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
The Image of Hexagram 3, Sprouting, says, ‘Clouds, thunder, Sprouting. A noble one weaves warp and weft.’ or as Bradford Hatcher translates, ‘sorts warp from weft’. What the noble one does is just two characters: jinglun, 經綸. Jing is the same word as in Yijing and literally means the warp threads on a loom,… Read more »A string sort of thing: hexagrams 3 and 40
…disguised as an archaeological discovery about Chinese pre-history. You might have seen the reports: someone has found clear evidence of a great flood in China. Here’s a good account of the discovery with a link to the full paper: in a nutshell, there was a great earthquake in about 1920BC which caused… Read more »Hexagram 43 is in the news…
