Yi and personal power

Excerpts from the I Ching Community:

Autumn:

‘I asked the I-ching, “Who do we speak to when we divine?”

34 unchanging.’

(Hexagram 34 is Great Vigour, very much an image of personal power.)

And on a separate thread…
Bruce:

‘Can the Yijing cause you to lose your personal power? Can the Yi cause more harm than good, specifically to those who seek to serve it, obey it or conform to it?…

I believe that we can so yield to the authority from which the Yi speaks, trusting implicitly in everything we interpret it as saying, that we stand to lose the best of what we are made of in the process.’

Listener:

‘The wisdom of the Yi is, must be, seamlessly connected to the heart, soul and psyche of the person who is asking the question. If you try to subtract your heart, soul, mind and personal intuition from the Yi response you get —if it is even possible –your responses will seem flat and nonsensical. People who try to use the Yi this way become disinterested and disillusioned pretty quickly. It is only the resonance with the soul which produces the wisdom.

… I trust the guidance I have received over the years, guidance which has almost unfailingly proven to have merit. I also pay close attention to my dreams. But most importantly, I trust the Yi guidance because I trust my soul, I trust my own intuition implicitly, and I trust that I am part of a whole picture. The Yi is only a way to connect with the larger picture and to illuminate things which may yet be in the shadows of my conscious mind.’

LiSe:

‘I guess if you listen to Yi like an authority who tells you what to do, or how your future will turn out, you lose your own color.

My own experience with Yi was rather the opposite. I had little faith in my own inner voice for the simple reason that it was too soft to really hear what it was telling me. So outside voices had big impact, and yet I knew, that it was not right this way. But finding the inner assurance to go your own way is hard, when you cannot even discern what your own way is.

I felt from the start of using the Yi, that it aligned with that inner voice. When that one was too faint, Yi made me recognize what it said. Not by ‘telling’ it to me, but by opening up something. Like removing earplugs. Very similar to telling someone a very serious story, taking approval for granted, and the other reacts with “oh, is it?” Or makes fun of it, or makes a small remarks which puts your entire story into disorder.

Makes you say “Oh..” and then silence. A very valuable silence, tearing down yet another wall of assumptions. Lost for words because you are finding your real words back.

This is very much what Yi does for me, tearing down walls. Most walls are made by the world around you, from what they expect, from what you yourself expect from them, and from what you expect of yourself towards them. Time and again Yi questioned those assumptions. Very often making me laugh out loud. So Yi loosened me up rather than made me ‘correct’. My inner voice is not soft anymore, I can recognize it easily and follow it, so I don’t need Yi anymore as much as I did back then.’

Nothing for me to add, I think. These are only excerpts from people’s posts: the whole thread is here.