The Great Vessel Blog : News

Stephen Returns to the USA and a New Project

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:34:00 GMT

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.

Over the last 7 years Stephen has particularly focused on that ‘interactive space’ where we engage with Change and from which we bring about change in ourselves. As well as teaching the use of the I Ching at these retreats Stephen shows participants methods which open this fertile space and ways to engage with it in a positive dynamic manner. Participants are given manuals and I Ching material to take away so that they can continue to develop their way of using this approach with their I Ching studies and practice. The feedback received is that participants have not only gained a great deal from the weekends, but they've had a lot of fun too.

Stephen is open to take bookings. So if you want to talk to him about seminars and workshops in your area please email him.

Stephen continues to be a part of the Great Vessel project which will continue in its present form with a focus on the Total Yijing, Foundations for Change, the Shuogua and some other publications that we are hoping to add later this year.

Here are some links to help you keep up with Stephen’s projects.

Stephen’s blog
Institute for Cultural Change
Email Stephen at: stephen.karcher@greatvessel.com

I hope you will join with us in wishing Stephen and the Institute a bright and happy future.

Kevin

An index of articles with summaries

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:56:00 GMT

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 put a link on the Home Page in the Start Here section. I hope it helps.

Kevin

G.V. I Ching Links page has been updated

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:22:00 GMT

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 sense of the I Ching from their perspective. There must be many omissions so if you feel there is a site which would merit inclusion please let me know.

Academic and mathematicians’ sites are deliberately left under represented. This is because we are primarily interested in divination and the field of I Ching studies is massive. Hopefully the I Ching web links sites and directories will make up this shortfall.

At last I have got around to looking properly at the maths behind Terence McKenna’s Time Wave Zero theory. I have always felt uncomfortable about the subjectivity of the historical events he fits into it. They seem a little too Western-centric. Additionally there is little allowance for the Butterfly Principle of Chaos theory fame, where something seemingly insignificant changes the world. Now I find that there is a considerable body of mathematicians who believe the maths underpinning it is flawed too.

OK, OK, I know I should'nt get so uptight about it, but I can't bear to read yet another glib blog listing a dozen proofs that 2012 is upon us and the I Ching is one of the models which substantiates this. Check the link.

Hmm... Where was I? Oh yes, I hope you find some new and interesting stuff in the new links page!

Kevin

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 Kevin, the webmaster, has been through a major computer meltdown. Two computers melted down in fact! 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.

Stephen

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 xpanded 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

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

Stephen Karcher - Available for Yijing (I Ching) Consultations

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:10:00 GMT

Stephen is making more time available to do Yijing consultations for others. I have had a number of these done for myself and have also seen him divine over a wide variety of things such as world issues, or those faced by organisations I have been involved with.

He is really quite startling in his clarity and the way he leads the questioner through the issues and forces in which they are situated. If you want to know more then go to ‘Community’ and select ‘Consultations’

Kevin

A Message to email Subscribers

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:40:00 GMT

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.

Unless your reading this online… (Sheepish grin again)

Caroline Casey talks with Sallie Ann Glassman and Stephen Karcher

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:23:00 GMT

Appearing on Thursday 2nd March on the Visionary Activist Radio Show on radio stations on the west coast of America, see the above link for times and frequencies. The link to listen to this show online will be posted here on Friday.

Caroline is a leading American astrologer. Her radio show is an experiment in broadcasting which seeks to look at topical events in terms of divination, myth and symbols. Sallie has trained in Voodoo in both the Haiti and the New Orleans traditions. Voodoo is not the evil art that Hollywood portrays, but is the religion, divination and medicine which grew out of the pain of slavery and the meeting of ancient West African religions and Christianity. Sally is the author of ‘Voodoo Traditions’ and the co- author of “Voodoo Tarot’.

This should be an interesting discussion. One of the themes of this show is ‘Syncretisation’, the combining of different teachings and beliefs. So we can look forward to a rich discussion by proxy between Astrology, Tarot, Voodoo and the Yijing.

Stephen has already worked with Rachel Pollack a leading Tarot practitioner. They each used their connections to enable the Yijing and the Tarot to talk to each other with very interesting results. During this work both the Tarot and the Yijing said that they want to talk together in order to find voices that meet the needs of our time, more syncretisation.

Sally appeared on last weeks Visionary Activist show. She lives in New Orleans and talks about Voodoo and the trials and hopes of New Orleans from a Voodoo perspective you can listen to it here.

Later in the show she discusses Voodoo and power, there is much about healing and love as well as who their spirits are.

Stephen Karcher in discussion with Caroline Casey

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:45:00 GMT

Stephen appeared on Caroline Casey’s Visionary Network radio show to discuss the state of the world and our role within it.

Caroline did a Yijing reading for this show and received 64.3 > 50. This forms a thematic foundation for their discussion, generating ideas and images which they explore and apply to the current world situation.

The discussion ranges over large areas such as the Han and Song dynasty commentators and the way they moved some of the Yijing text around to accommodate the idea of Yang - male, inspirational good and Yin - female, passive and evil and the way this was echoed in the first few centuries of the Christian Church with the outlawing of divination on pain of death. Both these movements were involved with the excommunication of our own inner underworld and its communication with us through symbolic imagery.

Thus the Confucian movement, by moralising the text, cut the user off from the animate images which were there before and in their place developed correlative categories of meaning and moral principles.

The theme which runs through this topical discussion is the way these symbolic images can be re-animated and how they can then be used to guide and inform. The way we can live the symbol, inviting it in, rather than cognating the it from above and beforehand.

I enjoyed listening to these two as they moved the symbols around and found the messages thus conveyed. They are both adepts at myth and imagery.

You can hear the show here.

The visionary Network website is here.

Caroline Casey - Visionary Activist Radio Show

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:12:00 GMT

Recently I have been feeling a little low about our world and the madness that seems to be unleashed on every quarter in these turbulent times. Hearing that our own Stephen Karcher was about to appear on Caroline’s show I decided to go to her website to see what she does. Her Candlemas broadcast on February 2nd had me captivated. In it she talked of the nature of the troubled times in which we live and pointed to the causes and their attendant solutions.

Her delivery is fast, animated and is clearly the product of considerable learning and wisdom. Caroline has a biography which leaves me a little breathless. She has appeared on many of the leading TV stations in the U.S. along with being featured in People Magazine, the Washington Post and the Sunday Times in the U.K. She is the author of Making the Gods Work For You - the astrological language of the psyche (Harmony Books/Random House or Random Harmony).

In her Candlemas show she talked about how we are bound and circumscribed, or expanded, by the images we hold in our minds and the way in which our ‘literal’ style of thinking has systematically excluded those ways of understanding our world, which we need, in order to deal with the problems we face as individuals and as cultures.

We are caught up in a compelling illusion of realism which excludes mythical images whose role has traditionally been to make plain to us those parts of ourselves which they represent. We have excluded our shadow world, the place in ourselves where we need to confront those difficult, disturbing and uncomfortable things which are a part of us. If we fail to recognise these things we are doomed to project them on to others. Thus on the world stage it is some other regime which becomes the demon. This polarized world we create is bereft of true dialogue and is one which is prone to wars and other ills. By recognizing the difficult shadows within ourselves we can find a position from which to dialogue rather than to polarize.

She illustrates this with the myth of Demeter searching for Persephone who has been abducted to the underworld. In the myth Persephone begins her ascent to the outer, real world, bringing with her the magic from the underworld thus making the outer world whole. This magic is the non literal, the non logical, it is creativity and intuition, it is the knowledge of our darker potentials which, if not recognized will burst forth in a dreadful manner. When Ishtar (Persephone in another cultures myth) wanted to return to the outer world she told the gatekeeper that should they not open the gate then she would smash it down and the outer world would be consumed by the dead. If we don’t have a regular process to go down into difficult places inside us, to be unfertile, to be depressed and face uncomfortable things then this part of the psyche will smash down doors and the dead will eat the living.

So it is that Caroline makes the case for the need to de-animate the images which set the current trail in motion and the task of bridging the two worlds of our psyche. Only then will we be able to find the dream or a vision we need to live up to.

She tells us that one of the ways we can begin this healing journey is by the use of oracles which are one medium for dialogue between these parts of ourselves. Hey, I have heard this before. It is one of the central tenets of Great Vessel. And it just so happens that the Total Yijing program is written in and dedicated to reviving the language of the mythos.

Stephen walks us through some of the features and stages of this healing journey in his article, The Shaman of the Shadows. In it he shows how Hexagram 38 is an instruction set for this passage.

Caroline’s website is here. I hope you will try one of her broadcasts, I expect to be blogging her again so please leave feedback.

Somehow I don’t feel as confused and helpless after listening to her and reading Stephen’s paper. But the journey is not easy and it has to be ongoing.

A quality yijing reading service 'improved'

webmaster@greatvessel.com — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 22:28:00 GMT

Hilary Barrett has just updated her Yijing Reading Service. She is an exceptionally able diviner with the Yi and her readings are sensitive and perceptive. Hilary has been offering a readings service for many years. She has now found ways to increase the depth and quality of the service she offers.

The Yijing may have been formulated in the Neolithic period, but it seems very adept at utilizing the technology that is available. I imagine the excitement of bronze arriving and the casting of the first Ding! Hilary's service is highly recommended. Readings can be sought here.

Kuan Yin goes home to China

wandering.sages@greatvessel.com — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:56:00 GMT

I have heard that translation rights for Stephen Karcher's ‘Kuan Yin Oracle', Time Warner, have just been bought by a Chinese publisher. It is about to be translated into Chinese for sale on the mainland.
Kuan Yin is the 'Compassionate One' her image is found wherever there is a Buddhist, Daoist or Shinto shrine throughout China and Japan. This is an old temple oracle which is still very much in use today in temples and homes. Kuan Yin is a Bodhisattva and her name means, ‘She who hears the cries of the world’. The Bodhisattvas are described in the Lotus scripture (Saddarmapundarika Sutra) and the Land Scripture (Shukavativyuha Sutra) which talk of the Bodhisattva’s life saving powers and direct connections with the Buddha. A well known passage in the Lotus Scripture says that a person only has to call upon Kuan Yin with single mindedness to be saved from any ill.
Each ‘outcome’ in this oracle begins with a short evocative verse of wisdom. This is followed by statements tied to the phase of the moon, season and lifecycle. Finally there are prognostications in each of the areas below:

Household and family

Business

Relationships

Children and birth

Litigation, Judgements, news from afar and journeys

The place you make home.

Illness.

The Kuan Yin oracle speaks clearly to our every day concerns. However the attached advice reaches somewhere a little deeper into the nature of the time and the way we conduct ourselves.