Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
Hexagram 8 is called Bi – 比 – a very ancient, simple character that originally depicts two people side by side. It implies both that they’re together, and that they can be compared to one another, and so the word means belonging, seeking union, holding together, comparing, neighbouring, side-by-side… really, to translate… Read more »Hexagram 8 musings
I wrote about a core message of Hexagram 23 when it’s your cast hexagram: how it demands a true tabula rasa, not just a ‘rethink’. What about 23 as relating hexagram – what can that mean? Of course, there are 64 different ways a reading can change to Hexagram 23, but… Read more »23 as relating hexagram
The essential message of Stripping Away is devastatingly simple: ‘Stripping away. Fruitless to have a direction to go.’ Your ‘direction to go’ can be whatever plan you have in mind, your purpose or vision or intent, or something as slight as a curiosity to explore in a certain direction. The root… Read more »Hexagram 23 in readings
I wrote about how Stripping Away, in its ideal form as depicted by the Image, might be painless – but that’s not how the process starts, and not our dominant experience of it. Hexagram 23 typically shows up as something you have to undergo; it is fruitless to have a… Read more »Stripping Away: a change of perspective
In a little post on hexagrams and scale I wrote, Just on this blog, I found three readings I’d shared with Hexagram 23. They were, in order: auspices for using a certain technology during a webinar. (I persuaded myself I could use it anyway, and it failed impressively.) foreshadowing my… Read more »The shape of Hexagram 23
The second chapter of David Pankenier’s lovely book, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China – Conforming Earth to Heaven – rejoices in the title, ‘Watching for dragons.’ In it he talks in detail about the dragon of Hexagram 1, and also proposes a whole new idea about why the dragons are fighting in 2.6.… Read more »Why dragons fight in hexagram 2
The fourth kind of Yijing story I mentioned when I first called it a ‘Book of Stories’ was the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale. Which is an easy bullet-point to write, but not so easy to expand on. Also, I’m no longer… Read more »Book of (very big) stories
