When I interviewed _____ (that ‘mystery interviewee’!) for the upcoming audio sale, she said something about the sacred space of a reading that got me thinking. I’ve just added some excerpts from our conversation, including the part where we talk about the ‘space’ of a reading, to the audio sale preview page, to give you some background to this.
My interviewee compared the reading space to the way in which changes happen when her homeopath prescribes a remedy – and before she’s actually taken it. That fits exactly with one of my stranger experiences with readings. It’s easy to say that ‘Yijing readings help you to understand,’ or, ‘the Yi is a wonderful decision-making tool’. And this does, undoubtedly, account for a lot of what happens in readings: you see more clearly; you understand what to do or how to be; you put your insights into practice. But it’s been my experience that there is something more than that going on – something that happens above and beyond anything the querent consciously grasps from the reading. People are changed when they talk with an oracle, on a level that has remarkably little to do with understanding anything.
Whatever’s happening here is clearly way beyond me – so I asked the oracle about it.
What happens in this space?
Yi answers with Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, moving to Hexagram 58, Communicating Joy.
The inner truth of communication? This makes sense.
Hexagram 61 acts as a channel for the essence of the hexagram that follows it – like a magnifying lens. In this reading space –
– communication and exchange are intensified. Hexagram 58 shows the trigram for lake, doubled, and this reminds me of the conversation about homeopathy, where water is the great carrier of messages.
‘Lakes joined together. Communicating joy.
In the same way, the noble one joins with partners and friends to speak and practise together.’
Exactly.
We arrive at 61 by way of 60 – Inner Truth has its roots in Articulating. You enter the sacred space because you have the measure of the words, and because you have a relationship you can trust with the oracle (and with the diviner). ‘Articulating and also trust, and so inner truth follows’: more than just a flash in the pan, an ‘aha’ moment, this is about an enduring relationship.
The word for ‘inner’ shows the centre, perhaps a drum mounted on a pole – being the conduit for vibrations felt in your core. And ‘truth’ shows a hand in the act of grasping a child: absolute presence, being here, now.
‘Inner truth. Pigs and fishes, good fortune.
Harvest in crossing the great river.
Harvest in constancy.’
Here, now, we’re in the right time and place to be blessed with two great symbols of good fortune. We stand in the river, and know the right place to fish.
The core – the nuclear hexagram – of Inner Truth is Nourishment, Hexagram 27. So at the heart of the reading experience is a desire for nourishment, a heightened awareness of it, and maybe inner mutation in the way we receive and digest it. Wanting to be fed implies true presence and single-pointed attention. Think of the attention a fledgeling bird has for the adult bird when it returns with food! Or how very, very present a hungry dog can be when you’re eating. The most powerful readings certainly have this quality about them – and when you are present, the pigs and fishes come to you. (And whatever else pigs and fishes might symbolise, in ancient China they were most certainly food.)
Yi, however, does not say that this is an occasion to sit and drink in the atmosphere, but that there’s ‘harvest in crossing the great river’. This level of perception and presence is the springboard for going out and committing to action – or for moving into an entirely new territory.
The Image of Inner Truth also shows something about what is happening in here:
‘Above the lake is the wind. Inner truth.
The noble one deliberates over legal proceedings and delays executions.’
The wind moves over the lake and stirs it. It doesn’t move the lake into the right position and then stop. The lake doesn’t attain the optimal wave pattern and then set. And so the noble one lets herself be stirred like the lake, ‘deliberates over legal proceedings and delays executions.’
This law-court imagery is often most usefully interpreted as an insight into the decision-making process: gathering information, weighing evidence, reaching conclusions. But when you decide, you fix things – and here that looks like a premature, unnatural end, an execution. Perhaps because it settles things, it closes the space?
Anyway, we’re clearly a long way away from ‘Yi as decision-making tool’!
Looking to the moving lines…
Line 4
‘The moon almost full,
Team horse goes away.
Not a mistake.’
This one is within 61’s own central space, on the verge of emerging from it back into action.
Horses are herd animals: by nature, they follow one another. But here on the cusp of change, one leaves. Karcher translates it succinctly: ‘horse’s yoke-mate disappears’.
We’re also herd animals, living in consensus reality and abiding by convention, looking for cues to follow. But in this space we are freed – or cut off – from our normal associations; we can move of our own volition.
This line looks across towards Hexagram 10, Treading – the tiger’s hexagram. That suggests we’re drawn towards something more solitary and more potent, wanting to connect with something bigger.
Line 6
‘Cockcrow rises toward heaven.
Constancy, pitfall.’
This line came as a surprise to me. Everything in this garden is not necessarily lovely after all.
This could, of course, mean that I’m losing the point of the experience by talking about it. But I think it also means that we can go too far as we emerge (at this last line) from the reading space. This line moves towards Articulating, which is where Inner Truth came from. But it can still move too far towards it. This seems to me to speak against over-interpreting readings, and against the delusion that we can control whatever-it-is that happens in the space, or make it happen to order. It’s not good to try to pin the process down with definitions, or to imagine we can dictate what miracles will happen – any more than the cockerel makes the sun rise.
Remember, you can listen to excerpts from the interview, and from the lessons and reference book of the audio course, here.