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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.

 

Introducing Crossline Omens

 

The Crossline Omens are probably the most mysterious part of Total Yijing and its project of reviving the old myth world that surrounds the origins of the Classic of Change and making it an immediate part of our lives and perceptions. They grow directly out of the Crossline Matrix of each Pair of hexagrams (Primary and Resulting Hexagrams) and my discovery that in that older tradition, omen words and phrases were deliberately spread across this matrix rather than being limited to a single hexagram. After I realized this I spent a long time doing the math that lets us see the Crossline pathways and an even longer time putting the omen words that live on these pathways into a readable and useable form. The result - the Crossline Omens - as almost all the rest of Total Yijing, are part of the effort to re-connect the opposites, healing the split we experience every day as subject-object, past-future, inside-outside, life-death or male-female through a kind of simultaneous or synchronistic perception.

 

You can read a lot about how these Crossline Omens were made, where they came from and what and how they “mean” or “signify” in my eBook 'Foundations of Change' .

 

The most immediate concern, however, might be how to use them in a reading. When I do a reading, for myself or others, I first circle through all the various parts of the Figures it presents and evoke their images, holding a sense of their various positions and functions – the Name and the Myths for Change of the Primary Figure and the Relating Figure, the Names of the Core Theme, the Inner and Outer Operators, the Ideal and Shadow and the Time Cycle all the while noting the meaning of the positions of the actual Transforming Lines indicated in the reading. I let this “walk-about” build up a deeper and deeper circle of associations, creating something like a super-saturated solution. I then read out the Transforming Line and Crossline Omen, letting its “voice” crystallize meanings out of the circle I’ve developed, meanings that spread out like the ripples that spread from a stone dropped into a still pond.

 

The text of the Transforming Line will locate and describe the specific transformation you are facing. The Crossline Omen text will open a sort of hidden pathway that you can “walk”, a pathway that, when enacted, will weave the yin and the yang together in and through the specifics of the situation. The pathway is not perceived in a wholly rational or cognitive way – it enters the heart-mind through an immediate perception and is experienced in action, as you dance your way into the situation by putting on the images as a sort of mask. In the words of Dazhuan: “One yin (step); one yang (step) – that’s (walking the) Dao (Way)”.