I Ching questions of ‘doing’ or ‘being’

I think that finding your question for the Yijing is the most important part of any reading. It sets the conditions for the whole conversation with the oracle: while it may or may not constrain what Yi can say, it certainly constrains what we can hear. The question is where we’re coming from: everything from casual assumptions to deep-seated beliefs will feed into it somehow. So it’s not just a matter of what we do or don’t want to hear, but also what we can conceive of asking.

The other day I wrote about the importance of getting ‘doing’ into the question before ‘having’ – and how people who are actually thinking in terms of what they can do, nonetheless put on a kind of straitjacket of passivity before consulting Yi: they only allow themselves to ask about what will happen to them, or what they’ll get. Getting ‘doing’ into the question, even if it’s just to ask ‘What will happen if I keep on doing the same things?’ is a good, practical step towards aligning readings with the way the universe generally works: what you get follows, one way or another, from what you do, and that can only follow from who you are.

Practical readings about ‘doing’ are good, useful things. ‘What if I go this way?’ or ‘How can I get to where I want to be?’ – both translate naturally into calmer, more confident ‘doing’, more aligned with the way things are. And they account for the great majority of questions I ask, for myself and other people. Many are very mundane – ‘What about buying a new computer?’ or ‘What’s the best way to produce these CDs?’ – but as long as the goal is good, Yi helps.

But then I listen again to the webinar recording, where Stephen Karcher tells the story of the Rainmaker and talks about the ‘synchronistic effect of inner work’:

“You’re not going to accomplish anything by more ego action. We are going to accomplish something by doing this inner work, and I am personally convinced that the symbols and the images of the Yi, when imagined in their deepest and most mythical way, as it were, are a profound tool to encourage this inner work of transformation. And I think that’s how we’re going to change the time, not by sending another hundred thousand troops into Iraq.”

And it’s a reminder of the limits of those useful ‘doing’ questions. It’s not as if we didn’t know that standard-issue, ‘b follows a’ causality is not the only way the cosmos works. We see ample evidence of that every time we cast a hexagram.

So we need room for ‘being’ questions. Not just for the intimidating, once-in-a-lifetime ones (‘Why am I here?’ ‘What do I have to give?’), but for the ordinary daily concerns.

(If I’ve learned anything from a few years of Yijing readings, it’s that life doesn’t subdivide neatly into cubicles for ‘spiritual’ and ‘practical – everyday’. If I imagine that I’ve fitted a question tidily into one or the other, I can count on Yi to kick down the partitions.)

So… as well as asking ‘What can I do to accomplish my goal?’ we might try ‘How can I be in harmony with the time?’ Or we could try a shift from ‘What will happen?’ to ‘What am I attracting?’ I think it would be more than just an exercise in rephrasing.