Most Recent Posts
Stephen has returned to the U.S.A. and is now living in Ojai California where he is developing a new project with the Institute of Cultural Change.
He has already run a number of exciting workshops and retreats in California and this is set continue....
The Shuogua, ‘The explanation of the trigrams’, is the 8th Wing of the I Ching. Because it cannot be divided up by hexagram it is often omitted from western transliterations of I Ching. Each hexagram is a dynamic symbol, a cluster of meanings and images,...
We have now added Articles Index
so that people can more easily gain an overview the site. Its a sort of homespun sitemap! The main difference being the inclusion of a brief note next to each entry summarising what it is about. In addition we have...
Here is something which really worked for me. Hillary Barratt found something in Hexagram 10 which brings it alive in a most interesting way.
Please do take a look .
Kevin
...
This is the second of four articles looking at Change from different perspectives. Yes, four, another has been written since last week.In Perspectives of Change II Stephen looks at the crisis of the modern world through the lens of Archetypal...
I have just posted a new article by Stephen. It is the first of a series of three looking at Change from different perspectives.
1 Perspectives of Change takes Chaos Theory and applies it to our experience of Change. It shows how change can be...
Looking over the wall I see that there are some interesting developments at www.onlineclarity.com.
There is now a paid for member’s area there where some quite exciting work is taking place. The first task they have set for themselves is to explore...
After months of recoding, bending, sawing and hammering Pete has finally made the Total Yijing application Vista compliant.
Anyone upgrading to it will be able to import their old readings from previous versions.
As before it will run on Mac OS...
There are many models which try to explain the place of divination in our lives. This is just one, but I think it’s a good one.To understand the importance of divination in human experience we need to look at human awareness or consciousness. I am going...
Some time ago I wrote about two perspectives of approaching the I Ching as a divinatory tool. I promised to write about the divinatory space and what happens there. This is an introduction to a series which will explore the divinatory process.When...
I have just updated the I Ching links page on our site. It has been expanded with ‘new to here’ links as well as updates to some of the sites which were already listed.
I have tried to select only those sites which I think speak with some deeper...
The last few months have been a fairly chaotic time here at Great Vessel. I’ve been teaching in the US for the past two months and Kevin, the webmaster, has been through a major computer meltdown. Two computers melted down in fact! We seem to have sorted...
I was talking with someone the other day about methods of ‘Casting the Yi’and they mentioned that they did not like using computer programs. In part I had to agree that sitting quietly with my casting stones ( 16 Token Method ) gives a great resonance...
52 Mountain or Bound is a very powerful image or symbol (a xiang or imaginal operation) of Stopping or bringing things to a still place. It the strongest possible injunction against "acting anything out." Rather, it is a crucial time when we have...
I have re-worked the 'Basics' article on Ideal and Shadow so that it reflects a new perspective that emerged from the divinatory work at the Vallecitos Retreat. We found this quite valuable and hope that you do too. The Article has been re-worked and...
The Total Yijing program has been written to run under Windows. However a
number of our users have informed us that they are happily running the Total
Yijing program on Mac computers. Specifically, they are running the Total Yijing
program...
This has been a very busy period for all of us here at Great Vessel and it shows little sign of letting up.Stephen has been touring the United States Teaching and leading the Vallecitos group in New Mexico. He returned to do the various things he does...
Somewhere in the Mawangdui (commentary) texts, “Confucius” is quoted as saying something like: “If you use the Yi for ‘fortune-telling’ it is right about half of the time. If you use it to find the De (actualizing-dao or “power and virtue”) of a situation,...
Stephen Karcher's new eBook Foundations of Change is now available. It opens the deep
foundations of the Way or Dao of the Classic of Change. It is a
companion volume which can be used with any translation of Yijing (I
Ching).
Foundations...
Amongst other things, the mythic images and sounds that make up an old divinatory tradition are called ji. They are hidden triggers or seed-syllables for the performative linguistic act of divination that exist at the liminal borderline between the...
Ancestors and the Personal Altar is a new article on our site.
Some years ago I began to read about early Chinese culture in order to better understand the values, beliefs and imagery found in the Yijing. In those days I learned a little factual material...
In his new article ‘The Furies and the Water Spirit Disorder’
Stephen Karcher takes us on two journeys, each represents cultural and personal stances which are deeply flawed and which are the cause of much suffering in our world.
First he brings...
Sources for the Decades is a new article just posted on our site.
In this article Stephen Karcher lays out the case that the King Wen sequence of hexagrams, which is the standard order found in the I Ching, is not a random sequence, but that it is highly...
In my previous post I sketched out two perspectives of the performative act of divination, the spiritual perspective and the Jungian perspective, two rivers flowing in one riverbed.
I suggested that if we as diviners move beyond using the text and...
As diviners we generally develop a deep personal resonance with the Yijing. Our methods and perspectives become complex and closely intertwined with our psychological, or spiritual, beliefs and values. It is as if we settle into our own spot on the hillsides...