When I asked people their biggest challenge in working with the I Ching, so many said, in one form of words or another, that it had to do with confidence. Forming a question, casting a hexagram, even coming up with intelligent interpretations of the answer – these things might take… Read more »Asking the wrong question about confidence
It’s a worthwhile exercise to look through the Sequence of hexagrams and see how it occasionally uses trigrams to tell stories – not just in its larger landscapes, but on a small scale. I’ve written about this quite a few times before, but I just noticed one that I’d missed… Read more »A trigram sequence vignette
And I thought I wrote about trigrams in the Sequence. Heh. Here’s Frank Kegan doing a very complete and insightful job of it. He sees the Sequence in groups of ten (which I’ve found works startlingly well – you might think that more patterns would emerge if you took it… Read more »The Sequence in trigrams – and decades
The other day, after a series of readings circulating between hexagrams 58, 47, 48, 57, I noticed another little nugget of patterns within the Sequence of hexagrams. Hexagram 37 describes life inside the home, defined by its boundaries (37.1). Hexagram 38 is outside the walls: opposed, seeing differently, alien. Hexagram… Read more »Inside and outside
Every hexagram of the I Ching has its complement: the hexagram created by changing every line to its opposite. The complement of hexagram 1 is hexagram 2 – and the complement of hexagram 63 is hexagram 64 – Other complementary pairs appear through the Sequence, particularly to mark the end… Read more »Patterns of complementary hexagrams
J.M. Berger has been working on the King Wen Sequence of the hexagrams (that’s the traditional sequence), approaching it from an angle I hadn’t thought of or seen elsewhere. He looks at the line changes necessary to change each hexagram into the next: changing all the lines of hexagram 1… Read more »More patterns in the Sequence of hexagrams
I’ve started re-reading Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre, a wonderful book I first attempted to understand when I was 16. This time through, I have help. I think of hexagram 29, the Repeating Chasm, as a dark place of bottomless depths. Yi talks of ‘holding fast your heart’ here,… Read more »Bede Griffiths on the Abyss
