There is a tendency for us Yijing users to be a little traditional in how we use the oracle. For those of us who were teethed on Wilhelm and Baynes: This is sometimes referred to the scholars method. There are other ways to use the Yijing. There is the Mei Hua Xin Yi method otherwise known as the Plum Blossom method, the Imperial Yijing and many others. The early Chinese prodded and poked at the Yi to try and explore its depths. They developed many approaches. Here in the West we have a tendency to look for truth by analysis. We tend to ask exactly what King Wen meant by this or Duke Zhou by that. Well first of all the text was written in glyphs each with poly meanings, secondly it was written in a mythical and cultural context where the reader might be expected to know a lot of associated mythology, history and folk tales to which the text might allude and lastly it got altered quite a lot through history. So unless you are an academic exploring a very defined area we might as well bottle the wind when it comes to precision and meaning.
I notice those who use the Tarot tend to be quite exploratory. Their cards are lexicons of symbolic meanings and they develop different layouts and add and remove symbols in different packs, prodding and exploring in order to develop different symbol sets to reveal the truths of their divination. The different areas of the Yijing’s text areas are just such symbol sets laid out in words. More than once I have found that I have been using what I later found to be a ‘poor translation’ of a part of the Yi only to decide to stay with it because it was so evocative, and because it worked for me.
Divining with the Yi is not divining from a book. It is divination oriented toward that set of images which will stir in our heart's mind after we have looked up the meaning in a particular book or books. In other words, I believe that when we divine the Yi ‘sees us coming’.