Hilary Barrett, I Ching

I sometimes think of Stephen Karcher as the alchemist of Yijing interpretation, working away in his divination-laboratory and emerging from time to time with new techniques and tools of interpretation for diviners to test out. I’ll always try what he offers, and often find it immensely useful – though by the time I’ve spent a [...]

Continuing with Harmen’s Ten Laws of Proper Yijing Practice… Law 3 – Too much is less than enough. “Can I expect any positive movement from P’s corner in the next couple of months?” I got Hex 10 unchanging. I get a sense that 10 means moving with caution. So I asked ….. “Why would he [...]

(Note: this is a quick post, throwing an idea out into the ether as soon as it hatches, with just a few feathers sticking to its scrawny neck, and a great big gaping beak squawking ‘Feed me!’ It is distinctly lacking in flight-feathers of its own as yet.) People instinctively feel that there must be [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]