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How does the I Ching Work?

  
 
eeoam
16:53 / 16.02.04
By this I mean not 'How do you use it' but why does it work? This is a question that can and indeed should be answered from a number of different perspectives - let us start with the viewpoint of empirical science. What, if anything, in empirical science can contribute to understanding of the operation of the I Ching?
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
17:24 / 16.02.04
Hmmm. As I see it, it is a collection of essays on morality and the taoist Way. It contains information on how to live your life according to the Way of the Universe, and how to overcome the tribulations of life in a manner that does not create friction with the Universe, but in harmony and synchronisation with it.

The casting of the sticks/coins/whatever are a contemporaneous event with everything else that occurs in the Universe at the moment the casting is made, and thus influences and is influenced by everything else in the Universe at that moment. The framing of the question in your mind also influences and is influenced by everything else in the Universe at that moment. The question and the pattern of chance (collapsing quantum probability wave, if you prefer) are thus linked, and the resulting application of the moral and flowing guidance of the Taoist principles are applied, by you, to the question you originally framed. You make the meaning and links yourself.

The fact that it is so peculiarly uncanny could be attributed to the effort involved on your own part in applying the poetry to your predicament, but that seems a bit of a cop out. It is spookily accurate in the texts it throws up in my experience.

Strange also that the more I tend to use it, the less I tend to use it, if you know what i mean.
 
 
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18:04 / 16.02.04
I don't know hardly anything about the I-Ching myself but i am interested in this and i want to use it at some stage in the future. I was looking at a thread about Mckenna the other day in the laboratory forum i think, and it gave a link to a thread about his Time Wave Zero program. After i looked at the link i found out that he'd also worked with the I-Ching and he said something about it's connections to the unconscious. I couldn't find the page again after looking but i found these :

"In part I of "Timewave Zero" Terence McKenna initiated the reader into his theory of nature's upcoming quantum jump out of history. Looking at the I Ching from a quantum physics perspective, Terence and his brother Dennis discovered a wave pattern in the ordering of the Tarot's trigrams and hexagrams that suggested time could be mapped. One of the oldest "structured abstractions" known, the I Ching has been found scratched on the 6,000 year-old shoulder bone of a sheep. Since the I Ching is particularly concerned with the dynamic relationships and transformations that archetypes undergo, McKenna intuited that the I Ching must also be deeply involved with the nature of time as the necessary condition for the manifestation of archetypes as categories of experience."

link


and from another site by someone else :


"The I Ching is not designed to provide easy, definitive answers. Hexagrams, like Tarot cards, embody many layers of meaning, and so to reap the oracle’s full benefit requires intuitive thought on the part of the seeker/reader. The revelations are drawn from the omniscient unconscious mind, and the I Ching, like most methods of divination, is merely a tool to facilitate our access to it."

link

Sorry i didn't have time to have a good look but i think it's a lot to do with the unconscious and maybe the mindset that the person reading the hexagrams has at the time of reading them, and i tried to find corresponding stuff on the net for this idea. I've heard a lot about the accuracy that readings can have though and i guess that the way they work would be very similar to the way that the Tarot works.

Sorry i can't be of more help, i've been on this PC for 14 hours + now, mostly trying to learn about hacking and my brains turning to mush.......if i find anything better i'll post back.
 
  
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