Hilary Barrett, I Ching

I always enjoy finding someone writing about hexagrams without knowing it. Here is Zoë of ‘Essential Prose’ writing about Hexagram 38, Opposing. The way she is, in fact, talking about Hexagram 38 really leaps from the page: “…the things we dismiss or reject because they don’t fit inside our perception of how things work. Maybe we [...]

On my ‘day off’ a couple of weeks ago, I went and wandered round the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, going whereever I felt drawn. Presently I found myself up on the second floor, in front of a huge wooden carving of a seated Guan Yin. There she is in her perspex box, faded cracking wood [...]

The name of Hexagram 36, ming yi, is translated as ‘brightness hidden’ or ‘brightness wounded’. The two ideas blend together in readings: the light is hidden away to escape the danger of injury. The wealth of layers of association in this hexagram hint at a complex relationship of light and dark. ‘Yi’, ‘hidden’ or ‘wounded’, [...]

… all still from Harmen. Laws 5 and 6 – If you cling to the answer you will lose the solution. The symbolic replies from the Yijing can invite you to endless lingering in the field of metaphors, chewing on every possible piece of information that might or might not be meaningful to you. Many [...]

Here’s a challenging post from Harmen Mesker: Ten Laws of Proper Yijing Practice Explained. While I’m unlikely ever to call anything to do with the Yi a ‘law’ (there’s a distinct shortage of rules graven on stone tablets for divination), this is a really thoughtful and thought-provoking article. Law 1: If you receive the same [...]

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 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 [...]