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Tag Archives: 44

Danger – good fortune?

I’m just coming to the end of the ‘omens’ section as I revise and enlarge ‘Words of Change’, my Yijing glossary. This involves testing out ideas by looking at every instance of each omen, along with all the example readings I can find. Since I’m going into more detail this time around, I’ve been looking more… Continue Reading

Casting the Vessel, so… (part 2)

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Casting the Vessel

I’ve been looking at the patterns that take shape within the ‘container’ formed by hexagrams 3 and 50, and wondering what they might mean. Here’s a bit more wondering. It looks as though hexagrams 3 and 50, living energies and vessel, form a mould, within which an individual life (or culture, or way of living)… Continue Reading

The Lorelei

I’ve been listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés talking about creativity and telling stories (always a good idea). She talked about that time when an artist becomes utterly obsessed by his (or her) art: the work is so perfect, so beautiful, so right, that nothing else matters. The artist forgets all about food, sleep, bills, family… Continue Reading

The challenge of Hexagram 44

My I Ching reading for last week was Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding, with no changing lines. And following the plans I’d already made for that week, which involved reaching out and making connections to others in various ways, I hit one technical road-hump after another. (Moral of this story: consider revising your plans in the… Continue Reading

Eating ancient de?

That’s how the third line of Hexagram 6, Arguing, begins: ‘Eating ancient de. Constancy: danger. In the end, good fortune. Maybe following king’s business, No accomplishment.’ It’s unusual for Yi to talk in abstract imagery in this way – eating not food, but de. De, as in Daodejing, is virtue, but also power, charisma and… Continue Reading

What is the I Ching?

The Funeral of the Real » I Ching and the Logos Here’s an unusual I Ching reading, interpreted with great creative insight from an unfamiliar perspective. The question is “What is the I Ching?”, the answer Hexagram 44 moving at lines 3 and 4 to Hexagram 20. So Joe Chip notices that the trigram for… Continue Reading

A picture of Hexagram 44 from Paulo Coelho

:||||| Hexagram 44 seems to be the most-debated hexagram of the lot. Should we be afraid of what the yin line in the first place represents? Of encroaching evil, temptation, the thin end of the wedge? (Not to mention the unspeakable horrors of ‘a bold girl who lightly surrenders herself’.) Or should we be nurturing a new life, welcoming it with respect? Much discussion ensues.

When I read good books, I sometimes find myself wanting to pencil in a hexagram in the margins. These excerpts from Paulo Coelho’s Veronika decides to die seem to me to paint a vivid picture of Hexagram 44 – an aspect of it, at least. Continue Reading

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