These offer on-going discussions of divinations of interest selected by our Reading Panel. You can submit a reading for consideration through the Contact Us page.
Voices of Change
Excerpts from an article in Odyssey Magazine, South Africa, 2005Stephen Karcher, PhD
I
We are living out a change that is transforming the basic ways we see ourselves and our world. The magic and the awe so carefully eliminated by classical religion and science have returned with a vengeance, leaving us staring into a mystery - the mystery of being and our “secret collusion” in its creation. How can we navigate this dark journey when the ways of thought we once trusted are falling all around us? The depth psychologist C. G Jung felt that the “whole practical use” of Yijing or the Classic of Change, a mysterious book that “traced the course of the valley spirit, the Tao, winding like a dragon or a river,” could be an answer to our spiritual needs. Yijing or Change, as it is usually called, is both a book and a spiritual and imaginative process and discipline treasured as the key to the mysteries of transformation for over 3000 years. The book itself consists of 64 Figures or symbols, often referred to as “hexagrams”. They are combinations of linear diagrams, short vivid pronouncements and intricate chains of associations. You do not so much read Change, however, as talk with it, for the figures truly come alive only in response to an individual question. The book then “speaks to your situation,” offering a mirror that “reaches the depths, grasps the seeds and penetrates the wills of all beings under heaven.” It opens a living stream of images that carries the seeds of the new and washes away what is finished. The old Sages who developed Change felt it as a companion or helper. Through Change, they maintained, we can seize the moment, moving with it as fluidly as the creative force that is shaping it.
The real way to experience the power of Change, however, is through posing a question to the Oracle, receiving one or more of its symbols as an answer and matching them to the situation. In this spirit, the editors of Odyssey asked me to pose two questions to the Oracle on behalf of its readers. The first question was:
Question:
What would you (Change) like to say to the readers of Odyssey about the future of South Africa?
The Inquirer:
Stephen Karcher.
Result: 56.4 > 52
Reading Matrix
Change describes the readers of this magazine as “Sojourners” who have received a hidden message announcing the beginning of a new time, given to them by the New King who has overthrown a vicious tyrant. It is the Sojourner’s job to circulate this message and the blessing that results. It is a time when each must actively provide for the future of the country by standing up for what is right in a whole series of small but very important ways.
However, the Voice of the omen, the transforming line in the fourth place that shows people just after the great transition, paints a different picture.
You find a place to abide. You acquire goods and a position. Your heart says: I am not glad.
This shows the readers of this magazine as people who have found security and power but are failing their true mission. Instead, they build walls to protect themselves and within those walls their hearts are languishing. The solution? The Relating Figure, the hexagram produced when this line transforms or changes shape, shows someone who can walk through the halls of power and position without being “caught” by greed, personal ambition or what has bee called spiritual materialism. He or she is does the inner work to rid themselves of the shades of the past and the fear of the future rather than acting them out or re-acting to them. This inner work remains to be done. The failure to do it is holding back the spread of the New King’s blessing. The second question was:
Would you give us a picture of South Africa in ten years time?
Result: 59.1.2.5 > 27
This “picture shows a time of Dispersal or Dissolution. It plays back and forth between the images of water and of blood: on the one hand, melting ice, fog dispersing, illusions clearing away, on the other, structures failing, a high fever and the breakup of the body in death. Traditionally, this is the death of an old self or identity, a time when we “pass through the Tiger’s Mouth to change the sources of spiritual nourishment.” It poses the question of whether this death shall be spiritual or literal. The new time must be truly Articulated, and it is the job of the Sojourners to accomplish this.
There are many Voices speaking here. The Voice of the Beginnings says that this is a critical moment when we must rescue what is important “with the strength of a horse.” The Voice of the Inner Center of this mysterious image shows “blood flowing over an altar table” dissolving all normal supports. Here, we must “flee to the hidden wellsprings,” the triggers of change, and if we do so, “all cause for sorrow will disappear.” The Voice of the Outer Center, the place of power, shows a flood of sweat and a King’s command: “Move the place that I reside in.” It connects the dissolution with mighty ad endangered efforts to articulate a new time. Like the first omen, the entire image of this figure is surrounded by the Tiger’s Mouth, the difficult passage whereby the corruption of the old is finally eaten away. And it shows the Sojourner from the first reading as critical to the spread of this new vision.
As a diviner, I cannot help seeing South Africa in ten years as poised at a critical juncture, a choice between complete dissolution and real rebirth. Two connections spring to mind: the vision of Nelson Mandela, a New King if there ever was one, and the Altar, the deep wellspring of native African religion and culture as a “trigger” to which we can “flee” to enact this vision and eat away the corruption of the old. The omen is surrounded by threatening images of corruption, greed, complacency and failure of vision. A thread between the two readings might be the part that readers of this magazine could play, if they would come out of the caves of their current beliefs and turn to these wellsprings. Here, I feel, Change offers its images as a vessel to contain the literal dissolution and focus it on a real spiritual re-birth connected to the roots.
II
When the editors of Odyssey approached me to write this article, they asked that I include something about my personal journey, how I first met and came to know Yijing or the Classic of Change. I can best respond to this request by talking about it in terms of images from Change itself. Like many others that the book and its tradition have called, I first found Change when I was in trouble (another meaning of the word change or “I”). I was an alienated exile who had refused to fight in the war in Viet Nam, one in the series of ongoing wars the US is still fighting with everything it refuses to recognize in itself. In my own “time of troubles,” Change first offered itself to me as a Vessel, a great spiritual “cooking pot” or grail that could keep me safe and, at the same time, open an inner path or way to a personal transformation that just might, in the long run, have an effect on the troubled world I lived in.
Over the years that followed this first encounter, I became a graduate student, a dancer, a shipper, a theatre technician and, finally, returned to university to finish a doctorate. Through all of this Change was with me. It continually articulated an inner path, drawing me into encounters with strange books, ancient languages and some very remarkable people. As I finished my doctorate and was teaching in France, I was asked to become the Director of Research for the Eranos Foundation in Switzerland, helping to guide its I Ching Project.
At Eranos, the different streams of my life and my mind crossed over – literary scholarship, depth psychology, a deep need to come to grips with the ghosts that were haunting my culture and the first-hand experience of the great transformative power of this book’s images when they are released from the technical and moralistic systems that surround them. My path since then has been what the tradition calls the Great Enterprise – “Raising Change into awareness and setting it out for all the people to use.”
This “enterprise,” which grew directly from my first encounter with Change, has led me, as writer, translator, teacher and seeker to present Change to psychologists, business people, artists, doctors, feminists and healing communities in centers throughout Europe, the US, and, most recently, South Africa. It has also led me farther into the links between eastern spiritual practices, western depth psychology, quantum theory and the myths that lurk hidden in most modern cultures, their hidden “shamanistic” roots. I came to see that there is something like an imaginal College of Diviners out there at the edge of reality who help us to “gamble with the gods” for our identity, our destiny and, perhaps, the destiny of the world we live in. I am honored to think that, in some small way, I and my work have become a part of that great circle. I sincerely hope that the experiences I have had with the oracle here in South Africa might become a part of their Great Enterprise.
Stephen Karcher PhD is an internationally known writer, translator, lecturer and consulting diviner. His latest book, Total I Ching: Myths for Change was recently published by Time Warner.