Kim’s speciality is Human Design, a modern system that brings together astrology, the chakra system, Kaballah and the I Ching. Fortunately for me, as I know nothing about three-quarters of that, our discussion on the show will be entirely I-Ching-focussed. It’ll include a call-in session when you can ask Kim to draw up your Human Design chart, which includes (as far as I understand it…) locating the planets of your birth within the hexagrams and lines. Then we can discuss the meaning of one or two hexagrams within your chart in detail, which is where I hope to be able to contribute.

On the show’s webpage (where please note I didn’t write the introduction…), you’ll find an ingenious ‘add reminder’ button. Kim is a delight to talk to, and it’s intriguing to see how she works with the I Ching. I hope you’ll join us – it would be great to hear some familiar voices/ names.

What am I doing instead? Thank you for asking. I don’t know. At present, I’m leaving myself a lot of space for ideas to arise, and not going running after them.

I was guided along this path by a combination of readings, helpful people, and slow, slow realisations. If nothing else, it’s given me some insight into how these things can work together. Nothing would’ve happened (except a continuing slow slither down into complete incapacity) without the friend who first mentioned ‘burnout’. Oh, I thought, this has a name, this inability to do even the basics… it’s a real thing…

Then I started talking with Yi, and then – through a bunch of readings I shared in Reading Circle – it told me in utterly unambiguous terms that I needed not just to have a break, but to stop altogether. In a state of complete shock and dismay, I stopped, and then people and books and very, very slow inner processes helped me to understand why I’d needed to. Dreams and synchronicities are joining in, too: I’ve started remembering my dreams again, and I had a great time the other night rejoining a class of ten-year-olds.

My time as a working diviner was wonderful and extraordinary – I always called it the best job in the world, and I still don’t know of a better one – and it’s come to its natural close. Thanks, everyone.

Step 2 – have a nice publisher contact you via said website and ask you to write a book.

Then…

Think of all the reasons why you absolutely should not do anything of the kind for another 10, 20 or 30 years. (This takes some time.) Think about them all some more. Check with the publisher in the faint hope they might want something you’d object to writing anyway, and find they do in fact want a real translation, with words from the real book. Check with Yi, and get encouragement.

Gulp.

Realise that one reason to write a book now is so you can write a better one later.

Then…

Well, I started with the text I wrote for the WikiWing, since that summed up my ideas for each line and included my ‘working translation’ (which turned out to need a whole lot of reworking). Then I gathered together everything from a vast Word doc that contains all my ever-expanding notes on each hexagram and line, that rejoices in the original name of MYNOTES.doc. (It was created before you could have long file names in Windows.) I made sure I had the line pathway – the journey through fan yao, paired line of fan yao, paired line of original line – copied into each line as well as its zhi gua.

Then I added an ‘examples’ heading under each line and started gathering up example readings. Thank goodness I’ve been keeping my personal journal in a searchable format for some years now. (Another good reason to keep a searchable journal – you never know when someone might expect you to write a book.) Then I creatively cursed the inadequacies of Windows search, and installed Google desktop to search through ten years’ worth of clients’ readings. Finally, for lines where I was short of readings (I’d decided for some reason I wanted at least half a dozen different examples for each line), I visited the I Ching Community archives.  (I would’ve been utterly lost without the hexagram search that Ewald created for us.)

I also spent some time searching for ‘threads started by’ the querents in these readings to find out how things turned out, and developed a new and profound appreciation for the people who are kind enough to post updates on the same thread!

I discovered the merits of coffee when working 12 hour days.

Reading through all the ramblings of ‘MYNOTES’ on each line and its pathways, I distilled these into a series of questions: how important is it to do this? do people feel that? why isn’t it a mistake, and why might you think it was? what does this kind of constancy look like, what kind of danger is there, how does the zhi gua show up…? – and so on. Then with my gathered example readings, I set out to find which of my ideas about the line actually fit, and which was just a nice idea in theory, and where I really needed to start over and work things out without preconceived notions. The aim, after all, was to write a commentary that would pretty reliably help people with readings – so it made sense to start by writing one that would have helped with the readings I know.

I renegotiated the deadline with the (very) nice publishers.

The next step was to distill all this down to a couple of paragraphs, agonising horribly over the choice of each word, trying to make them work with the explicit and implicit imagery of the text. Of course I want to be as specific and clear as possible, but not so specific that I exclude valid possibilities and get in the way of Yi talking to people. (Did I mention ‘gulp’?)

Somewhere along the way, I (re)discovered the difference between interpreting a reading and interpreting a line of text. It’s quite daunting.

As each hexagram was ‘finished’, in a provisional sort of way, I passed it to my husband to proof-read – which he did, and also pointed out all the unexplained assertions, logical discrepancies and unnecessary elaborations. I reminded myself repeatedly how generous he was being with his time (he really was!) and thought it all out again.

I uploaded each hexagram to the Change Circle’s private ‘jewelbox’ of downloads, where people looked at them and said kind and helpful things, and got me rewriting 29.6 in particular. Then, wonderfully, Bradford Hatcher volunteered to look through the work. He was indescribably helpful, and blessedly unintimidating for someone who’s forgotten more about this book than I’m ever likely to know. (I was already leaning heavily on his work for the ‘translation’ part, as well as LiSe, Harmen, Wilhelm, Lynn, Marshall, Rutt and God-bless-the-clickable-Wenlin for comparing word usage in Yijing and Shijing.)

Send finished work to nice publisher, who tells me it’s too long. Shorten it. Embarrassing how possible this is.

Still too long. Negotiate via nice, patient lady at publishers with design department to move the illustrations around as an alternative to cutting more words. Still need to cut some more or it won’t fit on the page – OK, getting good at this…

Finished!

Go outdoors in daylight, and try to remember what they call that big, blue ceiling thing.

Start a file called ‘corrections.doc’.

Wait for the book to be published.

And here it is. (US, UK and Canada)

Erm… let me know what you think?

So this experience, plus enjoying what she writes, plus the fact that her wonderful Virtual Retreats were what first gave me the idea of running an event that would be a whole, coherent experience rather than just a string of information… all meant that asking her seemed like a Very Good Idea.

Then naturally I talked with Yi (as I did with all the speakers), asking what it would mean to partner with her on this. Yi said 14.2.4 changing to 22: Great Possession’s Beauty. I think this refers amongst other things to the fact that she’s the most well-known among the speakers. It also shows the richness of what she offers, how she can provide a big enough ‘vehicle’ to carry us through, and how it would be best if I didn’t try to impose my ideas on her too much!

Timezones permitting, Jen’s call will be the first of the event, on 4th September. We’ll be talking – as you might have guessed – about questions: why they’re important, what knots we tie ourselves in with them and how we might untie a few. And Jen will take us through a guided meditation for listening to questions. (Something similar to the one that led to such amazing experiences for me.)

We’ll take questions during the call, as many as we have time for – but what would you say I should definitely ask her?

When – 4th to 12th September
Where – wherever you happen to be, within reach of a phone line – we’ll connect via teleseminars and a private forum.

What - a Festival of Change.

This is to celebrate change, and explore ways we align ourselves with its flow – through oracles of all kinds, dreams, paying attention to synchronicities… everything we use to be more in touch with the inner nature of the moment. It’s about that state of connection that gives you full-colour, full-dimensional, full-resonance living – real freedom of movement, because you’re actually living in the whole real, changing world.

The intention is to have an event that will both enrich and deepen existing divination practice and also make that experience of connection and fluency available to people who have never tried divination before.

So… if you know someone you wish you could share divination with, this will be a good way to introduce them. (If I can see a way to make it work technically, ‘bring a friend for free’ will be included in the ticket price.) The Festival of Change isn’t just going to be a catalogue of ideas – there’s a simple structure to it, designed to support the actual experience of connecting with the currents of change, making it accessible without necessarily knowing an oracle. (And recordings of each call will be included, to make this a resource you can draw on in future.)

The structure… two weekends of teleseminar interviews with a whole variety of speakers, framing a week of discussion on a private forum.

4th September – Opening the channel: how we create the space to listen and receive the answer.
5th September – Connecting with the response, recognising it, hearing it as something that speaks to you personally.

Then a week to try out what these first speakers have offered, ask questions and share experiences at the forum, and then…

11th September – Integrating the answer into real life, allowing it to become real change in practice.
12th Sept – I’m hoping to have a final Q&A call with as many of the speakers as possible, drawing the threads together and answering people’s questions. (I think this is the call I’m most looking forward to – with lots of different perspectives meeting, I expect creative sparks will fly.)

So you see how this follows through the basic contours of a reading (or experience with synchronicity, or working with a dream…) and fits with the real experience – during the Festival itself, or any time you use the recordings.

I’ll follow up with more information later about the different themes, introducing you to the speakers and getting your questions to ask them. Meanwhile… well, this is the first time I’ve done anything like this, and I’m going to be running in circles finalising things with speakers and putting things together. I’d really welcome any comments or suggestions.

So I’ve just added excerpts from my own upcoming I Ching to the free reading. Not the whole book – not wanting to make it completely unnecessary for people to buy it before it’s even published… – but all the translated text (Oracle, Image, Sequence, Pairs and lines) is there, and so too are excerpts from my interpretation/ commentary: I included the ‘key questions’ that I find Yi might be asking you with each hexagram, and the commentary on the Oracle.

The Flash I Ching had to disappear altogether, as it contained nothing but the Wilhelm/Baynes translation. But it will soon be back in a new incarnation using the ‘Barrett’ version.

It’s a colourful book with a clear, open layout that uses colour to reinforce the associations between hexagrams and trigrams. It also includes small illustrations for each hexagram, drawn from Stephen’s ‘Paper Horses’ work.

(Aside: the book itself simply describes these as ‘an image that gives you a feeling tone,’ intended to deepen your intuitive sense of the hexagram. But for more background on them, thoughts on the workings of images, and characterisation of the trigrams, download the pdf from here. Whether you get the book or not, this is abundantly worth reading for its description of the inner and outer landscape where divination takes place.)

What’s unique

What’s new in I Ching – the Symbolic Life is the seamless blend of imagery from the text with imagery from the hexagrams’ structural relationships. There’s no translation set apart from the rest of the text; instead, there are excerpts and improvisations on the translation woven into the interpretation of the structures.

The joy of discovering structural relationships within the Yijing is the way they can deepen and enrich readings, so you often find that all the answers you seek are already contained within a single answer; there’s no need to muddy the waters with a flurry of extra readings. It gives you a powerful sense of the way divination connects all areas of life and all layers of experience.

And the snag of discovering these relationships is that it generates a huge volume of technical stuff to bear in mind, and a huge range of connected hexagrams. There’s the paired hexagram, the Sequence, the nuclear hexagram, the family of hexagrams that surround that nuclear hexagram, the complementary hexagram, the hexagram created by reversing the trigrams, the Early Heaven hexagram, the Shadow Site… that’s anything up to ten other hexagrams to consider – before you even change any lines. The message of the reading can get very, very lost in a blur of information overload.

To access the richness of these connections without getting completely lost, you could absorb them all into your awareness of each hexagram – this may take quite a few years. You could also use this book.

The connections show up here as they might do in a reading from a diviner who has all these things deeply integrated into his sense of the hexagram. Naturally, he’d let this awareness percolate through into his interpretation without overwhelming the person he was reading for by enumerating all his sources. And in the same way, in the book, some sources are explained and some aren’t.

Similarly, the use of the translation reflects what a diviner might do in practice, maybe after reading out the words of the oracle. What you get here, instead of a complete word-for-word translation, is something like an improvisation on the text. It’s generally very close to it – the oracle of Hexagram 47, for instance, originally says,

‘Confined, creating success.
Constancy of a great person, good fortune.
Not a mistake.
There are words, no trust.’

- and the first passage on Hexagram 47 begins,

“You are cut off, oppressed and exhausted. Collect the energy to get out of this prison and re-establish communication. Be great and master the situation from within. Find what is truly important. Seek those who can help and advise you. The situation is not your fault but words are not to be trusted now. Do not believe what others are telling you to do…”

So this talks about every part of the text, but also (as I suppose is inevitable with any commentary) pushes some possible meanings to the margins – for instance, that ‘words, no trust’ might indicate that the reasoning of your own inner voice is hollow and inauthentic.

The text continues without break:

“Let Confining be your inner guide. It will turn self containment into the ability to manage the flow and flux of events.”

This is no longer drawn from the translation, but from the weaving of trigrams through the Pair. The intention must be that the reader will take and use all these ideas without worrying about where they came from. Also, she has a chance to absorb the relationships without consciously charting them, as both hexagrams and trigrams are consistently evoked using the same simple image-formula of words – a powerful way for ideas to put down roots and become familiar.

This use of structure means that every word of the book has its source: the shortest of short phrases might have an essay’s-worth of theory – and no doubt countless hours of divination experience – behind it. Here’s a very short example, drawn from the trigram-based section of Hexagram 45; I’ve added the source for each part in square brackets:

‘The Spirit Helpers

Lake above Earth [trigrams]. The Joyous Dancer and the Dark Animal Goddess [trigrams personified as spirit helpers – with the help of the Shuogua, I think]. This is Metal over Earth, an inner field that sustains outer stimulation [trigrams mapped to Five Elements]. Inner devotion now lets you express the spirit in the human community [trigram actions]. Take precautions and eliminate the causes of conflict [Daxiang text]. Do not accumulate great things for yourself [Complementary hexagram, 26, Great Taming/ Great Accumulating]. If you reaffirm common human needs and strengths [the Early Heaven hexagram, the ‘ideal’, Hexagram 48], the new spirit will reveal itself [the ‘Shadow Site’, Hexagram 20].’

And for the background to just one of these concepts, see the article at GreatVessel on Ideal and Shadow, in the amusingly-named ‘I Ching Basics’ section.

For each hexagram, there’s plenty of this kind of concentrated, distilled text that bears a lot of ‘unpacking’:

• A heading summarising the hexagram’s advice, based on the Judgement text and the movement between trigrams in the Pair
• Circle of Meanings – thesaurus-like – with reference to the ancient Chinese name of the hexagram
• Spirit Helpers – trigrams (and complement, and Ideal and Shadow)
• Heart Theme – the nuclear hexagram – and ‘Cycle of Seasons’ through the nuclear hexagram family, which he suggests ‘shows how this process plays out through time and the energies you can use to bring the action to completion and find the seed of new growth.’
• ‘Myths for Change’ section, which begins by describing the Pair
  • and then the Sequence text, translated/elaborated as ‘Charge to the Inquirer’
  • and a description of the hexagram (only subtly changed since Total I Ching)
  • and its position within the pair, decade, and probably some other relationships I’ve yet to identify
  • Hidden Exchange – swapping the trigrams to show how one hexagram ‘enables’ and develops another.
  • Direct interpretation and suggestions for action: immediate future, personal development, working with others, working with organizations, relationships.
• Transforming Lines. For each line (and I’m not altogether sure this is a comprehensive list of what’s being used):
  • Description of that position in the hexagram (in terms of the complementary pair of change patterns it creates – 24 and 44 for line 1, 7 and 13 for line 2, etc
  • Translation-elaboration-improvisation on the text
  • Instruction based on the new trigram created by the line change.
  • Advice based on line pathway, travelling through paired line and fan yao.
  • Advice based on nuclear hexagram of relating hexagram and its nuclear hexagram.

So for instance for 45.1:

‘Line 1 Beginnings: return of the spirit that brings the entrance of a new fate.

You are connected to a deep source of energy but the connection with others is unclear. One moment you are joyous, the next moment confused. Call out! One grasp of the hand and all will laugh together. Rouse the new energy. Leave your current position and mingle with the people. Changes are coming. You can achieve something great. Serve the highest ideals. Do not pause in your efforts to eliminate inner sources of discord. Proceed step by step. Prepare a decisive new move.’

Also, there’s an appendix at the back, ‘The Pairs in the Loom of Change’ describing how both trigrams and individual lines weave through each pair.

Who’s the book for?

I think it’s for fairly experienced users: people who already have a translation or twenty to hand and would like a way in to explore the meaning of the structures in the Yijing. (An interesting comparison would be with Nigel Richmond’s Language of the Lines.) I wouldn’t suggest this to a beginner as a sole source, because of the lack of clearly-differentiated translation – though it’d be interesting to read a review from a newcomer and see how this material ‘lands’ with someone who comes to it fresh.

Maybe more importantly, it’s for users who are interested in diving deep into a reading. In the introduction, Karcher describes the I Ching as ‘1) a book; 2) a technique; and 3) a way or spiritual practice,’ and says,

‘The long term use of this technique is the foundation of a spiritual practice or discipline that can give us a symbolic mirror that “reaches the depths, grasps the seeds and penetrates the wills of all beings Under Heaven.” In working with the symbols the Change offers, we experience how the Way or Dao is working in our lives. This Symbolic Mirror teaches us about the destiny that Heaven gave us (ming) when we entered this world and helps us manifest our innate power and virtue (de) in accord with that destiny. The practice transforms the shape of our heart-mind and links us with the Way of Water or Dao, the on-going process of the real. And, according to the ancient sages, this individual change of heart can synchronistically help to renew the world and the culture we live in.’

From which you can probably tell that this is not your first port of call for predicting election outcomes or diagnosing computer problems. But I’ve found it very helpful already with a reading about the subtle forces shaping my relationship with a group, and one about incipient depression.

Though this is clearly meant as a way into the depths, it’s meant as a simple way in. For instance, the only method of consulting suggested is one that always generates a single moving line (never more or less). This is the same method that Alfred Huang calls ‘Eight Coin Magic’ in his Complete I Ching: laying out eight tokens around a ring of trigrams. (The trigram-ring – another ‘Paper Horse’ painting – is provided at the back.) So this deliberately excludes all the subtleties that are created in readings by the interaction of different changing lines, or their absence.

Of course I’ll try using the book at least once with the casting method suggested – but I’ll be keeping it close to hand for all readings, for the insights it offers into the meanings created by hexagram and trigram relationships. I think that’s the particular gift of this book: tapping into the full, multidimensional ‘you are here’ capacity of these structural relationships and making them eloquent – something that belongs in a reading, not just in an interesting reference chart somewhere. I’ve only used the book for a couple of readings so far, but its words are already turning out to have that ‘jumping off the page and talking to you’ quality about them.

It’s designed to encourage that kind of steady, take-your-time approach: it offers you gentle colours, the option of soft background music or sounds, and a simple, uncluttered interface. Some real thought has gone into creating a piece of software that allows for a spacious experience of divination: there are relaxation instructions and audio guides available to use before consulting; there is information on Taoism; divination is introduced as an intuitive, meditative process. It may be a computer program, but it doesn’t reduce divination to a ‘press button, get answer’ process. (Hooray.) Also, it doesn’t dogmatically impose this approach; if you want to open the program and cast a hexagram quickly, you can. (Hooray, again.)

It’s true that this software has been around for a while, and the interface has an old-fashioned feel to it. But it also feels friendly, and there is plenty of good stuff hidden behind its simple initial menu. Under ‘Additional features’ > ‘Insight screen’ there’s consistently lucid, thoughtful advice on approaching and using the oracle (though you’ll want to take the ‘history’ section with a pinch of salt), as well as an introdction to Daoist texts and practice. There’s good information on trigrams with additional hexagram commentary based on their qualities under ‘Additional features’ > ‘Trigram chart’. It’s not always obvious where everything is (for instance, there’s commentary on the significance of each line position under the heading ‘Trigram chart’), but you can explore without getting lost; it’s always easy to get back to the main screen.

Another good thing: there are many helpful suggestions for further reading, including a generous review of the San Shan Yijing software – I think that speaks volumes in itself.

The journal function is easy to use, with a list of past entries to review and edit. The journal is also the place to go to find the commentary on any hexagram, just by clicking on it in the list on this screen – so if you want to chronicle past readings here, or just browse the hexagrams, you can. However, there is no journal search, which is likely to get awkward if you store a lot of readings here.

Still another good thing: in addition to the straightforward three-coin approach, and the option of entering a reading you’ve cast yourself, there are a couple of imaginative approaches to selecting a hexagram. There’s a ‘mirror reading’, where you’re guided through a landscape and component trigrams are selected according to the paths you choose to explore. And there’s intuitive selection: an animation of the hexagram sequence that stops when you click; you can have it whiz past too fast for your conscious mind to follow, and watch and absorb the change – and click to stop it if and when you feel the right moment to do so. (I found I’d stopped it at hexagram 54, the primary hexagram of my reading for the year.)

For the sake of completeness, I should give you the not-so-good things. Firstly, a minor technical glitch in Windows 7: if you use alt+tab to move between open programs, Way of Harmony doesn’t appear on the list. So it’s possible to open the software (which occupies the full screen),  use alt+tab to switch to another program – and then be unable to find your way back. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem: if you reduce any other programs you might need for your consultation to something less than full screen, you can keep Way of Harmony visible and accessible in the background.

You may find this doesn’t bother you at all once you get used to it – download a free trial and see.

Another disadvantage: this won’t work as a sole resource for your readings, as it doesn’t include a full translation – just commentary on/ paraphrase of the Judgement, and an almost-translation of Image and line texts.

The commentary is unique to this software, and it’s good. A couple of examples – just small excerpts from longer commentaries -

Hexagram 1:

“The Creative…  is the
spiritual spark which initiates the creative cycle of nature.
The Receptive responds by providing a vessel to shape
the spirit energy’s potential into energetic form.”

Hexagram 2:

“You are invited to welcome the receptive energies that this
Hexagram represents and to reflect on how its simple, open,
and devoted responsiveness expresses itself in your life. The
time favors relaxed listening, intuitive knowing, and tuning
mind and feeling to the often unconscious rhythms of nature.”

The author regularly uses ‘you are invited’ as an opening phrase, and characterises each hexagram as a time with its own unique qualities.

But that almost-translation, using some but not quite all of the original, inevitably loses some of its specificity and vividness. The horse’s lost yoke-mate in 61.4 becomes ‘you turn away from your companion’. ‘This makes my heart ache’ in 48.3 becomes ‘a sad situation’. The flowing tears of blood in 3.6 become ‘profound wounding’ (though he does then quote the original in the commentary!).

And so on. It’s a shame.

He’s also made some clear choices to change the translation of the Image: the ‘noble one’ is abolished and replaced with the ‘way of heaven’ or ‘way of development’ or ‘way to connect people to heaven’, and so forth. I can understand a desire to avoid the idea of a ‘superior person’, but I don’t think depersonalising the text actually helps. There are more drastic changes at Hexagram 8, where the image of the king investing in his chosen relationships, building cities to connect with his feudal lords, is swapped for a general ideal of universal human fellowship. He explains what he’s doing, and why, but something is lost.

Each hexagram commentary concludes with a poetic reflection on the hexagram, called ‘Beyond the Changes’. Here’s an example from Hexagram 61:

Patiently waiting in the depths of an open heart
is the doorway
to the wondrous mystery of your ultimate nature.

Gently devoted to truth
Perfectly surrendered to the wholeness of the Tao…

Sincere good fortune.

There is an unpretentious, simple approach throughout the commentary and the software as a whole; infused by the author’s Daoist view, it seems designed above all to draw you into the experience of divination. That makes it a good option for beginners; true, it would be a vastly better one if only it included a full translation, but it does recommend good books – and not just tucked away in a ‘further reading’ section, but after the commentary for every hexagram. The author’s very clear that his words are meant just as a ‘starting point for your journey’.

A highlight for me is the substantial essay on ‘Creative Consultation’ you can find via the ‘insights screen’. It doesn’t say anything startlingly novel or scintillatingly brilliant – it just gives wise, down-to-earth, lucid advice on approaching the Oracle. For beginners, it lays good, lasting foundations; for others, it contains good, welcome reminders. I’d recommend you download the free trial if only to read it.

This is a new start.

Vision

The I Ching Community is a warm and open place for free, wide-ranging exploration of the I Ching. It’s a place to learn about and from this oracle, through experience, one reading at a time. We respect the desire to learn, and honour the potential for growth in not knowing.

I asked Yi what the highest potential of this community is. It replied with Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, changing at the fifth line to Hexagram 59, Dispersing.

Welcome to the Community of Not Knowing!

The rule

As befits such a place, there are not many rules.

A huge diversity of ideas is welcomed and encouraged here, and so is vigorous debate about them all. In all this, please respect other members as individuals, and don’t post personal abuse, flaming, belittling, ‘diagnoses’ of their character flaws, etc.

A suggestion

If something about the way you do readings is unfamiliar to most members (eg the method, the text), please edit your signature to include a link to an explanation. (You can always write this yourself in Exploring Divination.)

How you can help

Use the new ‘thanks’ button!

If you post a reading for comment, please return to post feedback on how things worked out.

If you see a post that seems to you to break the rule, you could…

• report the post to me by clicking the little red triangle icon above it, and/or
• respond to the person who posted it yourself

But please remember that discussing other members’ behaviour is off-topic for the main forums. Don’t post a retort on the same thread. If there’s something you want to say, start a thread in the “Moderation” forum and say it there; then return to the original thread and post nothing but a link to your “Moderation” thread.

How post reporting works (what to expect)

The report is emailed to me with the message from the ‘reporter’. No-one else sees that the report has been made (and I don’t tell anyone who made it).

I visit the thread, read it through and consider what to do next.

I almost certainly won’t delete the reported post outright (because this is a conversation between adults). I may move it to the “Moderation” sub-forum in Open Space, where anyone who’s interested can reply.

I may also contact the original poster with an explanation and/or warning. If someone persistently makes posts that break the rule, they’ll be suspended from the forum for a ‘cooling off’ period of a week or more, or until any apologies needed are made.

A note about deleting posts (because sometimes people ask me to delete their posts after the ‘editing’ period on them has expired)

You own the copyright in what you post here, and you grant Clarity a license to publish it here on the website. This means I have the final say on whether or not messages are deleted or moved once they’re posted here.

~~~~~

I think that’s all for now. (Comments? Questions?)

The forum should re-open today or tomorrow, if all the upgrades go smoothly.

(Eep… this is the longest gap between blog posts in ages. Where have I been? I’m not completely sure… but it’s involved getting started writing a book (more about this in Change Circle shortly),  getting to know the excellent people who are participating in this year’s Yijing Class, and starting house-hunting – and that has a tendency to become a full-time job in itself.

Anyway… I’m sorry to disappear so comprehensively. I’ll try to do better and post more, though I somehow doubt I’ll be very prolific until after the deadline for the book, in October.)

‘No mistake’, or ‘without fault’, or ‘without blame’, in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, can be one of Yi’s more enigmatic pronouncements. Very often it comes up in readings just when we’re increasingly convinced that something must be wrong. Often, too, it’s a comment on scenarios that any reasonable person would think were ‘mistakes’.

There’s 21 line 1, for instance - 

‘Shoes locked in the stocks, feet disappear.
No mistake.’

The stocks are a punishment – surely a sign there are ‘mistakes’, and blame?

Or 55 line 3 -

‘At Feng is profusion,
Sun at noon, seeing the froth of stars
Your right arm broken,
No mistake.’

A broken arm is no mistake? (This can also be the image of the loss of your most able helper, or your greatest strength; you lose your capacity to act. And none of this is a mistake, either!)

And then, of course, there’s the utter paradox of 28 line 6 -

‘Overstepping, wading the river, head underwater.
Pitfall.
No mistake.’

Someone has probably drowned in this line. There is a disaster, and yet still there’s no mistake.

All this leads to a whole variety of interpretations – even reading it as a more-or-less meaningless emphasis, something like the expression, ‘…and no mistake!’ More useful is Wilhelm’s idea that this means there is no blame: even if things went badly wrong, you are not necessarily at fault. This can be a helpful insight in itself, and it also implies something more.

When Yi tells people something is ‘not a mistake’, their reaction is often something along the lines of, ‘Oh, really? In what universe?” In other words, ‘not a mistake’ can reveal the existence of a whole new perspective on the situation.

From one perspective, the immediate lived experience, the stocks are frustrating, the broken arm is blindingly painful and utterly incapacitating. And seen from another perspective, one in which this experience is part of a bigger story, there is no mistake. This is the best way I know to understand Hexagram 28, line 6: after the head has disappeared under water, after that ‘perspective’ is extinguished, another, different voice says, ‘Not a mistake.’

When the Dazhuan says that ‘no mistake’ means ‘mistakes can be mended’, it’s shifting perspective in a similar way, from immediate experience to longer term. And it makes a lot of sense that this should be the first line of Hexagram 40, which reads simply, ‘No mistake.’ Naturally, to be without blame (or blaming) is the first step into Release. And also, this seems to me to have the sense of being released from the whole story you were living. Yes, it asked a lot of you, it was a great struggle (Hexagram 39), but now you can draw a line under it all, understand it more as the playwright than as the actor, find what you take away from it and carry forward.

Here’s the section on ‘no mistake’ from Words of Change:

Without fault: ? ?, wu jiu

The exact meaning of this common auspice varies between lines, and between
divinatory moments. Some possibilities:

• Despite how you may feel (and what others might say), this is not wrong.
• Specifically, your idea (or motivation or basic insight) is not wrong. If the results are bad, don’t leap to the conclusion that it must all go downhill from here. Mistakes can be mended; change is possible.
• It just happened this way. Seeking to allocate blame is a waste of time.
• Take especial care not to let things go wrong, even in small ways.
• It’s not wrong… (but…?)