I asked the oracle if I should go back to school and i got hexagram 38.
I'm not sure if this means yes or no.
Can anyone help?

rara said:

I asked the oracle if I should go back to school and i got hexagram 38.
I'm not sure if this means yes or no.
Can anyone help?

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Should we assume no changing lines?
You might feel out of place there - if you can live with that,
"in ordinary matters, promising"

As 37 is Family, I read 38 as meaning going back to school will give you a wider perspective, you will be going beyond your familiar Family understanding and experiencing a wider world, possibly even encountering ideas that are in Opposition to what you were raised to believe was true. I once got this line when I asked the I Ching, "What was Budha all about?" I think how he grew up in a Family that tried to protect him from any knowledge of suffering and death. He chose to go out into the world and experienced the extremes of yin and the Opposite, yang, and formulated his ideas about following the Middle Way.

rosada said:

As 37 is Family, I read 38 as meaning going back to school will give you a wider perspective, you will be going beyond your familiar Family .......

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Rosada's interpretation is based on pairs of the traditional sequence and so not fully representative of hexagram structure. It is the binary sequence that brings out the natural properties of hexagrams and so 38 pairs with 54 rather than 37.

38 covers not just 'opposition' but mirroring - letting others see you being 'like them' - or more so they look at you and see themselves. The use of this mirror allows one to be themselves behind the mirror so going back to school would cover the need to 'mirror' and so fit in.

The trigram of LAKE that is the context of 38 covers self-reflection in lower position, self-reflection doubled, and so intensity in reflection, in upper position.

With 38 we have trigrams giving us "with/from self-reflection (lake bottom) comes direction, an ideology (fire in top)"

The reflection emphasis covers the literal of self-promotion as well as of self-analysis. Lake covers replication, mimicry and so covers sexual love as it does psychic love (e.g. fans of some charismatic person, movie star or politician or some discipline, a 'passion for mathematics' etc etc) - there is an overall sense of passion (shared with LAKEs opposite, MOUNTAIN where the passion is on the loss of love or an imagined love) - note is also cover self-love, narcissism - one can get trapped looking into that mirror.

The high energy focus of 38 is conditional, focused on some particular, as compared to its partner, 54, where the situation is unconditional and focused on the immature having to adapt too quickly to something or just an immature state (lots of energy at the beginning that leaves nothing later on - different to its opposite 53 that covers maturing, a bumpy beginning that develops into something of value later on)

Given the pairing with 54 there is a shared sense of some 'issue' in getting involved, in commitment where in 54 there is no choice, one is in a position imposed from outside one's control. In 38 there is control in the form of the use of a mirror - its like show biz personalities who have different home lives and home names. As such they dont want to get involved 100% and so try to keep some personal life besides their social life.

My question is on the consideration of the act of going back to school - something in your context is pushing you to ask the question so we can also identify in general what that context is - use the Emotional IC to do that:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/lofting/icplusEProact.html

Chris.

BTW - the lake trigram brings out a focus on empathy (e.g. hex 61) but the extreme of such leads to an empathy not for others but for oneself and so narcissism.

For the social label see http://www.healthline.com/galecontent/narcissism

The lake/mountain pair of trigrams cover issues of passion overall - existing, immediate, now (lake) or non-existing, delayed, past (mountain).

In emotions lake covers love, mountain covers grief (loss of love). Love amplified gets into context replacement (lake) and shares space with anger (heaven). grief amplified leads into learning from suffering and so discernment (quality control).

Going back to school is not too difficult but you will have to put up with being different, age wise and maybe not fitting into too well.
But your question was "should I", like in is it a sensible thing to do? I don't know how old you are but will it help you in the long run or will it be a waste of time and achieve nothing concrete? If it is full time education then you should think real careful before committing yourself. Studying spare time or at night is the more sensible thing to do and less of a strain.
Hex 38 is about opposition and misunderstandings, so I would presume that there are certain factors suggesting that it is not a good idea to go back to school, it speaks of estrangement. You seem like a person who is self assured who has the ability to complete the course and is interested in long term success but is going back to school the right way to achieve your aims, there are alternatives?
This hex says success in small matters but going back to school full time is not a small matter, rather it is quite a major thing to do, so I think that in the long term full time school is not a good idea.

rara said:

I asked the oracle if I should go back to school and i got hexagram 38. I'm not sure if this means yes or no. Can anyone help?

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Nope, I can't help. All I can do is throw you back on your own resources. See, Hex 38 says that viewpoints or energies are polarized, they're pulling in different directions. And then you say: "I'm not sure if this means yes or no." Which means that *you* are polarized on this issue. I mean, if you really wanted to go back to school, or if you really wanted to do anything except go back to school, you never would have consulted the oracle, right? You would have known what you wanted, and you would have arranged your life accordingly. All the Yi is telling you here is that you're of two minds on this issue. The Yi isn't going to make your mind up for you; you have to do that yourself. Which is what I meant when I talked about throwing you back on your own resources.

Okay, maybe I can help a bit. It's my experience that when the Yi does this, when it gives you an answer that just reflects your state of mind but doesn't really answer your question, it's saying to you something like this: "You're right. You know what your state of mind is. But I'm not going to tell you what to do, because the best thing you can do in this situation is make your own decision. You'll be okay whatever decision you take, but it's important that you learn how to make your own decision, going through the work of examining all your thoughts and feelings about this before you decide. Good luck."

Cuz unless there's more to this situation than you've outlined here, it looks like a case of classic indecision. And what I've got to say is the same as what I think the Yi is saying: 'good luck'.

Do you think the pairs were just placed in a random order, Chris?

rosada said:

Do you think the pairs were just placed in a random order, Chris?

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Sorry to butt-in, but could someone please elucidate for me the reasoning behind the King Wen arrangement of the Hexagrams?

Rara,
You might get a clearer answer if you asked 'is it time to go back to school?"

Best regards.

KgW

rosada said:

Do you think the pairs were just placed in a random order, Chris?

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Certainly not.

See this diagram and comments at the bottom:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/btree.png

as well as:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/cracked.html

The use of self-referencing a dichotomy guarantees pairing. BUT any sequence of hexagrams other than that derived from the natural self-referencing of yin/yang is DERIVED and so SPECIALIST - and that includes the traditional sequence.

See comments etc in http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/icmatrix.html

Not only can we pair any hexagram with any other (and so focus on some specialist sequence), but we can even consider differences in order reflecting differences in sequence.

YOUR perspective as a newbie with a traditionalist perspective (and so following Wilhelm) covers a specialist perspective, a derived perspective. The binary order is not derived, it unfolds naturally from self-referencing.

If we take a pair randomly then it will reflect meaning but lack context until we see the sequence that that pair belongs to. For the binary the core dichotomy is qualities of 01/02 (yang/yin). For the traditional it seems to cover 01/64 in that the poles of the sequence indicate the derivation dichotomy.

There are sequences than are man-made i.e. through placement, and so not reflecting pairs that form into quartets that form into octets etc. You can detect this by folding back a sequence to bring out consistancy in meaning.

Chris.

magictortoise said:

Rara,
You might get a clearer answer if you asked 'is it time to go back to school?"

Best regards.

KgW

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How can you get a clearer answer than "No"?

Hi WF

The issue is...

rara said:

I'm not sure if this means yes or no.

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Even in your comment, you couldn't give a clear ans absolute "no" for answer.

Best

Rara,

In your post you stated that you weren't certain if the reply meant yes or no. That is what I am responding to. And I don't read the posts of others before I reply.

Best regards,

Ken Wanamaker

rara said:

I asked the oracle if I should go back to school and i got hexagram 38.
I'm not sure if this means yes or no.

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Hi rara

If You need a yes or no answer, then throw a coin. To me hexagram 38 means:

There can't be two suns on the sky at the same time (danish proverb)

This indicate, that You have a conflict in your mind between two wishes. The I Ching hexagram advice You to make
both wishes conscious. Then You have a better chance of picking the right choice compared to throwing a coin.