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I Ching

Getting inside the imagery

– or, How just a Smidgen of Background Knowledge can take you a Surprisingly Long Way. As soon as you start talking with the Yijing, it’s apparent that there are things here you don’t understand. ‘Crossing the great river’, for instance. You probably don’t make a habit of wading rivers,… Read more »Getting inside the imagery

Marriage and Mandate

As I’ve probably mentioned from time to time, I’m working on an enlarged and improved version of the Words of Change Yijing glossary, to be included as part of the upcoming journal software. This gives me the perfect excuse for lots of completely engrossing research and exploration into Yi, while… Read more »Marriage and Mandate

Shadow hexagrams revisited

Four years ago 😯 , I posted about my first encounters with shadow hexagrams. And last week I was reminded of them again when a friend asked me to look at his connected-hexagrams-generating script that included Ideal and Shadow, along with many more of the creations from Stephen Karcher’s divination-laboratory.… Read more »Shadow hexagrams revisited

Four ways Yi works with dreams

A wise person said to me recently, ‘There’s only one oracle.’ She meant that there’s only one reality speaking to us – so it shouldn’t surprise us when dreams, Yi, guides, synchronicities and all turn out to be working together. On reflection… this turns out to happen more often and… Read more »Four ways Yi works with dreams

Oracle bones and remembering

I have a lovely, fat book on my shelves called Sources of Chinese Tradition (volume 1), full of excerpted translations from the Chinese. Chapter 1, fittingly enough, is about oracle bone inscriptions: the earliest Chinese writing, divination records from the Shang dynasty, long before Yi came into being. The bone… Read more »Oracle bones and remembering

Two-line changes

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Two-line relationships

If you’ve been working with Yi for a while, you’re probably familiar with the idea of looking at the hexagram each individual moving line would change to on its own, to give you a better context to understand its meaning. You might have heard them referred to as zhi gua,… Read more »Two-line changes