A variation on this ‘just an oracle’ idea (…I think this post is going to become an all-purpose rant…) is that since divination is so self-evidently shallow, the wise ancients couldn’t possibly have been interested in it. So it’s said or implied that the Yi isn’t really an oracle, or at all events not merely for divination.

Well… brief review of the history… the Yi was written as an oracle. Texts were joined with hexagrams because hexagrams are something you can cast – something that directly emerges from the quality of the time and embodies it.

I believe this is why people have been fascinated with the book for the past few millennia: not so much because of any ancient concepts it contains as because a cast hexagram, or the relationship and tension between two hexagrams, has this power to describe and embody present truth. (And because of this it has a unique power to breathe life into concepts we come up with long after it was originally written – not least the pairing of yin and yang.)

Yi, the oracle called Change, is still doing what it has been doing for 3,000 years or so: helping people to see reality. It helps ordinary people to see and think differently as they navigate their ordinary lives.

My most recent reading is a pretty good example of that. For a while now, I’ve been trying to build some relationships with other bloggers and practitioners online. I’ve been searching out people to follow and trying to think of something worthwhile to say in response to their posts, and I haven’t really created any momentum at all. So I asked Yi for advice, and received hexagram 1, line 3:

‘Noble one creates and creates to the end of the day,
At nightfall on the alert, as if in danger.
No mistake.’

From this I can glean a couple of practical hints: work harder, and be on the alert later in the day (which makes sense, because nightfall for me is prime working hours for the American people I want to connect with). It also completely reverses my whole idea of what this is about: following and trying to respond is the stuff of hexagram 2 – Earth, the Receptive – and I’ve received hexagram 1, the Creative. Create, create!

So here I am this morning writing a post instead of searching for a place to comment… and you might be thinking that when writing a rant about the non-trivial nature of divination, I could have found a better reading to use as illustration. Well, yes… and no.

This is not the obviously life-changing kind of reading. Most readings most people do are not. They just allow us to understand ourselves and one another a little better, to see things from another point of view, to notice the current of things so we can spend a little less effort struggling against it, to liberate a little more of our potential. We might end up choosing a better car or having a more skilful conversation with a colleague.

There is something disconcerting about this, isn’t there?

From the Dazhuan as translated by Richard Rutt:

“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 till the soul departs in alternation.
Thus:
it knows the condition of spirits and souls.
Being in accord with heaven and earth,
it does not go contrary to them;
its knowledge embraces all things,
and its dao assists all under heaven.
Thus it does not err.”

And Yi is also really helpful when I need to rethink my approach to social media.

This is not an easy gulf to bridge, between the greatness of the Yi and the trivia of readings. Only… if I divine about trivia, does that make divination trivial?

Here is what I have found still more powerful in readings than the help and insight they offer: the immediate experience of connection, of being part of the whole. You ask a question, you do something wholly random… and suddenly, something is speaking directly to you. You find you are seen and acknowledged; you might burst into laughter or tears in response. There’s a sense of wonder and belonging at the same time. Just an oracle.

For instance… the notion of ‘bad hexagrams’ (12, 29, 23, 47, maybe 51, 39…), and the notion of ‘problem cards’. Hopefully we learn early on not to take a literal-minded approach to interpreting these, fearing that Hexagram 29/ the Death card mean someone’s going to die, and so on. (Bradford Hatcher’s ‘positive and negative hexagrams‘ thread helps.) We learn a sense of proportion (47 might mean ten years of black depression, or it might mean you can’t get out of your parking space after work); we learn to pay attention to the actual content of a reading – the imagery, the advice, the dynamics of it – rather than ignoring the whole lot and rushing to the ‘good’/'bad’ omen.

To me, those – the sense of proportion, paying attention to the whole reading – are the basics. Reading Rachel Pollack’s blog, it occurs to me that maybe we can go beyond them.

She compares tarot’s ‘problem cards’ to the Furies, which rise up out of the ground to hunt those who ‘break primal laws’ (interesting thought in itself). Although in the end they are turned to positive purpose by Athena, who makes them into guardians of the city, this does not make them ‘safe’. And this is an important point about ominous readings: however ‘mature’ our approach to them, they are still ominous and untamed; it doesn’t help to bounce glibly to a ‘nice’ version. She gives the example of the Death card, and ‘Death-of-the-old-self’. I suppose a Yijing equivalent might be 23, and ‘stripping away the old, dead things that are no longer of any use, clearing space for new life.’ Yes, this is true, and the loss is going to hurt. (Except for the sage, perhaps: I think that for the sage, the loss doesn’t hurt, like erosion doesn’t hurt a mountain.)

So Rachel suggests a process of exploring the fearsome cards through tarot-inspired reflection. This is something I think we can borrow from here in Yi-land.

To start with, identify the gua that are frightening to you: they’re not the same for everyone. See exactly what it is about them that’s frightening.

(An example for me: Hexagram 29, for all I know it is a journey of the ‘connected heart’, commitment, learning, leaps of faith… , still comes with a fear of drowning. Yi’s used it for me several times to indicate the onset of winter depression, and I’m certainly afraid of that: being sucked down into depths where I might never reach the bottom, might never escape. So yes… 29, beautiful but still scary hexagram…)

Rachel suggests asking a series of questions about your Fury-card, and drawing other cards from the pack to answer them. What the card asks of you, for instance, or what lies beneath it, and also what justice it calls for. This is the moment where I don’t feel I can ‘follow along’ with Yi: partly because the Yijing doesn’t really lend itself to a group of mini-readings like this, but also because the Yi may have answers to some of these questions built into its structure.

For instance – the question, ‘What lies underneath it?’
There are various kinds of ‘underneath’ available in Yi. There’s the previous hexagram in the Sequence, showing you in simple terms where it came from. (You fall into the depths of 29 after your supporting structure is overloaded in 28.) There’s also the ‘ideal’ or ‘earlier heaven’ hexagram, found by locating the component trigrams of your hexagram in the Later Heaven bagua, and replacing them with the trigrams from the same positions in the Early Heaven bagua. (For Hexagram 29 that reveals an underlying ‘ideal form’ of Hexagram 2. So original form of the Repeating Chasms, and/or the ideal mindset to have when experiencing it, is one of earth, receptivity and willingness. I’d need some time to think about that one…)

‘What does it ask of me?’
Here I’d suggest looking at the nuclear hexagram. That can show you the inner work a hexagram is doing. At its heart, Hexagram 29 asks that I find balanced, reciprocal ways to be Nourished (27).

‘What justice does the situation demand?’
Hm… thinking of justice as the restoration of balance and wholeness… how about looking at the complementary hexagram?

These are – obviously! – not a tried and tested recipe, just some initial ideas for exploring further into bad negative hexagrams that are hard to enjoy. I’d be inclined to use some combination of these structural relationships alongside a single, wide open personal reading, maybe along the lines of, ‘How can I best relate to this gua?’

Thoughts?

But actually deciding to skip the second hexagram often comes of getting stuck on the idea that it’s a ‘resulting hexagram’ that shows the future. This leads to readings with a supposed internal logic: obey first hexagram, follow advice of lines, reach second hexagram. The logic is incredibly neat, tidy and easily explained – so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that in real readings with the Yijing, it often makes No Sense Whatsoever.

Follow the advice of the perfectly pleasant line from this perfectly pleasant hexagram and you too can land in this remarkably unpleasant-sounding hole (58.1). Incur this hideous misfortune and then you arrive somewhere good (23.4). In an attempt to keep things straight, you wind up reasoning that if you like the second hexagram, you can reach it by doing what the lines say. Or maybe by not doing what the lines say, if they’re ill-omened. And if you don’t like the second hexagram and wouldn’t want to reach it, maybe you can avoid it by following (or not following) the advice of the lines? And then if the advice of the lines, that either does or doesn’t lead to the ‘resulting’ hexagram, goes in two (or three) opposing directions at once… well, then you might be forgiven for no longer looking at the second hexagram at all.

And this isn’t a disaster – it doesn’t ‘break’ the oracle. (It’s proven pretty shatter-proof so far.) Looking just at the cast hexagram and moving lines, you’ll get a direct answer to your question, an immediate picture of the situation you’re asking about coupled with some ‘you are here’ signs in the lines. This will give you something to take away and act on – so it’s enough for the Change Book to do its job.

But coming at this from the other end… quite often, having worked on someone’s reading, I find it comes naturally to present it to them by starting with the second, relating hexagram. (Naturally if I’m working with someone new to the Yi I explain first that we’re starting ‘zoomed out’ and will ‘zoom in’ to the crux of the answer later.) I do this because it’s the part of the reading people most often recognise. This is the part of the reading where you get to see yourself: it’s where you stand in relation to everything that’s going on, or what you aspire to or fear, or the direction you’ve pointed yourself in, or what this whole chapter in your life is about.

As that little list illustrates, this way of approaching the relating hexagram doesn’t lend itself to tidy logical formulas, applicable to every reading. It’s more of a cue for things to look for as you start to find yourself in the reading. (Come to think of it, this is probably another reason why people are inclined to ditch the second hexagram altogether – they don’t get on well with this kind of un-pin-down-able vagueness.) The most useful general formula I’ve found is that the relating hexagram embodies what it’s about for you.

And that’s why I’ve found that the relating hexagram is where people most often recognise themselves. I start to talk about the relating hexagram and they say, ‘Yes, you’re talking about me.’ (This is also a reason to use the individual zhi gua of each line, by the way, and the fan yao within it.) From this sense of recognition comes any ability to engage with the reading at all. Without it, you just have an eminently forgettable shopping list of advice.

Another, related reason why I appreciate the relating hexagram: it provides context, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ to go with the primary hexagram’s ‘what’. As well as opening the door to ‘aha!’ moments and deep changes, this also enables me to answer people’s questions about their readings and show how it hangs together.

Take the example I gave above – 23 line 4,
‘Stripping the bed by way of the flesh.
Pitfall.’
which points you towards Hexagram 35, Advancing. Looking at a lot of past readings with that (and probably also the fan yao) in mind, I settled on this commentary for my book:

“The ‘pruning’ process goes too far; it cuts away not only support and security, but even living flesh.

This is a danger when you only see the situation in ‘positive’ terms, always looking for ways to get the best possible outcome. When you place too much emphasis on a narrow definition of ‘success’, you become blind to the harm you could do.”

LiSe was way ahead of me on this, naturally. Here’s what she has for my other example above, 58.1 illuminated by 47:

“Initial 9 : Harmonious exchange, auspicious.
Inner contentment, not needing anything from outside, is the base of freedom. You find your power within yourself. Making a true and good contact with others is only possible when this inner freedom exists.”

None of this exactly makes it easier to understand why people sometimes don’t get anything from the relating hexagram – not even if they’ve read Karcher (who coined the term ‘relating hexagram’ and from whom I learned this way of reading) or otherwise come across the idea that it is a ‘relating’ hexagram. So still puzzled, I asked Yi:

“What’s going on when people don’t recognise or get anything from the relating hexagram?”

On reflection – you know, the kind of reflection I’m always saying is better done before divining? – that’s a fairly hopelessly presumptuous question. What are the chances that the exact same thing is always ‘going on’ for everyone who doesn’t get it? Still… the answer was so interesting I wanted to share it anyway: 52, Stilling, changing at the third line to 23, Stripping Away.

‘Stilling your waist,
Dividing your back,
Danger smothers the heart.’

‘How can I do this?’
‘What’s my best path?’
‘What if I try this?’
(Or ‘What if I commit to this?’ – which can yield a radically different answer.)

Lately, though, I’ve been asking more questions along the lines of,

‘What to be aware of here?’
‘What’s going on with this?’
‘What do I need to understand?’

I ask these in the hope that the answer will also show me something of how I can be here (wherever ‘here’ is) in a well-adapted way. And they do: I’ve been getting some hugely helpful answers from Yi, that say in effect: ‘Here’s what’s going on, here’s where you are, so to live here to the full, to navigate it, be like this.’

A tiny example… I was confronting something that always intimidates me, for no good reason that I could see, so I asked – what goes on here, with me and this thing? (And I was certainly hoping the answer would give me some idea how to be less inadequate about it.)

Yi’s answer: Hexagram 29, unchanging. After a moment, I realised this told me very exactly what it was and how to be. These were chasms to learn, and if I held my heart fast, movement would bring honour. (I got on and did the intimidating thing, and it went well.) Very direct, very immediate – a kind of instruction manual for the psyche in the moment.

Also… this kind of reading can create some compassion and patience for oneself. Chasms? OK, maybe it’s not quite so pathetic to be frightened. Or – demon country? OK, maybe my efforts here deserve a bit more respect, and maybe it’d help to adjust my expectations about how long it might take to change this particular pattern. I think this sense of compassionate recognition is one of the greatest gifts Yi offers.

If what I was saying the other day is right, and readings fundamentally bring about change through awareness – more than through advice or resolution – then what kind of reading is going to make the biggest difference? Should ‘what to be aware of?’ be the default question?

It’s also potentially tricky, that mix of getting started with overwhelming emotion. Easy to get tangled up in doing reading after reading that isn’t really helping you at all, without even noticing. And this is a shame, because readings can and will help: Yi offers clearer insight and more complete understanding (of the other person and of yourself), things that provide a stronger foundation for that relationship you’re building.

(Note: I’m writing this article assuming you’re asking about a man, because writing s/he all the way through feels silly. It’s all just as true if you’re asking about a woman.)

So, how to start?

First, start with one reading. Read everything it says, together with your question, and allow yourself time to understand. Sleep on it. Ask for help if you need it. Think about what difference this answer makes – how you’ll respond to it, whether there are things you’ll change.

Yes, it is very tempting to ask questions in dozens so you can get all the answers at once, clarify everything and leave no shred of doubt. Problem… it doesn’t work. You bounce about between your dozen or two dozen answers and don’t have the time or focus to take any of them in, let alone respond to them.

(Tip: there are online readings, like the one at this site, that make it quick and easy to ask. They do give genuine readings; Yi isn’t fussy. Nonetheless, for your first few readings, I strongly recommend you get pen and paper and three coins and cast your own hexagram. It’ll give you a much better understanding of what you’re looking at and how it fits together, and the time it takes makes it much easier not to ask your next 23 questions.)

Starting with one reading means you start with one question. It’s never hard to think of one (or thirty) in these situations, but some lead to much more helpful readings than others.

Not-so-helpful questions

Basically, any question designed to make things emotionally safe for you before you take any risks (or any more risks) counts as not-so-helpful, because it’s trying to achieve the impossible.

I can think of a couple of ‘making it safe first’ questions…

There’s,
‘What will happen?’ and ‘Is this meant to be?’

What will happen depends on what you choose and what he chooses. ‘What will happen if I…?’ is a better start to a question, because it recognises your choice. But he still chooses freely, also, and will not be tied down by an oracle. ‘What difference will it make if I…?’ is a more lucid kind of question here.

And there’s,
‘How does he feel about me?’
with its friends, ‘Why is he doing this? What did he mean by that? And why isn’t he calling me?’

This is a radically unhelpful question in a whole lot of ways.

Does he want you to know the answer to this? And if he doesn’t, is it at all reasonable to expect Yi to help you to spy on his inner life?

If you can in fact spy on his inner life, and he’s confused and his feelings keep changing, all this is going to show in the reading. It is not going to be easy to understand. Also, it is not necessarily going to be true tomorrow.

It is hugely, terrifyingly hard to interpret these readings objectively. It’s excruciatingly easy to respond instead by building a fantasy relationship-castle out of a string of readings, with each question based on a misinterpretation of the reading before. What you end up with has nothing to do with the reality – and yet it is strangely addictive. It’s always easier to ask another question – fitting the curtains and carpets in your imaginary castle – rather than actually going and talking to the man himself.

And on that subject – substituting readings for communication does not make for a good relationship. If you’re in a relationship with someone and can’t ask what they mean or how they feel, then a better question to ask might be ‘What can I do to help us to communicate better?’

Come to that… substituting obsessive speculation about what he feels for becoming conscious of your own present desires and choices? “If I knew what he felt, I’d know what I can safely let myself feel”? Also doesn’t tend to work. If only.

And finally, it’s surprisingly hard to ask a clear, unambiguous question about this. For instance, is ‘how does he feel about me?’ meant to give you a picture of his emotional state? Or of how you appear when seen through his eyes? This is not something you want to be trying to work out after casting the reading, believe me.

Questions that help

A possible first question (remembering that you’re starting with just the one) might be,
‘What kind of relationship could we create here? What’s the potential?‘

It’s true that this is perilously close to asking, ‘What will happen?’ The difference is the awareness behind the question. You know that the relationship is something you and he will create; you know there is no stone tablet with your relationship future carved into it, ready for Yi to download for you. Still, some relationships are just never likely to get far, some people are not what they seem; Yi can help you to avoid disasters. Also, spending time with one of these responses gives you a chance to discover how you feel about that potential.

A useful question in an ongoing relationship – asking how he feels.

?

Yes, I do remember the first half of this post. But these readings can actually be helpful when you’ve already asked questions about yourself, and when you’re in an existing relationship (by which I mean one that any outside observer would recognise as a relationship!) and having problems. Yi can help you to see how things look to him, so that you can listen better when you talk.

‘What do I need to understand about…?’
or
‘How does this look to him?’
can be helpful. You do still need to be absolutely clear about what you’re asking – to see him through Yi-eyes, or to see through his eyes. Is either possible? Will you understand what you see anyway? There are no guarantees – but you can at least avoid the hideous muddle of not knowing what you’re interpreting.

If you’re not sure whether it’s right to ask, you might start with a question like, ‘What difference would it make to talk with Yi about x?’

Anything that’s about you, here and now

These are the ones we forget to ask, and – of course –  they’re the ones that can make most difference.

Try,
‘What’s going on with me here?’ (for instance ‘what’s up with how I react when he does that again?’) This is good to know.

Or try, as I was saying, ‘What difference would it make if I…?’
(But only if you are willing and ready to do that thing now, and not just castle-building! The reality of your intentions does reflect in the reading.)

Possibly the most helpful question to start with is just to ask for advice.
‘What’s the best attitude to take to this relationship?’
‘How to be with this?’

You may even find that’s all you really wanted to know.

I just wanted to add that this makes it worthwhile to respond to readings in a very simple, child-like way. If your readings keep talking about horses, and you’re not sure how to make sense of that – don’t. Go and talk with some horses instead. (The only word of Horse I know is ‘hello’, said by blowing down your nostrils – but it goes a surprisingly long way.)

Puzzling over 40 line 4? Grab strongly, make a fist, then release your thumb, and pay attention. 31.1? Calls for toe-wriggling, also while paying attention. When writing about 20.2 for the book, I spent time at my partly-open front door and peering through the crack, so I was sure I knew what this looked like and how it felt. Hexagram 46 – climbed any hills lately? 9 – done any gardening?

Some lines (like 49.5 or 62.1) will likely require more imagination for you to live them in this way. But none requires you to know for sure what they refer to, or ‘make sense of’ them (an overrated pastime), or anything like that, before you start. And then it’s amazing what you can learn – more or less consciously – just by playing with the image.

Sometimes, of course, they don’t. And sometimes the answer is obvious: we ask about options a and b, and like the look of option a better, and choose that. But also, sometimes, a reading sets off a whole snowballing process of change in perceptions and behaviour that plays out in some quite unexpected, startling, unquantifiable ways.

So for instance… I noticed I wasn’t working more than 5 hours in a day and this wasn’t enough to get everything done (delicate understatement here), and so I asked,

I need to work more hours in a day. Any tips on how to get from here to there?

Answer – 11.1 changing to 46. (Yes, when I wrote about 11.1 it was because I’m seeing it happening!)

I got the idea of changing one thing, any thing, one thing at a time, and the idea of opening up inner communication. I could tell I was creating a little bit of momentum, but I was still pretty frustrated with what I was actually doing each day and how easily I get distracted; I wondered how to reach the ideal of 11, how to be more like the prince of its Image.

So I tugged at another clump of thatchgrass, I asked for “Advice on how to restore flow and ease in my work, so I achieve the big things,” and received 63.3 changing to 3.

…

I could certainly recognise myself in the reading. Hexagram 63, being ‘already across’ the river and in danger of just sitting on the bank forgetting where I was going… that would be the post-book-publication let-down. Hexagram 3 is my primary hexagram for the year, and also pretty recognisable as where I actually am: very small indeed and barely beginning (to have a business, to be a diviner, to scratch the surface of what Yi has to offer).

The line that connects these two sticks a very precise ‘you are here’ pin in the map: it’s the point where I start seeing everything I’ve achieved so far, the rivers crossed and ‘kingdom’ established, as a tiny little garrison camp (see the conclusion of this article of Harmen’s) in a very big landscape.

I can also recognise the Demon Country. After thinking for just a little while about what might live there, I realised I’ve been distracting myself when faced with things I didn’t want to do since the age of about 6.

Then came a lot of thinking, writing and connecting of dots that probably only makes sense in my own head. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I realised I wanted to orient my life around a completely different kind of ‘goal’: not future targets, but present experiences. Then I realised that I’d finally got to grips with the apparent paradox of hexagram 3: how is it possible to be full of creative energy, growing vigorously, and yet without a ‘direction to go’?

And somehow, in the weeks following that reading, I find myself approximately twice as energetic and five times as focussed, and with a completely new idea of what even makes sense as a ‘goal’. It’s not some miraculously perfect overnight transformation, of course – it comes with the usual lapses into forgetfulness. (Yi does mention that it takes a while to deal with Demon Country!) I’m still thoroughly nervous about the newness of it all, still apprehensive about ‘endings, chaos’ and the path petering out, but change is happening in places that had rusted altogether solid.

It’s obvious to me that this happened because of the reading and wouldn’t have happened without it. And yet it’s extraordinarily hard to see quite what the reading did. I was already thinking about this, talking about it, asking for help… so why were the results of talking with Yi so different? Why did the thinking suddenly become productive and other people’s help suddenly become helpful? Talking with the Book of Change has meant change… and on the one hand that’s exquisitely obvious and needs no comment, and on the other hand… what really happened?

I suppose I could say it’s just a product of taking a reading seriously, and hence taking time to think and write about it. But that’s about necessary conditions for the thing to happen, not about what the thing is.

Here is a brilliant article about that thing by Eric Klein, entitled ‘What slows down change (and how to accelerate it)‘. I could happily quote half the article, but I’ll limit myself to just this bit:

“Deeper shifts rarely come from a list of tips or an instant technique.

Deeper shifts come through deepening awareness.
What I mean by deeper is really simply sustained awareness.

Just spend more time paying attention to what is true, rather than seeking ways to fix the problem. Become a deeper, sustained, student of your own habits of mind/speech/body.

The more you truly see what you’re doing – the more clearly you’ll realize “what to do differently”.
New perceptions, new actions, new choices emerge as awareness infuses fully into your mind and body. You don’t need to think of a new strategy – rather deepen your awareness of the ways in which your mind/body react habitually.

When unconscious habits are infused with awareness, they naturally transform.
Awareness is the secret to accelerating change.”

That’s how talking with Change creates change: through the awareness that comes of recognition.

It seems to happen in a few ways. For me there was the gradual process of thinking back through my life and seeing how the ‘Demon Country’ had been there for as long as I could remember. There’s the way that seeing this new picture of the distraction-habit gives me a way of relating to the distraction-habit without identifying with it. (Because trying to get a good look at something I identify with is pretty much like looking everywhere trying to find the glasses I’m wearing.)

Multiple moving lines can also be a way of doing this, of hearing your various inner voices distinctly: your intuitions say one thing, your desire for relationship says something else, your sense of competence has a whole other idea, and so on. When you’re given this portrait to look at, you no longer have to identify with any one of them.

There’s also the ‘aha’ moment, when suddenly all the lights come on. When I was looking at my 63.3 reading, getting stuck into the awkward and uncomfortable part of the interpretation around the moving line, I got distracted. Surprise. Suddenly some link in my email was far more interesting and I had to follow it right away.

Presently, I came back to the reading, and saw the fan yao looking at me:
‘Pursuing a stag with no forester,
Simply entering into the centre of the forest.
A noble one reads the subtle signs and sets this aside.
Going on: shame.’

It begins:

The magickian’s cycle is, in essence, as follow:

• Become very enthusiastic about magick
• Practice magick in a regular and dedicated fashion
• Have an crisis – either external or existential
• Sulk
• Stop practicing magick
• Rest
• Repeat

Don’t know about you, but this sounds familiar. A diviner’s cycle might go something like…

• Have some amazing readings and become very enthusiastic about Yi.
• Divine regularly with complete trust.
• Have a crisis.
• Optional additional steps: argue with book out loud, scowl at book, shout at book. Feel entirely sane.
• Sulk.
• Stop divining.
• Rest.
• Repeat.

…which is wordier, but not so different. What I’m wondering is whether what James describes as lying behind that magickian’s cycle might also be somewhere behind the one I know.

The ‘crisis’ for diviners seems to take the form of going from having readings ‘work’ for you beautifully, naturally and quite predictably, answering your questions in the way you need, to abruptly having readings make no sense to you whatsoever. It could be that questions that used to ‘work’ for you now lead to impenetrable answers; you could be left feeling that Yi’s led you completely up the garden path. Somehow, the lines of communication broke altogether. What happened?

I don’t know. It’s easiest to say that we just got out of synch, confounded the signal with too much personal noise, or too much sense of entitlement and regarding the cosmos as our personal ‘slot machine for answers’. Yet after reading James’ article (and remembering things Sparhawk wrote on the forums a few years back, here and here), I wonder whether maybe we tripped some kind of cosmic circuit breaker for our own protection.

James says that,

“The thing about magick is that it induces change – and not always the change you intend.”

and

“But over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re practising regularly and nothing much is changing in your life then you aren’t doing it right…

…well, either that or you are actually, genuinely, in harmony with the state of your life.”

And again for ‘magick’ you could read ‘divination’ quite easily. In theory there is a clear distinction between the two: one wants to change how things are, and the other wants only to discover how they are. But maybe the distinction is not quite as clear as we imagine. Certainly if you go back to the roots of ancient Chinese divination, the line between performing magic to invite good weather and divining to discover what weather you’re getting is a very blurry one. We call these things we do with coins or yarrow stalks ‘readings’, but is it really just a pure, hygienic, ‘read-only’ process?

Is the experience James describes as ‘pushing the accelerator on life’ a familiar one to you at all? I find it’s faintly echoed in my own experience when I’m doing weekly readings: it’s not that a bunch more stuff happens, necessarily, but that I find myself about ten times more awake in the midst of everything. Habit and routine become much less of a factor, and the dominant guidance system is living communication rather than auto-pilot.

But this idea that as we engage with Yi, and hence with the whole, we’re inviting more energy to flow through the contours of our own stuff, and hence we might experience a bigger, more charged version of it… that grabs me. And like I said, I wanted to see what you thought. Here’s the link again –
http://www.weirdshitnotbullshit.com/the-magickians-cycle

…divination with Yi is not particularly about getting what you want. As a wise person pointed out recently in Reading Circle, it’s not life-as-catalogue:

‘I want that person/ this experience/ that possession, so how do I get it?’

We need to be at least somewhat aware of the possibility that maybe we can’t get whatever (or whoever) it is, as maybe this is not for us, or maybe it’s not the kind of thing that can be ‘got’ quite as we imagine.

Talking with Yi has not so much to do with what we want and how to get it, it’s more to do with being introduced – gently or otherwise – to what’s real, and how to inhabit that fluently.

And on the other hand…

…divination with Yi is absolutely about knowing what you want. Not knowing what you want leads to asking questions about your career when you’re expiring from loneliness: distraction-questions, about anything other than the real issue. Or it leads to asking endless questions about what someone else feels and wants, because it doesn’t feel safe to feel or want anything yourself yet.

And all this leads to colossal muddles in interpreting answers from an Oracle that will insist on talking to your whole self, wants and all, when you’re doing your level best to stuff great swathes of that self out of sight.

(I don’t mean this to sound as though we’re asking stupid questions…

There was a time when I thought that asking about someone else’s wants because you never dared to contemplate what you yourself might want was quite stupid, until I noticed myself doing exactly that, and at length. So clearly it can’t be stupid.)

The thing is, knowing what you want is not easy. Life is altogether smoother (not to mention flatter) if we stay on a nice even emotional keel and never find out. It’s just that the more I see, the more it seems that being in touch with what you want – ‘waking up the inner Wanter,’ as I think Pamela put it on her last call – is pretty much essential to divination.

So… in brief, Pamela Moss has another free call coming up. This one is specifically about ‘How to get clear about what matters most’ and has a lot to do with what you truly want. The call’s on Wednesday 26th at 12 noon Eastern time, which is 5pm for me here in the UK.  Have a look at this list to find your local time for the call and then by all means sign up for it. As before, there’ll be a recording (to be released after the call is replayed on Saturday). Pamela can be relied on to provide some solid, useable ideas that make this absolutely worth your time.

So perhaps it’s not so surprising that by the time he gets to his chapter on superstition, he abandons his ‘open minded investigation’ stance and simply enquires into how and when people are weak-minded enough to believe in lucky charms and rituals and things that obviously aren’t real. Here’s what he has to say about its causes:

‘Superstition is clearly not restricted to primitive peoples who have no other way of understanding how the world works, though these people can show us how superstition actually functions. Take the Trobriand islanders of Melanesia, off the coast of New Guinea, studied by Polish psychologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the 1900s. Malinowski found that when events were outside the islanders’ control they resorted to superstition. While observing the fishermen at work, he noticed that when sailing in lagoons or close to the short, the men relied entirely on their skill and experience to control their boats and locate fish. On venturing into the open sea, however, these same fishermen began using magical rituals, faced as they now were with unpredictable hazards – exactly the type of superstitious behaviour in the face of anxiety and uncertainty that is very much alive today.’

‘These same fishermen…’ – extraordinary transformation!

I imagine you see what I see here, so I won’t add much commentary.

The fishermen (and the university student with the ‘lucky pen’ he goes on to interview) transform as if by magic into superstitious primitives when in an unpredictable, uncertain situation; one that’s largely outside their control. Which is another way of saying that it’s outside the realm of dependable cause and effect: if I do x, I will always get y. If I adjust the sail thus, the boat will certainly go this way; if I revise thoroughly, I’ll certainly be able to think clearly and remember everything under exam conditions. Only it might not, and I might not – and to imagine that we can one day live in a world with all its deep oceans filled in, free from undercurrents, all within our understanding and under our control, really would be superstitious.

When we seek to stretch ourselves, we push the boat out into deeper waters, and go to places beyond the comfort-lagoon-zone where we can’t control outcomes. To navigate here, we relate to our surroundings with metaphor, not mechanics – through ritual, or a reading we can carry with us as guiding principle.

(Little’s story of the university student reminds me…

In my own first Finals papers, I used an old fountain pen, and spent the whole of German prose struggling to restore the flow of ink to my pen, and the flow of German vocabulary to my brain. Failed on both counts. I went and bought a beautiful new pen before the literature papers, and then ink and ideas flowed smoothly.)