One of the meanings of the “I” in “I Ching” is “easy” or “simple”. Given the smallest opening, it will speak to your heart, reconnect you with the deeper patterns and meanings of your life, and let you move with the flow instead of swimming doggedly upstream.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s actually possible to work with the I Ching to multiply your confusions and frustrations. Here are the top 10 ways to complicate and obfuscate your readings and minimise the danger of their prompting any positive changes. Some are widely known and used; some of the more advanced techniques (notably 5 and 9) I’ve tried and tested for you myself.
1. Never pick up the I Ching unless you’re so distressed you can’t think straight.
It also helps to be in a great hurry. When you’re not in panic mode, you don’t need an oracle, do you? Dust the book occasionally, if you must, but don’t get to know it.
2. Keep your question confusing.
There are a few different ways you can accomplish this. One is to spend 45 minutes composing a question, taking excruciating care not to leave anything out. For example:
“Given my feelings for X, and what Y said about my experience with her over the past 9 years, especially that time in the lobby, and in the light of the astrological challenges I can expect, according to my chart of last Tuesday, over the coming 3 months, should I continue to wait for her response, and if so should I leave my phone on, or should I contact her, and if so would email, texting, post, phone or visiting be better, and what should I say or write, and what will she think if I do?”
This example actually models many best practices, including asking about several alternative options at once, asking what you should do without clarifying what you’re aiming for, and asking about another person’s thought processes. But you can generate almost as much confusion with considerably less effort by using just one of these methods, for instance, “Should I call her or not?”
Now, before you can engage with the I Ching’s answer at all, you first need to determine whether it’s describing a) what you should do, b) the consequences of calling, or c) the consequences of not calling. And if ‘a’, you also have to work out whether its advice corresponds to calling or not. You will probably find yourself trying to interpret the reading from all three perspectives simultaneously.
At the same time you have masterfully limited the reading, making your question a small and rigid box inside which you’re safely defended against any broader, more useful advice the oracle might offer.
3. Ask about what will happen to you…
…but (and this is the important part) never mention anything you might do. Forget “Should I call her or not?” – go for “Will she call me?” Even if you interpret the answer correctly, the risks of this causing you to do anything to improve your life are greatly reduced.
4. Forget your question.
Even if you can only manage a fairly simple, direct question about your own choices, don’t panic. You can keep things hopelessly confusing by the simple expedient of forgetting your question. Needless to say, don’t write it down.
5. Forget the hexagram.
You might want to follow this up by not quite remembering the answer. Write down your hexagram, if you must, on the back of an envelope, or a sweet wrapper. Now lose it. (Or – interesting variant – convince yourself you can remember the hexagram as you cast it without writing it down, and do this at 2am.) It’s OK to remember a few things about the reading, for instance the name of the first hexagram, but you should be uncertain as to which lines were moving. Now you can attempt to interpret several alternative readings, and try to guess which one was yours.
6. Demand it ‘make sense’.
Expect – no, demand – that your answer should make perfect sense at once. If it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. Consult again. Repeat as necessary.
7. Don’t read the I Ching
Avoid the words of the I Ching itself, which have a distressing tendency to speak directly to your soul. Read commentaries, read ‘simplified versions for the modern world’ that replace the imagery and stories with moral abstractions, and read lots of them. If you read enough, you should be able to find one that says what you want. You will also find several that contradict it. This proves that the reading didn’t work. Consult again.
8. Second-guess.
If you accidentally catch sight of an authentic text and your answer does, in fact, make perfect sense at once, all is not lost. Get out of your heart and into your head, and use your natural reserves of indecision and over-analysis. Consider that your intuitive response might be wrong after all, and you can’t really be sure. Consult again. Continue until the answers become mutually contradictory. This proves that the I Ching doesn’t work – but continue to consult anyway.
9. Lose sight of the reading.
Worst case scenario: your question is clear and simple, you remember both question and answer, the answer speaks to you and moves you profoundly, and everything falls into place with extraordinary clarity. I can tell you from personal experience: all is still not lost. If you can’t altogether avoid keeping a record, at least ensure you won’t be able to find it again. Write a long, poetic journal entry recording your discovery, if you must, but don’t look at it for at least a year. There is some risk that the effect of the reading will seep out into your daily life, but you should be able substantially to forget it and continue as normal.
10. Take it seriously.
Perhaps most important: take your divination absolutely and profoundly seriously at all times.
“Ask about what will happen to you. … Even if you interpret the answer correctly, the risks of this causing you to do anything to improve your life are greatly reduced.”
It is a pity that the old Zhou dinasty didn’t learn how tu use the Yijing in a propper and simple way; instead, the used to ask about what will happen to their Kings and nobles, or the Kingdom.
I have always wonder how the Zhou dinasty became the most despictable dinasty in the history of China. Now everything reach Clarity to me: they reduced the risk to do anything to improve their lives, with the wrong and complicated use of the I they made.
😉
From all I’ve read, the Zhou didn’t spend that much time passively waiting for what might happen to them. I know there are records of divinations asking if now is a good time to march on the enemy. Are there any of divinations asking what the enemy will do next?
“…the Zhou didn’t spend that much time passively waiting for what might happen to them”
Are you saying that you can both ask about what will happen and don’t spend time passively waiting for what might happen??? Because they DID ask about what would happen, right?
Oh… in that case, the 3rd technique loses it’s charm 😉
Putting the irony aside, for a while
There is a common idea: “divination” is diferent than “fortune-telling”. Asking for what would happen is “fortune-telling” and it (necesarly?) leads the people to assume a passive rol.
Of course, in our culture, that may happen. Even I can say, that really happen more than 49% of the times.
But why don’t see (and reinforce) that in the origin of the Yijing, asking about what will happen wasn’t “fortune-telling” but real divination; and the way people aproached didn’t lead them to a pasive rol?
Why say “don’t ask about the future”, instead of “you can find a worth use of the Yi asking about the future, if you aproached like the older did”?
There are one root-question: if the Yijing is really a tool to improve one’s life (and it is not a scientific data that Yijing is a tool to improve ourselves), then why they chose to make a tool to improve ourselves in the form of an oracle?
Yes, absolutely. It’s one thing to ask, ‘What if I do this?’ For instance, ‘What if I call her?’ or ‘If the king marches on the Southern barbarians?’ Those questions assume an active querent.
Actually, so does, ‘What if I don’t call her, and continue waiting as I have been doing?’ It recognises that either way is a choice, and that one’s choices make a difference. Whereas ‘What’s going to happen with her?’ – or ‘What’s going to happen with the Southern barbarians?’ – are phrased as if the querent had no influence the outcome.
There’s a temptation to think, ‘I’ll ask what will happen. Then when I know what will happen, I can start thinking about what approach to take myself.’ Unfortunately things don’t usually quite work in that order.
I didn’t say ‘don’t ask about the future’. I do so myself, a lot. But I try to remember that this isn’t the same as asking what will happen next in a film I’m watching. I think there’s another article in this, don’t you? 😉
An oracle’s a way to perceive truth. There’s certainly no scientific data as to what this might be ‘for’. That’s always been up to the individual user.
By the way, thank you very much for the detailed and provocative questions! 🙂
“Yes, absolutely. It’s one thing to ask, ‘What if I do this?’ For instance, ‘What if I call her?’ or ‘If the king marches on the Southern barbarians?’ Those questions assume an active querent….There’s a temptation to think, ‘I’ll ask what will happen. Then when I know what will happen, I can start thinking about what approach to take myself.’ Unfortunately things don’t usually quite work in that order.”
Let’s see Zuo Zhuan for a while (Duke Zhao, 7th Year)
Kong Zhengzi needed to decide between his first son (Meng Zhi) and his second son (Yu) to rule.
“Kong Zhengzi consulted the Zhou Yi by the reeds, propounding the inquiry whether Yuan would enjoy the state of Wei and preside over its altars, and he got the diagram Tun. He also propounded the inquiry whether he should set up [Meng] Zhi, and if this appointment would be acceptable, in answer to which he got Tun and then Bi”
Two mistakes:
first he asked about the future without assuming himself as an active querent, but asking for the future outcome to inform his present decision;
second, when finally assume himself as an active querent, he did it with that horrible expression.. “wheter he should”.
What a surpise to see that, at least in the old times, this actually work.
My humble opinion is this: While the Yi is thought of as an “oracle,” and is rather seen in the third person, and even though it was made a classic to revere and study, it is indeed a “divination manual.” For this I mean that, while we see it as external from us, the answers drawn and interpreted from it, come from within. It isn’t but a tool to access knowledge that’s already inside. Divination, by definition, is to get in touch with “divinity” and an “oracle” is the “spoken” message from such a contact. Many religious traditions find “divinity” outside, external from us, but even dogmatic Christianity acknowledges and preaches that we are part of it. A dialogue with “divinity” is thus a personal and internal dialogue.
The fact the Yi was later made into a classic and the words of the text became a sort of moral and ethical masterwork does not exclude or deny its origins.
The ancient Chinese, as any other ancient culture (and most of them had their own “oracular traditions), were very practical people concerned with very immediate issues: war, conquest, government, sowing the fields and harvesting their food. Oracles were, and still are, used as calendrical (as in timing) and directional tools. Intuition is learned from observation and experience. The Yi and its use is the result of the compounded observations and experiences of hundreds of generations of observers and diviners. People like us. We are, not only benefiting from those that came before us, but also adding our own experiences and observations to the oracle. The oracle is in a retro-feedback flux and, fast communications and sharing of information, compounds the effect. If there is a prediction that can be made with certainty is that, granting humanity survives their own follies, the Yi will be and even better and more precise tool as time goes by, be it a week or 2000 thousand years from now.
In the meantime, I also believe we Westerners are “over-thinking” the oracle. IMO, that leads to the confusion Hilary points to.
L
Agreed, at least with the parts that I understand. 😉
>>>Agreed, at least with the parts that I understand. 😉
++++Agreed, at least with the parts that I understand. ;)+++
Hey, I ain’t no Chris…!! 😀
L
I don’t know about the Zhou, but during WW2, the Japanese did ask the YiJing what the US was going to do next. It was only after they stopped consulting the YiJing that they started losing.
During the Long March the esteemed Minister consulted the YiJing about the actions of the enemy.
One of the reasons that the YiJing had an ambiguous status during the Cultural Revolution, is because it was both a tool of improving one’s self, and an oracle, as the esteemed Minister aptly demonstrated to the Chairman in several critical occasions.
Well, at a glance, all the other respondents seem mortal serious to me. Just wanted to tell you I laughed out loud at every point…I guess you have to have been there, done that, and lost your metaphysical tee-shirt in the process. I have to sadly add that I’ve backed off consulting the Yi so much recently, which is a pity because I genuinely believe the Yi has spoken with great veracity in answer to my many queries. However, too much navel-gazing does no good. One does – sometimes – just have to spend some time DOING things to produce results in the physical realm.
But Thanks for the belly laugh – it was just what I needed!
Warm Regards
Caro
Great!
Yes – rule #11 is, of course, ‘Never do anything differently as a result of your readings.’ It’s easy to achieve if you observe rules 1 through 10, or any selection from them. (Also suffering from a shortage of metaphysical T-shirts here… maybe we should go shopping.)