I’ve become aware recently of an emotional pattern that makes people reluctant to try a reading with the I Ching. These are open-minded people, interested in spiritual growth and self-knowledge. So they don’t dismiss the idea of divination unthinkingly, as something that obviously couldn’t work. Nor do they avoid it because it’s forbidden by their religion. No – these people actually say they don’t want to have a reading done, as they’re afraid of what it might say.
What’s going on here? It’s not as if these people had become recluses or deliberately avoided hearing unwelcome insights. They might have embarked purposefully on a path of self-discovery. It seems there’s some specific fear around divination.
I’d welcome any insights you might have into this. Maybe you’ve tried to interest friends in the Yijing, and got a sense for people’s fears?
I asked Yi, “What lies behind the fear of divination?”
Yi says Hexagram 12, Obstruction, moving at line 4 to 20, Seeing.
‘Obstructing it, non-people.
No harvest in noble one’s constancy.
Great goes, small comes.’
So the initial challenge is one of obstruction, finding that being your best and ‘thinking bigger’ consistently lead to a dead end.
‘Heaven and earth do not interact. Obstruction.
The noble one uses energy sparingly to avoid resistance
He does not allow official honours and salary.’
Better to draw back and stop trying to get a favourable response; hitting your head against the wall harder only makes for a bigger headache.
Things are not flowing, and in particular there’s no flow of awareness or knowledge. While the translated texts simply imply living in circumstances that frustrate your natural strengths and virtue, the Chinese character for ‘no’, part of the name of the hexagram, appears to show a seedling uprooted before it can grow, or a bird flying away. (Looking at the oracle bone characters at the link, I wonder whether the ‘same’ character wasn’t written at different times with different images in mind.) It seems that when birds fly low and settle, they bring omens. If they fly away, then you are denied the omen: no messages are coming through. ‘Heaven and earth do not interact.’
All this, of course, is exactly the crisis that divination promises to resolve. Here’s how to reconnect, how to restore the flow of meaning. And in fact, looking at the reading as a whole, I think it describes exactly that. The immediate experience of Obstruction meets with Seeing.
‘Seeing. Washing hands, and not making sacrifice.
There is sincerity and confidence like a presence.â€
You may not be able to act positively on the situation – but you don’t need to do anything in order to See. Present blocks will be set in a bigger context; perhaps a spiritual presence can be felt here after all.
Obstructed, Seeing:
‘There is a mandate, not a mistake.
Work with clarity, fulfilment.’
The characters of this line lend it multiple layers of meaning. ‘Working with’ also means farmland, cultivating, and companions ‘of like kind’ (the ones beside you in the field, maybe?). ‘Clarity’ is the same word as the name of Hexagram 30, and one of its meanings is ‘oriole’. So we have a wonderful couple of characters that can be interpreted as anything from ‘those of like mind’ to ‘paired orioles’. And ‘fulfilment’ is satisfaction and also blessing, including the idea of an omen that has manifested itself in blessing.
Bringing all this together (with the help of experience and a few past readings on how to interpret the text), I think this line is about the moment when the omen bird does land. Put Obstruction in the context of Seeing, and you find there is a message for you. More than that, even, there is a mandate: something you are called on to do, bigger than you are. (Perhaps you suddenly feel like the guest in the king’s shining city, at 20.4, with the problems of your own hamlet forced into perspective.) You have clarity and insight; you have to accept the whole reality you’re given (the paired line is 11.3) and work with it.
…
I’m very much afraid that Yi has responded to my nice, detached ‘market research’-type question with a precise account of why I am afraid of divination. If I ask, I’ll get an answer – which I may or may not like – and then I’ll have to do some work. Ouch. There are things I’m reluctant to ask about for exactly that reason.
But does this answer also address the wider fear of divination – the reason for not having a reading at all, in case it says something bad?
