Conversation with

Paul O'Brien

Called the Father of Interactive Divination, Paul O'Brien has founded the company Visionary Networks - offering
a computer-based multi-media program for Tarot readings and the I-Ching.

The Monthly Aspectarian: Paul, you bring an interesting background to your work. I think it would be
fun to talk about where you came from and how you got to where you are now.

Paul O'Brien: Well, there's two sides to my mission, and they derive from my lifelong interest in spirituality: my career in the software field, and the convergence between the two. Being a child of the `60s in San Francisco, I was introduced to the I Ching and have been a student of that oracle for the past 30 years. Ten years ago when I was the vice president of a highly technically-oriented software firm. I found myself using the I Ching more often than usual because of office politics. I thought, "Wouldn't it be convenient if I could somehow put it on the computer" _ because I had a computer on my desk and so did everybody else. So I thought about whether it would be possible to use computers in that way. I was inspired by the thought that this technology could be used to support the spiritual side of life and the personal development side of life rather than just amplifying logic and the left brain.

My biggest concern was whether I could create an authentic I Ching program for the computer so that the computer wasn't getting in the way, so that it wasn't the one that was actually doing the calculating using some kind of random number generator. I thought, "Well, not only can we make this more energetically authentic, but we can actually add some value in terms of the experience itself." Typically, when somebody casts the I Ching there's a lot of busywork. You have to figure out what kind lie you've got [how the coins are arrayed] and write that down. There's a lot of left-brain busywork involved. The computer could do all of that — but even more than that, I decided, the computer could add some value to the experience by the skillful use of multi-media . . . specifically, beautiful art and sounds. I figured out how I could make it both mathematically and energetically authentic so that it would be possible to program computers to recreate virtual space while capturing an authentic divination experience.

TMA: You're also a meditation teacher and an ordained minister.

PO'B: That's right.

TMA: What are those directions?

PO'B: I'm an ordained New Thought Christian minister and a certified Buddhist meditation
teacher. That derives from my lifelong interest in spirituality and studies that I've done along the
way, and I don't see any conflict
in that.

I once took a sabbatical from my software career for a two-and-a-half-year pilgrimage. I went on the road and stayed in spiritual communities of most of the world's major religions to try to get to the bottom of what religions are really good for and which ones, if any, had any relevance to the spiritual quest in modern times. That gave me a tremendous perspective on my own personal spiritual journey and convinced me that the most important thing I could do is to make spiritual wisdom more available to people in an easily accessible way. This led to my interest and desire to create divination systems that were easier for people to access — and ties in with my history as a meditation teacher because I see divination as a form of meditation.

The I Ching is a very practical form of meditation because it also helps with intuitive decision making. This is one of the most important things that every one of us has to do.

TMA: What do you see as the difference between divination and what people think of as fortune telling?

PO'B: Well, fortune telling is one way that classical oracles have been used. To my way of thinking, it's a slight bastardization of their original intent. Human beings have an innate desire to control their fate as much as they can and any information that's going to give us a clue as to what the future holds is extremely desirable. So there have been all kinds of efforts throughout the history of humanity to do that _ and oracles have been used that way. But if you look back at the Oracle at Delphi or the way the I Ching was used by the ancient emperors and sages of China, they're really more about getting insight into the present moment. It's not about the future, it's about the present moment.

Now the present moment certainly holds the seeds of the future and can give clues as to the direction the energy is moving, but that's a by-product of the basic function of divination — which is to get insight into the present.

TMA: Yes, I've always said that Tarot and I Ching and similar divination techniques don't tell the future, they tell the now.

PO'B: Exactly.

TMA: It is all based on ynchronicity.

PO'B: That's a term Carl Jung coined to describe how divination systems work. He had another area of development, the whole concept of archetypes, which is the other half of the picture. I like to say that divination systems or oracles are where archetypes and the synchronicity principle come together.

The synchronicity principle, simply put, is that there are no accidents _ but that the way things happen is related to everything that's happening at that moment in time. So it's really taking time into account. In Western science, we don't take time into account at all. If you perform an experiment on Tuesday morning under controlled circumstances, it's assumed, not even questioned, that this same experiment is going to produce exactly the same results in the middle of the night on Sunday. Time is not even considered relevant . . . but that's because we've been trying to ask a different question
than the sages of antiquity were concerned with.

Western scientists have been
obsessed with the question, "What
are things made of?" But in the East and in the ancient wisdom schools, we were more concerned with questions about how things happen and in the worth of social affairs and politics and love affairs, and that's a different question.

Systems like Tarot and I Ching give us an excellent map of how things are happening at any moment in time. That's what they're designed to do.

TMA: You've been recognized as the father of interactive divination, and I know that the first product you came out with in June of '89 was the I Ching program, Synchronicity. How have things evolved over the past ten years?

PO'B: That was the first divination program ever published. Somebody pointed out to me last year that that made me the father of interactive divination. I said, "Gee, I never thought of it that way." He said, "Well, you should tell your PR people," and since then, the name has sort of stuck. Synchronicity was a mathematically and energetically authentic I Ching program but by today's standards, it was primitive. In 1989, the multi-media capacity of computers was severely limited. Now we have a program called The Oracle of Changes, which is Synchronicity times 100.

We sold a lot of copies of Synchronicity in the first couple of years, but it became quickly apparent that we were years ahead of our time and that people who cared about spiritual systems did not buy software. So the company went more mainstream and got into time management programs to help people manage their priorities — which is also a very important thing in terms of spiritual development. It's only been recently that the market is catching up with what we're doing, now that everyone and his sister has a computer to access e-mail. People who care about these things are looking for better things to do with their personal computer and there's a whole new market emerging

TMA: For a while, it looked as if CD-ROM was going to rule the world. As broadband Internet connectivity comes about, you'll be able to do on the Internet everything you can do on a CD-ROM.

PO'B: Yes, eventually, when broadband capability is widespread and inexpensive. I think probably the relative failure of CD-ROMs as a medium to permeate people's lives is more due to the misguided efforts of large publishing companies four or five years ago who saw an opportunity to put their intellectual [wares] onto a new medium and shove it into bookstores. Basically, they were putting books on disc. Nobody really wants to read text on a screen and the bookstores were convinced that CD-ROMs just don't sell. All these huge publishing houses that started interactive divisions folded a couple of years later with millions of dollars of losses — and they took the same posture because they didn't want to admit that putting a book on disc was a braindead idea to begin with. That actually has made it more difficult
for the types of programming that really are suitable for interactive treatment to get the attention and interest they deserve. Divination is one of those areas.

Computers were made for divination. This is one of the most natural applications possible for a computer. The reason I say that is that because if you look at the I Ching or Tarot, really what you've got there is a hypertext system, a collection of a large volume of non-linear information linked in any number of different ways depending on how you cast the oracle or which cards you pull into which positions in a spread. This is what computers excel at: the management of large volumes of non-linear information.

The other aspect of the synchronicity principle is about timing, and computers excel at that, too _ precise timing operations. So certain things really make sense in an interactive format whether it's CD-ROM or over broadband, and divination is one of them.

TMA: I see no conflict myself, especially as we move further through the age change. Computers and tech-nology in general are very Aquarian.

PO'B: And so is divination. Now that we're moving into this new astrological age, we're leaving behind the trappings of the old age, which were embued with dualism, hierarchical structures, the externalization of authority and the whole pantheon of middle men in the form of priests and swamis and gurus, and psychics, too. In the Aquarian age, it's more egalitarian. It's idealistic, it's individualistic, it's about the empowerment of the individual, it's about going direct, it's about recognizing the divinity that lies within each one of us. This is what the divination experience helps somebody to get in touch with because really, all it's doing is stimulating our intuition _ or the inner voice of the divine self within us.

TMA: Very well put. You're online in quite a few places?

PO'B: We have not only created divination systems in the form of CD-ROMs, we also have very popular websites that offer an authentic experience of Tarot reading or I Ching consultation. The Tarot website is named www.tarotmagic.com and the I Ching site is www.iching.com. We do hundreds of thousands of readings every month for people worldwide via the Internet.

TMA: I know you just joined our site.

PO'B: Yes, we're very excited about being affiliated with your site and in fact, we have an affiliation program available to anyone who has a website wherein a divination experience would add value whether that value is perceived as entertainment or as a spiritual experience.

TMA: What would you say is the essence of your work?

PO'B: It think it's very important that people come to understand the value they can derive from divination systems _ not only because that's the business we're in, but because we have a real problem _ a decision-making crisis — in this day and age at every level of society from the individual on up to the highest levels of government. We are called upon to make more important personal decisions in a few weeks than our grandparents had to make in decades. We're called upon to make them more rapidly than ever before because of the accelerated rate of change; because of the lightning speed of modern communications. To make things even worse, we're called upon to make these important decisions while we are literally being bombarded by unreliable or just plain
bad information on all fronts . . . whether that be commercial propaganda, tabloid journalism or the Internet itself.

We're left with a great difficulty in the decision-making process, which is the most critical thing any one of us does. Decision-making is what we pay executives or rulers huge sums to do for us. We need better intuitive decision-making skills just to sort out what information to trust. People are in desperate need of help in making better personal decisions for themselves. That's why we do what we do. Our mission is to empower people to have greater control over their lives and their health — including their spiritual health _ which is largely a result of the choices that each of us makes.

Paul O'Brien has published eight interactive titles including Oracle of Changes CD-Rom and Tarot Magic. He has written two books, Visionary I Ching and Visionary Tarot, is the publisher of an email newsletter entitled Synchronicity News and serves as CEO of Visionary Networks Inc.