I Ching

I was unsure about how to proceed with my TG book and I consulted the I Ching, in part because of a lyric on the album that references bibliomancy.
So anyway blah blah I consulted the I Ching, asking "how should I proceed with my book on Throbbing Gristle?" and I immediately got the "DISCIPLINE" hexagram. I took it as A SIGN.

(for non TG-nerds, "Discipline" is one of their greatest songs, with the chorus "We need! Discipline!" chanted over and over for ten minutes).

The last time I asked it something, it was how to deal with a new radio volunteer whose hectic enthusiasm I find nervous-making. It very specifically told me that it's important to delegate and then trust the people you've delegated to.

Lately what I ask it is often about how to deal with wingnuts in our new organization. I repeatedly get the same hexagram when I ask this question in various forms. It basically says fools have to be tolerated and will eventually go away of their own accord. This has proven true on several occasions.

"chapter 11" always jumps in from time to time.

The last couple of times that I consulted the I Ching (I'm pretty sure your pronunciation is right, more or less, btw), I consulted it about health and then subsequently about relationship issues. Both results gave fairly unpropitious results, which I was inclined to balk at in the moment, but in retrospect, they proved true. That being said, I think that the I Ching, like other oracles which one would might tend to place faith in, are greatly affected by one's state of mind at a given moment, (whatever that means...) In other words, to the degree that you have faith in a given oracle as a source of reliable feedback, to that same degree the results will be of value.

it said there'd be some thunder by the well.

philip k dick consulted it constatly while writing "man in the high castle"

Also, I would add that I view consulting it as having some parallells with following principles of feng shui. Which is to say that, I think pretty much everyone instinctively picks up on certain physical environments as feeling somewhat ok, or conversely, just plain godawful, or something in-between...but, at the same time, lining up everything in one's home or workplace according to a bagua diagram is not necessarily gonna override other extenuating circumstances in life. Which is to say, that I think that if one gets a particularly good or bad reading from consulting the I Ching, I don't think that it is cause for either feelings of elation or damnation. Rather it reflects certain trends which happen to be operating at a given point in time.

That being said, such an interpretation and whatever else might lead people to say that it's all complete bullshit, more or less...but, if nothing else, I have a great deal of respect for the basic principles of feng shui. I mean, speaking for myself, there are certain places that I walk into or visit that just feel completely off-putting on the basis of not only poor use of space, but also Le Bad Vibes.

I have a friend who uses it constantly, he uses 8-sided dice so that he gets the broken lines and can roll a complete hexagram in one roll of dice. Is this cheating?

Seeing as there have been different traditions of consulting the oracle from using reeds, to using to coins, to whatever...no, I don't think that's necessarily cheating. But I don't know...

I would gather that the most important factor is sincerity and respect when going into the affair...

i would like to learn to read i ching, but i don't know where to begin

There are so many English translations available at this point...and I have no idea as to which ones are the "best" or whatever. I haven't tried to consult it in a long time, but I'm guessing that someone here might have a favorite translation to recommend.

The best one is the mustard-colored Wilhelm/Baynes version. It's actually a translation from the German. Wilhelm went and lived with the Chinese and translated the oracle into German. Then the Chinese had it back-translated into Chinese again - the discussed the meaning and inconsistencies, then that revised back-translation was translated back to German and subsequently to English. The Wilhelm version has footnotes about similarities with the bible or other Western teaching.

There's a vocabulary you learn when you consult it over time and it starts to make more sense. "Crossing the great water" doesn't mean taking a big trip necessarily - it means taking a big step, making a big decision.

So does that guy's hexagram die also have changing lines?

I don't tend to ask it yes/no questions or questions that have a favorable/unfavorable result. I ask for advice - for a new perspective on something that I'm thinking about. I've been wondering if I should get another job (worried about the economy's effects on the translation biz) and if so, what - whether radio volunteerism will turn into paid work. I'll ask right now.

The Marrying Maiden (Kuei Mei - 54) with bottom line changing to Deliverance (Hsieh - 40).

Scott makes fun of me cuz he says no matter what it tells me I somehow bend it to apply to my situation. That's one of those cases (of course I'm asking it for show and tell and not asking it sincerely - I agree with dell's comment about sincerity). I find that the I Ching often has something to add to something I'm thinking a lot about, even if it's not directly related to my question. Because I started a new organization lately and have been trying to interface the radio station with other organizations, I've been thinking a lot about hierarchy. Also reconfiguring our board and thinking about how to gently remove some dead weight from it.

The Marrying Maiden is about the role of a younger wife towards the chief wife. "She must not take it upon herself to supplant the mistress of the house, for that would mean disorder and lead to untenable relationships. The same is true of all voluntary relationships between human beings. While legally regulated relationships evince a fixed connection between duties and rights, relationships based on personal inclination depend in the long run entirely on tactful reserve."

"The superior man understands the transitory in the light of eternity in the end."
~ this might apply more specifically to my question about the economy

The changing line is about humility - about staying modestly in the background and letting others lead while quietly achieving things through kindliness.

Good advice.

The changing line of Deliverance:
Without blame. In keeping with the situation, few words are needed. The hindrance is past, deliverance has come. One recuperates in peace and keeps still. This is the right thing to do in times when difficulties have been overcome.

So does that guy's hexagram die also have changing lines?

they are 8-sided, so results of 7 or 8 represent the broken lines as I understand it.

i wonder why i've never gotten into this

i'm pretty skeptical of any of these things 'showing the future' but they can be a good tool for understanding/accessing one's own intuition abt what to do
i ordered some pretty crazy/awesome tarot cards the other day tho

Scott makes fun of me cuz he says no matter what it tells me I somehow bend it to apply to my situation.

man scott you suck, maria rules

no matter what it tells me I somehow bend it to apply to my situation

If ever there was a succinct description of how divination works...

"There is no Chaos, only great Energy!"

i just asked an online i ching 'is president trump correct about there being 'great energy' in the white house?' and got this response

Cast Hexagram:

63 - Sixty-Three
Chi Chi / Aftermath

Boiling Water over open Flame, one might extinguish The other:
The Superior Person takes a 360 degree view of the situation and prepares for any contingency.

Success in small matters if you stay on course.
Early good fortune can end in disorder.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:
Victory at the expense of another is a merciless taskmaster.
The precarious balance here is reflected in the lines of the hexagram: each of the yin lines rests upon a strong yang line -- a seemingly perfect arrangement.
But the scales will be tipped with the change of any one line.
And there WILL be change.
Tireless vigilance and an answer to every challenge -- that is the uneasy Seat of Power occupied by the conqueror.

makes u think

http://www.psychic-revelation.com/images/i_ching_63_chi_chi.jpg

(what about the moving lines?)

dammit i closed the window before i read it D:

uh oh

what would philip k dick do

what would philip k dick do

Cast Hexagram:

34 - Thirty-Four
Ta Chuang / Awesome Power

http://www.psychic-revelation.com/images/i_ching_34_ta_chuang.jpg

Thunder fills the Heavens with its awful roar, not out of pride, but with integrity; if it did less, it would not be Thunder:
Because of his Great Power, the Superior Person takes pains not to overstep his position, so that he will not seem intimidating or threatening to the Established Order.

Opportunity will arise along this course.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:
The Awesome Power available in this hexagram stems from what the Taoists call your Te, a term not perfectly translated into English.
Roughly, it is your Integrity -- not in the Western sense of honor -- but more in the psychological definition of a full integration of Who You Are.
This Awesome Power is achieved only by fully embracing both the good and the bad, the strong and the weak, the masculine and the feminine -- all polarities within you.
Such self-knowledge spawns a Mastery tempered with the humility necessary to rein in and harness this Awesome Power

(ps no changing lines)

^^^imo this is more abt me than pdk

'is this more about mark s than philip k dick'

Cast Hexagram:

41 - Forty-one
Sun / Decrease

The stoic Mountain drains its excess waters to the Lake below:
The Superior Person curbs his anger and sheds his desires.

To be frugal and content is to possess immeasurable wealth within.
Nothing of value could be refused such a person.
Make a portion of each meal a share of your offering.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:
This is an occasion for downsizing to fighting trim.
Simplicity and economy are strong defenses against the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune.
Whether this is a time of want or a time of plenty, it is an auspicious time to shed a dependency.

Changing Lines:

There is One Changing Line.

Hexagram Forty-One/Line Six:

He finds gain in that which others see no value.
His example generates widespread support.
This course brings success.

damn is the i ching calling u fat? rude imo

rude but timely

fatshamed by a millennia-old book of divination, damn

the yarrow stalks have spoken

"piglets and fishes"

apparently they are the hardest animals to influence

("influence": a term not perfectly translated into english)

anyway i got hexagram 61 ("inner truth") followed by hexagram 5 ("waiting") and things could honestly be much worse

piglets and fishes!

Love of my life. I mean, this oracle, and the book and diagrams. But mark s is cool too.

The line statements of 61 are among my favorites, maybe my absolute favorite. The ones you cast, 3 and 6, sound pretty melodramatic to me but of course i have no idea what you asked for.

The word in the Yijing translated roughly as 'influence' is 咸，literally 'to cut off' (as in dismember, presumably the bodies of sacrificial POW's). In roughly contemporary texts, it also has the meaning of 'entirely' or 'completely'. But in the tradition of exegesis on the core text of the Yijing, beginning with the Tuanzhuan appendix, it is understood as a homophone of 感, a word that is indeed difficult to translate from Early Old Chinese. As well as 'influence', it carries the sense of 'arousal' or 'sensation'. This character doesn't appear anywhere in the text of hexagram 61.

Piglets and fish are symbols of plenty, but they're also lowly, marginal creatures in the hierarchy of ritual sacrifice. The judgement of 'piglets, fish auspicious' at the head of hexagram 61 is one of the most baffling in all the text. Scott Davis, a structuralist and student of K.C. Chang, identifies this as something like the headline of a "subsystem" of line statements scattered throughout the Yijing which articulate container/content relations (idgi).

I got # 50 The Caludron - that means time for coffee

hell, who doesn't these days

Deflatormouse much appreciated. I’d like to subscribe to your oracular newsletter.

The Man in The High Castle came up in conversation with my family recently and my brother said he thought it was an incredibly well-written book. Didn’t rip into that at the time but while the plot is interesting it’s not like the oracle granted Dick actual three-dimensional characters or anything right? I mean it’s still got all his usual tropes and flaws iirc.

viborg, years ago i briefly toyed with the idea of publishing my reading journal on a blog, but it never really materialized. Ultimately, it felt pointless to share.

It's really turned my life around, though. I've studied the heavy-handed interpretive traditions of it and tried to keep up with all the relevant academic research. But it really came alive for me when I stopped looking for a rosetta stone and got very playful with it. And formed a very childlike, emotional bond. The text itself is full of puns and rhymes. In fact, many of the puns are on animal names. For example the name of hexagram 33, 遯 'Retreat' is a pun on 豚 'piglet'. And indeed, the line statements such as ' tail' or 'fat retreat' make a lot more sense if you read it as 'piglet'. The other major interpretive tradition, based on the diagrams, has an aspect to it that's a bit like rock, paper scissors.

I don't want to give the impression that the Yijing is a dark nursery rhyme if you read it in Old Chinese, because it also contains a lot of prosody and belongs to the genre of, like, technical occult literature. But it definitely has that element, it even goes "jingaling". The literary style of it has definitely been neglected. Ancient and modern scholarship in both China and the west has focused almost entirely on the semantic meaning. Wen Yiduo, who was also a poet, was the most attentive to style and form. Of all the translations into western languages, only Richard Rutt's has retained the rhyme scheme. It's a shame, the magic wordplay aspect of it really appeals to me and helps to soften the face of this oracle that many envisage as a cranky old granddad. It's more like a Santa Claus to me.

The only Philip K Dick I've read, on the recommendation of ? and the Mysterians' bass player when I was in high school, is A Scanner Darkly. I'm not a fan.

It frustrates me that even the most obvious onomatopoeias in the text are mostly always translated rather than transliterated. The semantic meaning of those words is present, it's something like entendre, but it's extremely secondary to the sound.

Haha Old Chinese is so daunting to me. It’s thrilling to be given a chance to dip my toe in the water like this but my immediate instinct is “run away!” Would also be interested in learning your thoughts on the Dao De Jing if that’s something you’ve explored.

(Then maybe we could get into Ursula Le Guin…she came up in relation to the family Dick chat, having gone to Berkeley High School at the same time as PKD iirc. Plus she’s a daoist/taoist but I’m mostly just off on a tangent now, feel free to disregard.)

The Man in The High Castle came up in conversation with my family recently and my brother said he thought it was an incredibly well-written book. Didn’t rip into that at the time but while the plot is interesting it’s not like the oracle granted Dick actual three-dimensional characters or anything right? I mean it’s still got all his usual tropes and flaws iirc.

It's my understanding that all PKD did really was to use the actual I Ching whenever a character in the book uses it and then let the character interpret the results. This makes the book go into some weird unexpected directions at times which I think is maybe one of the reasons it stands out a bit from the rest of his novels.

That sounds pretty cool, actually. Maybe I should give PKD another shot?

I love the Daodejing, I love Le Guin too. I'm completely unqualified to talk about either one of them, but more than happy to be a fly on the wall if they're up for discussion.

It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts. Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.

Ursula Le Guin OTM

Apart from the Yijing, the Shijing and Jiaguwen (oracle bones) are the texts i've spent the most time on, as well as some recently excavated manuscripts and books like the Zuozhuan which contain old divination records.

A friend of mine who once attended a Yijing course at the Brooklyn library (which I'd also sat in on a couple of times previously) told me that during the class, the instructor predicted on the fly that Anthony Scaramucci was about to be fired when she saw someone go through a revolving door.

Point being, the culture that produced these books, the Yijing, Shijing, Chu Ci- didn't make the same distinctions we do between literary symbolism, metaphor and mimesis on the one hand, and omens and portents on the other. That's what their poetry shows. If you saw an oriole, you knew you'd better hurry home because mom and dad were hungry. And words themselves are incredibly potent, magical, portentious .

You may already be aware that the Zhouyi, the core text of the Yijing, is presumed to be several hundred years older than the Daodejing. Concepts which were very fashionable by the Warring States period- 'dao' in the Zhouyi is only used in the earliest, literal sense of 'road'. Even yin & yang- there is one occurrence of 'yin', in hexagram 61, where it simply means 'shade'. The Daodejing comes out of a very different cultural milieu, but still at that time people are being buried with copies of these books. People, some of whom may have been illiterate, are buried with these very important books because the books were believed to have talismanic properties.

If the very first thing it says in the Daodejing is that words and thoughts aren't real- and we could talk about "words" vs. "images", logographic writing, literature that assumes the limitations of painting- this creates a dissonance that i'm not sure how to reconcile.

That's where the hundred layers of exegesis get very interesting.

Have you seen Le Guin's Daodejing translation, btw? Worth it mostly for her annotations which are laugh-out-loud funny.

Six days ago I asked the Yijing oracle to share its own thoughts and feelings about the Daodejing, with the intention that I would file away the answer and revisit it over the years.

Glanced at it again last night and immediately recognized that it's just a snarky put-down! Very funny bit of trash talk & classic Yijing humor.

thank you deflatormouse, this has been an extremely enjoyable and informative follow-up to my basically very ignorant and shallow post of 1 feb

(based on a reading given me by a random internet site as my books and coins are all curretly in storage)

On the Daodejing, the Zhouyi oracle (hereafter 'Yi') says, essentially: "pish-posh, it's never done anything for me, I derive no benefit from our lil' association. The Daoists can have it!" And this is colored by a sense of "good riddance" and a delicious bit of braggadocio where it refers to itself as 'King Yi'. My books are beefing and writing diss tracks about each other.

Re: shallow and ignorant, the belief system behind this book is something like a spiritual bureaucracy of vengeful ancestral ghosts/gods who decided your fate and had to be appeased through blood sacrifices, often of human war captives. It shows a concern with calendars and timing, but the whole cosmology of living in harmony with nature, the Confucian ideas about the Superior Man- all that comes later, and the concept of yin&yang is solidified much later still. You could say it contains the seeds of those ideas, but it's really not a book of profundities. Those things are great too, and very beautiful, but largely anachronistic to the extent they're appended to the Yijing. So have fun with it, if you want to. Not in a mocking way, of course, but in a friendly way, there's nothing wrong with that. It's very playful IME. Don't worry about the shroud of ancient symbolism you're unfamiliar with, cut it down to size and let it talk to you directly, in your own language.

I'm just geeking out here, of course, do feel more than free to disregard.

What's actually in it:
proto-empirical observation. We saw frost on the ground = winter came. We saw a black cat = something bad happened. We're in the process of establishing an early nation-state, or have recently established one. But we're very unsure of ourselves. Maybe this isn't such a great idea.

http://hugh-gallagher.com/yo-ching

^Fun book that makes a connection between the language of bronze age Zhou warlords and that of Gangsta rap.

xp and oh yeah, how could i forget 'here's the name of the ritual/sacrifice you should perform when you cast this line', that's like the biggest one.