Wondering...

[rinda]

Friends,

An idea for discussion... We have been talking about versions of westernized Yi in another thread. What do you think of this:

Instead of entering the silence with a question for Yi, what if we enter the silence with an image that speaks to us, that resonates with us some way, and ask Yi which Hexagram and/or moving lines correspond to it?

If we worked on this together, each using images that speak to us personally, I wonder if between us we could come up with a new/old Yiching? Multiple responses would be enriching. If we all made our direct contributions to the task using the Anonymous button, we could minimise ego involvement... (Comments and discussion could be done with faces on in another thread.)

I asked, and the response was 12.5.6 >16... (!)

What is your impression about how well this might work? Do you think it is something we might like to pursue here? It could be a way to give back to this community... What say ye?

Rinda

[dobro]

It might work, if two conditions were met.

First, we all continued to survive and work on the project for five to ten years.

Second, one person in the group was the editor and facilitator. See, somebody's gotta be the decision- and order-maker. In a project like this, there would be about a million decisions to make, I think. Can I give an example or illustration of what I mean? Stephen Karcher recently came out with a wonderful, wonderful version of the Yi ('Total I Ching' - dumb name, but that's cuz he wasn't in charge of naming the book - see what I mean?), and yet if I'd been involved with him on the project I would have been opposed to many, many of the decisions he made in that book. I'd've dropped out long before things got very far. But the reason the process got carried to magnificent completion is because one person was making the ultimate decisions.

Finally, I'd like to comment on your overall approach. It starts with the images that come up for each of the participants and then asking the Yi which hexagram and line they apply to. Now, the Yi is a living thing, with images on the conscious level that access the unconscious. So what you're suggesting amounts to us being the facilitators, the 'imagers', of the Yi reproducing itself. The same structure, but new images. (I think one reason Karcher's new Yi works so well is because he's re-imaged a lot of it.)