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… Read more »The challenge of Hexagram 44
It’s a cliché of every I Ching introduction: the oracle is an aid to decision-making. Of course, it’s also perfectly true. Historically, the ancient Chinese divined on decisions about marriage, warfare, whether to open the fields, what to offer to the ancestors. Nowadays people consult the I Ching on which… Read more »Ways to involve the I Ching in decision making
Hexagram 18, Corruption, demands that we actively engage with how things are. And things are a mess: there are ‘negative patterns’ playing themselves out, or in other words the same old bad things keep on happening.
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,… Read more »Eating ancient de?
I’ve been hearing from quite a few people lately who are wondering what to do when they’re consulting the I Ching, and their coins behave oddly. What if one rolls away? What if it ends up under the furniture? Or propped up against something so it doesn’t land flat? Of… Read more »I Ching coins questions
One of the trickier aspects of interpreting an I Ching reading has to be working out what scale the oracle’s using. By which I mean, if it says ‘good fortune’, is that a lottery win or a pot of jam in the raffle (for instance)? Does ‘misfortune’ mean mild inconvenience,… Read more »Grasping the scale of an I Ching reading
Here’s an excerpt from Osho, talking about divination to a student of astrology. He says that it’s possible to make predictions about people only because ‘people live like mechanical things’. (Strong words, but you know what he means.) “If you know the past of the person, unless the person is… Read more »Osho: not predicting the future
