The Great Vessel Blog

News from Stephen

sa@mono.hr — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:55:00 GMT

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 the webmaster has been through a major computer meltdown. We seem to have sorted things out, so you can look forward to a lot of new material over the next month or two. If you would like to see what I’ve been up to, take a look at the postings on Events Calendar that describe some of the things that happened on the US Tour. In addition to the teaching described there, I re-recorded and upgraded lectures for the Master’s Course on Yijing: Models of Transformation I teach at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles and laid plans for a major conference next spring in the Santa Barbara area. The new Reading on Creating Ancestors, which came out of the Vallecitos Yijing Retreat last year, focuses on a central concern of all the new ritual work I’ve been doing with the Change over the past year and will continue this fall. To me, it is a crucial theme for all of us and for our culture, which completely lacks any sense of the crucial importance of connecting with the Ancestors. It also introduces the Paper Horses (mazhang), the spirit-papers I’ve been working on the past year or so that key directly to the hexagrams, and gives you a taste of the new Guideways book we are preparing. You can expect more on the Paper Horses soon, as well as a new series of Audios on important Yijing themes. I hope you’ll visit us to see this new work.

News and an article

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

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 with the Yi. Having said that the results I get from a program are just as effective. After all the divination takes place in us and not in the stones or the computer.

One advantage our Yijing program has over paper is that it calculates all of the different dimensions of the Reading Matrix and brings all of the relevant texts together for ease of reading. So if you are one who prefers not to use a program for casting you might consider trying the free trial and manually enter your readings after divining in your preferred manner, or just use it as a lookup tool.

Currently Stephen’s latest work is only available electronically on this site, with the exception of a Yijing in Danish. We are looking at ways of getting his work available on paper too. Until then, Foundations for Change is a much expanded and easier to understand development of the introductory chapters in the Total I Ching Book. It is now a ‘book’ in itself and it is the companion to the Total Yijing Program.

Well that’s the marketing done!

I have posted a short article by Stephen “Using Crossline Omens” here.

In it he says a little more about how he approaches and uses Crossline Omens in his readings. This is particularly useful as it can be a little overwhelming for the newcomer approaching his depth reading techniques for the first time. The important thing to remember is that the first step to using his methodology, in practice, is to look briefly at what each approach has to say for a given reading and then to focus on those parts that seem to speak to the situation with the most ‘charge’.

A little news

Stephen is just back from teaching in the US. He had a great time and is looking forward to his next trip later this year. I will post details shortly. However if you can get a group and venue together he can often extend his tours to accommodate - please let him know through the Contact Us area.

More News

As those who have attended Stephen’s courses will know his latest development is coming to fruition. We will post more about this over the next few weeks. He has been working to relocate the Yi back into its deep ritual and imaginative context. He brings the images alive through very beautiful artwork. These can then form a focus for readings and ritual. No, we are not asked to dress up in funny robes and chant, but rather to use additional ritual and art to open up the imaginal world where the Xiang (symbols) can circulate and allow their meanings to precipitate.

Wishing folk a good year of the Male Earth Rat:

15 Humbling/The Great Grey Rat QIAN
Balance, adjust yourself, cut through pride and complication, stay close to fundamentals; think and act in a modest way, yielding and reverent; the Great Grey Rat, an Animal Ancestor showing that liminal unconscious processes are constellated in your favor.

This is an Inspiring Figure. Part of the Sacred Sickness Pathway, it contains a Zone of Radical Transformation that acts as the experience of the Centers of power in the stage or Decade of life when we struggle with identity and its relation to society.

Core theme: 40 Deliverance from suffering.
Season: Winter, finding the seed of the new through hardship. North, midnight, Water, black; ordeal, divination and the judgement of the spirits; elders and ancestors.

Trigrams: Mountain below the Earth. Inner self-constraint now brings you a deep faith in the overall processes of life. Reduce the many to augment the few. Evaluate and even things out. This is not the time to step out to meet a new destiny.

Stimulus: 23 Strip away the past.

Ideal and Shadow: Think of this as a time of blessing and pour in more energy and involvement (42). Do not think of it as the founding of a noble house or a new paradigm (50), for there is much personal work to be done.

Kevin

52 Mountain or Bound

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:23:00 GMT

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 to "act it in" or become the victim of our own negative emotions. Jesus said "when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" not to make us into doormats or robots, but to break us out of the endless cycle of wounding and retribution.

52 Bound shows not just a mountain full of peace and calm, but a mountain where a bloody sacrifice is being enacted - and we are the "victim" in that sacrifice, the "body of our past". All our literal attachments to the past, our compulsive identifications and our pain-and-desire circuits are "cut into" one by one. The mettas, enacted in stillness, are a great challenge here. What does it mean to wish George Bush, Osama bin Laden and our own oppressive parents "happiness, health, safety and security, and freedom"? The basic lesson is that anyone who possess these things will not and cannot act in a compulsive or negative way. The secondary lesson is that any of these terrible encounters with fate actually might be a gift, releasing us from our compulsive identifications and freeing us to walk the "axis of the universe - Love". For the sacrifice of the literal in 52 Bound "opens the subtle body." It makes our response to any situation a matter of imagination and ritual rather than literal activity and affirms that this imaginal or ritual activity is the most efficacious thing we can possibly do in the situation we are confronted with.

Stephen

Ideal and Shadow

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:39:00 GMT

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 contains an example of how this can function in a Reading (link).

The Ideal Form and the Shadow Site form a pair of figures that let you grasp the ideal potential of the situation and a necessary transformative potential that is, for the moment, shadowed and unavailable but will manifest spontaneously if you do not seek it out. This focuses you on the sort of motivations and activities that the Primary Figure seeks to inspire and those it asks you to let go of.

The Ideal Form gives you a hexagram that represents the most effective way to think about your entire situation, the ideal way to visualize it and act on it. It will further the emergence of the bright spirit and idealizing energies that the situation contains.

This is a quite effective perspective that was developed over the last few years after I came through contact with the students of an old Chinese master in South Africa. It works by reflecting the positions of the trigrams of a Figure in the King Wen or Later Heaven Sequence of Trigrams back into the Fuxi or Early Heaven Sequence. It is a brilliant move that has a solid foundation in Daoist thinking about the relation of these two primal trigram sequences.

The Shadow Site gives you a hexagram that represents what is, at the moment, counter-indicated in your situation, covered by a sort of negative screen that can contain often painful memories. This screen or shadow is blocking transformative energy. If you completely release your awareness from these configurations by focusing on the Ideal, the necessary energy the Shadow Site contains will manifest itself spontaneously.

I had been pondering the possible meanings of what I call the Shadow Site, the reflection of a given hexagram in the Reverse Sequence of the 64 hexagrams, for quite a while. One of its functions made immediate sense to me when it was paired with the Ideal Form as a sort of negative mirror. This is the way Change seems to work, tactically pairing opposites with a situational rather than an abstract moral judgment on their innate qualities. Another realization came as I was working in depth with the Reverse Sequence in deep divinations as representing a kind of mystical re-birth, a union that can only be achieved through indirection or not-acting (wu-wei). From this came the awareness that whatever is shadowed is necessary for the completion of the transformative possibilities of the moment but cannot be reached through conscious action. It can and will manifest synchronistically, however, when there is no conscious effort directed towards it. This sort of indirection frees the quality in question from the linear flow of time and the karmic chain of cause and effect.

I have tried these out in quite a few divinations and, to my mind, they add a special and quite effective way to see what we should and should not be doing, practically rather than morally, at a given moment along with what we might achieve directly and what we can achieve only by renouncing our desires for it.

Stephen

Running the Total Yijing Program on Mac Computers

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:26:00 GMT

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 under OS X 10.4.9 operating system with Virtual PC 6 or 7, using a Windows XT Pro system.

We are unable to offer support for this type of installation, however there is a two week free trial so you might want to try it.

Kevin

Great Vessel News

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:54:00 GMT

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 for a number of University Courses he is involved with as well as popping over to do more courses in – was it Germany? It is very hard to keep up with him!

The Vallecitos Group: This wonderful group beavers away all year around. I hope they won’t mind me saying that they are a strong independent minded bunch who bring together incredible and diverse skills and learnings. So it is no surprise that the retreat has yet again provided a deep source of inspiration, practice and development which has lead to a new series of papers and articles which we will start posting online shortly.

Pete our IT man and the guiding hand that keeps Great Vessel running has gone to Malaysia with Theresa visiting the Chinese wing of the family. I should add that we seldom mention Theresa, but she is a professional programmer who quietly solves a lot of our programming problems… (Waiving deep thanks).

I have been pursuing a slightly different route. For a number of years I have been exploring the process of what happens when we divine. Not in a particularly formal way, but experientially with an anchor firmly set in Analytical Psychology (Jungian Approach). By using the Jungian perspective as a touchstone I have pushed out into the mystical end of the process. In February I started working with Eileen Murray, a Canadian Psychic. Our experiments have been intense and sometimes disturbing as they often challenged my accepted ideas. So next week I am flying to Canada to spend a couple of weeks doing more direct work.

So what have we got coming up?

First a whole series of articles which fit into the Imaginal Menagerie and Ritual side of the Yijing.

Second we have some more e-books which will fill out the spectrum of Yixue (Yijing studies and practice).

There is more which will come online in time.

I hope you find something you like in these new developments.

Kevin

Answers from Yijing and the De of the Inquirer

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:51:00 GMT

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, it is right all of the time.”

If we take this to heart, it turns our questions about whether the Yi’s answers are “right” or “wrong”, whether they satisfy us or not, back on themselves. It points not at the “accuracy” of the Change in predicting the future but at the quality of our De, our motivation in asking the questions, the integrity of our desire for a particular outcome and our willingness to submit to the “judgment of the Others”.

Now, according to my friend Scott Davis (whose work I am paraphrasing in the following) the development of both writing and high divination in old China was conceived as a foray into the future, a “narrated risk”. The vocation of the diviner was as at least as much to create the future as it was simply to foresee it. The mission was to confront the future, to capture its emerging signs and to manifest the “royal intelligence” (for the King was the first diviner) in permanent form. This involved configuring the projects of present activities in such a way that they risk the encounter with significant events in the future, creating “meaningful coincidences” or synchronistic fields by casting the outlook on the future in terms that are amenable to confirmation (or not) by turns of events in the outcome. It narrates the outcome (success or failure) in terms of what was agreed to be risked. And one of its main concerns seems to center on the “license to become an ancestor.”

Technically, this effort might be called the cognitive analysis of metaphor, metaphorical coherence, and complex coherences across metaphors. Unlike simile or equation, metaphor doesn’t operate on the basis of similarity – it creates similarities, takes the risk, and this risk involves locating the De or “actualizing-dao” in the metaphorical field. It selects for experiences that involve both risk and the feedback the world and the ancestors offer.

This kind of metaphorical “gambling” sets our intelligence out in a temporal field of not-yet-existent events as conveyed by no-longer-living ancestors. Its specialized symbols (xiang) are like transducers of the intelligence of these ancestors. It moves backwards and forwards in time, involves previous divinations, observed ritual attitude, moral character, dreams, visits from ghosts and other coincidental events that accompanied past episodes as omens and turned out to be correct – the risk is whether or not they will here and if so, in what manner.

The “risk” in this kind of narrative is directly connected to the stance, integrity and De of the Inquirer; it documents the operation (or not) of what was called bao - return or reciprocal action. If the narrative features of the outcome match (dang) the narrative features of the omens, the coincidence counts as a divinatory achievement. If they do not, it points at a failure of the perception of the De of the situation.

In its origins, this kind of divination was a gesture of wagering the present to the future based on the De of the Inquirer (the King). It exposed all action to the risk of divinatory narrative and awaited the future to adjudicate the outcome. The xiang involved in the reading were not “mere symbols”, but real things in the world – “operators”. “No coincidence, no make book,” an old literary maxim says. Without coincidence between the desire and the outcome through the xiang, there is no divinatory narrative. The Inquirer’s wager has failed through insufficient De. We need to look somewhere else for the “meaning.”

This “looking elsewhere” sets the action in terms of the moral/ritual imperfections of the “losers” and the subtle insights and moral/ritual integrity of the “heroes”. The narration dissolves human events into a multiplicity of signifying features in which the actors risk producing the structural features that “correspond to” unfavorable outcomes through lack of ritual integrity or risk not being capable of matching (dang) the structural features correctly to produce a satisfactory narrative, again in terms of a lack of De or actualizing power, the power to perceive the “real” connections. This re-forms the divinatory narrative in terms of the working (or not working) of bao.

The purpose of the symbolic narrative was to sensitize people to the manifold points of significance that crackle around human action like an electric field, with the potential to connect somewhere with future structure and become a story. Once an action is performed it has a life of its own, takes on its own volitions much in the way the notes on a scale want to return to the tonic note in a musical system. Called bao, these dynamic moments of behavior constitute its risks. They await the coincidences that will reveal the pattern of the character (De) of the agents who initiated them.

The main element of risk here is how the “world tells our story back to us” (or not). Configured in a progressive-regressive time frame, it is concerned with the “justice” of the closure of the structural openings the question and the reading have opened. Ritually reflected, this “justice” involves us directly in the realm of the Tiger and our own Gu or inner corruption. It foregrounds a quality of “blame” that is not attached to a random scapegoat, a broken taboo or a dysfunctional system, but to the De of the Inquirer.

Now, the most characteristic feature of this divinatory world view is ritualism, the priority of formality over finality, of De over fortune-telling. This would ask us to reflect our dissatisfaction with the Yi’s answers back onto our stance and integrity as Inquirer. It has been my experience that the Yi seldom gives a “wrong answer”, though the answer might not be what we would like it to be. If the answer is “inaccurate”, it is probably pointing at a disconnection between the pattern of our desire and the actual situation. It is time to look at what we were asking for and why. It is time to see the distance between the De of the King as Inquirer and our own inner motivations. If the answer is “confusing”, perhaps it is a very accurate reflection of our own inner confusion. It may be a reflection of a lack of bao or reciprocal action between our “inner base” and the “judgment of the Others”, a cloud of confusion that surrounds us and cuts us off.

This kind of De or ritual integrity was seen as the studied form upon which one should model all types of action, the real base of divination. It is called Li, reason or pattern, cognate with Li rites and rituals and Li, footwear and to step (as in 24.1). When we embark on a divination we are potentially stepping in the ancestor’s footsteps. The whole purpose is to step in their Way, not to try to make them wear our shoes.

Stephen

Yijing Companion - 'Foundations of Change' by Stephen Karcher

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:05:00 GMT

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 of Change begins by orienting the modern reader to areas that are essential to a deeper comprehension of the meaning and wisdom of Yijing. These include:

The development of Yijing in its original historical and cultural context.
An in depth discussion of key rituals and beliefs which echo throughout the Yijing and which add a profound texture and meaning to the text which otherwise might simply appear to be descriptive poetic metaphor.
A clear explanation of the psychological and spiritual stance of the early Chinese which is assumed throughout the Yijing. By adopting this stance the modern reader is able to move beyond Yijing as a system of thought to embrace the realm of dynamic imagery which we enter as we put a question put to the Yi, re-creating the meanings and understandings which comprise our entrance to its Way or Dao.
Part II of the book is a step by step explanation of the Tools or techniques that Stephen uses in his work with the Yijing. It includes descriptions of the different components of a reading and the way they can be used, offering explanations of the hexagram as Pairs, the different types of Pairs and the different sorts of change they represent, the use of Transforming Lines and Crosslines, and much more.

Part III looks at the process of consulting Change. It explores key words used throughout the text, explaining their deeper meanings and the way they describe the core processes of Change. It discusses the processes we enter into when using Yijing and the ways in which they inform us. Finally it describes the mechanics of casting the oracle and drawing up the matrix of hexagrams that compose a reading.

Part IV details casting techniques – getting an answer.

Part V is a step by step walkthrough of a reading. Each part of the reading is systematically approached using the Tools from the previous section.

This book is the product of over 35 years professional study and use of the Yi. It draws on wide reading about old Chinese culture from many sources both ancient and modern. By moving beyond the usual description of historical fact and modern methods for using Yijing it offers a depth, perspective and a stance which a diviner can use to enter into their own authentic dialogue with Change.

Kevin

Opening the Inner Thesaurus or Sounds as Eggs

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:05:00 GMT

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 oral and the written. Each of these ji triggers a return to, transformation within and emergence from the fertile chaos or linguistic whirlpool that exists in what chaos theory calls the water of the synapses.

This is the diviner’s place and moment and its force lies beyond the reach of our usual discourse on language. Reading and voicing the Ji is not a hermeneutical task; they are a knock on the door, a sign of presence belonging to something “other”, a context or field with its own identity and its own things to say. Its purpose is “not just to learn something, but to experience something and be set right.”

In traditional Chinese thought the perception of Ji brings an intuitive sense of differences (trace and deferral) based on Lei “natural category”, correlations of pattern that occur not by wilful analogy but because their elements are “of the same kind.” These categories are presided over by an omen animal called the Small Fox, a sort of dream-animal both male and female. The “traces” of the ji (actually related to the “klang” or phonetic associations characteristic of “primitive languages,” primary process and the working of dreams) act in the Xin or Heart-Mind to awaken patterns of a world of analogies linking cosmic, human, moral and supernatural that simply “rise up”.

The diviner was the medium for this living world’s coming-to-be. Stirred by the seed-syllables, “wind-tossed and fluttering,” the diviner’s heart-mind is moved through endless associations, forgetting itself in the wanderings. He or she sings out what they see and hear, sketching the animate spirit as they are rolled round and round with the courses of things. From this “wandering” the Bright Omens arise, the “hole that reveals the (w)hole)”.

In modern terms the context for all this is what we call an intertext that “already-always” contains the energy through which we learn to see the past not as a linear progression of fixed moments but as an endless series of re-creative fiction-making opportunities. In the continuing evolution of the Chinese language I would suggest that the system of seed syllables and “radicals” collected in the Han potentially represents such a system. Though sinologically and academically scandalous in the extreme, I would further suggest that if we “wander” through this system rather than attempting to analyze it historically or intellectually, it can open the on-going Inner Thesaurus of Change “as an endless series of re-creative fiction-making opportunities” at the boundary of the oral and the written.

Seen in this way, the system becomes a network of reciprocal intelligibility in which the content of each myth comes to consist more and more of other myths. Its resists total enclosure by any external constraint, guaranteeing the continuity of culture while at the same time inviting and triggering (ji) its transformation. As a continuing dialogue linking the mythical and the mimetic, it opens a shifting and ambiguous landscape where “the Real becomes Not-real when the Unreal’s Real” - the instantaneous movement that characterizes intertextual communication.

See:

Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Jing Wang, The Story of Stone: Intertexuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and the Journey to the West, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992.

Stephen

Ancestor Worship in the Modern World

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 13:21:00 GMT

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 about Ancestor Worship with the thought that the knowledge would help, but that of course it is a bit of “What they did then” and that I would have to work with it as a metaphor.

In my day job, in mental health, I work with a lot of displaced or estranged people. Some are displaced in that they may have come to the UK as refugees from very different cultures or who are parted from the culture and people who make up their feeling of home. Those who are estranged have lost the roots of their identity. An example of estranged people might be some of those British people who made the long ancestral journey by way of slavery, freedom and later a second migration. Some groups of these peoples are now doing a lot of work to reclaim their roots. This is an act of reclaiming identity, of rebuilding a foundation of the self with which to withstand the tugging winds of high speed western culture where every marketing campaign tries to redefine us by the image of the car we drive, the clothes we wear or some other fashionable commodity. Of course its more than just about marketing, there are many such winds blowing at us. Stephen Karcher wrote about the need for roots in The Furies and the Water Spirit Disorder . The part of this article which addresses the Water Spirit Disorder explores the act of reclaiming our place in the community in which we live and the community of ancestors from whence we came.

Ancestors and the Personal Altar takes a look at Ancestor Worship in ancient China. It may be read as spiritual fact, or as an expression of working with those Jungian archetypes which we hold within us, and its centrality to our use of the Yijing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we all need to build an Ancestor Altar on which to make offerings, though that act does fix (heng) the process in our hearts. For many of us it might mean recognising the hardships and struggles that our earlier relatives and their community made to continue the line. Perhaps to feel deep sadness at the trials they underwent, gratitude that they struggled through or wonder at some of the things they created, discovered or thought. Seeing ourselves in this light is to see ourselves as part of a long succession, or as the current holder of the torch in a long line of creative thrust. Seeing ourselves like this is to reclaim the anchor of who we really are and from whence we came. It is to be, ‘not alone’, it is also to feel the gravity of our responsibility to those who come after.

Hillary Barrett wrote a beautiful piece about her own experiences of loosing her mother. She entered into a dialogue with herself and the image of her mother at the ‘altar’ of her mothers old home. The process enabled her to re-form part of her identity, claiming the strength and abilities she needed. This, for me, is one very good example of how the idea of Ancestor Worship might be expressed in our modern world.

Kevin

Dedicated to Hillary and her mother.

The Furies and the Water Spirit Disorder

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 12:47:00 GMT

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 together modern Western imagery with that of the ancient Mediterranean world, Buddhism and the Yijing to take the reader to the heart of darkness which pervades our culture in modern times. He explains how we wilfully found this path and then followed it. With equal care and detail he uses text and imagery from the Yijing to show a possible route back to a wholeness.

He then takes us out on to the plain of the ‘wandering rootless’ and shows how this too is a path all too easily found by the way we have structured our culture. Again he uses text from the Yijing and other sources to offer us a personal and cultural path back to our hearts sanity.

The article ends with an excursus into both the psychology involved in relating to the Yijing as a divinatory system and those processes necessary to make our readings effective in our lives. In part he uses a reading where the Yi itself is brought in as a guide to this process. As always the Yijing has some very interesting things to say.

I found this article rich with a knowing and very informative.

Kevin

Sources for the Decades

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:10:00 GMT

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 organised. He shows that it is a rational sequence which reflects the stages of life we all pass through from birth to our death. This is in addition to the usual imagery found in the text for each hexagram.

Stephen has been working on this idea for many years and we already have a short introductory article here as well as a brief article about applying them in readings here.

He says of this article:

“The Decades model the ideal shape of the Symbolic Life. Each tells of a birth, death and re-birth process that enables us to Accumulate De, the actualizing power that lets an individual connect his or her own identity to the Ancestral foundation of life. Each recreates the shape and dynamic of the sacred or ritual cosmos at a different Stage of Life. The movement through a Decade or sequence of ten hexagrams can be simultaneously imagined as a personal experience; as a progressive reorganization of the intelligence and the nervous system; as a step in the evolution of culture; and as an experience of the creatio continua, the continuous creation of life and spirit."

In addition to this he begins his article by describing the I Ching’s symbolic landscape as well as the core ritual moments which are acted out within it. This part of the article is gold dust in itself.

I have used this decade model in readings for both myself and for others. It is particularly useful when the questioner is undertaking a major remodelling of their life or is struggling with a deep inner world crisis. Additionally it has great value as a framework to understanding the dynamic relations within the I Ching. It provides much food for thought for those trying to fathom the King Wen sequence.

Kevin

Painting the Canvas – The Act of Divination II

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:22:00 GMT

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 images in the Yijing as simply prescriptive, or as narrowly descriptive, then the imagery is able to circulate within us informing our deeper selves of the dynamics within us and of the time or moment around us. It can then conjoin our inner world with that of our outer world, or for some our inner world is brought into tune with the Dao or our divine purpose (Ming).

I would like to offer a metaphor for what occurs when we divine. The specific reading we obtain might be seen as a dynamic template which matches the ‘moment’. That ‘moment’ encompasses both our inner potentials and the outer world in which we live. When we contemplate this template we enter into a dynamic process of shifting around our potentials, and perceptions, to get a match with the template. We use the template to make a congruence between ourselves and the moment in which we find ourselves. We do this to the best of our ability and to our own satisfaction using whatever we, as individuals, have at our disposal in terms of potentials, perceptions and opportunities.

Seen like this divination is an act of creation, or recreation, of both ourselves and the world in which we live. It provides the canvas on which we paint.

In my next piece I will look at the way in which images need to circulate and the pathways which we can offer to them.

Kevin

Weaving the Canvas - The Act of Divination I

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:08:00 GMT

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 surrounding the ecologically rich valley called Yi. We all see the same things, but from the perspective of our different positions. So for me the sheep is in front of the tree and perhaps to you on the other side, it is behind it and of course you may be much more concerned with some other valley feature which for me is less interesting. What follows are the broad brushstrokes of two of the slopes where diviners might be found.

One perspective is that when we perform the act of divination we are making an opening across our liminal threshold into our fertile unconscious. Here we can experience the images moving around, resolving their dynamics until we perceive an understanding of the moment. This is often referred to as the ‘Jungian’ perspective of how the Yijing works. We enter that inner landscape rich with dynamic archetypal images which the moment of divination has illuminated through our imaginal apprehension of the images generated by the Yijing.

Another broad perspective is that of the spiritual or psychic belief set. Here the act of divination makes an opening through to the Yi spirit, the spirit of the ancestors, or to whatever other cosmological perspective works for us as individual diviners. For this group the ‘hand that writes on the wall’ gives us text references in the Yijing and through reading those texts we come to understand its message.

There is a group of diviners on both of these hillsides which are worth a brief mention here. For many of us the Yijing is a text rooted in a foreign culture with images and stories which relate to other places far away in distance and time. Understanding as much of that culture as we can gives us a better depth and appreciation of the words and their possible meanings. However pushing this to the point where we reduce a piece of text to a single meaning is as pointless as trying to reduce an image rich line of poetry to a single descriptive point. Such a reduction makes the Yijing oracle prescriptive with overly fixed sets of values and meanings, cognitive sets of ‘this is’ and ‘this is not’. I have to accept that this approach might suit those of us who prefer the security of setting ourselves into prescriptive projections which define our choices and paths more tightly. Freedom of choice and imagination can be unsettling and letting images circulate within our minds can leave us confused about what really is and what really is not.

It appears to me that the two broad approaches of the spiritual and the Jungian, are so closely parallel that the difference in appreciation and outcome is of little matter. One locates the knowing in the Spirit of the Yi flowing through the informative text into our spirit mind and then finally into our perceiving mind. This person might be seeking to keep their actions within the flow of the Dao, or be seeking to find the best paths through the potentials of the time. The other sites the knowing in our unconscious which is illuminated by the text and images of the Yijing. These are then appreciated by our imaginal mind before being grasped by our perceiving mind. This person might be seeking to work with their own potentials within the time or to find the path back to them through divination as an act of healing.

This is perhaps a case of two rivers with different sources flowing in the same river bed.

For me this is the canvas of divination. In my next piece I will sketch out a perspective of divination as a creative act.

Kevin

Nesting of Images by Glenroy Wolfson

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:50:00 GMT

This post from the Midaughter forum caught my heart and eye and Glen has been kind enough to give me permission to post it here.

He is an experienced diviner who has worked with the Yijing for many years. For me he has caught some of the essence of the sort of relationship that can be developed with the Yi and the way it comes alive and informs our perceptions. A thoughtful and evocative piece. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Kevin

"When consulting with the I-Ching the echo comes to us off of the I-Ching; coming back to us from us. It is our stance, our mind-frame, our emotional environment, our optical time-span, our "wanting to know" that colors the response, because the I-Ching is the echo - allowing us to see from where we have asked the question and in the answer we are reflected back to ourselves. But it is not though an obscure echo, for without that echo coming back from its encounter with the I-Ching, it might as well be our echo from the city buildings or the Swiss Alps, or the mirror on the wall.

The I-Ching is not a neutral tool with no consciousness - for the minute it encounters our voice it comes alive. It's life is a responsive life - its coming to life is in its encounter - it is a relational tool. It's wisdom catches ours and reframes it from its Empathy with the Tao. In so doing it finds the interference patterns of our mis-stepping from the Tao - our opposition to "what is." The Way of the Tao as the I-Ching is generating images of our correspondences or lack of correspondences with that very Way which is the echo, but the echo reflects both the Way as it is, and our mis-stepping from the Way - and it is this mixture (hologram) that is the Hexagram Images and the lines and their energy dynamic. This complex makes new eyes for us to see ourselves . It asks that our intuition open its doors to sense in its feeling/knowledge where we stand and where we are and where we may choose to go or not go, to act or not act, to continue or not continue.

More than this, because it is this visual echo (Hexagrams) with the added verbal texts and commentary texts - our lives become a commentary text that is being written as we continue to encounter and act on, or not act on, this echo. With our own kept records of our encounter with this echo, and our own internalization of this echo in the lives we live, we become a new commentary text, and those who observe and are effected by our lives see a visual echo of the I-Ching as a living entity in us. We then are not in one sense just scripts from the conditions of life, but become scriptures of life marking the values or errors of those very conditions.

When our sensitivity becomes refined through the impact of the echo, we begin to see nested images. There are questions that give an echo from close by - our myopia bringing myopic responses; but always a little beyond that horizon of our limitation. Other times we ask from a broader landscape and are returned an encompassing image. To become aware of the scope of our questioning and the echo, and noting those image that reflect the narrow mind, and those that reflect the broad mind, then allows us to nest images in a hierarchy of meaning. To take the "local" echoes from the narrow and emotionally constricted questions and set them inside of the open and objective meditative and peaceful questions with their echoes, can give us a nested picture of the way we have allowed our own attachments to the inferior man to overshadow an answer awaiting our expansion. This expansion is always hinted at in the wisdom of the sage-entity informing the echo to lead us beyond ourselves.

In our growing relationship with the I-Ching we will become an expansion of ourselves and less a caricature or ourselves. We will see and hear an echo of who we were before we were born into the conditioned.

Nested images of our own limitations and parodies reveal the multilayered masks we wear as faces to the world and even to ourselves. Pointed images of the armor we wear against the flow of the Tao allows us to see into the melting of the ice and the deliverance out of the nests we have made and into the source of the echoes which we see and hear.

The I-Ching springs instantly to life from its dormant state the moment we ask for an encounter. With it we become a new image and a new text. Each day there is a new life and a new image and a new text. The more consistent we become as followers of the Way, the more consistent will become our image and our text. To become re-made in the image of the Tao we become perfectly consistent with the time of each moment and perfectly spontaneous with the demands of each action. Within the change there is no change at all. Then the echo always has the same voice.

Nested images then become the points from which we learn to fly."

Glenroy Wolfson

New Jersey USA

(First posted on Midaughter - A Yijing Forum)