The Great Vessel Blog

A Beautiful Yijing Place.

Following on from the previous blog on Candid’s Cave…

Allied to this site is the wonderful work of Coyote. Coyote (aka LiSe Heyboer has studied and written on the Yijing for many years. I think she has an extraordinary depth of perception and sensitivity. This site is an imaginative experiment. It’s a place to reflect on word images and pictures relating to the Yijing.

I am not sure where the work by Bruce ends or where Coyote begins… maybe they just happen to howling at the same moon. It’s good to find a place where beauty matters and where images and meanings drift about so carelessly and with such ease. Wandering here stilled my mind and fed my spirit... I shall be returning.

The Yijing Arizona Style

Here’s a site which is a little different. Candid’s Cave

Bruce Grilli is a little different too. He teaches the Yijing as well as doing readings for folk. I have read his work online for a few years now. He has an ability to make short pithy statements which go straight to the heart of a matter. Though he can growl a bit he actually has extraordinary sensitivity. I put it down to all of that Arizona desert sand which must get into his coffee.

I am really pleased to see that he has at last started his Pithy Yijing (my term). Obviously it runs into some trouble as brief statements cannot hold the complexity of images which the Yijing evokes. Having said that, Bruce is thought provoking. He makes no attempt to hold back, please folk, or get it just right… You get your beans on a tin plate and the coffee is strong and black. Sit back and enjoy some unadorned, hard earned, wisdom. You might not like what you hear, but his takes are his and he doesn't really mind.

Taking a break with some Chinese Myths and Stories

The weather in London is dull and cool this weekend. Good reading weather. I came across this wonderful British Chinese website which has a couple of dozen renditions of traditional Chinese myths or stories. They are simply told, but enjoyable. Just the thing to sit down to for a break between chores with a pot of tea. 

These are a good opening to the stories and myths which would have been circulating in the minds of the early Chinese when they read the Yijing. In this way they would have had a strong influence on how they perceived the brief lines of the Yi. I will give an example of this in the next blog.  

Hexagrams in Pairs - A New Article

We have just posted another article, ‘Working with Pairs’.

For many years I viewed each hexagram as if it was a vessel for dynamic movements which took place within it as indicated by the lines. I delved a little further and found that there was a dynamism between the two trigrams interplaying as images. Both of these added to my understanding of what the hexagram represented. However I was still stuck with what now feels like 64 fairly static images. These only became dynamic in a reading when set along with the other hexagrams it brought forth.

All this changed when someone informed me that there was a structure to the Yijing with every hexagram sitting in dynamic tension as a pair. There are in fact thirty-two pairs of hexagrams. Contemplating them as pairs was like letting the brake off a car for the first time. Suddenly everything was moving around. Each hexagram lent insight to its partner and the proverbial sun rose above the horizon. I still find it an extraordinary exercise to work at holding the two hexagrams, of a pair, in my mind at once. The ‘Pairs’ page in the Total Yijing program, available on this site, is a good start to understanding how they represent the movement of energy. However by contemplating them a sort of understanding begins to emerge about the nature of the worlds fundamental dispositions and the way they exist in cycles. I don’t know why I ever imagined that a book about change might have been made up of 64 static components.

A Message to email Subscribers

Oh dear, none of the last three blogs was emailed out to subscribers. The server remains staunchly unapologetic. If you rely on the emailed version you have missed:

A Short History of the Yijing - An introduction and links to a new article on the history of the Yijing.

“The Unpublishable Reading” – This was the reading about Osama bin Laden which we felt we could not publish some weeks ago. At first glance it is quite shocking. With a second glance it still surprised me! Much food for thought here. The Yi does have that way of turning my world upside down. Usually when I understand what is being said it looks better that way up.

“The Love of Fate – Amor Fati” - Is an astonishing article by Michael Ortiz Hill. He is quite simply an extraordinary man who writes quite beautifully. In this article he tells an evocative story about his struggle toward wisdom. They can all be found here.

A Short History of the Yijing

A Short History of Change is now online. We will be posting quite a few pieces this week so you might want to keep an eye on What’s New as we will not be covering them all here.

Throughout history famous people have said some version of, “History is written by the Victors.” My favourite example of this is the modern mythical image of the historical English feudal lord who supposedly oppressed his serfs with his castle troops. It was a French historian who asked the question, “Where did he get the troops from?” He went on to show that these lords raised their armies from their estates and that the same people farmed his lands, shod his horses and milled his grain. Indeed there was little overt oppression as these communities, including the Feudal Lord, existed in a complex set of mutual obligations. He went on to explore the institution of the Vestry. This was the fore-runner of the Parish Council. Any man who had property or a trade was automatically a member. They would meet to decide how the commonly owned land should be farmed and to decide who would do what work on it and when. The produce from this land was shared throughout the community. The Vestry also relieved hardship in the community with alms and services. This was an old Saxon tradition which was essentially socialist in nature. Then came the Industrial Revolution and history was rewritten. The new industrialists fighting for control in Parliament (See the Corn Laws as an example) and for the hearts and minds of the people, developed the myth of the callous and cruel Feudal Lord. Such a myth served to maintain the peoples belief that no matter how grim those ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ of the new towns became, they had to be better than what went before.

More recently I was watching an episode of the X-Files. A Navaho Indian Shaman said, “Each new government rewrites history to support its cause… they write with the blood of murdered truth.” In this context it is not surprising that we have a number of views on the history of the Yijing. It is quite possible that the myth that its early authors included the great culture heroes Yu the Great, King Wen, Duke Zhou and Confucius, was a culturally acceptable way of giving it the authority it deserved at the time. However what we find is that the Yijing has grown and metamorphosed as it was transmitted through each epoch. From time to time it underwent redactions such as the one which produced the Palace Edition from where we get our Wilhelm Baynes edition.

The history of the Yijing reflects it as a cultural artefact which has had to continually find new garb and a new voice in order to reach across to each period and culture. To attempt to freeze it in any particular shape or form is perhaps to write it in the blood of murdered truth.

The ‘unpublishable’ reading on Osama bin Laden

The idea of publishing a series of readings by Stephen Karcher was to use them as a vehicle to illustrate his approach. Those who have been following this blog will be aware that we got a reading about Osama bin Laden which we felt was unpublishable. Following a number of requests we changed our minds and it can be found here.

I was quite shocked when the Yijing gave us this result. It has caused me to reflect on the way I perceived him and the dynamics which are now playing out in the world.

This reading also has a good illustration of the use of Karmic nodes. Also of interest is the fact that Stephen identifies the predictive element as being sited in the Time cycle part of the reading in this instance.

"The Time Cycle links four hexagrams through the images of the Four Seasons to place your situation in the oldest description of divinatory time. Use the Time Cycle to relate your situation to one of these seasons and look backwards and forwards to see where it came from and how it can be developed. A Time Cycle is made up of four hexagrams that share the same four inner lines, lines that represent a Core Theme of Change. The different top and bottom lines attached to this Nuclear or Core represent the Four Seasons and their themes.

• Spring (yang below, yin above): rousing new growth.
• Summer (yang below, yang above): ripening the fruits.
• Fall (yin below, yang above): harvesting the crop and gathering the insights.
• Winter (yin below, yin above): finding the seed of the new by grinding away the old."

I would be interested to hear folks views on the Readings Forum

The Love of Fate - Amor Fati

Michael Ortiz Hill, Writer African Shaman, Nurse, Husband and more has led an extraordinary life. He has kindly allowed us to post his article Amor Fati – The love of fate. In it he weaves moments from his life together in a beautiful and evocative manner. Moving times in Africa are brought together with childhood struggles in a family farming the Mexican desert after being ambushed from California. This collage of his struggle toward understanding is compassionate and beautifully written. It speaks of a path toward compassion and wisdom. The jewel buried within it is Amor Fati.

Divination – The act of a cultural Warrior?

"[Divination is] also [a] cultural or hermeneutic battleground where competing systems of interpretation contest the nature of spirit. A divinatory system carries and re-creates the great images through which people interact with the larger than personal forces that surround them. It is the first line of culture, where these myths or archetypal images connect with individuals and where they are in turn shaped and changed by the individuals they encounter. The images are both carried and continually modified through the opening of “sacred space” the act of divination provides. Major changes in a culture are often a direct reflection of the way in which people divine themselves, the ways they use to connect their daily life with the spirit or spirits."

This article explores some of the ancient Greek events which still echo in our culture today. It sheds some light on the nature of divination as a ‘dramatic’ cultural practice which gives us a dynamic language with which to understand the social world around us and the world of our psyche within.

By choosing one myth or set of beliefs over another, in any situation, we are engaging in the act of culture creation. We live in this battleground of competing images and beliefs. The act of divination is at the forefront of those acts which seek to find both meaning and a consonance between the worlds of soul and the mundane, both of which we inhabit.

Myth and Theatre – Meeting our Ancestors

We have just opened up a new area called Myth and Theatre. What on earth has this got to do with the Yijing?

I recently attended a conference on divination at Kent University (UK). There were some presentations which examined the western world’s Greek divination heritage. I was quite surprised at the extraordinary relevance of Greek Myth and the great Greek teachers, along with their machinations, to our current world. I had always assumed that folk like Socrates, who drank hemlock to make his point, and his student Plato,  gave birth to the rational world. Also that this was eventually achieved with a little help from others like Pythagoras (who probably pillaged his maths from further east) and that they left us with the foundations of science, a charming mythology and a tradition of theatre of which Tragedy is pretty impressive. Not a bit of it! Mythic battles took place between these apocalyptic philosopher heroes and some of those struggles continue to this day. One of these is between the rational and the gnostic parts of our selves. Parmenides, a great thinker and mystic, was metaphorically murdered by Plato and Neo Platonists like Iamblichus later led a revolution to try to reclaim the mystical world which Plato banished. Iamblichus examined divination and the processes it involved in an effort to ‘clean up’ fraudulent and unfounded methods and practices. I am grateful to him in that he was one of those who moved us away from peering at the entrails of animals. Thankfully I do not need to go to the butcher to ask for a ‘diviner’s pack of Ox entrails and a bottle of libation blood’. Hail Iamblichus!

Part of this heritage was Greek theatre. It was rich with archetypal characters and Gods. They birthed our deepest hopes and fears into the daylight and played them out in front of their audiences. Their gods and myths represent deep and enduring structures in our psyche. So what is the relevance of this to the Yijing? It too uses a profound symbolic language drawing on myths of heroes, gods and situations of mythical proportions. It too was tempered in the struggles which took place in the same magnificent epoch as that of the Greeks. It too demands we listen with a poets ear.

By belatedly working to reclaim these culture spirit ancestors, the Greeks, I have found new inroads into understanding the Yijing, not so much logically with my mind as by drawing on a psyche full of innate images which give meaning rather than rational understanding. In divination we are challenged to bring together both our rational world understanding and the symbolic feeling world of our deeper gnosis. When we do this we are in fact re-entering that ancient Greek struggle. This is the struggle to synthesise these two core aspects of our human experience, our struggle toward wholeness.

These ‘Myth and Theatre’ pieces explore this realm whilst seeking echoes and linkages to the Yijing. A word of warning, some of these pieces are graphic and even disturbing. They have taken me to those darker thoughts and feelings which are uncomfortable, but which are nevertheless part of who we are as humans, more synthesis. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Divination – What it is and what can happen when we divine.

Re-Enchanting the Mind is a major new article by Stephen Karcher. In it he explores divination, what it is and the processes which take place when we enter into that practice. He explains how it came to be marginalised in Western culture and the reasons why we are now having to repossess it and the other world to which it links us.

He approaches the act of divination from a number of angles. A Jungian explanation is put forward as well as those of the shaman and the ancient mystic.

It is entirely possible to get meaningful answers through divination without plumbing the depths outlined here. However these descriptions point to the road which empowers the diviner to enter into a deeper discourse and a more profound relationship with their (fill in the blank).

Here are the powerful arguments which led Stephen to write the Total Yijing in a symbol rich language and why he promotes symbols and language to jump the reader out of the cognitive mode and into heart mind understanding. There is much here which those who work with divination, dreams and the Total Yijing will find useful.

It is a primer for those who would travel further.