Hexagram 9 says, ‘Small taming, creating success. Dense clouds without rain Come from my Western altars.’ The dense clouds without rain suggest that what we need is tantalisingly close, just not quite here yet. Those ‘Western altars’ are probably a subtle reference to the Zhou, people of the West. Before… Read more »The clouds of Hexagram 9
– 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
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
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
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
I thought I’d make a quick post about this to be sure no-one who’s interested misses out. Change Circle are resuming regular monthly calls, on the 4th Saturday of each month. We’ll talk about a variety of Yi-related things: anyone can bring a reading for discussion, or we may settle… Read more »Change Circle Gathering, 22nd March
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
