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Hilary

Helping to find the question

GreenOwl wrote:

“Ideally you need to allow a good half hour to talk with (or rather listen to) your querent and arrive at the right question for them.”

Any chance you could do a post (y’know, sometime) that walks through an example of that process? Or, if you’ve already written about it and I’m forgetting, just point in the right direction. Thanks!

That’s tricky, as I promise clients complete confidentiality – no discussion of their situation, question or answer, even anonymously. So I can’t go through a specific real-life example. But I can talk about general experiences that I’ve had with a few hundred customers – why not?

Abundance from Cygnus

On the ‘abundance’ theme still – I promise to get back to Yi in the next post – The Architecture of All Abundance by Lenedra J Carroll £2.60 from Cygnus Books, who send me a beautiful free magazine every month. Hopefully I can send them some website visitors in return.… Read more »Abundance from Cygnus

Another thought on Hexagram 14

The name of Hexagram 14 is Great Possession, and the character for ‘possessing’ also means ‘offering’ – suggesting that the two ideas are not so far apart as they might seem.

Interpreting this one, I’m often reminded of Molière’s play, The Miser. (Or was this in Plautus’s original, The Pot of Gold?) The miser has kept a pot of gold buried in his garden for years, sneaking off to gloat over it when no-one’s looking. Of course one day someone is looking, and the hoard is stolen, and he bewails his fate. Some witty character offers the consolation that he still has a dank hole in the ground to gaze down, so what has he really lost?

Back to basics

I write a lot about trying to recover the original meanings of some of the I Ching’s key phrases. Which may be of academic interest, but why bother with China circa 1000BC when asking about Western life in 2005 AD?

Well, not to get to the One True Authentic Original Oracle. That doesn’t exist, and any claims otherwise deserve short shrift. No – it’s about trying for an imaginative grasp on the ideas and interrelationships in the old text.

The Useless Tree: Friday I Ching Blogging: Reversal of Verdict on June 4th Massacre?

The Useless Tree: Friday I Ching Blogging: Reversal of Verdict on June 4th Massacre? Not only is Sam Crane talking with Yi about Chinese politics, but Allan Lian and Steve Marshall are joining in the discussion. Looking at both the reading and the Washington Post article linked to from there,… Read more »The Useless Tree: Friday I Ching Blogging: Reversal of Verdict on June 4th Massacre?