Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
The first question one asks is where do the answers come from? I try to refrain from stating it (obviously not enough), out of respect for other peoples beliefs, but it seems to me that most people expose their credulity more than anything else, when they talk about the Yi as some way to get answers directly from god, mysterious spirits, or whatever high-beings they imagine. These people often even think that these high-beings have some special interest in their existences, and link every odd occurrence in their lives to their manifestation. We all want some superior entity to come out of the skies and tell us what to do with our lives, and we expect that magic answer to come from the Yi. But that can only lead to disappointment. I admit I too have fallen under that fallacy, but now I realize it doesnt work that way. There is no need to bring other entities into the game, apart from the only real entity intervening in the process.
The Yi can provoke us to come up with the answers OURSELVES, but it cannot give them black-in-white as if it was some sort of almanac (and even almanacs, that state the weather for the whole year ahead, are bound to be right sometimes). There is no one size fits all, or some sort of enlightened scholar's interpretation that unveils some unmistakable answer. And so there is little interest in trying to find the real answer. If one cannot know in the first place which of the possible interpretations is actually the true one, then its useless to go and ask someone more knowledgeable (unless from the fact that this clarification can itself ring more bells). Gene really nailed it when he said "I suspect it is not just knowing the I Ching but yourself as well". If it didn't ring a bell, then just forget it. If it did, then THAT is our answer (for the moment being), even if its not the "right" one. What is important is the intent of the answer, more than the answer itself.
So what the Yi does is to throw us bates in several directions. The hooks you bite are the parts of the answer that you take as relevant, the ones you take to be the whole. The rest you just discard (it may be relevant in some other context, but not for this question Im asking right now, so I wont even see it). This process is known as selective thinking. The point for me is that the text is mostly open, and it is WE and we alone that supply the answer. How do we do that? We read the text and something is bound to resonate in our minds, provoking thoughts that are indeed the real answer. We give the answers to ourselves, maybe not the right ones, but it still forced us to meditate on them. If the Yi's texts said such objective omens like "you'll break a leg today", or "you'll win the lottery next weekend", then it would be easy to see that it definitely didnt work. Hell, I could even win the lottery this time, but surely not every time that answer comes out.
But being open in its form, the Yi also makes it very hard for us to select the "real" answer. When the answers come resonating from the sub- to the conscious, there is a lot of ways in which we can distort them to match our expectations. In terms of precise divination of future facts, we can most of the time just do post-hoc reasoning. The Yi would say something like "you'll win the lottery but you can break a leg (if you get too excited and start jumping around like a madman)". Then we choose the part of the answer we like (the lottery), and if next weekend instead of winning a pile of money we break a leg, we'll be saying "it was there all along, I just didn't wanna see it". The Yi never tricks us, but we trick ourselves all the time. If we happen to win the lottery, though, then it proves besides any reasonable doubt that the Yi is an amazing predicting tool. This is indeed god's broadcast for us humans to tune in, let us all surrender. That is simply giving up to our inalienable rights.
I had recently a very important matter that I asked a lot about (hey, is there any other way to learn than the hard way?). I was looking for precise answers. Yes or no, damn it! I could as well have flipped a coin, since the accuracy would be the same. At some point we have had all the possible answers, and we're back where we started, everything open. Surely somewhere among all these answers theres the real one? let me ask again! But it can never tell me a precise fate, even if I believed that a precise fate actually existed. It can tell me "yes", this moment, and "no", the next. Is it of any use then? Of course! It made me confront "yes" back then, and "no" just now. I learned a lot from this process, as anyone that actually used it can state. It opens my views. But was it the "sage" (I particularly dislike this coined term)? I dont think so, merely the sage we all have within. The Yi even tells us this, "look within for the answer" as in 20.3. From outside we can only get confusion? look within!
Its the confrontation with the coming "answers" that makes it a valuable tool. It expands our minds, and in a way that is kind and benevolent, due to its underlying philosophy. But to think that god would bother answering our petty questions on a one-on-one basis, is just kidding ourselves, and surely a source of profound future disappointment. Even if you can use it to predict (more on this later), there is no way it will always tell you the truth. Or that you will always recognize the truth from its answer, which is the same.
One simple experience (I read some guy actually did this, but his purpose was to dispel it as fake, so he missed the point), would be to give people wrong answers (not the ones that actually came out), and hearing they comment how amazed they were by their accuracy (hum, maybe the Yi knew its answers would be tampered with, and intended the wrong answer all along). Maybe we could even shuffle lines omens at random, or a different oracular structure be decided (I dunno, more than two states per line, or other than 6 lines, or forget lines, I want dots, of different colors or whatever), or we could randomly pick one out of a thousand of vague omens, and the result would be the same. If it's a matter of provoking us thoughts, then it doesn't really matter what provokes them and how.
Fascinating as Steve Marshal's and other scholar's work is, I dont even think history is of particular relevance, since this could have been written at a different age and place, surely not using the same imagery, and it would still work. I do agree with the need to get as close to the source as possible, at least I'll be forming my own images, not someone else's, but I cannot say for sure that my images are more accurate than yours or vice-versa. They are the ones that have worked for me in the past, and they have helped me a lot, no doubt. But I had plainly wrong views over some hexagrams in my early days (Im sure I still have some), and even then it worked (for me). It really did as it always will, because the answers were not in the texts in the first place, those were only the catalysts for me to come up with them myself.
And what when an answer comes out that doesn't say a thing? Some answers just don't resonate at all, maybe none of the bates looked tasty enough for our mind to grab it. Steve seems to suggest in another thread that its a matter of knowing the "real" text. But as I said, there is not a definitely right text, cause even the Yi had many incarnations and suffered from various deturpations. I believe that even going to the ultimate source would prove unfruitful in some cases. It was simply a wrong answer. What it happens is that when we get such a reading, we tend to look to other sources for additional meaning. We will look deeper into the symbol, by our own effort or guided by the (possibly wrong) views of others. But the point is we will do this as deep and for as long as we need, until something (inevitably) resonates in our brain. And then that is our answer. But no one can say that was the true answer, the most profound meaning of that particular hexagram, cause indeed next time it may not be that same notion that provokes us. We will look for ANY answer, and restlessly so, until we find one.
But if it is all a mind game, a way to reach conclusions by ourselves, then how come divination IS possible? And how come it even speaks literally at times, like it was addressing us directly? In short, why does it (so obviously) work?
First of all we have to keep in mind that it also DOESN'T work. For instance if we ask repeatedly, or if we fail to understand (by lack of knowledge, interpretation skills or merely a good translation). The times when we say it really DID work, are those when it has resonated deeply in our mind, we paid a lot more attention to those times than to those it went mute on us, and so we're back to our own minds again. It just acted as a catalyst to bring out what we already had in. This also accounts for the fact that different people give special significance to changes that happened at important times for them, but we wouldn't be consensual as to which those important changes are. People attribute special significance to the particular answers they got at key points in their lives, but seldom reflect that this is all due to subjective concern, and there cannot be one single truth. To each its own.
But also, more often than we notice, we have intuition. Now intuition is just a glimpse of the subconscious, a piece of pure knowledge that doesn't pass through the usual ego barriers, and so is not questioned by reason. And we all know our reason can deceive us more easily than it will help us find the truth. Reasoning can spoil the meaning that a pure mind would be able to grasp. All religions stress the fact that the answers are to be found inside ourselves and nowhere else. By looking at the "antecedent" of it all, not the "I" but the "am", not the puppet, not the strings, but the puppeteer, we come to the full comprehension. And only that way.
So in this sense the Yi is a tool to reach our subconscious. It does that by surprising us, by provoking us a state of perplexity that ceases the usual ego function (the ego can only operate on pure logic), in pretty much the same way the hua tou works. Once this state of perplexity, or doubt, is provoked, the ego is set on hold, and the glimpses we get on that brief instant are pure thoughts from our subconscious side, untampered and consequently, true.
What is needed from any symbolic oracle, is that it provides a representative sample of reality encoded in its symbols (a cosmology). It must provide enough situations so some of them are bound to strike us, and provoke that surprised state. It must be vague to work, but if it contains some precise objective statements (in the case of the Yi these take the form of all the imagery derived from historical facts) the better, cause when they happen to fall right on spot it serves to prove the Yi. That's also how hexagram #4 surprising statement works. You don't get it cause the Yi wants to shut you up. You get it when you consult too much (of course, that's only statistics).
But if all this skeptic vision explains fairly well the self-growth part of the use, it doesn't answer so well the fact why it happens to divine correctly. Sure it can come from intuition, reducing it to the first case (ie selective thinking, but now a more enlightened one), or it can be coincidental, and we just pay more attention to the divinations that work. In fact coincidences are not as odd as we often think. We pay attention to the meaningful odd occurrences, but don't evaluate statistically the meaningless not-so-odd ones, and so we suffer from self-deception.
Still there is this notion, undeniable from experience, that not only it works, but it seems to elect the most appropriate answer for each question. Not any answer, we would read something out of, but indeed the answer that speaks directly about the facts asked. This doesn't happen all the time (important to notice, indeed one of the motives behind repeated questioning is wanting to force this to happen), but it does happen all the time we really NEED it.
Although the skeptics view is important to eliminate some of the superstition around the Yi, it doesn't explain the obvious conclusion we come to when actually working with it on a serious manner. Apparently we are able to make the "correct" hexagram fall out, that's what experience tells, and Im sure you all agree.
But how does this happen? By some sort of ideomotor effect? I have trouble believing that the particular system the Chinese invented somehow takes into account subconscious activity to make the coins fall out some specific way. Other systems also work, so there is not a supremacy of the Yi. If that is indeed the way it works, it cannot have been devised like that, it was found that it works like that. After all the source of the Yi system is a very prosaic one, wanting yes or no questions to be answered. There were no enlightened sages devising a magical tool, it must have happened pretty naturally.
Incidentally, I happen to believe that the mind has indeed an effect over random processes, and perhaps by some undetermined rule, it shapes the random "energy curves" around it, making random happen one particular way. Following this line of thought, one could argue that the oracle's meanings were determined empirically. Over the centuries, people faced with similar questions, would generate the specific mindfield that distorts random in a particular way, and we would see a correlation of the results that came out for those questions. By an incremental process, of tuning the correlated meanings over the years, the final text would have been constructed, reflecting the mental state's relations to specific meaning. This theory could be tested given enough time. Just devise a symbolic system and a random method to elect one of the symbols. With enough consultations on specific questions, one would see that specific symbols came out associated with specific outcomes, and some omen text could be determined for each symbol.
But there is another thing that bothers me in the skeptic view. Even if hexagrams come out by purely random processes, and the mind has no effect on the draw, coincidentally so, they happen to be the most wise we could get for the question we posed. And that beyond the skeptics view of coincidences. There is need for more than coincidence, and thats why people talk about synchronicity. But synchronicity doesn't strike me as something real, at least not as some law governing chance. Its just an abstract concept to describe a phenomenon we fail to understand in its entirety. The answer, I think, has not to do with chance at all.
Somehow our paths in life take us to the knowledge we need, at the precise time we need it. This can mean bumping into an important book hidden under a pile in a bookstore, listening by chance to some words that resonate in a special way, or getting that fantastic reading from the Yi that really opens our eyes, and was "just what we needed to hear". The principle is the same, it seems coincidental, yet with time we see this so called coincidences were strategically placed among the course of our lives, like directions along a path, and we start to feel that it was intended, that our mind (perhaps) is what makes it happen, like it had determined all along the path that we would be traveling, and made the clues available at the right points, so we would be able to jump to the conclusions we needed to.
Or maybe our souls simply chose to incarnate into a specific life that would bring those so called coincidences. The one with the little pieces of wisdom we needed on the way. The directions were already on that particular path, we just chose to follow that, and only that, path. That was the path with the answers we needed to learn. This is not so hard to believe, after all I don't think astrology can be understood any other way. We choose the instant of time and space we will be born, so we will be forced to experience particularly important challenges. Those we need in order to grow further.
That's why concentration is important in the process of casting. Actually we don't get concentrated to get real answers, it was the fact that we needed an answer that made us pay attention. Somehow at those turning points in our lives we sense something relevant is going on and we pay attention. Concentration was more of a consequence than the determining factor, we needed that answer, and so it has come to us. We just happen to be more attentive during those times.
That's also why even miscasting (not knowing the "right" method, or making an error while using the method) can work. We needed that answer, that "coincidence" in our life, and we would get it, even if by a wrong reading.
This brings me back to the role of the mind in all our existence. In fact, even physics knows that everything is devoided of existence. Matter is composed of 99% empty space, and the remaining 1%, when put under the microscope, is itself made of 99% empty space, and so an as we progress deeper. So it is all an illusion, none of us is seeing life as it really is, but merely its own, personal beliefs about it, which due to subjective concerns can only be wrong (unless we've freed ourselves from conditioning, and reached enlightenment). So it seems our mind is only taking us through the steps necessary to learn what ever it is we need to learn, and that can take many forms. In that sense, although the hexagrams fall out by random, random itself is created (or chose) by our own minds, and we get the random occurrences we NEED throughout our lives.
So we're back to the beginning, and its all a mind game. That it works, it surely does, that it helps us grow, its also uncontestable. But there is nothing, and no one giving us the answers. We are making the questions and the answers ourselves, and that for me is the final conclusion.
To finish it up, I don't pretend to have it all sorted out. Next minute my convictions (and they are just that: my convictions) may be shattered by some unaccountable experience. I still sense there may be something more. What is it? That's something we must continue to ask ourselves, as I believe the answer is not to be found outside. One thing I must agree is that the way the Yi works is intimately connected to the way our own minds work. And understanding one must bring some enlightenment over the other. That's the real value of the Yi.
Final lesson: we are what we believe. The Yi can help us find out what we believe, but it can not (and should not) tell us what to believe. Allowing that would be giving up on our right to govern our lives.
Now go and have fun with it
The Yi can provoke us to come up with the answers OURSELVES, but it cannot give them black-in-white as if it was some sort of almanac (and even almanacs, that state the weather for the whole year ahead, are bound to be right sometimes). There is no one size fits all, or some sort of enlightened scholar's interpretation that unveils some unmistakable answer. And so there is little interest in trying to find the real answer. If one cannot know in the first place which of the possible interpretations is actually the true one, then its useless to go and ask someone more knowledgeable (unless from the fact that this clarification can itself ring more bells). Gene really nailed it when he said "I suspect it is not just knowing the I Ching but yourself as well". If it didn't ring a bell, then just forget it. If it did, then THAT is our answer (for the moment being), even if its not the "right" one. What is important is the intent of the answer, more than the answer itself.
So what the Yi does is to throw us bates in several directions. The hooks you bite are the parts of the answer that you take as relevant, the ones you take to be the whole. The rest you just discard (it may be relevant in some other context, but not for this question Im asking right now, so I wont even see it). This process is known as selective thinking. The point for me is that the text is mostly open, and it is WE and we alone that supply the answer. How do we do that? We read the text and something is bound to resonate in our minds, provoking thoughts that are indeed the real answer. We give the answers to ourselves, maybe not the right ones, but it still forced us to meditate on them. If the Yi's texts said such objective omens like "you'll break a leg today", or "you'll win the lottery next weekend", then it would be easy to see that it definitely didnt work. Hell, I could even win the lottery this time, but surely not every time that answer comes out.
But being open in its form, the Yi also makes it very hard for us to select the "real" answer. When the answers come resonating from the sub- to the conscious, there is a lot of ways in which we can distort them to match our expectations. In terms of precise divination of future facts, we can most of the time just do post-hoc reasoning. The Yi would say something like "you'll win the lottery but you can break a leg (if you get too excited and start jumping around like a madman)". Then we choose the part of the answer we like (the lottery), and if next weekend instead of winning a pile of money we break a leg, we'll be saying "it was there all along, I just didn't wanna see it". The Yi never tricks us, but we trick ourselves all the time. If we happen to win the lottery, though, then it proves besides any reasonable doubt that the Yi is an amazing predicting tool. This is indeed god's broadcast for us humans to tune in, let us all surrender. That is simply giving up to our inalienable rights.
I had recently a very important matter that I asked a lot about (hey, is there any other way to learn than the hard way?). I was looking for precise answers. Yes or no, damn it! I could as well have flipped a coin, since the accuracy would be the same. At some point we have had all the possible answers, and we're back where we started, everything open. Surely somewhere among all these answers theres the real one? let me ask again! But it can never tell me a precise fate, even if I believed that a precise fate actually existed. It can tell me "yes", this moment, and "no", the next. Is it of any use then? Of course! It made me confront "yes" back then, and "no" just now. I learned a lot from this process, as anyone that actually used it can state. It opens my views. But was it the "sage" (I particularly dislike this coined term)? I dont think so, merely the sage we all have within. The Yi even tells us this, "look within for the answer" as in 20.3. From outside we can only get confusion? look within!
Its the confrontation with the coming "answers" that makes it a valuable tool. It expands our minds, and in a way that is kind and benevolent, due to its underlying philosophy. But to think that god would bother answering our petty questions on a one-on-one basis, is just kidding ourselves, and surely a source of profound future disappointment. Even if you can use it to predict (more on this later), there is no way it will always tell you the truth. Or that you will always recognize the truth from its answer, which is the same.
One simple experience (I read some guy actually did this, but his purpose was to dispel it as fake, so he missed the point), would be to give people wrong answers (not the ones that actually came out), and hearing they comment how amazed they were by their accuracy (hum, maybe the Yi knew its answers would be tampered with, and intended the wrong answer all along). Maybe we could even shuffle lines omens at random, or a different oracular structure be decided (I dunno, more than two states per line, or other than 6 lines, or forget lines, I want dots, of different colors or whatever), or we could randomly pick one out of a thousand of vague omens, and the result would be the same. If it's a matter of provoking us thoughts, then it doesn't really matter what provokes them and how.
Fascinating as Steve Marshal's and other scholar's work is, I dont even think history is of particular relevance, since this could have been written at a different age and place, surely not using the same imagery, and it would still work. I do agree with the need to get as close to the source as possible, at least I'll be forming my own images, not someone else's, but I cannot say for sure that my images are more accurate than yours or vice-versa. They are the ones that have worked for me in the past, and they have helped me a lot, no doubt. But I had plainly wrong views over some hexagrams in my early days (Im sure I still have some), and even then it worked (for me). It really did as it always will, because the answers were not in the texts in the first place, those were only the catalysts for me to come up with them myself.
And what when an answer comes out that doesn't say a thing? Some answers just don't resonate at all, maybe none of the bates looked tasty enough for our mind to grab it. Steve seems to suggest in another thread that its a matter of knowing the "real" text. But as I said, there is not a definitely right text, cause even the Yi had many incarnations and suffered from various deturpations. I believe that even going to the ultimate source would prove unfruitful in some cases. It was simply a wrong answer. What it happens is that when we get such a reading, we tend to look to other sources for additional meaning. We will look deeper into the symbol, by our own effort or guided by the (possibly wrong) views of others. But the point is we will do this as deep and for as long as we need, until something (inevitably) resonates in our brain. And then that is our answer. But no one can say that was the true answer, the most profound meaning of that particular hexagram, cause indeed next time it may not be that same notion that provokes us. We will look for ANY answer, and restlessly so, until we find one.
But if it is all a mind game, a way to reach conclusions by ourselves, then how come divination IS possible? And how come it even speaks literally at times, like it was addressing us directly? In short, why does it (so obviously) work?
First of all we have to keep in mind that it also DOESN'T work. For instance if we ask repeatedly, or if we fail to understand (by lack of knowledge, interpretation skills or merely a good translation). The times when we say it really DID work, are those when it has resonated deeply in our mind, we paid a lot more attention to those times than to those it went mute on us, and so we're back to our own minds again. It just acted as a catalyst to bring out what we already had in. This also accounts for the fact that different people give special significance to changes that happened at important times for them, but we wouldn't be consensual as to which those important changes are. People attribute special significance to the particular answers they got at key points in their lives, but seldom reflect that this is all due to subjective concern, and there cannot be one single truth. To each its own.
But also, more often than we notice, we have intuition. Now intuition is just a glimpse of the subconscious, a piece of pure knowledge that doesn't pass through the usual ego barriers, and so is not questioned by reason. And we all know our reason can deceive us more easily than it will help us find the truth. Reasoning can spoil the meaning that a pure mind would be able to grasp. All religions stress the fact that the answers are to be found inside ourselves and nowhere else. By looking at the "antecedent" of it all, not the "I" but the "am", not the puppet, not the strings, but the puppeteer, we come to the full comprehension. And only that way.
So in this sense the Yi is a tool to reach our subconscious. It does that by surprising us, by provoking us a state of perplexity that ceases the usual ego function (the ego can only operate on pure logic), in pretty much the same way the hua tou works. Once this state of perplexity, or doubt, is provoked, the ego is set on hold, and the glimpses we get on that brief instant are pure thoughts from our subconscious side, untampered and consequently, true.
What is needed from any symbolic oracle, is that it provides a representative sample of reality encoded in its symbols (a cosmology). It must provide enough situations so some of them are bound to strike us, and provoke that surprised state. It must be vague to work, but if it contains some precise objective statements (in the case of the Yi these take the form of all the imagery derived from historical facts) the better, cause when they happen to fall right on spot it serves to prove the Yi. That's also how hexagram #4 surprising statement works. You don't get it cause the Yi wants to shut you up. You get it when you consult too much (of course, that's only statistics).
But if all this skeptic vision explains fairly well the self-growth part of the use, it doesn't answer so well the fact why it happens to divine correctly. Sure it can come from intuition, reducing it to the first case (ie selective thinking, but now a more enlightened one), or it can be coincidental, and we just pay more attention to the divinations that work. In fact coincidences are not as odd as we often think. We pay attention to the meaningful odd occurrences, but don't evaluate statistically the meaningless not-so-odd ones, and so we suffer from self-deception.
Still there is this notion, undeniable from experience, that not only it works, but it seems to elect the most appropriate answer for each question. Not any answer, we would read something out of, but indeed the answer that speaks directly about the facts asked. This doesn't happen all the time (important to notice, indeed one of the motives behind repeated questioning is wanting to force this to happen), but it does happen all the time we really NEED it.
Although the skeptics view is important to eliminate some of the superstition around the Yi, it doesn't explain the obvious conclusion we come to when actually working with it on a serious manner. Apparently we are able to make the "correct" hexagram fall out, that's what experience tells, and Im sure you all agree.
But how does this happen? By some sort of ideomotor effect? I have trouble believing that the particular system the Chinese invented somehow takes into account subconscious activity to make the coins fall out some specific way. Other systems also work, so there is not a supremacy of the Yi. If that is indeed the way it works, it cannot have been devised like that, it was found that it works like that. After all the source of the Yi system is a very prosaic one, wanting yes or no questions to be answered. There were no enlightened sages devising a magical tool, it must have happened pretty naturally.
Incidentally, I happen to believe that the mind has indeed an effect over random processes, and perhaps by some undetermined rule, it shapes the random "energy curves" around it, making random happen one particular way. Following this line of thought, one could argue that the oracle's meanings were determined empirically. Over the centuries, people faced with similar questions, would generate the specific mindfield that distorts random in a particular way, and we would see a correlation of the results that came out for those questions. By an incremental process, of tuning the correlated meanings over the years, the final text would have been constructed, reflecting the mental state's relations to specific meaning. This theory could be tested given enough time. Just devise a symbolic system and a random method to elect one of the symbols. With enough consultations on specific questions, one would see that specific symbols came out associated with specific outcomes, and some omen text could be determined for each symbol.
But there is another thing that bothers me in the skeptic view. Even if hexagrams come out by purely random processes, and the mind has no effect on the draw, coincidentally so, they happen to be the most wise we could get for the question we posed. And that beyond the skeptics view of coincidences. There is need for more than coincidence, and thats why people talk about synchronicity. But synchronicity doesn't strike me as something real, at least not as some law governing chance. Its just an abstract concept to describe a phenomenon we fail to understand in its entirety. The answer, I think, has not to do with chance at all.
Somehow our paths in life take us to the knowledge we need, at the precise time we need it. This can mean bumping into an important book hidden under a pile in a bookstore, listening by chance to some words that resonate in a special way, or getting that fantastic reading from the Yi that really opens our eyes, and was "just what we needed to hear". The principle is the same, it seems coincidental, yet with time we see this so called coincidences were strategically placed among the course of our lives, like directions along a path, and we start to feel that it was intended, that our mind (perhaps) is what makes it happen, like it had determined all along the path that we would be traveling, and made the clues available at the right points, so we would be able to jump to the conclusions we needed to.
Or maybe our souls simply chose to incarnate into a specific life that would bring those so called coincidences. The one with the little pieces of wisdom we needed on the way. The directions were already on that particular path, we just chose to follow that, and only that, path. That was the path with the answers we needed to learn. This is not so hard to believe, after all I don't think astrology can be understood any other way. We choose the instant of time and space we will be born, so we will be forced to experience particularly important challenges. Those we need in order to grow further.
That's why concentration is important in the process of casting. Actually we don't get concentrated to get real answers, it was the fact that we needed an answer that made us pay attention. Somehow at those turning points in our lives we sense something relevant is going on and we pay attention. Concentration was more of a consequence than the determining factor, we needed that answer, and so it has come to us. We just happen to be more attentive during those times.
That's also why even miscasting (not knowing the "right" method, or making an error while using the method) can work. We needed that answer, that "coincidence" in our life, and we would get it, even if by a wrong reading.
This brings me back to the role of the mind in all our existence. In fact, even physics knows that everything is devoided of existence. Matter is composed of 99% empty space, and the remaining 1%, when put under the microscope, is itself made of 99% empty space, and so an as we progress deeper. So it is all an illusion, none of us is seeing life as it really is, but merely its own, personal beliefs about it, which due to subjective concerns can only be wrong (unless we've freed ourselves from conditioning, and reached enlightenment). So it seems our mind is only taking us through the steps necessary to learn what ever it is we need to learn, and that can take many forms. In that sense, although the hexagrams fall out by random, random itself is created (or chose) by our own minds, and we get the random occurrences we NEED throughout our lives.
So we're back to the beginning, and its all a mind game. That it works, it surely does, that it helps us grow, its also uncontestable. But there is nothing, and no one giving us the answers. We are making the questions and the answers ourselves, and that for me is the final conclusion.
To finish it up, I don't pretend to have it all sorted out. Next minute my convictions (and they are just that: my convictions) may be shattered by some unaccountable experience. I still sense there may be something more. What is it? That's something we must continue to ask ourselves, as I believe the answer is not to be found outside. One thing I must agree is that the way the Yi works is intimately connected to the way our own minds work. And understanding one must bring some enlightenment over the other. That's the real value of the Yi.
Final lesson: we are what we believe. The Yi can help us find out what we believe, but it can not (and should not) tell us what to believe. Allowing that would be giving up on our right to govern our lives.
Now go and have fun with it