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1eleven

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Does anyone here use the "sticks" offered by Carol Anthony?
http://www.ichingoracle.com/show_book.php?ID=22

I feel they're a bit overpriced but picked up a set for my collection and neatness - I like to document my hexagrams in Evernote and I'm not a big fan of my handwriting. I'm not sure I'll use them for actual readings (At the moment, I prefer the coin method for balance - I've read they are in line with the probabilities of the yarrow stalk method) but may use them to arrange manually and photograph for my journal. It's also pretty neat to be able to rearrange the lines and break them out in trigrams, etc.
 
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I don't use them, and am in no place to say....

But they are beautiful and seem like a good tool for what you're talking about.
Overpriced...but cool and useful...so not by tooooo much.
I'd venture to suggest making your own....I imagine the beginning...the very first diviners to collect and mark their sticks, with intention.
Perhaps sticks that you gather, mark, and prepare yourself would have even more connection and power for you? Like, instilling your intentions for greater good into the tools themselves. I bet in your neighborhood, or any craft store, you could get some sticks and paint, or other even more awesome materials to create them. They're so simple!
It may be a challenge, but perhaps it would be a labor of love and meditation. I think that sort of devotion has the potential to create a connection between you and your self-made tools that may be missing from the store bought.
(Experience that makes me feel this way: cooking, sewing, quilting, building a fire in the wilderness, crafting personal dieties etc)

Just a thought:)
~Claire, with love
 

1eleven

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Hi Claire,
Excellent idea... I thought of it prior to ordering but figured I'd get these then decide if I wanted to make a set more personal based on how these were designed. Basically, I wasn't sure where to put the dots ;)

Thanks for your insight!
 

pocossin

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I recommend the bamboo skewers available at grocery stores. Buy a pack and select the 50 best. I used to grow yarrow commercially for the family florist business, and I was too familiar with it to use it in divination. Technically, I think the proper yarrow is that which grows on ancestral graves.
 

sergio

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I made a couple of sets myself some time ago, one with just one set of lines on each side and another one like the one's shown in the video. I got the idea from a box set edition of the I Ching with the sticks from a Dutch writer whose name I cannot remember right now. My experience with them is that they produce many more changing lines than any of the other methods( coins, stalks, stones,)which makes for a more complicated reading and was not very accurate either. That's my experience, somebody else's might be different. They became really handy when I bought Nielsen's book and used them to study and test certain procedures described there.
Sergio
 

pocossin

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The Two Cent Solution

It occurs to me that you could get the same results with two pennies (Ok, I'm frugal) as with Carol Anthony's expensive (25$ including shipping) sticks, with the first penny indicating yin or yang, and the second penny indicating changing or unchanging. If you want to do something good with your money, make a donation to Clarity.
 

1eleven

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I don't believe the two pennies would be the same probabilities - these sticks are in line with the yarrow method as far as I can tell. As Sergio mentioned, a nice set like this or a handmade variation is handy to rearrange the lines.

I've been donating quite a bit the last few days :)
 

pocossin

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I don't believe the two pennies would be the same probabilities - these sticks are in line with the yarrow method as far as I can tell. As Sergio mentioned, a nice set like this or a handmade variation is handy to rearrange the lines.

I've been donating quite a bit the last few days :)

I'm no mathematician, but the probabilities should be the same. The sticks have four sides, don't they? So each possible outcome has an equal probability, which isn't what the yarrow sticks give, I think. By 'donation' I meant what is is possible when one clicks the 'donate' button at the right bottom of the page. Probably shouldn't have mentioned it since you are a new member, but I am feeling self righteous because, after a decade of hanging around here, frugal or not, guilt finally overcame me, and I got around to paying some dues :)
 

Trojina

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You can read more about the probability and patent here:
http://www.biroco.com/yijing/patents.htm

More later... I'm posting from my phone.

He does say in that link that devices for casting hexagrams are unecessary and useless or pointless....but nonetheless interesting.


Personally I cannot see why anyone would spend money on these. Carol Anthony seems to be doing a fair bit of marketing lately becasue I've noticed recently several newbies have come here saying they have her book to start with....:confused: I mean as a newbie (or an oldie) Hilarys book is going to be alot more use than Carol Anthony's. And as a newbie no one needs to be buying sticks at all IMO...well unless as you say you like them aesthetically.

I don't know if you are a newbie BTW so that was a general comment :)
 
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Trojina

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I don't use them, and am in no place to say....

But they are beautiful and seem like a good tool for what you're talking about.
Overpriced...but cool and useful...so not by tooooo much.
I'd venture to suggest making your own....I imagine the beginning...the very first diviners to collect and mark their sticks, with intention.
Perhaps sticks that you gather,

Just a thought:)
~Claire, with love

or you could get your dog to gather them for you :rofl: sorry right since the start of this thread I've had visions of dog collecting Yi sticks. My dog used to select a stick each day and I never did know what guided her selection
 

buzzurro

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You can read more about the probability and patent here:
http://www.biroco.com/yijing/patents.htm
OK, so the probabilities are not the same as the two pennies method, but they aren't those of the yarrow either, they're actually those of the three coins!
That is, the probabilities are the same as the three coins as long as you consider the casting of a single line, but then you have to take into account that half of the sticks have more 7 than 8 lines, and viceversa, so the casting of each line changes the probabilities for the others. As a consequence of this, unless I'm overlooking something, you should end up having much less probabilities to receive hexagram 1 or 2 than with the traditional methods, while it should become more likely to get an hexagram formed by 3 yang and 3 yin lines.
 
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buzzurro

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Do the Anthony sticks have Rolle's patent number on the box?

Ah, that's a good question indeed!

Anyway, one thing I forgot in my previous post: I can't see how on earth one could ever get the yarrow probabilities out of six sticks with four sides each... :confused:
 

1eleven

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buzzurro, how are you coming to this conclusion?

One thing I can say for sure is that you'll never get more than 3 changing lines in a given hexagram, which can be seen as an advantage, but it's still a limitation...
 

buzzurro

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buzzurro, how are you coming to this conclusion?
I got carried away by my imagination, and I thought there were changing lines on half of the sticks only! :eek:
Of course I was totally wrong, so I edited my post accordingly... :D
 

buzzurro

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Ok, I got it, it's much simpler than it seemed. We have 2 different kind of sticks, one is like this:
7,8,7,6
If you "switch it longitudinally" it becomes like this:
9,7,8,7
So the probabilities for the sticks of this first kind are:

7 : 4/8
8 : 2/8
9 : 1/8
6 : 1/8

The sticks of the other kind have these probabilities:

7 : 2/8
8 : 4/8
9 : 1/8
6 : 1/8

Now, since there is an equal number of sticks of each kind, we can sum all the probabilities and get exactly the same as the three coins:

7 : (4 + 2)/16 = 3/8
8 : (2 + 4)/16 = 3/8
9 : (1 + 1)/16 = 1/8
6 : (1 + 1)/16 = 1/8

But what actually happens is that half of the lines have double the chances to be 7 than 8, and vice versa!
So it becomes easier to get hexagrams formed by 3 yang and 3 yin lines, and it becomes harder to get hex 1 or 2... but this probably doesn't make a big difference, I guess it's an acceptable alternative to the three coins method... not to the yarrow, that's for sure.
 

1eleven

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Hi buzzurro,
I believe your'e mistaken here but don't have the time at the moment to sort this out. It's definitely not the same odds as the 3 coin method.

Thanks for your input though.
 

buzzurro

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Well, as a matter of fact, I'm not sure if it's correct to say that Rolle's sticks method has the same odds as the three coin.
According to my reasoning, this method presents two different sets of odds, each set applying to half the lines of the hexagram, so it's not comparable to any of the traditional methods, where the same odds apply to each and every line.
In order to make a comparison I can say that the average odds are the same as the three coins, but this might be too arbitrary indeed...
Anyway, since I'm no mathematician, nor am I here to enforce any particular opinion or reasoning, I'd be very very interested in other points of view on this subject!
:bows:
 

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