Cloud and crystal gazing

Cloud gazing is the cheapest divination and the most honest, because in ten minutes the symbol leaves. Crystal gazing — looking into a stone or a glass sphere — is the parlor version. Both produce pareidolia, the human gift of seeing faces in noise. Use it to ask what you are preoccupied with, not what the stock market will do.

Clouds

1. 1Go outside or to a window. Set three minutes.
2. 2Find one shape. Name it without inflating it.
3. 3Ask: what in my week does this remind me of, if anything?
4. 4When the cloud shears apart, let the meaning shear too.

A stone

1. 1Use any polished stone or a glass of water. You do not need a sphere.
2. 2Same timer, same rule: images are hypotheses.
3. 3Do not stare until you have a headache and call the headache an initiation.
4. 4Cover the stone when you stop, as a behavioral cue that the interview is over.

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