Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Stephen Karcher’s latest book, I Ching – the Symbolic Life – is a self-published work. The advantage of this: he’s been able to create and illustrate the book he wanted, in colour, with no corners cut. The disadvantage: the price is a little scary. I ordered my copy from the US, which turned out [...]

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 [...]

Hexagram 10 tells you that you are ‘treading the tail of the tiger.’ The first question to ask yourself about it is always – naturally enough – ‘What tiger? Where?’ There is something here that could devour you; you need to know what it is.
In some readings, the tiger is not hard to identify – [...]

I’ve been taking a good, long look at the Way of Harmony I Ching software.
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 [...]

I’ve been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and just reached the chapter on the power of expectations to change perception. The introductory example comes from sport: the supporters of two rival teams watch the same key, game-deciding moment, and for one of them the ball (or player, or something – it’s American football, so [...]

This is just a speculative post, or a starting point for speculation…
I’ve started thinking of the trigram li – fire and light – as being like eyes, particularly when it’s the inner trigram. Then sometimes it seems to look out at the outer trigram, and sometimes it seems to look through the outer trigram, as [...]

There’s a deep humour to the last two hexagrams of the Yijing.
63: Already Across. Already Completed. Every line is in what was traditionally said to be its ‘right place’ – that is, the yang lines are in the odd-numbered positions, 1, 3 and 5, and yin lines sit quietly in the even-numbered places, 2, 4 [...]