Insights into general trends (three years of readings)?

[dnc_iching]

Hello there,

I've recently finished archiving almost 3 years of readings – the most recent was today 28 May 2020 and the earliest was 25 July 2017, the rough date of my first successful cast and reading (there are some sketchy, experimental attempts in the days preceding, getting to grips with the process and trigram structures).

There are sometimes gaps of a few weeks or a couple of months in this account – lacunae which are themselves significant – but it's often been a daily practice, the cast written down in a diary with or without accompanying notes. Using Resonance Journal, I've inputted every reading, working in stints of a month or half a month, pushing into the past from the present day, adding new ones as I go (and entering in a transcription of the Wilhelm translation as I go, too).

It's been very interesting, nostalgic and sometimes saddening to revisit these diaries, the memories that they evoke, and to revisit some of the wisdom after these months of reading and re-reading what once were cryptic passages and that now – some at least – seem like old and familiar if nonetheless cryptic friends. These three years have been some of the most difficult in my life and the I Ching has played subtly powerful role throughout.

I have some plans to experiment with various ways of visualising this data, with a mind to an art project when I finally collate a good three years of readings (middle of this year). I was pleased to see that Resonance Journal offers a basic bar chart – it's interesting to see the peaks and troughs of more and less frequently drawn hexagrams that emerge from the indeterminate 'background radiation', so to speak – insistences that buck the law of averages, the mean, the norm, the 'bell curve' and so on.

And I'm wondering if the community here could offer some very general insights based simply upon these bar graphs? Any comments are welcome.

 

[Liselle]

Congratulations on being so industrious! I haven't managed more than the occasional old reading migration.

I like the bar charts, too. Am I correct in magically deducing that your casting method is something with yarrow stalk odds? (Not magic at all, of course, Hilary has explained that yarrow odds by nature produce a lopsided number of relating hexagram 2s.)

One thing that's interesting is to see if there are any patterns or commonalities in frequent hexagrams. For instance 48 is your most common primary hexagram. You could click on 48 in the Insights chart to see if there are any time-related clumps. Go to Tag Cloud and click on the # hexagram 48 tag to open a Tag Information listing - then you can see what topics are involved (if you tag your readings by topic).

 

[Liselle]

What's also neat is your journal is exportable to Excel (or any other spreadsheet program that supports .xls) - of course there's tons of stuff could be done there.

 

[dnc_iching]

Thanks Liselle.
Yes I plan to do some data crunching with an Excel export. Have to come up with some meta-questions to 'ask the data' ...

If the last three years have been characterised in particular by a high frequency of "#48: Ching / Well" – and inversely a low frequency of "27: I / Corners of the Mouth / Providing Nourishment", and so on – is it possible/advisable to make general judgments based on frequency?

As for my method - fantastic detective work – yes I use a method that purportedly approximates the yarrow stalk method – the long dice method. Interesting that there's an explanation of the bias towards #2 in the relating hexagrams – I always thought it was suggesting I 'get humble' and 'ground myself' as a supplement to the primary hexagram, hah!

Here's a pic of the dice I made:

 

[Liselle]

Mind you I have no idea what the tendency towards 2 relating is supposed to mean - Hilary may have said but I forget.

Nice dice! They look like stone - how did you make them? How do they work?

If the last three years have been characterised in particular by a high frequency of "#48: Ching / Well" – and inversely a low frequency of "27: I / Corners of the Mouth / Providing Nourishment", and so on – is it possible/advisable to make general judgments based on frequency?

What made you pick out 27 specifically? (Then again I didn't have any great reason for picking out 48, it was just "one of the tall ones.")

I think to figure out what the frequencies tell us we have to do a lot more digging. Find out when the readings were (any clumps?), what they were about (a particular topic or two?), what was going on in your life.

Notes I made to myself while experimenting with this once:

• I'd gotten 62 a lot as primary hexagram and thought they were about work, till I looked at the readings and found I hadn't cast a single work reading during that time frame.
• graph showed a lot of 62s for a particular month, turned out they were concentrated in one of the four weeks
• in the week of 62s, what were the most frequent relating hexagrams? (31, 13, and 15 stood out)
• but this seemed more like themes - it's not like I got a lot of 62 to 31, 62 to 13, and 62 to 15 readings exactly.

Last sentence: "not sure what this sort of digging tells me..." (lol - which doesn't mean it has nothing to say, just that I didn't find it so easy to figure out)

Have to come up with some meta-questions to 'ask the data'

This was a lesson I learned (embarrassingly) a while back - before I start staring at numbers, it helps to think about it loosely in my head first for the exact reason of coming up with good questions. Otherwise I stare at numbers like this: (which happens anyway, but...)