Hilary Barrett, I Ching

…or am I imagining things?

A brief note about this post: after someone let me know he was unsubscribing because he hadn’t been able to understand any of my posts, I’ve aimed for a mix of generally-intelligible things and pure Yeekery. Yeekery is that which is only intelligible to Yeeks; a Yeek is someone who sees hexagrams everywhere, might say they are having a horribly 39 day, for whom it’s old news that hexagrams 63 and 64 are one another’s nuclears, and who can’t even remember a time when they didn’t know that the expression ‘regrets vanish’ only appears in the Lower Canon. (OK, maybe allow for a little exaggeration for effect, but you know who you are.)

This post is Yeekery.

I’ve just started working on some new entries for my ‘Words of Change’ glossary – a nice, simple, non-Yeeky little book. I started looking at ming, mandate, and when that appears in the various layers of the text:

Zhouyi: 6.4, 7.2, 7.6, 11.6, 12.4, 49.4, 56.5

I notice that there’s a predominance of line 4, which makes sense to me. Line 4 is the minister’s line, the muscle-flexing, ‘what can I do here? what work is there for me?’ line – a good moment to learn about mandate.

I can’t see any patterns with the zhi gua, but there may be the glimmering of one in the trigrams: qian becomes xun twice, kun becomes gen twice, kan becomes kun and li becomes qian, and dui becomes kan. When qian becomes xun (6.4, 12.4), the mandate feels like something to work with in a time when you cannot bring about immediate change. And when kun becomes gen (7.6, 11.6), these are rulers’ mandates – received at the summit of the mountain – that mark the beginning of a time to build.

I get the sense there is a story being told, from a mandate that’s an alternative to fighting the status quo, through orders, building and labour, through the immensely long gap between 12.4 and 49.4 when mandate finally changes, and then the moment when ming is simply the work you have to do, your own quiet haven within the order of things. This is the first and only time ming reaches line 5, where it can be wholly identified with individual will and intention, and it does seem to be a symmetrical reflection of 7.2 in meaning as well as the changing of trigrams. It’s certainly come a long way from 6.4 to reach its zhong, ‘in the end’, in 56.5.

Here is the part where I wonder if I’m seeing a real pattern or a coincidence:

The mandate is mentioned in the Daxiang in hexagrams 14, 44, 47, 50 and 57. Hexagram 14 has qian below li; 56.5 changes li to qian. 44 has xun below qian, and 6.4 and 12.4 change qian to xun. And 47 has kan below dui, and 49.4 changes dui to kan.

Then the pattern, if there is one, breaks down: 50′s component trigrams differ by two lines, and 57′s not at all, so neither could represent a single line change. (All that can really be said for them is that 50 follows 49 and 57 follows 56, the last two Zhouyi mentions of mandate. But maybe this is a little weak, even for me.) And despite 7.6 and 11.6, there is no mention of mandate in the Daxiang of 15.

Probably my imagination, then. Only… there does seem to be at least a resonance in meaning between the line texts and ‘their’ Images.

‘Fire dwells above heaven. Great possession.
The noble one ends hatred and spreads the good,
She yields to heaven and rests in her mandate.’
…with the Traveller’s Retreat…

‘Below heaven is the wind. Coupling.
The prince sends out mandates and commands to the four corners of the earth.’
…with the times when there’s mandated work to be done even though you cannot master the argument, cannot set the world right, cannot achieve great or lasting things… cannot take the woman because such a match would not last…

‘Lake without water, Confined.
A noble one carries out the mandate, fulfils her aspiration.’
…with the moment of truth and confidence when time and will flow together and the mandate changes…

What do you think? Am I imagining things, or might the writers of the Daxiang have had something like this in mind?

I’ve been looking forward to this book ever since I met Margaret and ran a webinar with her back in 2005. And late last year, it finally became available. It’s a neat little hardback with the characters for ‘yin’, ‘zhouyi’ and ‘woman’ on the front and a hexagram reference chart inside the back cover.

The book in brief: what you get

• An intriguing, thoughtful introduction.
• A translation that blends the received version of the Zhouyi with emendations taken from the Mawangdui (MWD)manuscript. (With just one exception, she doesn’t tell you which is which – but she does give you page references to Wilhelm/Baynes, Lynn and Shaughnessy’s Mawangdui translation for each hexagram, and the Chinese text she’s using in an appendix.)
• A translation of the Image. (Oh, except for hexagram 36, where it’s replaced by an excerpt from the Tuanzhuan. Odd.)
• Commentary on just eight of the line texts – but there are occasional interpolated glosses throughout offering a starting point for interpretation, like ‘matters affecting many people’ for ‘king’s business’ or ‘eliminating all your defences’ for the walls collapsing into the moat.
• An original, helpful commentary on each hexagram as a whole, based largely on the trigram imagery, blended with natural imagery from the Zhouyi and insights into Chinese thought and history.

Issues…

To be clear – I do like this book very much; I’ve been enjoying reading it, and I fully expect to be using it in readings. But there are a couple of issues that could get in the way of both enjoyment and use for you, so let me get those out of the way before I move on to the good stuff…

It’s described on the front cover as ‘The Original I Ching’ and on the back cover as ‘based on the core text created during the first centuries of the Zhou dynasty.’ Only there’s a basic problem with going looking for an ‘original I Ching’: it’s not like researching the work of a single modern author, where if you go far enough back the variant texts will resolve themselves into a single original. Travel far enough back through Yi’s history, and you will find not a single source, but multiple tributaries. Where is the ‘original’, and how are you to know when you’ve found it?

Margaret has chosen to use a blend of the Mawangdui (MWD) manuscript, which is the most complete but not the oldest of the early versions we have, with the received text, creating a truly ‘original I Ching’. There’s nothing wrong with that, nor with choosing the MWD as a source and deciding not to look at the more fragmentary, earlier texts discovered more recently. Learning and discoveries never stop with the Yi, so if anything is ever going to get into print there has to come a point where the translator says ‘enough’.

What I don’t like, though, is that she only mentions these earlier texts in a little footnote in the introduction, and then in her commentary on hexagram 18 implies that the received meaning of corruption and the ancestral curse is altogether superseded by the ‘earlier’ MWD meaning of ‘branching out’. So all the richness of imagery that comes with the ancestral curse is lost, while she pretends that it never meant more than ‘saving insect-infested food’!

Argh, somewhat. I like working with hexagram 18 – it’s one that speaks particularly clearly and eloquently and works inner magic for people. (By the way, it seems the oldest manuscript does have it as the gu curse.) And in general, I’d rather have Margaret’s translation of the whole of the received version – partly so I could more easily compare like with like, putting her work alongside other translators’, and partly because the received version is what I use in readings, and it just isn’t practical suddenly to switch to a whole different text and turn 18 into ‘Branching Out’ or 19 into ‘The Forest’.

The second issue is also a good thing, in a way. Margaret has that essential scholar’s honesty that refuses to invent meanings to fill in gaps: she even says in her introduction that her book ‘aims to be as clear or as vague as the text itself.’ The unpretentiousness of her translation is appealing – ‘You should’ for the junzi of the Image, for instance, or ‘crossing the great river will work out’ or ‘impeded’/'on foot’ for 39. She offers lucid, intelligent explanations of recurrent phrases (like crossing the great river and yuan heng, li zhen) in her introduction.

However, when she comes to something unclear, it remains quite authentically unclear. 37.3, for instance, she translates,

‘The family goes “shyow-shyow”. Remorse and danger, but good fortune. Wife and children go “shee-shee”. In the end, distress.’

and adds a footnote,

‘It is unclear which emotions were associated with these sounds. The first may indicate anger or joy; the second may be happy.’

This is refreshingly open and completely without that irritating ‘I know what this means and I’ll make it mean it, damn it!’ translator’s attitude. However, it does often leave the reader without much of a starting point.

There’s next to no interpretation offered of line texts in general – some italicised commentary on eight of the 384, the occasional gloss in parentheses – so that often you’re left on your own to work with something like,

‘Sincerity. In peeling, danger.’ (58.5)

That’s fair enough. But at times it seems there is just no attempt to make sense in the translation itself:

‘Reversing the jaws. Gnashing at the warp at the north. Going on a campaign would bring misfortune.’ (27.2)

‘Jaws reversed: good fortune. The tiger gazes “dan-dan” (his eyes down], his face “didi” (flute-like). No blame.’ (27.4)

And for 29.4, here is all you get:

‘Six in the fourth place: (this line has to do with the bronze containers used in sacrificial rituals, replacing them with earthenware pots, and with either a wine ladle or angelica coming from a window. The one clear statement is: ) In the end, no danger [or blame].’

I can sympathise absolutely with the feeling behind this kind of note. It arises after a few weeks or years spent looking at every meaning, usage and variant of every character in a line, parsing it every which way, maybe looking at a small mountain of sample readings and consulting the Yi to ask it what it means for good measure, and still being all at sea. (Come to think of it, hexagram 29 is an apt place for that to happen, isn’t it?) But seeing this note in place of a translation still makes me feel as though an early draft went to the printers by mistake. I feel the same way about flute-like tiger faces – oh, and the standard of proof-reading, which is really not good at all.

Good things

Let me move on to the things I particularly like about the book.

The introduction makes interesting reading. It’s permeated by an awareness that this is and has always been an oracle, not just a foundational philosophical/metaphysical text. So towards the beginning she says,

‘Over the centuries, many have found that consulting the Changes can encourage thoughtful decision-makers to see aspects of situations to which they had been blind. The natural images in the Changes, when considered as analogous to recurring human situations, can provide fruitful images for meditation as people search for ways through – or out of – their particular dilemmas.’

and

‘It is best used as part of a thoughtful process involving repeated meditation, journaling, and the advice of others. It was not intended to replace moral dicta but to assist those determined to act responsibly. It can prod us toward a deeper, more informed view of the world and our actions within it.’

And towards the end, when she offers two example readings, one is modern and the other dates from the second century – a fact she doesn’t mention until after walking you through the reading. So the reader is left with a sense of Yi’s powerful history as an oracle – which is good.

I also especially like her advice on how to divine, something she regards as being part of a process of decision-making that includes information-gathering and talking to people. (Since a classic and painful mistake is for people to use divination as an alternative to these things, this is a Good Thing.)

Her ideas for questions are reasonable, if weirdly limited – why only decision-making and no asking for advice or insight? – and she seems stuck on the idea that second hexagram equals future results (not that that’s unusual). But then she suggests that you write down your response to the reading, journal before bed, sleep on it, write more the following morning, talk with a friend for advice, keep coming back to your reading for a few days and meditate on the Image. That’s far, far more true-to-life than your average, ‘cast coins, add up values, look up hexagram, get answer’ kind of account. ‘Expect to find wisdom though not clarity,’ she says. ‘If the answer seems clear, be sure to read all sections again, carefully.’

You can tell this is the voice of someone who has consulted the oracle, not just treated it as the object of study. She even mentions in passing, in the Acknowledgements, having introduced students to the oracle and had them write essays about their reading experiences. Hooray!

There’s also intriguing insight here into Margaret’s approach to translation. She explains how the concepts of yin and yang were introduced long after the Zhouyi was written. Instead of merely mentioning this, though, she has taken care to avoid the casual conflation of solid lines with yang and open with yin (I only have to look at my own book’s introduction for a handy example of that ), remove this conceptual layer from her thinking about the text, and explore what is revealed behind it. (And she includes a lovely interpretation in passing of 61.2 and its mention of ‘yin’.) And there’s a good account here of her take on Hexagram 44 – the accounts of 44 in Karcher’s Total I Ching and my book both owe a lot to her original article on this.

The commentary on each hexagram is original, sometimes surprising (24 as an earthquake?) and often insightful. It’s mostly based on the Image, and you can tell that, as she says in the Introduction, this arises from personal daily reflections:

‘I have lived with these words for many years, writing down the characters in the morning and carrying them throughout the day, memorising them, and writing the characters over and over when I could…’

(And I do very much like the fact that she’s included the Image because it speaks to her, and never mind historical authenticity.)

She uses her background knowledge of ancient Chinese life and thought to provide a context that makes things more accessible. There are little references to Confucius and Mencius; there’s an explanation of the setting-right of the calendar in 49 and this at the end of Hexagram 56:

‘A further note: In early China, fire was used to clear mountainous land and prepare it for cultivation or easier access by humans. So for them it was a civilizing, fructifying act, not one of long-term destruction. In th same way, in being wanderers (or pilgrims), we must leave behind many ties and almost all physical possessions. But by acceding to this emptiness and vulnerability, we open ourselves to new worlds, some of which may be far more fruitful for us than our current homes.’

Margaret writes in a plain, direct style that encourages you simply to contemplate the natural imagery – the scenery of the trigrams (had you thought of 26 as ‘the skies that lie among mountain peaks’?) and also the imagery of the original. Here is the bamboo in the name of Hexagram 60:

‘Bamboo is a rapidly growing grass with hollow stems. Each hollow tube terminates in a woody membrane that blocks the hollow. These solid portions have two functions: they give strength to the plant and they are the loci for branching and other growth. Without the joints, bamboo would collapse easily, and never grow into sturdy tree-tall plants.’

She goes on to compare this to a university course being just a term long to support the development of skills and the making of better long-term choices, and to simple, frugal living. We might already know all this about bamboo plants, but I find that to have it presented to me explicitly like this keeps me from skimming past the imagery and encourages the kind of slowing down and contemplating that makes for readings that work. Without being plunged into a sea of imagery and associations (no mythic or legendary dimension here), you’re nonetheless quietly guided into a meditative approach. And this is why I expect to be picking this book up quite often, to see if it can take me back to beginner’s mind again and out of my ‘I-know-what-this-one’s-about’-ism.

Who it’s for

I don’t think this is a beginner’s book, or not on its own, because of that lack of interpretation I mentioned, and the way it sometimes extends into the translation. But alongside a book that’s more inclined to ‘tell you what it means’ line by line, this would be a good addition: an alternative perspective, a common sense approach without moralising, and a reminder that the more prolix commentator didn’t really know what it meant, either.

I think it’ll be especially useful for non-beginners who have a store of their own ideas and could do with coming back to basics. And it would also appeal to anyone who’s averse to over-complication and drawn to the natural imagery of the trigrams.

You’ll find it at Amazon.com, and in Canada and the UK.

Oh dear, oh dear. Another one – someone explaining how the Yijing is not just an oracle, but ‘so much more than that’. I do wish people would not say this without pausing for a moment to contemplate what an oracle is.

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.

As I’ve mentioned before, I first got to know Hexagram 14, Great Possession, through volunteering. When I was just getting started with Yi, I asked about volunteering in general and about various individual opportunities, and received 14 again and again in the answers.

What I came to love about volunteering was how great things arose from such simplicity. You see what someone needs, and you provide it, spontaneously and without thought. The things you do may all be very small, and often the things the people around you do are also small, but when a whole group of people with this same motive force comes together, something great emerges and lives are changed.

Last week I had 14 as part of my weekly reading. My re-application forms for volunteering arrived (I’m changing volunteer placement, which means more government checks – more 47 than 14, those…) and I was on the alert for 14-ish things.

When I was coming home on Thursday night, I found myself short of money for the ’bus fare. Before I even had time to be embarrassed, much less to worry how I was going to travel the 10 miles to the train station, the man I’d been chatting to at the stop stepped forward to pay the difference for me. We were perfect strangers with nothing in common, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. He saw a need and – in the same moment – acted to fill it.

Later in the same trip, I was cycling home from the station and had a slight mishap with the back of a parked car. Someone showed up to move my bike off the road, check I was OK, and wait with me in the rain until my husband arrived. When we’d assured him I was fine and there was nothing else he could do, he quietly went home.

A couple of days later, a forum I just joined organised their first group phone call. There is no leader running this group. Someone has created a private forum for us; someone has an account with a free teleconference provider and volunteered to lead the call; someone else collected up our email addresses and sent out reminders with the details; someone else provided download space for the call recording. The call happened, and it was good.

All this is 14 in action: Great Possession that arises because people see needs and fill them, and because we co-operate.

Where is this to be found in Hexagram 14 – besides in experience, that is?

There’s the name of the hexagram: Great Possession. The word for ‘Possession’, which also means ‘being’, shows an open hand. According to LiSe, “Later a piece of meat was added, to emphasize possessing.” You can see as much on the Chinese Etymology site – except that, on reflection, you cannot tell whether the hand is holding the meat or offering it.

(While you are enjoying the wealth of information on the Chinese etymology page, you may notice that – wholly in the spirit of Hexagram 14 – it has a ‘Paypal donate’ button towards the top right. Please use it!)

Also… 14 follows from 13; Great Possession arises from People in Harmony. In fact, since these two hexagrams are an inverted pair, you can say that Great Possession is the same thing, the same pattern of energies, as People in Harmony, just seen from a different angle. (And if you read about the ‘gift economy’, as I’ve just begun doing, this makes wonderful sense.)

And most simply of all: the pattern of the lines of hexagram 14 -

- shows five strong, solid, yang lines gathered around a single, open yin line in the fifth place. This is the place of vision and choice, and it is the ruling line. The guiding principle of this hexagram is the yin: what is open, responsive and (as Karcher says of hexagram 2) willing to provide what is needed. It creates the upper trigram li – fire, light and vision. Seeing what is needed, responding spontaneously to provide it, Great Possession comes into being and we are wealthy.

I don’t do tarot readings, or know anything worth mentioning about tarot, but I still like reading what wise tarot people write. They seem to have a creative, flexible, improvisatory approach to divination that I think Yi people could learn something from. And a lot of the problems/ questions/ possibilities in tarot reading are things I can recognise in my experience with Yi.

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?

… starting at 9pm UK time? (That’s 4pm Eastern.) As that’s when Kim Gould of Love Your Design has kindly asked me to join her for her web-radio show.

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 an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”

Proust

Hexagram 29, Repeating Chasms, has a reputation as one of those ‘bad hexagrams’ – which is basically code for ‘hexagrams the experience of which we typically do not enjoy.’ Only, of course, it is more than that…

The two words of its name are equally important:

Repeating also means rehearsing and learning: this is the classic hexagram of ‘learning opportunities’ (also something we might prefer to avoid).

Chasms are pits, depth and absence, and also the dangers of running water. We experience them as the complete absence of anything solid – and for a comical take on this, see ‘Hexagram 29 and learning to swim’. (Though the experience I describe there would have been a better picture of 29 if I’d had no idea whether the pool had an opposite side I could reach.)

I have seen Hexagram 29 describe the experience of someone who is going blind and doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to cope. Someone who never hears from the one she loves. Someone who finds her ability to do her beloved work slipping away, and who has no idea what she might be or how she might live without it. The roof beam of Hexagram 28 has broken, the structure is falling, and there is no more support or reassurance to be had. What’s left?

There are many stories of Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, coming as Yi’s reproof to someone who asks too many questions. Repeating Chasms can do something similar, but whereas 4’s message is something like, ‘There is no answer for you because you’re too immature to understand,’ 29’s is more like, ‘No matter how desperately you want there to be a solid answer, there isn’t one.’

29 is not only chasms, but repeating chasms. The pit will yawn open on your path again and again until you stop searching for detours and travel through it. A few examples…

Someone close to me is suffering, and I don’t know how to cope; I never know how to cope. I write in my journal, ‘Oh, how I wish I had some kind of strategy to handle this!’ (Ultimately the answer is to stop wondering how and allow the free flow of compassion. This is scary in itself – it feels like pouring myself out into a bottomless pit – but it transforms the situation.)

Or there is Barbra’s experience, as she described it in her second comment on this post. When she received Hexagram 29, she imagined her life might be in danger – but what she and those close to her actually faced again and again was the need to go through the fears of illness, disability and lack.

It’s important to realise that 29 is not always about something big and life-threatening. Looking through my own readings, I find one occasion when it referred to a cold that came back for 24 hours because I did too much too soon, and another where the small cut on my fingertip was going to take many weeks to heal, and I’d learn this again and again every time I tried to find a new way to wrap it up so I could play the ‘cello.

Also, Hexagram 29 is not just a sign of repeating chasms to come. It also describes how to travel through them, living in the dark for as long as it takes:

‘Repeating chasms.
There is truth and confidence.
Holding your heart fast creates success.
Movement brings honour.’

In these times, certainty comes of an inner connection, by holding to your own heart (or from a ‘connected heart’). And it comes of being in movement: undertaking committed action without knowing; being present without trying to make it safe first. (You can’t.) This is a liquid hexagram (not unlike 59), where all you can know to be real is movement – though the moving line texts often advise moving with attention, noticing where you are before hurtling into action.

The Image – always a source of counsel – develops the idea of repetition as ‘learning opportunity’:

‘Waters flow on and reach the end. Repeating Chasms.
A noble one acts with constant character [de],
And teaches things by repeating.’

Water never loses its nature, and so it creates rivers that reach the sea. Sometimes this Image reminds me of what I’m communicating to another person; more often, though, it seems to be what I’m teaching myself. This crystallised for me when I heard Jennifer Louden suggest that I ask what I am teaching myself with each habit.

Come to think of it, that could be yet another way in which 30 emerges from 29.

A subscriber asked me to write about 29, and especially about 29 as relating hexagram. Well… it so happens that my reading for last year was 3 changing to 29, so I can respond with the full benefit of hindsight.

29 as relating hexagram says something like this:
“See this primary hexagram? You will be compelled to learn its depths and intensity, and the movement it demands of you in order to come through.”

Sometimes, especially if two or more lines change to reach 29, the line texts show both the depths of a hexagram – the ways you could fall into it and not be able to get out – and also its flow, what it will take to come through. For instance, I think this pattern’s visible in the lines that join hexagrams 3, 4, 5 and 6 to 29. (Maybe also in 7.2.)

You’re compelled to learn, of course, by repetition: the chasm keeps presenting itself until you do. I spent the first 8 months or so of last year looking for ways to keep on pursuing my chosen ‘direction to go’, and coming up against the same basic inability every time. I was searching diligently for a route round the chasm, and we know how well that works. Eventually, I had to learn Hexagram 3: growth without direction; coming up against my limitations; seeing the smallness of my own perspective compared to the larger scale and longer term.

Thoughts? Examples to share? Please comment…