Book of (long term) Change

I wrote before about how Yi can be a vehicle for instantaneous change, through an image that immediately transforms your experience.

Immediate change…

The effect of a ‘vehicle for change’ tends to be an immediate change of perception and experience. One moment your inner space is just hollowed out and empty, the next it’s a Well. One moment you’re a hero, battling the odds; the next, you notice that you’re a ram that’s charged valiantly into an unyielding hedge. (Most disconcerting.)

I think this is basically how Yi works its transformations, opening one new window at a time on the larger reality. Certainly, a few years of having one’s most-cherished personal heroic stories skillfully debunked (did I mention the disconcerting part?) tends to foster self-awareness, and a certain readiness to question comfortable assumptions.

…and longer-term relationship

I think there’s more going on here, though. When we cast our coins or sort our beads or stalks, we’re initiating a conversation with what is. We connect, at some level, with the truth of ourselves and the situation. We start to bring our choices into resonance with this: because we’re quite often moved to consult at a moment of decision, whatever awareness we can develop will also be translated into action.

In an ideal world, this can anchor us into a kind of virtuous cycle of authenticity: acting in resonance with truth, as your own self; having the experience of being in resonance; changing the way you act as a result.

Of course, that’s the ideal world. It’s also possible, with some ingenuity, to use divination as a way to prop up the usual assortment of delusions – though I think that gets harder and harder the more you learn about interpreting the answers.

The felt sense of connection

Here… this is what I’m trying to express:

“This is how I define God: a felt sense of the interconnectedness of everything to everything else, and the subtle harmony that runs through it all. And the “felt” part is what I want to talk about here.

Things are interconnected whether you feel it or not. And that field of interconnectivity is there whether you sense it or not, whether you want it to be or not, just like gravity is there whether you pay attention to it or not.

So why does it matter to cultivate that inner sense of connection with that web of harmony and flow? What difference does it make?

It matters because there is subtle information that makes life much smoother, that is only accessible through your internal connection to that Interconnectedness.”

That’s the opening of a beautiful blog post by Emma McCreary at ‘Tao of Prosperity’. After explaining how God is like playing Guitar Hero, she goes on to ask, ‘How do you listen?’

Conversation with the Yijing is one way of listening. It can be tightly focussed or wide open, profound or apparently quite mundane, and yet it is still helping you to develop ears to hear. Book of Unexpected Changes…