 Clarity's I Ching Newsletter: Issue 71 "The message of Yijing is... how to be wholly and completely human" Jane Schorre |
™Letter from the Editor— Dear Subscriber,
Hello again - welcome to the first 'Answers' for 2005. I hope you had a good, refreshing break and are looking forward to the year ahead!
I'm going to make an effort this year to keep these newsletters shorter, as I know there are only so many hours in your day. This time there is the first half of a book review (or the review of the first half of a book), and a quick note on keeping in touch with your reading for 2005.
If you missed the free downloads at the end of 2004, you can still get them from the last issue. There are compilations from the newsletter over the past year, and also a directory of Yi (I Ching) diviners who will provide readings in person. Do you have a friend who would like a copy of one of these? Please feel free to email it to them, or print it out for the technophobes.
I hope and pray that your family and friends are safe after the horrors of the tsunami. I won't take this opportunity to send online donation links, as I know that you'll have given all you can. All I can think of to suggest now is that maybe the charities would benefit most from us signing up for a regular donation (by direct debit), especially as the relief effort starts to fade out of the headlines. Charities often say that these allow them to plan ahead and minimise administrative overheads.
Wishing you a joyful 2005!
Hilary
"Hello, Hilary...
I wish to share with you and all the friends a message that I sent for my friends and I have translated from the Spanish..., I hope you will understand it.
 For the next year and for your whole life, I wish you:
Lots of peace to have a clear horizon
Lots of love, because Love cures everything.
Lots of happiness to face every day with a smile.
Lots of friends for sharing joy and loneliness.
Solidarity to allow you when the others need from you
Lots of understanding to avoid mistakes and non-fast judgments
Lots of Faith in your intelligence, in your heart and, in your better life possibilities.
Thousands of Happiness for the New Year.
Leah
Dec. 2004"
"Dear Hilary,
I hope this finds you well. You've asked for some ideas from your readers concerning the I Ching and its relationships to other bodies of knowledge, so here are just a few.
The late Kabbalist and Golden Dawn practitioner Gerald Suster wrote a guide to the Tarot, in which he mapped the eight trigrams or bagua onto the sefiroth on the Tree of Life, which further strengthens the link between the I Ching and the Tarot.
Someone called Ouran has pointed out that the African divination system Ifa has 16x16=256 figures, the I Ching can be extended similarly by "mirroring" it. Then a 1-1 corrrspondence can be achieved.
Best wishes for 2005,
Graham"
™DIY Corner: Holding onto your annual reading— This is just a quick chat (about 3 1/2 minutes) - practical suggestions of how not to forget a reading! (Sorry about the computer fan coming on half way through...) Click the blue 'play' button above to listen - or if that doesn't work in your browser, click here to listen with your usual media player.
™Book review (part 1): Jane Schorre and Carrin Dunne, Yijing Wondering and Wandering ˜ This is actually two wonderfully complementary books in one binding: 'Wondering', by Jane Schorre, and 'Wandering', by Carrin Dunne. To do them both justice, I'll review just Jane Schorre's book here, and come back to the Carrin Dunne's in a future issue. (Frankly, I think the book would be worth buying for either half.)
Jane Schorre started the project off with her 'Wondering'. She looks at the names of the hexagrams, in their Pairs. Many people using Yi must have noticed over the years that the hexagrams are arranged in pairs, but until now, Stephen Karcher was the only author to see the Pair as the basic unit of the Yi, and pay close attention to the different kinds. Most pairs - like 3 and 4 - are inverted; some, like 1 and 2, are polar opposites. Jane describes the opposites as having a generative, 'breathing movement', while the inverses are as if 'reflected in a lake'.
Her other significant idea about the structure is that the received division into Upper and Lower Canon - after Hexagram 30 - is misplaced, and should come after #28. This is an interesting idea, and Carrin Dunne goes on to use it to find many very convincing symmetries. The split at hexagram 31 does look illogical - until you count the number of hexagram forms in each part (with each inverted pair as a single form) and find that the two canons actually divide the Yijing exactly in half. I wonder whether she - like most commentators - just hasn't noticed this... ?
For each pair, Jane has a double-page spread showing the hexagrams and their English names along with the Chinese characters, their ancient components and meanings. (Giving these space of their own leaves scope for your own imagination to come into play before you encounter her own ideas.) Then come her own conceptions of the pairs, and stories and extracts from Laozi and Zhuangzi to illustrate their ideas, and finally there may be a Chinese painting or calligraphy (from a master) to bring the concepts to life.
The etymological part is the weakest, I think. Jane Schorre is quite clear herself that this is not meant to be a a well-researched investigation into the ancient characters, but rather an imaginative exercise in possibilities. She seems to have been content to get just enough information to spark off her imagination - which is fair enough. LiSe's website is a far better source of information and ideas on the ancient characters, though.
But Jane's response to her discoveries, and her conception of the Pairs, is wonderful to read. She understands that the Vessel (#50) contains the transformation of #49. She sees that hexagram 21 bites through to the essence, and 22 is that essence. She suggests that the plants covering over the young one in hexagram 4 might represent his ignorance - or his excess of learning. And so on! Though I must admit, I keep thinking 'If only...': if only she had known that 41 was an emptied vessel to 42's overflowing one, what might that have inspired? If only she had known about the spirit tablets of the ancestors when writing on hexagram 19; if only she had read LiSe's site (or Stephen's book) on hexagram 38...
Still, the insights she does offer are priceless in themselves. This isn't a book to read for a definitive interpretation, nor yet for The Authentic Original Meaning (thank goodness!), but for inspiration and ideas you can apply to your own readings.
I appreciated the excerpts from the Daoist classics that accompany each pair. They open further perspectives, and often have that incisive, clout-round-the-ear quality. If there's a down side to this Daoist perspective, it's that maybe it limits the book's breadth of interpretation. If one hexagram of a pair seems more naturally Daoist in tone than the other, I think it gets a little more attention. (52 as compared with 51, for instance, or 36 as compared with 35.) Speaking for myself, I don't find Yi's message as uniform as Laozi's; I think it can sometimes advocate going against the flow and striving to bring about change.
Maybe this is connected with the way Jane reads each pair as a unit, but doesn't speak of them as an evolutionary sequence. Her Yi is poetic rather than historical or mythical, and hence has no stories: no narratives, no sense of travelling in order to arrive.
Looking back at the introduction to Wondering - this is superb in its own right. It reveals Jane's approach very clearly: genuine, authentic, and humble in the sense of Hexagram 15. As she puts it:
"What we have here is the result of a search for meaning in Yijing from my own personal point of view. It does not try to prove anything, but presents only a way of entering into the great mystery of Yijing. I am not an authority on the subject, and have absolutely no credentials to present...
"I am a dedicated appreciator. The wonderful abstract beauty in the patterns of Yijing teases me and entices me to try to make some sense, and perhaps nonsense, of it all. ... "
Her introduction includes one of the best accounts of divination and symbol that I've read... I just get the sense that she really knows this from the inside. (She's a retired Taiji teacher.) I rather think that beneath her quiet, approachable style lie many years of studying Yi in its entirety, not least the Dazhuan (Great Treatise). No-one, for instance, could read her introduction to yin and yang and imagine that these are static categories that live in columns of opposites.
Everything Jane Schorre writes about Yi, her approach and her experience rings absolutely true with me. She loves the book, divines with it, delights in it, finds it 'a wonderful mystery to enjoy having on my bookshelf'. I think a lot of thoughtful people who love the oracle will find they have a lot in common with her - and I don't doubt she would be an outstanding teacher.
Comments on Carrin Dunne's Wandering in a future issue - meanwhile, you can read the first six pages of Jane's introduction at Amazon.com, where the book is available in paperback. It's also available from Amazon Canada (eventually!), but unfortunately not in the UK. (You can always order from the States, though - and I do think this one is worth the postage.)
Offsite:
Nina Correa wrote to tell me about her new Daodejing book. It's not a translation as such, but a full word-by-word version, with notes on the etymology of every character, that offers you the means to find your own translation. This is a lot like what Bradford offers for free in digital form over at hermetica.info, but Nina does add an etymological dictionary that looks very interesting.
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Holding on to your annual reading (put this at the end in a 'transcripts' section
Some time round about the end of 2004, you may have consulted with Yi about the year ahead. I hope you did - the annual reading is a powerful way to put the pieces together and get a sense of direction. Needless to say, you can still do your annual reading now! Some people actually prefer to do this on their birthday - a kind of personal New Year. Asking for your path through the year, or for guidance for the year, usually works well.
Once you have your reading, the key thing is not to forget it! Understanding it all right now this minute is not so important. Keeping it in your mind is.
I'm talking to myself as much as anyone here. Last year - which was not my best - I don't think I could have told you what my annual reading was by June. If I had been able to, of course, I'd have had a whole lot more idea what I was doing in general. So - what I need, and _maybe_ what you need (!), is ways to keep a reading in mind.
You could do this by making it visible. The simplest thing to do is just to draw the hexagrams on strong card with a big black pen, along with a few choice words from the text, and stick this up where you'll see it every day. Or if you think more visually - or if you need to be more subtle about it - look for a poster that would represent the message of your reading. Maybe a scene that represents its trigrams. Of course, this doesn't have to be a poster - it could be a bookmark, a cover for your diary - wherever you'll see it.
Another way is to enlist some help. Get people you can trust to give you reminders. You'd tell them something like -
'if ever you see me doing such and such this year, tell me this...' and you'd give them the gist of your reading. This year, I have 56, line 4 to keep in mind. The traveller in a resting place, with property and an axe, my heart is not glad... So I would get someone to ask me to stop and ask, 'Are you really happy with that?' whenever they saw me settling for some stop-gap solution. The person you ask doesn't have to understand the whole reading, of course, or even know that this idea comes from a reading at all.
As you know, I spend my working day in front of a computer screen. If you're the same, then you are in reminder heaven. To start with there's the screensaver: right-click on the Windows desktop and choose 'properties' and 'screensavers', and you can select what they call the 'marquee' screensaver. It's scrolling text, and you choose the words, colour and font. And while in 'properties', of course you can use your imagination to think of a good desktop image that will reliably bring your reading to mind.
If you use an organiser program, will it do a repeating reminder? Mine's set to chime every 21 days and bring up a reminder: 'Traveller, keep still.'
Finally - there is the giant cosmic reminder system that some people call synchronicity. For as long as you can remember what your reading was at all, you'll hear and see reminders of it that show you how it's evolving. I know this because I received a good one a couple of days ago - someone who has no clue about my reading, putting its essence into words for me. So so far, the cosmos is conspiring to keep me awake. Still, if come February or so you get the impression I need another reminder, you know my email address!
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