Greetings all. I've finally subscribed after anonymously benefiting from this fabulous resource for a while. So here's my first post. Reading Diana Hook, I've again found myself confronted by these two arrangements. It's not the first time, but I remain baffled.Do they have any practical applications for divination, or are they just ways of exploring the internal logic of the trigrams? To put things in perspective, I've been working with the Yi for about three years, so I'm still a relative beginner. Many thanks in advance.

Barnaby said:

Greetings all. I've finally subscribed after anonymously benefiting from this fabulous resource for a while. So here's my first post. Reading Diana Hook, I've again found myself confronted by these two arrangements. It's not the first time, but I remain baffled.Do they have any practical applications for divination, or are they just ways of exploring the internal logic of the trigrams? To put things in perspective, I've been working with the Yi for about three years, so I'm still a relative beginner. Many thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

Lo Shu - Later Heaven
He Tu - Earlier heaven

In Plum Blossom, Hexagrams are made with earlier arrangement... While later one is used for almost everything else you can think of. Sometimes earlier can show specific numbers, like years between events etc. but all that is mostly for BaZi, in most of Yi Jing later heaven is used.

In theory one is the ideal world, Heaven Above, Earth below. But the idea is as soon as something is born that is lost and it ends up in the world around us and that would be the later heaven.

So earlier heaven is used when we have conditions of something before it's born and when we have something that goes back to its pure form. Outside of that if you have doubts what is better just use later heaven, it will cover almost everything that exists(since it has already been born, otherwise it wouldn't exist)...
(there is one more situation when earlier heaven is used and that would be in the calculation of combinations between the lines in Liu Yao... But if you aren't using that, it doesn't really matter, since there are no combinations between Trigrams that I'm aware of)...

Thanks for that.There's a lot of complex stuff here that I don't have a firm grasp on yet.But from what you say, it sounds like I should be thinking of the Lo Shu and He Tu as things that give rise to the Later Heaven and Early Heaven sequences. And that, in divination, it's related to what Hook calls the World of Thought and World of Senses arrangements and the practice of translating a cast (Later Heaven) hexagram back to its Early Heaven equivalent (the "ideal hexagram").Anyway, thanks again. It's all grist to the mill.