Article Index
You will find a great variety of articles and guides on our site, from short topical guides and how-to-do-it instructions to articles that look at I Ching, divination and culture in depth. We also offer e-books and consultation programs.
Decades and Karmic Nodes
Each Pair or set of two interconnected hexagrams in Change generates a set of other paired figures across its Internal Matrix. These sets of Generated Pairs do many things. They describe the overall interchange between the themes of the two hexagrams involved; they connect the Pair in question to other sites in the overall Matrix or Sequence; and they generate the Crossline Omens. Further, through the model of the Decades they can also point at specific events in a person’s life that may be relevant to the situation at hand.
The Decades and the Symbolic Life
The Decades are an ancient age-grade system that shows the progressive formation of an individual’s character (de) throughout life in terms of ideal units of Ten. It is a major shaping principle used in sculpting the local logics of Change, giving shape and meaning to individual experience by describing its major events, initiations and passages from one state of being to another. There are specific tasks associated with each of the Decades.
First Decade (Figures 1-10, childhood): The child seeks to create a world in which to find a self.Second Decade (Figures 11-20, the Teens): Struggles with identity and Society.
Third Decade (Figures 21-30, the 20’s): Initiation and search for a Self.
Fourth Decade (Figures 31-40, the 30’s): Heroic struggles to found a dwelling, family and career.
Fifth Decade (Figures 41-50, the 40’s): Emergence into higher levels of culture and empowerment in society.
Sixth Decade (Figures 51-60, the 50’s): Dealing with power and responsibilities to the human community.
The Crossings (Figures 61-64): Preparation and birth into the life of the spirit, passage across the River of Life and Death.
Within each Decade, there are five positions that describe developmental dynamics:
1:2 Position: Axis and Gate to the world of the Four Directions where we emerge from the fertile chaos into the world of the new stage of life. 3:4 Position: Approach to the Royal Center, an offering, a sacrifice and a gift that allows an audience, an approach to the experience of royal power and mystery. 5:6 Position: Royal Center and apex, the experience of the numinous power and attraction of the King and High Culture, the hierarchical and centralizing power of the Decade.7:8 Position: the Mission or mandate that can lead to a change of state, an ordeal that must be faced or a challenge you must confront. 9:10 Position: Transition or Liminal Zone, a passage between stages that opens the world of the ghosts and spirits, a place where identity dissolves and is re-formed.
When the numbers of the Generated Pairs are arranged sequentially, associated with the specific age of the inquirer and dropped into this system they become what I call the Karmic Nodes.
Karmic Nodes as Tools
The Karmic Nodes can point at knots in the flux of individual experience that contain either traumas (yin fixations or “ghosts”) that are influencing the situation at hand and can be dissolved or hidden powers (shen or bright spirits) that have been hidden or repressed and can be reclaimed. The Nodes are a mysterious but, in my experience, very powerful tool for going into the depths of an individual situation. They are not relevant to all readings and should be used with real care when you are working with another person.
Reading the Nodes
Here is an example of how the Nodes can amplify and deepen a reading in an individual sense. We asked a question to Change about how we can best read the answers it gives us.
Question: What would you (Change) like to say to us about reading your answers to our questions?The Answer was Hexagram 3 Sprouting as Primary Figure, with a Transforming Line in the first position, producing the Relating Figure 8 Grouping. The Answer is notated like this: Answer: 3, 9/1 > 8 Grouping.
I used the Karmic Nodes to explore the deep connections of this Pair (3:4) to myself as the individual posing the question.
Through the model of the Decades these connections can be seen as a series of Karmic Nodes that relate the central theme to an individual life. Look at the ages the figures below suggest for relevant personal experiences and connections to past and future. They point at themes from your life that may be woven into the situation.
When I mused on the events in my own life associated with these times and ages, I saw a series of cultural or educational thresholds and betrayals – the failure or corruption of cultural institutions, the images of the Ancestors, to do what they are supposed to do and the personal suffering and search for alternative ways of thinking and living this set off. These were my personal associations to the subject of “reading the answers” from Change.
At 7:8, in the building boom of the 1950’s in the US, the beginning of the “Sputnik” era and the great fear it engendered, I was enrolled in a new primary school that began a truly disastrous engagement with what I can only call dis-education and deep confusion. At 17:18 I passed into an equally disastrous institution of “higher” learning.
At 23:24 I learned what I was being trained for - the war in Vietnam –and left my country as a criminal and an exile. It was then, too, that I first found the Classic of Change and my true education, or re-education, began. It was an education that went on to include training and working as a professional dancer, a PhD in Comparative Literature and Archetypal Psychology and an introduction to eastern languages and ancient texts.
At 41:42 I became Director of Research at the Eranos Foundation and applied the scholarly tools I had acquired to a serious study of the texts and history of the Yijing. After the breakup of the Foundation, I became what we might call a wandering scholar and teacher, taking the Yijing to many different places and countries. 59:60, the years now coming up, will hopefully see the publication of my life’s work, the program you are now encountering.
If there is a lesson for me in these experiences it is the deep necessity to find a way to transform the corruption of learning in which we are trapped. There is also a warning against despair and an injunction to have faith in the “on-going process of the real” that will always, somehow, come through when we have the courage to accept our exile as a real message from the spirit and have the courage to step outside the norms, to encounter these shadows and “nurture the new”.