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
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
Click the blue ‘play’ button to hear it. Sorry this is so brief… I have a bunch of work waiting for me. More information soon, I hope! Or right-click here and choose ‘save target as’ to download the sound file to your computer.
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.
Good news! When I reviewed Jane Schorre and Carrin Dunne’s Yijing Wondering and Wandering in issues 71 and 72 of the newsletter, it was only available from Amazon in the USA and Canada. Now you can get it direct from Amazon UK without the extra postage costs and delivery time.… Read more »Yijing Wondering and Wandering available from Amazon UK
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.)
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.
