Hilary Barrett, I Ching

There’s a much-quoted passage from Wang Bi’s General Remarks on the Zhouyi about concepts and images:
“Images are the means to express ideas. …The images are generated by ideas, thus one can ponder the images and so observe what the ideas are. The ideas are yielded up completely by the images, and the images are made [...]

Do you cast a reading for the year? For many years now, I’ve cast mine on my birthday – I’m lucky to have a birthday in early December, so there’s plenty of time for the reading to start to sink in during the depths of winter. Winter is an utterly natural time for introspection: the [...]

Ah – experience. People phone me up to say they’d like an interpretation from someone who has more of the stuff. We gather it in journals (and Change Circle’s WikiWing); it crystallises into a clear inner sense of what lines and hexagrams mean; it’s worth more than any 20 commentaries put together… so naturally I [...]

One of the meanings of Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, is being ‘covered over’, like a young animal whose mother hides it in the undergrowth. This means you can’t see as far as you’d like to, something which people tend to find frustrating – and yet the image of the young creature in the undergrowth, to [...]

A while ago, I received an email politely suggesting I stop referring to the Yi simply as ‘Yi’ without an article. The writer maintained that since the oracle is ‘not a person’, it would be better not to give it a ‘pet name’; this was not good English usage when talking about a book.
I welcomed [...]

(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.)

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 [...]

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 [...]