Unasked questions

A couple of my most startling, transformative readings lately have come when I asked questions I could and should have asked a year or more ago. The issues were on my mind – in some cases driving all I did – yet it never dawned on me to talk with Yi about them.

It doesn’t make this much less embarrassing to realise that I’m definitely not the only one: it’s amazing how many other things people can find to ask about. If the elephant in the room would just move to one side a little so I have room to sort yarrow stalks? Perfect, thanks.

We don’t ask where only one answer would be bearable. (That’s something I notice most often in people I read for – maybe it’s just the easiest motive to see from the outside.) We also don’t ask when it just hasn’t occurred to us that there could be a different answer. Or maybe we know there’s a problem, but would rather not ask about it for fear of knowing what it might have to tell us.

In my case I think I’m often afraid of losing momentum: I’ve reached a conclusion, I’m secure in my conviction that this is the way forward, and the last thing I want is a reading that might shake that ‘knowledge’. (Hm – maybe I’m over-identifying a bit with what I ‘know’…?)

So I asked Yi:

Why do we leave certain questions unasked?

(When I say ‘we’, I mean myself in the first place – I’ve used the plural just in case anyone can identify. 😉 )

Yi answers with Hexagram 60, Articulating or Limiting, changing at the second line to Hexagram 3, Sprouting.

Articulating is about setting limits, measuring and defining things, as a way of making them manageable and digestible, bringing them down to a human scale. It improves communication and understanding by asking, ‘What’s workable? What can I assimilate? What can we live with?’

And Sprouting is about beginnings: the chaos and difficulty and excitement in the creative ferment, and the great need to orientate ourselves in all this. The sprout puts down roots; the army establishes a base camp; we’re ‘not letting go our dwelling place.’

When 60 moves towards 3, or is moved by its priorities, we have

‘Not going out of the gate from the courtyard.
Pitfall.’

This is the gate that leads from the extended family home out into the street. We don’t ask questions because we’re staying within our four walls. This is familiar space, the comfort zone, or the ‘I know who I am, I know how I fit into the scheme of things, and everything here tells me this is true’ zone.

Staying inside these walls leads to a kind of moral and spiritual claustrophobia, as if knowing my world from the inside were enough. There’s a distinct failure to send out those feudal lords of hexagram 3 to explore broader perspectives and possibilities.

And naturally, the attractions of this home base are stronger than ever if we already feel insecure around an issue, as if we need to rebuild that home base and regroup. Why run the risk of putting ourselves out there with a question, when we’ve no way of knowing what, if anything, we might receive in return?

Hm. Just thought of another question I could usefully have asked about a year ago. Maybe it’s time to pick up the divining-beads and walk out of the gate.