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I Ching questions of ‘doing’ or ‘being’

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.

Being, doing, having – and questions for the I Ching

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.)

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.

ICC : Spiritual hierarchy

I Ching Community Discussion Forum: Spiritual hierarchy Quotation of the month, from Dharma: “Methinks it redundant for Yi to talk “about” love since the whole book itself is a major portal that leads us directly to it.” (Also go to the top of the page and search on ‘Dharma’ to… Read more »ICC : Spiritual hierarchy

Brad Hatcher’s Yijing translation

If you haven’t already visited this page and launched into a feeding frenzy of downloading, go now. Brad has converted everything to pdf format, so it’s viewable on any computer. If you don’t have the means to unzip the files already, try Izarc for Windows or Stuffit expander for Macs.

The CD is ready!

It may have taken me a month, but I’ve got the CD of the webinar with Stephen Karcher ready for you, finally. It includes the screen recordings, transcript, and extra explanatory articles with slides from the webinar, and costs £12 including postage. Full details here I’ve also made a few… Read more »The CD is ready!