on one's inner oracle

Jun 03, 2025

Tapping into your inner oracle can only be accessed through self-knowledge. I believe that it is a kind of power that allows you to have a certain level of foresight that is uniquely consequential based on who you are as a person.

In principle, it is actually just a process of elimination. The only prerequisite is to have a wide scope of knowledge and understanding about yourself and the people around you (which includes human psychology) to have a comfortable level of predicting outcomes for yourself and for other people.

Humans are very predictable. We have countless of records in literature that prove how predictable our species is. We can create characters from our imagination that embodies the reality of what it means to be human. Perhaps, this deep exposure to the heights and depths of human capabilities is where the wellspring to human knowledge that would allow us to predict a kind of future that concerns ourselves and the people around us.

I am convinced that I am already applying it to myself in a sense that I see my own life as a kind of story that I am writing for myself. Needless to say, I am the main character of this story. But what I wrote about my own self-awareness has stuck with me for a very long time until this very moment. I have mentioned the possibility of prediction in that log, which carries a particular exactness to what I have been articulating:

A prediction that results to only few possibilities is the only kind of prediction that I can consider to be worth it and realistic. If I try to predict an outcome with a lot of possibilities, that can only mean two things:

  • either I do not have a firm grasp of the relationships of every elements involved in the situation, or
  • I am in denial of the realistic possibilities so I try to look for a way out of the thing I cannot accept.

In another sense, I have also talked about perceiving myself as a trinity by being aware that I am writing at this very moment:

What this made me realize is that writing allows me to be three persons at once. The one who writes is the exposed vulnerability. The one who reads what is being written is the one who turns their gaze into writing. The one who realizes both is the one acting out the performance of being the writer. I write, I read the writing, and I react based on the reading of what was written. The one who writes become everything all at once where these three processes are subsumed into a single entity of me being the author of this writing. I can hide what I want to hide because I am always already carrying out the performance of the writer writing this piece. I am ready to be vulnerable as I am also the one who gazes at what is being written. I have already gazed at what will be written before they become words in this page. I am the creator of the criticism of my own work.

When life already takes the form of a narrative: what happened yesterday somehow made sense because of the things that happened today. Even if there are no direct connection to the events from yesterday to today, this frame of thinking that there is an indirect causation, a concrete series of events that we can look at and determine what possibilities may happen next. How you feel about a decision may impact how you respond to future events that directly concerns your decision.

For example, if you harbor resentment for your friend because of being inconsiderate of how you feel, what would you do? Would you choose to initiate a confrontation, even just to have a conversation about what happened, or would you keep it all in for now to avoid "unwanted" conflict? What narratology would dictate is there is already a conflict and it is happening inside of you. And with every conflict, a resolution is inevitable. A resolution may come in various forms, but we can always reduce it into two essential outcomes or two versions of a resolution:

  1. The resolved resolution: pardon the tautology but this only refers to our first response earlier. You initiate a conversation with your friend.
  2. The "unresolved" resolution: for the lack of the better term for now, let's go with this. This refers to our second response: You brush it off, despite feeling this resentment.

The resolved resolution is the act of doing the appropriate response in line with a progressive narrative. The chosen path to advance the story is impactful and externally consequential. For every conflict, there is a confrontation. When there is a confrontation, there is always a resolution at an individual level. What is being resolved in the most atomic scale is the person's emotions and not the situation itself. This is why we have already established earlier that understanding human psychology is important. We need to hold on to predictable actions that we are bound to make as a response about a particular event, which is an unacknowledged and perhaps unintended emotional harm by an other. This confrontation may end in two ways:

  1. The unintended harm: the other acknowledges and apologizes sincerely and everything became a trivial misunderstanding.
  2. The deflecting other: the other denies that a harm was done, furthering the resentment of the friend to the other.

The second outcome transforms the scenario into an unresolved resolution, turning the conflict inward. You are forced to deal with the denial because the other chooses not to acknowledge the harm they did to you. It becomes a fertile ground for gaslighting to occur. To also become one with the other in denying that the event happened. Then again, we are forced to look at the possible outcomes of the other's denial:

  1. Your experience is the truth: your reaction is valid. The harm was done and the reality was that the other chooses not to acknowledge it. This presents a possibility of negative future interaction with the other.
  2. You overreacted: you were too sensitive. The harm was not as grave as you think. This has two possibilities: that this is true or you are only convincing yourself to deprioritize your emotional sensitivity for a "better" social harmony.

Now, at this point, these branching of reactions and their consequences should provide a general sense of prediction of events by understanding and anticipating the possibilities of outcomes based on one's reactions, and how much truth can we ascribe to each of the reactions. What we come to understand is that there are specific consequences to each actions that are aligned with a specific emotional state. Since the intention of the other is difficult to predict, we can only try to narrow down the possibilities of the genuineness of one's actions.

Taking this further, since your intention is only knowable through you, it requires radical honesty with the self to make your true intentions known. Only then can it be used as another guiding post in attempting to have a better sense of foresight that applies to your life. With the kind of framework that we have understood in anticipating reactions and consequences, we can apply this to ourselves in weighing the best possible outcomes that we can take or trade whenever we are faced with the difficulty of moving forward.

Your intention becomes a revelation to your own true emotional state that you can confront and align towards the goal that you are pursuing. Or, you will be prompted to change your goals whenever you find your emotional state to be uncompromising. It is this push and pull of various factors that we can understand where we are going and why we are going in the direction that we are headed. It is as if you are looking at a character in a novel that has their own unresolved conflicts and unprocessed emotions and trying to analyze them from a perspective that is depersonalized. This attempts to separate the bias from the objective reality and manifest radical honesty with the self. You become the character that you are creating by going into the core of your own self. This self-discovery is a way of finding your own inner oracle.