I Ching Community: Rude awakenings
I Ching Community Discussion Forum: Rude awakenings Very interesting thoughts from Auriel on the lines that lead towards Hexagram 23, Stripping Away.
I Ching Community Discussion Forum: Rude awakenings Very interesting thoughts from Auriel on the lines that lead towards Hexagram 23, Stripping Away.
Email from John: “I was wondering why someone such as the host of ‘Useless Tree’ would ask such large questions as he does. Isn’t it better to ask such questions so as to influence events to promote the general benevolence?” It’s a reasonable question, and I’ll send Sam Crane a… Read more »Why ask political questions?
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.â€
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?
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?
I came across this lovely article – The Abundance Site: Spending as a prayer? – and thought at once of Hexagram 14, Great Possession. The character ‘possess’, which also just means ‘there is’, shows an outstretched hand, holding meat. Owning? Offering? Is there a difference? I think the small ritual… Read more »Spending as a prayer? and Great Possession
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.
I Ching Community Discussion Forum: 2.6 dueling dragons A great thread on hexagram 2, line 6: ‘Dragons battling in the fields, Their blood indigo and gold.’