How to be really awake, casting hexagrams? How to stay aware of what we’re doing, not slip into auto-pilot from the force of long habit?
I’m thinking only of ways to be aware through the process of casting the hexagram – between the time spent meditating on the question and receiving the answer, when concentration is maybe easier. I’ve come up with just six suggestions so far – please add your thoughts and methods to the comments.
- Choose the place where you cast. For instance, there’s a particular quality to reading outdoors, wall-less.
- Choose your method: try yarrow. The clatter of coins (to say nothing of the dilemma of what to do when one of them rolls under the bookcase or lands on its side) isn’t necessarily conducive to a meditative state.
- Or try beads, and pass them through your fingers like a rosary until you settle on each line.
- Of course you hold your question in mind as you cast – but try asking it aloud, to the ’empty’ space, just as you naturally would when starting any conversation. Hear it in the air; expect an answer
- How do you record your answer? The corner of an envelope works… and so does clean, crisp paper and an ink pen you save just for this.
- Another approach is to draw your hexagram only in your mind’s eye. You might see it as calligraphic strokes on parchment, or radiant lines in the air. You’ll find your own unique way of keeping the hexagram in mind as you build it (its rhythm? presence in your body? trigrams, bigrams?).
2. Choose your method: Try cards. Because of the discipline which I derived from: Bridge and gambling, I found a long while ago that I did not like cumbersome stalks and messy coins, beads, or colored tokens and sought to revert to the familiar deck of cards. I found that there existed trigram card sets that I could combine in yarrow odds: 1 earth, 3 heaven, 5 mixed yang, 7 mixed yin equaling 16 cards, and with three sets like this I had a deck of 48 cards, close enough to 52 to satisfy tactile needs. They have served well over 15 years and have proven as portable as imagined. It’s a simple routine: Shuffle a few times, cut and turn the top card — first line; redo five times; reading. The deck, some 3x5s, and a pen; equipt.
Nice!
Do you find that the specific ‘mixed’ trigrams you draw affects the way you read the resulting hexagram?
I found 6 small, flat stone. On one side of the stone, I drew a yin line, on the other, a yang line. I keep them in a drawstring pouch, which I shake and then select, one at a time without looking, the six stones to construct the hexagram.
This is not my original idea, but one I got from Cassandra Eason’s I Ching: Divination for Today’s Woman, 1994.
I never thought of reading out of doors, but the stones would likely feel very at home there, so I will be using you suggestion.