intuition is an immediate perception. Analysis brings you to a conclusion step by step; intuition happens straight away. I Ching interpretation involves a mixture of intuition and analysis (which in turn creates more food for the intuition), but it all hangs on a single moment of intuition, when you perceive the connection between question and answer.
Especially when you’re getting started with the I Ching, it can be hard to know what to ask – or what you can ask – or hard to put your question into words. Hence the ‘Suggested questions’ page here, which offers ideas for questions on anything from relationships with your… Read more »New for members: Question Guide as pdf
My I Ching reading for last week was Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding, with no changing lines. And following the plans I’d already made for that week, which involved reaching out and making connections to others in various ways, I hit one technical road-hump after another. (Moral of this story: consider… Read more »The challenge of Hexagram 44
It’s a cliché of every I Ching introduction: the oracle is an aid to decision-making. Of course, it’s also perfectly true. Historically, the ancient Chinese divined on decisions about marriage, warfare, whether to open the fields, what to offer to the ancestors. Nowadays people consult the I Ching on which job to take, whether to buy a house, whether to stick with a relationship or leave it…
Hexagram 18, Corruption, demands that we actively engage with how things are. And things are a mess: there are ‘negative patterns’ playing themselves out, or in other words the same old bad things keep on happening.
That’s how the third line of Hexagram 6, Arguing, begins: ‘Eating ancient de. Constancy: danger. In the end, good fortune. Maybe following king’s business, No accomplishment.’ It’s unusual for Yi to talk in abstract imagery in this way – eating not food, but de. De, as in Daodejing, is virtue,… Read more »Eating ancient de?
I’ve been hearing from quite a few people lately who are wondering what to do when they’re consulting the I Ching, and their coins behave oddly. What if one rolls away? What if it ends up under the furniture? Or propped up against something so it doesn’t land flat? Of… Read more »I Ching coins questions
