Since I first started working with Yi, I’ve enjoyed asking about the outcome of tennis matches. The dual between individuals, as much psychological as technical – it’s something very natural to divine about, and the outcomes teach me a lot about the hexagrams involved.
You may know my husband doesn’t believe in the efficacy of divination. So of course I had to mention to him how accurately I could call a tennis match, didn’t I?
You can probably guess what happened next. My success rate, which had been over 90%, plummeted. There were readings I couldn’t relate to the match at all. One that quite definitely described the arc of a player’s performance over the course of a tournament rather than the one match I’d meant to ask about. Sometimes I called it wrong, more often I had no clue how to call it at all. Something was obviously up… now I’d set this up as some kind of ‘demonstration’, Yi was not playing. (Not the kind of discovery calculated to impress a sceptic, of course. Non-repeatable experiments don’t prove anything.)
So when the next match I wanted to watch came up, I asked Yi ruefully, without expectations, and definitely without telling anyone I was asking:
‘Look, just so I learn something, how will Henman do here?’
55, line 3 moving.
‘At Feng is profusion,
Sun at noon, seeing the froth of stars
Your right arm broken,
Not a mistake.’
‘And what about Grosjean?’
36, line 2 moving.
‘Brightness injured, injured in the left thigh.
Using a horse for rescue, its strength means good fortune.’
Henman was incapacitated by an injury to his right shoulder, and lost. Despite the injury Grosjean was carrying to his left thigh.
Game, set and match, Yi.
Perhaps the voice of the Ching doesn’t like ‘tests’ to non-believers. Sort of like “Physician, Heal Thyself?”
You are so absolutely right, it doesn’t! Or not from me, at all events. Many years ago, when I was just starting out with Yi, I thought of a very prettily designed and rational experiment I could do to show my husband the oracle at work. We’d take a group of pictures, he’d choose one, and I would divine to ask what the chosen picture looked like.
Yi’s comment on this bright idea was 29, with line 3 changing. Entering into the pit within a pit, indeed. Ouch. No experiment.
I will never forget the big one, when the labour Government was going to be reelected versus then Liberals. Come hell or high water, my mate at the time through Fu, 24 Double Dissolution, they did win back into office, but only briefly.
I have found doing anything oracular for anyone skeptical is like trying to talk religion to an atheist. I had one last week tell me she had absolutely no beleif in God or any religion. So, I reminded her, our spiritual life is just behind all of us and it must be a popular ride because everyone is quewing up in their thousands waiting to get on it.
Bewildered she asked what I meant. I told her, Lord Yamaraj, the Lord of death is three feet behind all of us with the noose of death and who can tell when he’s going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you its’ your turn.
Then again, some computer programs require a larger megabyte system to run on. Maybe its the same with spiritual life. If your hard drive only has a couple of megabytes and they are devoted to eating, sleeping, mating and defending, then what hope or scope, does such a being have of enquiring into anything about any such things as higher domains, or even the very notion of God Himself.
Nandalal
the servant of the servant of the servant of the servant
Maybe, indeed. But consulting an oracle isn’t proof of having a spiritual life, and not consulting oracles certainly isn’t proof of not having one…