PS. What a nice website you have?

Lisa – I’m not sure what more I could put into words. Yes, it was certainly an affirmation that the strength was (always) there – but it also interfaced in some strange way with my physical experience of the emotion, and changed that. That was the experience I was trying to convey – that there’s more to the reading than just its content of ideas.

Would you be willing to go into more detail about *how* 48 unchanging changed your reaction to the stressful situation and enabled you to cope? Did you maybe see it as an affirmation that you really did have the inner strength you needed?

I suspect if I’d gotten the same reading in a similar context I would have seen it as the sort of shallow, not-terribly-useful advice as “stay calm” – i.e., “dig deep.”

Either that, or I would have focused on the negative aspects: “…breaking one’s clay jug, Pitfall.” It may have even seemed like Yi was yelling at me for losing it!

It seems unreasonable that the same 64 hexagrams apply equally well to details that change in a breath as to the sweeping changes worked in us over a lifetime. So my question is, “Which scale of changes is Yi best suited for?” For example, emotional questions come and go quite quickly — over in an hour or two; whereas political questions may take years to formulate, talk through, become the consensus view and finally be allowed to happen.

Of course, that begs the questions of (a) contexts (What range of contexts are most appropriate?) and (b) historicity (Would that be the contexts the words were written for, or does Yi work in the (eternal) Present Moment?). But then its always easier to come up with questions than the answers, isn’t it?

They did say some remarkable things about the nature of Yi, though…

Opening the book at random:

“Yi, being aligned with heaven and earth,
can wholly set forth the dao of heaven and earth.
Yi looks up to observe the patterns of heaven,
and looks down to examine the veins of earth.
Thus:
it knows the causes of darkness and light, origins and ends;
it comprehends the meaning of birth and death,
how form and essence fuse in an entity,
lasting until the soul departs in alternation.”

(Richard Rutt’s translation, from his Zhouyi.)

I think I’m going to re-read .

The Yijing says: ““The Changes illumine the past and interpret the future. They disclose that which is hidden and open that which is dark. They distinguish things by means of suitable names. Then, when the right words and decisive judgments are added, everything is complete.””

Tthe authors of the Yijing, what can they know about the REAL value of the Yijing?