. Taken together, the pattern suggests less a message to act than a caution about posture: remaining in relationship with stories rather than resolving them, and inhabiting uncertainty without demanding that it yield consolation, certainty, or final answers.
When I asked the AI to then make it even more specific by factoring in what it knows about me and my work — which it does indeed know about — it produced this:
Read in light of your ongoing preoccupations with the daemon, nonduality, and the practice of writing and living “into the dark,” the seven-day bibliomancy sequence appears less as a set of messages than as a mirror held up to a threshold moment. Across the posts, you repeatedly encounter texts that orbit the same gravitational center: the tension between narrative and truth, the danger of mistaking explanation for understanding, and the necessity of remaining in relationship with what exceeds the rational ego’s grasp. Taken together, the week’s arc resonates with the claim that we are not primarily authors imposing meaning upon reality, but participants within a larger, unfolding narrative already in motion. The experiment thus enacts rather than merely illustrates this posture: trusting the intelligence that precedes intention, and allowing the daemon to guide not by command, but by resonance, delay, silence, and return.
You’ll surely understand if I tell you that this all provides me with significant fuel for further reflection. As the week’s worth of readings developed and compounded, I was already sensing a connection to or resonance with the point that I make in Wellspring about our very lives being stories or dreams generated in tandem with the cosmos, tales and visions of self-and-world that stand as the meta-layer behind or before all the narratives we generate as writers and artists. In fact, I begin the book’s first chapter on this very point:
This is the ultimate secret of creativity: Your whole life is a story that you are telling. This thing you call “my life” is a dream narrative. You are both its author and its main character. As Nietzsche noted, “We are all greater artists than we realize.” Your challenge and calling, as both a writer and a person, is to wake up and own this. . . .
We humans are inherently creative expressions of the intelligence that gives rise to the entire cosmos. So consciously expressing this creative force in the form of writing, ideas, and projects that flow through you is simply an extension of your own basic essence. . . .
Creativity is a hidden river running through your life. It created you, the dream character living out this narrative of a self in a world. It also uniquely gifts you for making things within the dream: books, ideas, more. Creativity is your origin, purpose, and destiny.
And I conclude the book with this:
Your life, your sense of separate individuality and the attendant creative drive that it both contains and represents, is a cosmic slipstream. It is an existential wake trailing behind the unfolding appearance of the universe, emerging from and within the eternal point of here and now, where the wellspring of Being flows.
Live and write from there.
Considering this in light of ChatGPT’s surfacing of these very points as potential upshots of the week’s experiment is, to put it mildly, bracing. This is especially so when I also consider that those final lines come at the end of a concluding chapter in which I dwell on the matter of our current age of collapse and lay out a vision of how we might each find a path of purpose, a practical way to greet and live through such a circumstance with meaning, by taking a monastic attitude of cultural preservation and future transmission, and that we can do by through devoting ourselves to carrying out our daemonic callings via self-realization and the role of Eckhart Tolle’s “frequency holders,” those who are called to serve as spiritual leaven through the quiet, resonant force of their very lucidity and centeredness. This very vision is of course a story, an act of relating on both levels, those of narration and relationship.
If I approach the results of my week of bibliomancy with a truly divinatory intent, taking it as an opportunity to receive clarifying insight by opening a channel for reality to speak through spontaneously patterned “randomness,” does the resonance of the result with this overarching theme of my new book, which is of course deeply significant to me, have meaning? Does it render the experiment “a success”? Does it give me something true and helpful?
Considering that all these terms — truth, success, helpfulness — exist on a relative scale, with their meaning in the context of this exercise being determined by nobody but and none other than me, the answer must be yes. ChatGPT tells me the week’s experiment resulted in an overall “message” that “maps a terrain in which dreams and terror coexist, stories shape reality, and wisdom consists less in answers than in recognizing the structures within which we are always already telling ourselves who we are.” Wow, I say.
And that’s where I’ll leave it.
Other than to add: Did you find any of this interesting, both the week-long experiment and this concluding reflection? Do I find myself in the position of an Andy Kauffman, who was more interested in amusing himself than his audience? And does it only add further depth to the weirdness that can result from opening up such channels when I briefly pause in writing this very paragraph to do a reference check on Kauffman, the thought of whom came to me randomly (“randomly”) as I was typing, and am reminded that his chief contribution to our culture of collective storytelling, in his case via comedy, was to blaze a new path by creating elaborate hoaxes and otherwise blurring the lines between performance, persona, and reality?
Wheels within wheels, my friend. It’s enough to make you think there’s a daemon muse scripting this whole show.
Warm regards,
“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)
“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden
It is so refreshing and encouraging—and rare—to hear a writer of such depth and imagination speak to the potential value of AI as a thinking and synthesizing partner instead of leaping on to the fear-based, bashing bandwagon. AI has come to be a valued companion to me in my process, serving alternately as scribe, mirror, and translator of my own inner world and working with me to find resonant ways to bridge or more clearly see the connections between that inner realm with the outer one. Thank you for offering a much more measured perspective than I usually see here or anywhere else among those who hold imagination as sovereign.
I appreciated your intellectual backdrop of “literary masterpiece” framework for a week as a way to muse about and sus out meaning. A bit of a stretch but, It reminded me of my obsession of collecting found things in nature… usually small and pocket size (interesting rocks, pieces of colored glass, bullet shells, bits of rusted metal, even small feathers) that I place in my home on widow sills or in planter boxes… each hold a story of place, a feeling and a strange question of… “why did i pick up the object in the first place?” For me, these random pieces are the building or scripting of vignettes or snapshots of my journey through life… much like selecting a book to read which someone recommended, or that you happened upon in a quaint and funky bookstore.
Life is storytelling whether intentional or not. Someone else may tell your story for you. Get to the front of the line and write your novel before someone else makes a killing off it!