The Construction of Worldviews and Life Visions of Fourtune-believers

• Main Author: 陳宏儒
• Other Authors: 王智弘
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25629420821794451143

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 輔導與諮商學系所 === 99 === The purpose of this study was to understand how the fatalism and religious belief in Chinese cultue influence individuals on their construction of life visions. Three female and one male with religious faith, age between 45 to 65, have or had been devoted to learning and using fortune-telling were invited to tell their life story related to career, fortune-telling and religion. Three of them had or have been fortune-teller and the other one had gone to the fortune-teller and thus they were named fortune-believer. This study took the narrative view of career proposed by Larry Cochran and the holistic view of career development proposed by Shu-Hui Liu to comprehend how fortune believers construct their private worldviews and life visions and what their worldviews and life visions are. The inter-constructions between their worldviews and life visions were also discussed. The findings of this study were as follow. 1. There two way to construct private worldview. The major way is finding meaning. The fortune believers have some experience that their current private worldview can’t explain, including the mystical experience and suffered experience that they find no reason. In the exploration of fortune-telling and they found explaination. The the second way is to learn or use the five occutls sciences for practical reason or just interesting. Fortune-belivers generally have various expericeses that can be explained in many worldview. They would use the worldview that is most comprehensive to intergrate others. Fatalism is the mayjor worldview they had at first, but it was intergrated into the worldview of religion or I-Ching. 2. All of three female fortune-believers faced the dilemma between living up to traditional gender role expectation from family-of-origin or family-in-law and developing their own careers. Their life visions and career decisions are formed after balancing give-and-take, right-and-duty within interpersonal context. The dilemma were reframed through the religious worldview. The male fortune-believer seldom told those affairs in his life story. How fortune-believers went to the field of fortune-telling varies but all of them met a mentor or teacher to teach them knowledge of occults. Only one female fortune-believer didn’t become fortune-teller. Those who become fortune-teller mostly found they are gifted in this field, or at least are able to help their clients. Two fortune-tellers start worshiping occupational deity and having better occupational identification. Influenced by her religious worldview, the female fortune-teller who did not worship occupational deity becoming more and more altruistic, withdrawing from the fortune-tellers career and devoted herself to voluntary work in the end. 3. According to career view of narrative, fortune believers’ construction of life visions were influenced by their private worldview in three ways: subjective and objective integration, temporal integration and agency. (1) Fortune-telling helps the fortune believer to attribute the negative events and situations to fate and lower their subjective expectations toward the future. Their religious worldviews gave them a comprehensive reference framework to interpret negative events as solvable spiritual obstacles that need them to overcome rather than meaningless mundane suffering. (2) Both Fortune-telling and religious worldview provide fortune-tellers with systematic theory to conceptualize their life events and personalitities, and help them weave those isolated messages into a coherent life story. However, certain experience can only be successfully explained by the karma or reincarnation in religious worldview. Fortune-believers who have such kind of experiences would extend their identity cross lives. (3) Religious worldviews turn fortune-tellers’ life visions from outward situation into inward personal spiritual striving, hence their sense of control increased. Occult worldview can’t cause the same effect, but occults give the fortune-tellers ways to control their life.