Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Over in the quaintly-named ‘Basics’ section of GreatVessel.com, there’s an enticing article on The Voices of the Lines. As with most of Stephen Karcher’s ideas nowadays, I find I need to take small portions and chew them over well, not try to swallow it all at once. (When you’ve digested that article, try part II.) [...]

This year I’m giving myself Fridays off. I don’t seem to get appreciably less work done this way than when I was staring at the computer 5 1/2 days a week, and I’m rediscovering some good things – books, for instance. Today we went up to the British Museum – in theory, to see the [...]

The fifth line of Hexagrm 45, Gathering, reads: ‘Gathering, has a position. No mistake. No truth at all. From the source, ever-flowing constancy. Regrets vanish.’ How can your position in the gathering be ‘no mistake’ if it’s altogether without truth or trust? I picked up Anyway by Kent Keith, author of the paradoxical commandments, and [...]

… as a source of political insight. Suzi Gablik thought it a good source. (She asked about the meaning of the 9/11 attacks and received 15.6.) Her correspondent reacted as if she’d committed blasphemy against the jealous divinity of social science, or something. And Virgil the alligator commented on all this with his customary wit [...]

Someone emailed me recently to say that the written instructions for the yarrow method were too complex, and was there a video she could watch? I said no, sorry, and suggested that if she took it step by step a few times she’d soon get into the rhythm of the thing. Since then I’ve found [...]

Some hexagrams – like 29 – seem to derive much of their meaning from their component trigrams. Some – like 27 – seem to derive it in the first place from the picture made by the lines themselves. Hexagram 27 looks like jaws; Hexagram 21 looks as though an obstacle’s been placed between the teeth [...]

The Wing of the I Ching describing the Sequence of Hexagrams, the Xugua, generally has a laconic style, sometimes saying scarcely more than, ‘this hexagram is bound to follow from that one.’ But there’s an exception to this when you arrive at Hexagram 31, Influence. This is the first hexagram of the Lower Canon, and [...]