‘DIY’ tips for I Ching divination
Thanks to two correspondence course customers who have shared their experience with templates. You know who you are!
I find I get a lot further with my readings, learn more and change more as a result, when I use a template to record and study them. Here are a few ideas I hope you’ll find useful…
Useful elements in a basic reading template (and why you might want to try them)
Over at the I Ching Community, Demitra has shared some readings about vegetarianism and meat-eating: not just which is right for her, but what each means for humanity as a whole. Have a look at those readings here (they’re very interesting, and not what anyone from either side of the… Read more »Is this the Wrong Question?
I think that finding your question for the Yijing is the most important part of any reading. It sets the conditions for the whole conversation with the oracle: while it may or may not constrain what Yi can say, it certainly constrains what we can hear. The question is where we’re coming from: everything from casual assumptions to deep-seated beliefs will feed into it somehow. So it’s not just a matter of what we do or don’t want to hear, but also what we can conceive of asking.
It’s something of a truism that the cosmos works in this sequence: be – do – have. Who you are leads to what you do which leads (by a more or less direct path! 😉 ) to what you get. Also well-known is that universal human tendency to get this very precisely backwards:
‘If I had lots of money I could do what I want and then I would be happy.’
(If you haven’t come across this before, try googling “be do have”, for about 4,450 pages making the same point.)
So where in this sequence do we usually break in with questions for the I Ching? Unfortunately, there’s a huge great cultural misconception that divination can only approach the ‘have’ end of the sequence. I suppose it’s the popular cliché of the fortune-teller in her tent, with headscarf, greasy card pack, etc: she tells you what you’ll get. (Then you go away and wait until you have it before doing anything different.)
Nelson commented on the ‘Kinder I Ching’ page: “Aren’t you all confusing various ‘interpretations’ with a ‘translation’?”
Well – yes, we are. But then they are already inextricably confused.
Yes, occasionally there are good reasons for asking Yi the same question again.
But here is what usually happens with repeated questions:
An email from Quinn in New Zealand, about I Ching translations:
“I have been throwing the I-ching for years, My father taught me how, and I have to say I nearly drove myself crazy.
It’s almost unintelligible, sometimes I get the sense that by the time you understood it in its entirety you wouldn’t need it any more, and if you had the right view of things, you wouldn’t need it at all, or any oracle for that matter.
The Richard Wilhelm version is quite terrible for someone like me who is already quite self judgemental, and can make you feel really worthless. I know in a sense it’s your ego resisting, but would it not make more sense to write an interpretation of the hexagrams that would not fire up the ego, aggravating the problem, and would be compassionate of the fact that none of us can really expect to be truly enlightened. We do our best.
