Orchestral I Ching

This started out as an audio recording I made while I was washing up one night and just felt like ranting aloud. Unfortunately this means the sound is punctuated and/or drowned out entirely by assorted splashings and clashings of pans. I would re-record it – except that I haven’t altogether got my voice back yet. So here’s a transcription, instead, edited only very slightly for increased coherence:

“Someone sent me an email – I think it’s an email he sends out regularly on a kind of personal mission to owners of I Ching related sites, to tell them how much he disapproves of the I Ching.

The reason he gives for this is that it disrupts the nature of reality: he seems to think that the ills of the world are attributable to people consulting the I Ching. His idea of reality, on which he bases this, is that it’s like a single harpist on a stage giving a performance. And what happens when people consult the I Ching, in his book, is that this is like members of audience barging up onto the stage and starting plucking away at the strings of the harp – which results in complete cacophony, and in the end the harpist leaves the stage in disgust.

Needless to say, this isn’t quite how I see it – and I think this chap is a few yarrow stalks short of a hexagram. But it is interesting to start thinking about the impact it might have on the world if a significant number of people ever did start consulting the Yi – if it would have any impact at all. And the analogy I’d use for this – well, you know I’m not a harpist, I’m a ‘cellist, and above all I’m an orchestral ‘cellist, so naturally I think of the world – of reality – as being not so much like a solo performance, more like an orchestral performance. And I imagine each one of us playing our own instrument.

Now my friendly correspondent is concerned that when people decide they’re going to create reality the way they want it to be, this is like them barging up on stage and joining in. I don’t think any of us is or needs to be in the audience. I think we’re all up on the stage in the world’s biggest symphony orchestra. And I think what happens when we use the I Ching is, if anything, that we take the cotton wool out of our ears and the blinkers off our eyes.

One thing I’ve noticed in orchestras is that every now and then, you get someone who is superbly good at playing their instrument – has fantastic, exceptional technical prowess – and in an orchestra they’re an absolute disaster, because they don’t take any notice of what’s going on around them. They don’t have the orchestral skill, which is a matter of being able to notice any number of things that are going on around you at once. As a string player you have to know what’s going on with the person sitting next to you, with the people behind you and in front of you, with the leaders of the other string sections – and of course you can’t take your eyes off the conductor – and incidentally you need to read the music. So you need eyeballs on stalks, basically.

I think that consulting with the I Ching is the way of becoming an orchestral player in life rather than a soloist on the platform. I would suggest that if we have cacophony, it’s the result of having a bunch of soloists on the platform: either they’re not bothered about what else is going on, or they don’t have the skill to connect with it even if they are bothered.

So yes, I’ve started wittering, but that’s the gist. Consulting the I Ching is the way of becoming an orchestral player…”