Skip to content

I Ching Readings

Sample Yijing readings

Yi’s recommended reading

I dropped into Oxford today on the way home from a friend’s, and found my way into Blackwell’s – the university bookshop. And down to the Chinese history section, where I came across an intimidating-looking tome called To become a god: cosmology, sacrifice and self-divinisation in Early China. And with about 7 minutes to closing time, took it over to the desk to find out what it cost. £17. Hmmm. On the one hand the chapter headings are fascinating: ‘Transforming the spirits: sacrifice in the Shang’; ‘A moral cosmos: Zhou sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven’; ‘Spirits within humans: the issue of shamanism in early China and early Greece.’ On the other hand, these are 300 very dense and scholarly pages, and what are my chances of getting through them without getting lost?

Learning from the tennis again

I used to play around trying to predict the outcome of tennis games with Yi. I still find it fascinating as a way of learning more about hexagrams. Big singles tennis matches are huge contests between two people – everything each individual has goes into it. And then they’re much analysed and talked-about, occasionally even by people who know, and the players give interviews afterwards… human character and ability (and luck) under the magnifying glass.

Staying at line 3

I was working on a reading for a client. And the gist of the answer was unmissable: what she’s asking about is a very good idea. I didn’t understand why it is, though – it’s hard to connect these particular positive images with her question or her situation – and I do like to do more than provide just the ‘good idea’/’bad idea’ reading. The oracle does more than that, after all, so I’d feel I was letting people down if I didn’t go deeper.

Allan Lian on hexagram 18

Spoiled by the mother An interesting account from Allan Lian of an investment reading. He was considering investing more in a company when he asked Yi about this, and received 18, line 2: ‘Ancestral mother’s corruption Does not allow persistence.’ (Or words to that effect: Allan uses the W/B version.)… Read more »Allan Lian on hexagram 18

Wanderer’s Vessel: a reading

Here is another audio entry (about 15 minutes, this one) – click the ‘play’ button, or right click here to download the file if that doesn’t work. I’m trying something new here: previously I’ve always written myself a script so I wouldn’t embarrass myself too much with endless ‘um’s and… Read more »Wanderer’s Vessel: a reading

Yi on quantum mechanics?

There’s this experiment in quantum physics that shows the weird dual nature of atoms: sometimes particles, sometimes waves. If you fire enough bullets at a (bullet-proof!) screen with a couple of slits in it for them to go through, eventually you’ll get a pattern on the wall behind the screen that shows two bands of bullet-holes, one for each slit, with a bulletless band inbetween. So if atoms are particles, mini-bullets, then if you do the same kind of thing with atoms you get the same three-band pattern on the ‘wall’. But in fact when they fire atoms – just one at a time, so they don’t hit each other – at a two-slitted screen in this way, they get an interference pattern on the ‘wall’ behind, as if what they’d fired were waves, not particles, that had gone through both slits at once.