Hilary Barrett, I Ching

There are two lines in Hexagram 20 that differ by just one word:

Line 5 -

‘Seeing my own life.
The noble one is without mistake.’

Line 6 -

‘Seeing their lives.
The noble one is without mistake.’

Seeing ‘my own’ life, or seeing ‘his, her or their’ life. How to understand the difference between these two perspectives? One possibility is to look at them through the lens of different spiritual teachings.

Wilhelm says of line 5 that one should ‘examine the effects one produces.’ Take this advice a step or two further, and you have the whole idea of creating your own reality. Since the ‘law of attraction’ was popularised as The Secret, it’s not an unfamiliar concept: everything you see in your life at this moment is your own creation. You attracted it all, including other people’s behaviour.

Changing this line alone points you towards Hexagram 23, and this can certainly be ‘Seeing’s Stripping Away’. If you see your life as the real image of who you are, any better-looking self image you might have been hanging onto will be torn away. This can be very disillusioning - and it can also have 23’s effect of clearing the space for a fresh, more authentic start.

Is this an anachronistically modern, new-age-y idea? In a way, yes… but there is a Chinese parallel. Line 5 is the ruler’s place in the hexagram, and the ruler had responsibility for everything in his realm.

When there was a seven-year drought, the first Shang king, Cheng Tang, offered himself as a human sacrifice to appease heaven. He said,

“The fault is mine and mine alone. Please do not punish my subjects. If my subjects had done anything wrong that might contribute to the drought, I must be the root cause for their wrongdoings. Heaven and ghost spirits, please do not hurt my subjects because I failed to guide them properly due to my insufficient capability.”

(from Reflections on History)

So if you receive 20.5 you can see your life from the king’s perspective, and own it all as your own work. (But it’s in the nature of the Yijing, as an oracle, that there’s no ‘Law’ to say you must always see things this way…)

Then at line 6, the personal element is removed altogether. Once again, Wilhelm points the way: ‘here in the highest place, everything that is personal, related to the ego, is excluded.’ The ‘ego’ is a modern notion, of course, but the sage who retreats from the world to the highest place really isn’t.

From here, the view is towards Hexagram 8 - you’re Seeing the quest for union, the human patterns of relationship and affinity. How does the world look from up here? Eckhart Tolle describes this shift from ‘my life’ to ‘his/her/their life’ in A New Earth:

“To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions - as they happen. This is not really a “doing,” but an alert “seeing.” …When that shift happens, which is the shift from thinking to awareness, an intelligence far greater than the ego’s cleverness begins to operate in your life. Emotions and even thoughts become depersonalized through awareness. Their impersonal nature is recognized, there is no longer a self in them. They are just human emotions, human thoughts. Your entire personal history, which is ultimately no more than a story, a bundle of thoughts and emotions, becomes of secondary importance and no longer occupies the forefront of your consciousness. It no longer forms the basis for your sense of identity. You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.”

These two lines seem natural alternatives - you can recognise your whole life as ‘your own’, or you can have no ’self’ with which to own anything. Which is better? Yi offers no hint at all: each line is a way for the noble one to be without fault. (And maybe anyone not a noble one would be quite likely to make mistakes in trying either of these.) Unlike the first line, for instance, both are acceptable perspectives for him to adopt; both are an imaginative expansion of vision. And it would be possible, of course, to have both lines change together, and See absolutely receptively, as open as the earth.

Since I’m up to my neck in the technical stuff for Change Circle - irritating but necessary, as the last thing I want is technology getting in the way for people - I need to bow to the inevitable for a week, fill my head with templates and cascading style sheets and suchlike, and not take on more reading work for a while. I’m guessing that I can get through it all and be back to normal in a week - I certainly hope so.

The contact and order forms are still open as usual, so if you send me a message or place an order I’ll be able to get back to you just as soon as I’m clear of all the techie stuff. Oh, and if we already have an appointment, it isn’t affected by this, of course.

Each Sunday, I cast a reading for the week ahead - sometimes just asking for something to be aware of, sometimes asking for advice. This week I asked for advice, and received Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, with no changing lines.

This was pretty baffling. Lately I’ve been working very intensely and intentionally, focussed in on the targets for the day, which lead towards the target for the month, which builds towards the target for the year… and so on. It’s a wonderful way to ensure that I’m not just drifting through ‘busy work’, and I always know what I’m doing from moment to moment.

But I’m feeling the pressure of time more intensely than ever, and I’ve got into the distressing habit of reacting like a cat with its tail trapped when anything comes up that’s not in The Plan for the day. Hm… could be something out of balance here…

So the question behind the question was, ‘How can I get it all done?’ Now how - on earth - is ‘not knowing’ any kind of guidance for dealing with a to-do list as long as your arm?

Oddly enough, it turned out to have a good practical application right away. Two technical snafus came up that I had no clue how to fix. Under these circumstances I could either a) try to work it out myself through trial and error or b) explain the problem to the helpdesk and wait to see if they come up with something. So I looked at this…

‘Not knowing, creating success.
I do not seek the young ignoramus, the young ignoramus seeks me.
The first consultation is clearly informative.
The second and third muddy the waters,
Confusing, and hence not informative.
Harvest in constancy.’

…and sent the first question to the helpdesk. They replied with the hour, and the problem was solved.

The remaining snafu was one of those things the helpdesk officially don’t support (and they get miffed if you try it on). I resisted the strong temptation to ask them anyway - more for the sake of having someone to complain to than out of any particular hope they’d solve the problem for me - and settled down to trial and error. And, hallelujah, solved the problem - all while Not Knowing the first thing about the Cascading StyleSheet complexities that were causing it.

I think there’s an element of ‘trial and error’ in the Image. As so often, it helps to elucidate the original oracle. If asking again and again won’t help, what will?

‘Below the mountain, spring water comes forth. Not knowing.
The noble one with the fruits of action, nurtures de.’

Sometimes you can build up your own capacity and resourcefulness just by doing, carving your own course - making it up as you go along.

So there was one layer of the reading, and it turned out that following its advice actually saved me a good-sized chunk of precious time.

Later, I was listening to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth while I cooked. My ears pricked up when he started talking about the inner protestation, ‘But I don’t know who I am!’ He responds to this:

‘If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are.’

It seems there could be another layer to this week’s advice. After the meal, I followed links at random and found myself at the wonderful blog, Practical Spirituality, by Staci Boden. (Isn’t the hyperlink a great new instrument of synchronicity?)

At bottom, I think this is saying the same thing that Tolle said:

“Spirituality is a relationship with the unknown mystery of life; an energy that is difficult to quantify or touch. It’s not something we can use to get what we want so we can feel more in control over life’s challenges.”

Oh…

…this is what the reading is about. Hexagram 4 is how you relate to everything you don’t know - including the things that aren’t knowable. And the other side of this coin is that if I know all about everything I’m working with, then there’s a whole lot that I’m not relating to at all.

More from Staci:

“Goals and dreams are the way the unknown—some might even say God—speaks to us and works through us. An intention is a guide in navigating the unknown. But it is important to look closely at what lies underneath and around intentions to find what motivates them. It’s possible to hold focus for a dream or goal, but in an open way, so that there is room for the intention to become a sounding board in a conversation with the unknown. It’s also possible to invite (and invoke!) help from the unknown in order to refine intentions as a way to learn and grow.”

There’s nothing wrong with being the young ignoramus, or having this insistent desire to learn, and flow further and deeper. The problems only start when this tips over into a desire to know it all already, to eliminate the unknown.

Of course, I ‘already knew’ all this. Odd how ‘revising’ it gives me the sense that I’m breathing freely again.

And to cap it all, after I wrote the draft for this post I watched a short ‘inspirational movie’ before bed. It turned out to be platitudinous and not especially inspiring - but it just happened to contain the phrase,

“Just because you don’t know how to attain it, doesn’t mean it is not possible.”

You’ll want to subscribe to the Quoteable I Ching blog, if you haven’t already. Despite the title, it doesn’t just contain quotations from the I Ching, but lovely lucid thoughts on how other things - poems, images, quotations - reflect the hexagrams. Or how the hexagrams reflect in other things.

I enjoyed all the posts so far (this is a bouncing infant blog, just a few months old), but I think my favourite is probably the one on hexagram 23, which turns up reflected in what JK Rowling has to say about failure. (The only thing I’d add is that while pretty much anything we can hold onto is ‘inessential’, it isn’t necessarily going to feel that way when the time comes for it to be stripped away!)

So that Change Circle’s ‘WikiWing’ doesn’t start life as 64 empty pages, I’m writing my own contribution for each hexagram before we open - an edited and distilled version of my own working notes. That way there’ll be something there to refer to for every hexagram and line right from the start, and also something to refine and build on.

I’d like to make you a present of one of these preliminary contributions - the one for Hexagram 47. This is a pdf file, so right-click the link and choose ’save target as’ or ’save link as’ to download to your own computer. Hopefully this’ll be helpful to you in its own right, as well as giving you a flavour of what’s to come later this summer. Any suggestions for what to include or how to structure entries? And would it be helpful if I released another one of these publicly before Change Circle opens?

Some 50 truly brilliant people have taken the trouble to fill out the Change Circle Features Survey. Thank you. I know this one is a bit on the long side, and I really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness.

I always prefer taking those surveys where I can satisfy my curiosity and see the responses afterwards. But the program I’ve been using for surveys here only lets me show you either all the responses, or none of them. So to keep people’s individual comments private, I have to hide away the whole lot. Nuisance.

But let me show you some screenshots of the results pages (click the image for a more legible version)…

First, I asked which resource would most help you gain more confidence in interpreting readings:

So the WikiWing is the winner here by miles, and finding some easy-to-use Wiki software that will integrate well with the site is my top technical priority. Also, since lots of people put WikiWing first and my contribution to it second, I’m writing that up as fast as I can. (3 hexagrams done, only 61 to go…) That way, by the time the site’s ready, there will be pages for each hexagram ready for you to refer and add to.

I asked separately about the opportunity for creative exchange and contribution, and people felt that WikiWing and the Reading Circle forum would be the most useful. (The Reading Circle will be a private forum within the current I Ching Community - like the Yijing Class is at present.)

Here’s another interesting chart:

OK - there’ll definitely be personal blogs available from the start to use as reading journals (really easy to write in, just like the forum, and easy to control who can see your entries).

One final feature update:

It looks as though these extras aren’t that important to people, not compared with the forum that makes it so much easier to build connections across timezone differences. But the virtual meeting room definitely stands out, so I’ll do my level best to find us a good one.

Of course I’d welcome your thoughts, comments, and suggestions on any of this - features I haven’t thought of, good ways to provide the ones I have, and so on. Also if you haven’t already filled out the survey and you’d like to do so, it will stay up for another few days.

By the way… you know I said this would open at the end of the month? Now I get a good look at the list of what needs doing first, I think maybe I got the wrong month . It’ll be ready for you by early August, if not before…

A search for I Ching things brought me to this blog post. Profound questions, beautiful readings; I can’t describe the blog as a whole.