‘DIY’ tips for I Ching divination
Someone asked: “How do I go about developing the talent to access this wisdom faculty without using coins, yarrow stalks, computers and so on?” It’s an extremely good question, and not one I truly know the answer to, as it’s not a talent I’ve developed. However, I do think that… Read more »Without coins or yarrow
Email from John: “I was wondering why someone such as the host of ‘Useless Tree’ would ask such large questions as he does. Isn’t it better to ask such questions so as to influence events to promote the general benevolence?” It’s a reasonable question, and I’ll send Sam Crane a… Read more »Why ask political questions?
GreenOwl wrote:
“Ideally you need to allow a good half hour to talk with (or rather listen to) your querent and arrive at the right question for them.â€
Any chance you could do a post (y’know, sometime) that walks through an example of that process? Or, if you’ve already written about it and I’m forgetting, just point in the right direction. Thanks!
That’s tricky, as I promise clients complete confidentiality – no discussion of their situation, question or answer, even anonymously. So I can’t go through a specific real-life example. But I can talk about general experiences that I’ve had with a few hundred customers – why not?
I write a lot about trying to recover the original meanings of some of the I Ching’s key phrases. Which may be of academic interest, but why bother with China circa 1000BC when asking about Western life in 2005 AD?
Well, not to get to the One True Authentic Original Oracle. That doesn’t exist, and any claims otherwise deserve short shrift. No – it’s about trying for an imaginative grasp on the ideas and interrelationships in the old text.
You’d think I’d do this automatically by now, and go unerringly to the best possible question to get the clearest and most direct answer. It ain’t necessarily so… 😕 Someone ordered a reading with the question, ‘What would be the difference between taking option a or option b?’ (I can’t… Read more »The benefits of thinking about the question…
I’ve just been looking at an article by Edward Shaughnessy about the Fuyang Zhouyi: a fragmentary copy of the earliest part of the Yi, dating from 165BC. And what struck me most forcibly was how little has changed. The fragments show hexagram and line texts more or less identical to… Read more »A living tradition
I find it makes a difference if instead of drawing each line of my hexagram as I go, I draw it first in my mind’s eye. Closing my eyes and visualising clear, creamy paper, and drawing on each line with a broad-nibbed pen. Or keeping my eyes open and seeing… Read more »Writing hexagrams in the air
