EVEN MORE FUN WITH THE I.CHING
First of all, I want to make it perfectly clear that, while I have no fear of being burned as a witch for consulting the Oracle, I don’t want to alienate my Christian Substack friends.
It has been said (and not without cause) that the readings can be interpreted in many ways. It’s not as if I could ask who is responsible for protecting Hunter Biden and his father from responsibility for their traitorous deeds. It doesn’t work that way.
To bore my regular readers and to inform my new readers, when the three coins are tossed six times, they create two trigrams. Balanced upon the first (which states the status quo, today) is the second trigram and that tells us what the future holds.
Asking the I CHING who started the fires in California was anything but a normal question; but I figured it would be interesting. Would it say, as Joe Biden suggested, that the cause was downed power lines? Would it say, as the Fire Chief thought, that the Santa Anna Winds started the fires? I certainly didn’t expect it to say anything like that.
Here’s what it did say. The first trigram was #45 (Bringing Together) and there were two changing lines. According to Master Huang’s translation, the sequence of the trigrams leads to “After encountering, things begin to gather together. Thus, after encountering, Bringing Together Follows”.
While any further discussion could only cause confusion (the fact being that the lines changing from yin to yang and vice versa are the most important), let me quote from page 362 of Huang’s translation: THIRD SIX (i.e. line)
Bringing together: sighs
Nothing is favorable.
In closing,
We must ask ourselves who would it be that might encounter allies that would work together to create chaos, death, and billions of dollars of loss to the USA?
The second trigram is #39 (Hardship). Whether that applies to those who started the fires or their victims is currently still a mystery.
My view of the I-CHING is that it operates similarly to a Rorschach test. Its value comes from forcing the individual to face a conclusion and then ponder whether he/she can abide by its implications. This is one of the valid approaches in psychiatry when dealing with anxiety.
I was curious about your interest in the I Ching and read a little about it. It was mentioned in connection with the Tao Te Ching - though they are different in content and purpose..
I have read the Tao Te Ching two or three times over many years, each time comparing and contrasting its contents with the Bible.
I have tried a couple of times to read nothing but the Bible and Christian literature, but that never lasted long. Some exposure to the ideas and history of the world at large is - for me at any rate - an important part of my Christian life, and differing ideas, even though unbiblical, can offer interesting food for thought.
Thus with the Tao Te Ching. Many things in it are wrong from a biblical point of view, but some ideas are suitable for a Christian - not being too interested in fame, power, or money for example.
I also like the Tao's emphasis on the mysterious and unknown nature of God. Even though in Christianity we have a much fuller revelation, we allow our theology and our knowledge to obscure the fact that there is still an unknowable dimension to God, and a mystery to the divine that is sometimes lost in our commentaries and bible memorization (and having memorized many parts of the Bible does not necessarily equal knowledge of God).
About the I Ching, I know little, except that it asserts a connectedness between all parts of the universe, and that because of this connectedness certain events can reveal other events, or something like that. Hence the significance of divination.
Except, all events are controlled directly or indirectly by God, who either causes things to happen, or allows things to happen when he could prevent it. In this case, the entire I Ching is nothing but a profound misunderstanding about the nature of reality. And, by your own account, it is also very ambiguous.
This does not mean I suggest you read nothing but the Bible and Christian literature. If anyone wants to study Taoism, Buddhism, Marxism, Freudianism, empiricism, Platonism, whatever, it does not hurt to look into different things and to try and see where and how they are right or in what ways they are wrong - but the ultimate reality is found in God and nowhere else.
This does not mean I advocate joining a church and going every Sunday. Many churches are nothing but social clubs, shallow, trivial and boring. And even those that make more of an effort are deeply influenced by American culture. But I do think there are deeper avenues into the unseen spiritual reality behind the physical world than the I Ching or any of the Oriental religions and philosophies - which is also true of many Western philosophies and religious varieties.
Have you read the Tao Te Ching? You might find it has more of real life than any divination practice.
I also read the Analects of Confucius. Much of it seemed uninteresting, even obvious, but here and there were some really remarkable insights. If I still had my copy of it I would be glad to give a few select quotes, but haven't been able to accumulate a library, moving as often as I did.
Also, some general overviews of the history of Western philosophy written on an introductory level for laymen like ourselves, from the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece up the latest European anti-philosophies, might be interesting.