Past, present, future

I have an email asking me for

“some instruction on how to identify the past, the present and the future through I Ching reading. I would like to receive any useful comment relating to this topic. My intent is to have more confidence when doing a reading for myself.”

Well, the first and easiest way to identify anything in a Yijing reading is in your question. That way you can have absolute confidence in what the answer is about. (Well – almost absolute. If your inner voice is persistently asking a particular question, then Yi is likely to answer that, even if you write something different on the paper in front of you.)

So for example –

• “How should I rate my performance at work since the beginning of the year?”

or

• “What can I do today to improve this relationship?”

or

• “If I carry on as before, what developments can I expect over the coming seven days/ six months/ afternoon?”

While I don’t tend to ask questions with dates attached myself, except perhaps for my regular ‘what to be aware of this week’ divination, it’s a reasonable way to establish a focus when you really do need to know.

There are also ways of looking at a reading to ‘parse’ it into time periods. Most simply, the lower moving lines in a reading tend to be about the present or near future; the higher ones tend to be more remote. If you have several lines moving, then by reading up through them you may see a story unfolding.

But this is no kind of hard-and-fast rule. It’s at least as likely that if you have several lines changing they describe alternative outcomes depending on your choices. The only ‘rule’ I know of is that the reading is a conversation, and so your own intuitive response is an essential part of it all. If you look at the second hexagram and recognise the way you’ve been behaving for the last three months, then there’s the pattern of the past. If you look at a moving line and recognise an option for today that came to mind as you were consulting, or an outcome you’d been hoping for or dreading… you get the idea.

Which I suppose just boils down to saying that you identify times in your reading, like everything else, by diving deep into the process and listening attentively for those stirrings of recognition.  There are ways to make timings easier to recognise (and if you have experience with one that works reliably for you, please add a comment), but they’re just creating an environment for the moment of recognition.