Hilary Barrett, I Ching

(Where have I been since my last post? Following Yi’s guidance through the emotional minefield that is house-hunting. Still in one piece, though, and starting to see a way through.)

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Sometimes people will ask you to consult the Yijing on their behalf, or to help interpret their readings. It’s a daunting challenge (and doesn’t get any less so with experience), but at least ‘the rules’ are simple: put your own assumptions and prejudices to one side, and communicate what the oracle has to say as completely and clearly as you can.

The situation’s far less simple when you want to help someone who isn’t asking you to read for them - maybe someone who never would. You might well feel that you could be of more help if you understood better - so is it OK to ask Yi for background information the other person isn’t telling you? Is it OK to ask for advice on their behalf? There’s not much of a dividing line between seeking understanding and invading privacy - more of a broad grey area.

Yet in this grey area, I’ve found Yi to be a huge support in understanding and helping people who are living through things outside my experience. In the first place, its images help me to understand. Then they help me to listen better, because I have something to recognise. If Yi says Hexagram 47, and the person I’m talking to mentions feeling ‘imprisoned’, I ‘hear’ the whole hexagram behind their words.

Because Yi talks in the language of imagination and mental imagery, having the guidance of a reading allows you to communicate in the same language. If their world is dark and watery and draining inward, you can participate in the same landscape, and avoid the mismatches of imagery that would break the rapport.

This is a very subtle, powerful way of deepening communication - it means you can almost ‘identify with’ things you’ve never experienced, and without loading them down with your own associations. Also, the reading may show you a next step within that inner landscape, one you can introduce without becoming a well-meaning dispenser of advice that might as well come from another planet. (What if the person who feels imprisoned reaches downward and inward, what might he find in the depths? If someone is hiding their light away from a hostile world… look, the light is still shining on the inside, because you have kept it safe.)

I haven’t tended to try asking for advice for someone else. That feels unworkable to me in lots of ways - partly that people don’t tend to ask me for advice anyway (and I wouldn’t be good with the unsolicited kind), and partly because I know that if I do have a message from the oracle for someone, then I also have a huge, inescapable responsibility to pass it on. Dropping ideas into conversation as if they were my own might or might not be enough to discharge it.

Questions that have worked well:

• “How can I help?”
• “What role can I play, for the greatest good of all?”
• “What do I need to understand about X?” (”What do I need to understand?” is fast becoming my favourite question.)
• “What does X need from me now?”

Yi’s been reminding me of hexagram 2 lately. It’s my ‘hexagram for the year’, unchanging, so I have the opportunity to see it from the inside - after seeing it through my mother’s example a few years ago. 

One of the biggest changes in my life this year is going to be moving house, and owning a home for the first time. (No more trying to fit our lives around the landlord’s furniture!)  Hexagram 2’s ‘peaceful constancy’ is fitting here: the character for ‘peaceful’ shows a woman under a roof. Quite.

Naturally, as we start looking, I’m talking with Yi a lot. I tried to start out systematically, by narrowing down the area to look in, asking ‘what would it be like to live there?’ questions. Something about the answers told me I wasn’t quite starting in the right place… and so I wound up asking,

‘What would be a good guiding principle to bear in mind when house-hunting?’

Yi’s response: Hexagram 2, unchanging.

… …

Hexagram 2 is where Yi first introduces the whole idea of ‘having a direction to go’:

‘The noble one has a direction to go,
At first, confusion; later, gains a lord and harvest.’

When I start looking online, there’s a confusing multitude of possibilities, not least the various different areas we could move to. As we get out on the road and look at some houses, guiding principles start to emerge - and they’re not necessarily the ones that made sense ‘in theory’.

One aspect of Hexagram 2 that’s being brought home to me now: the importance of being in motion. A ‘direction’ literally has to do with sounding out a ford with a stick, trying out possible routes. It means having a good imaginative vision of the objective, yes, but not just sitting and theorising about it. I need to get going!

I once heard a motivational speaker type talk about how guided missiles only become guided missiles after launch, when countless little nudges that keep them on course to reach their target. The same is true of the mare, whose constancy bears fruit: she is sensitive to guidance as she runs.

(Sometimes I’m working through my notes and some small thing comes into focus. Here’s one of them.)

Hexagram 28 is ‘Great Overstepping’: the time of ‘overstepping the mark’ or ’stepping over the line’, when the weight of things goes beyond what the structure can support, and the ridgepole begins to warp under the strain.

Often, we experience this simply as stress: the camel who very much hopes that there will be no more straws added to her burden. Sometimes it represents another form of ‘overload’ or ‘excess’: it can be a hexagram of death, that ‘great stepping over’ when spirit exceeds the capacity of the body to contain it. It’s part of the extraordinary nature of Yi that it offers a pure model of a configuration of energy - the greatness at the centre, the inadequacy of the framework - that we can recognise in anything from death to an electrical surge triggering the circuit breaker.

Another thing that all ‘Great Overstepping’ situations have in common: a sense that there must be movement in response. It’s ‘fruitful to have a direction to go,’ and indeed it feels impossible not to move.

So… with the roof about to fall in, what happens at 28, line 1, as the inner imperative to act makes itself felt for the first time? When Great Overstepping meets Deciding (Hexagram 43), and the message comes through loud and clear that there is danger, and ‘making do’ will not do?

‘For the offering mat, use white thatchgrass.
No mistake.’

Thatch grass - a wrapping for ceremonial offerings, a cushioning mat for sacred vessels: an image of taking great care on a very fine scale. This is not, in any way, an image of running around with ladders and scaffolding and Doing Something.

Why not?

As far as I know, Bradford Hatcher, in his exceptional Book of Changes (finally available in printed form), is the only one to suggest that there’s a joke here:

“One is cushioning one’s valuables from below, but it’s the roof which is about to come down. This line is about acting upon misplaced caution, as its fan yao, 43.1, is about misplaced incaution or vigor. This could be similar in meaning to our more modern ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’.”

That’s certainly a possibility worth considering. And yet… it’s been my experience that when Yi says ‘No mistake’, it generally means this quite straightforwardly. Often, it needs to mention that something is ‘not a mistake’ because we’re naturally inclined to think that it must be one. I believe that’s the case here; it certainly fits with my experience of the line.

The Dazhuan, the Great Treatise, quotes the Master on this line:

“It does well enough simply to place something on the floor. But if one puts white rushes underneath, how could that be a mistake? This is the extreme of caution. Rushes in themselves are worthless, but they can have a very important effect. If one is as cautious as this in all that one does, one remains free of mistakes.”

(Wilhelm/Baynes translation)

Rushes in themselves are worthless - and with the roof creaking ominously overhead, the care you’re taking may seem absurd and pointless. But what you’re taking care of in this way is important, and so this is ‘no mistake.’

To use white thatchgrass marks out what you are attending to as special, as worthy of this ‘excessive’ care. It could be that Hexagram 43 hints at what could be so special: a jade token of parting from the old, a message brought, a decision in process. Wrapping this up as an offering is a way to ensure that these human actions ‘cross the threshold’ and connect with the spirits, finding their counterpart in the larger reality.

I wrote before about how Yi can be a vehicle for instantaneous change, through an image that immediately transforms your experience. On the call last Sunday, we discussed these and other ‘vehicles for change’, and four other ways that the Yijing fosters personal transformation.

(If you missed the call, you can pick up the call notes and recording from the Friends’ Area - and if you’re not yet a member, you can join here, for free.)

The effect of a ‘vehicle for change’ tends to be an immediate change of perception and experience. One moment your inner space is just hollowed out and empty, the next it’s a Well. One moment you’re a hero battling the odds, the next you notice that you’re a ram that’s charged valiantly into an unyielding hedge. (Most disconcerting.)

I think this is basically how Yi works its transformations, opening one new window at a time on the larger reality. Certainly, a few years of having one’s most-cherished personal heroic stories skillfully debunked (did I mention the disconcerting part?) tends to foster self-awareness, and a certain readiness to question comfortable assumptions. 

I think there’s more going on here, though. When we cast our coins or sort our beads or stalks, we’re initiating a conversation with what is. We connect, at some level, with the truth of ourselves and the situation. We start to bring our choices into resonance with this: because we’re quite often moved to consult at a moment of decision, whatever awareness we can develop will also be translated into action.

In an ideal world, this can anchor us into a kind of virtuous cycle of authenticity: acting in resonance with truth, as your own self; having the experience of being in resonance; changing the way you act as a result.

Of course, that’s the ideal world. It’s also possible, with some ingenuity, to use divination as a way to prop up the usual assortment of delusions - though I think that gets harder and harder the more you learn about interpreting the answers.

Here… this is what I’m trying to express:

“This is how I define God: a felt sense of the interconnectedness of everything to everything else, and the subtle harmony that runs through it all. And the “felt” part is what I want to talk about here.

Things are interconnected whether you feel it or not. And that field of interconnectivity is there whether you sense it or not, whether you want it to be or not, just like gravity is there whether you pay attention to it or not.

So why does it matter to cultivate that inner sense of connection with that web of harmony and flow? What difference does it make?

It matters because there is subtle information that makes life much smoother, that is only accessible through your internal connection to that Interconnectedness.”

That’s the opening of a beautiful blog post by Emma McCreary at ‘Tao of Prosperity’. After explaining how God is like playing Guitar Hero, she goes on to ask, ‘How do you listen?’ Consulting the Yijing would be one particularly focussed way of listening.

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By the way… the 2009 Yijing Class starts on Sunday. There are still some places left, and still time to join.

I just finished the handout for today’s free call on the I Ching as ‘Book of Transformations’: you’re welcome to download this in pdf format (to print out and write on) or as an editable rtf file. Do get yourself a copy even if you can’t make it to the live call; there will be a recording available in the Friends’ Area later.

The call starts at 7pm UK time, that’s 11am Pacific time. You can participate by phone - dial (001) 801-717-1157 and use the conference ID 447495# - or you can listen online, here. (You can still participate by typing questions and comments into the ‘Q&A’ box on the call page.)

This is the final free call before this year’s Yijing Class starts on the 17th - and also the last one before the ‘early bird’ discount expires on Tuesday 12th. So if this class is something you might be interested in, please have a look at the details soonish and if you have questions, ask me…

Hope to speak in a few hours’ time!

I’m running a free call this Sunday (10th) about the I Ching as ‘book of transformations’. This is all part of the preparations for this year’s I Ching Class: I’m trying to use the free calls to give a flavour of what it’s about, as well as some practical suggestions and techniques you can take away and use.

This call’s about divination beyond fortune-telling. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the I Ching can’t predict the future, because ‘can’t’ turns out to be a remarkably silly word to use of this oracle. (Also, it can - I’ve seen it happen.) I’m saying that this isn’t the true value of it - in a way, it’s a distraction. “I Ching” translates into English as “Change Book”, and change happens in the present moment. 

To start looking at this on a small scale - because this is how the I Ching works, one question and one (usually small and subtle) inner shift at a time - 

On the face of it, it’s obvious how consulting with the I Ching can bring about change. You ask for advice -

“What would be a good approach here?”
“How can I achieve that?”
“How can I cope with this?”

 - and you receive it. The answer contains suggestions for ways to act that you’d never imagined, or that you hadn’t quite had the confidence to try; you try them; the situation changes; so do you.

But I doubt the I Ching would have been quite so popular for the past 3,000 years if its answers only gave advice. Advice, after all, is of limited usefulness:

“‘How can I possibly cope with this hugely stressful situation?”
“Stay calm.”

Well, gosh, thanks, why didn’t I think of that?

Advice - especially advice about making inward changes - inevitably tends to be abstract. There is no world shortage of this kind of thing.

(In fact, ‘simplified versions’ of the I Ching - you know, the ones that scrupulously remove all that ‘difficult’ old imagery - only add to the supply. When someone tells me they’ve made an I Ching reading and been left wondering how to do what it advised, the chances are they’ve been using one of these, and never had the chance to hear what the I Ching had to say. But that’s a whole other rant…)

The I Ching’s advice comes in the form of stories to inhabit and imagery to step into. Seeing the same situation in a new image is a superb way to transform the situation - starting with your experience of it, and spreading ripples of change out from there.

The I Ching is full to overflowing with mini-parables and vivid characters. You might be invited to become a crane calling her young, or a king, or an apparently-powerless second wife, or a farmer, or a suitor, or a tiger. You might get to see your situation as a tiny vignette (a ram butting a hedge, a cart’s axle coming adrift, an illness that needs no medicine), or it might be revealed as part of a great mythic arc. It’s possible to talk about what these things represent - but not to reduce them to that.

To take an example I might have shared before… that “How can I possibly cope?” question. I asked that one at a time when I’d been congratulating myself on how well I was handling all the stressors - until just one more arrived, and the camel’s back broke with a resounding crack. I felt exhausted, hollowed out, with nothing left to cope with even one more thing. So I subsided to the floor, grabbed the beads, and asked Yi how I was meant to cope.

Yi said:

This overturned my whole way of thinking - the idea that I had my own resources to draw on, and now they’d run out. The inner resource, said Yi, had not gone anywhere - in fact, it could not be diminished. The only question was whether I was reaching it.

That’s basically what I learned from the reading - but only a pale reflection of what I received. There was an abrupt, complete change in how I experienced that inner hollowness and darkness (a well is a deep, dark pit…) - that is, my physical awareness of my own emotions changed. And so my way of responding also changed, on some indescribable energetic level.

So… that’s one way (of many) that the Change Book sparks and nurtures change. More examples, and some suggestions on how to tap into this kind of potential, will be in Sunday’s call: here are the details.

There’ll also be time on the call for me to answer questions about the I Ching and how to work with it as a ‘Book of Transformations’. Please could you send me your question in now? That way I can fit it into the call and include it in the handout. Post your question in the comments, or use the Q&A box on the call page. 

Thanks!