Responding to emails from someone struggling with his readings started me thinking about the basic principles of interpretation – the real essentials. Of course I have picked up a bunch of background knowledge along the way, and it all contributes, but people can do perfectly useful readings without most of… Read more »A few essentials for Yijing readings
======================== Update It took longer than planned, but the Resonance Journal software is now available for download. ======================== Announcing… at last… with fanfare… The Yi-plus-dreams-plus-signs journal software – that’s been in a sousaphone-sized pipeline for a while – is really taking shape now. We’ll be calling for half a… Read more »Announcing: new Yijing and dreams journal software coming 15th October
Where you find the noble one We mostly come across the junzi, the ‘noble one’, in the Image Wing of the Yi. But he also features in many oracles and lines of the original text. Here’s the whole list: 1.3, 2.0, 3.3, 9.6, 12.0, 13.0, 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 20.1, 20.5,… Read more »The noble one’s story
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
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 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
