Starting the I Ching

My first deep dive into spirituality came fourteen years ago or so when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching in a bookstore. This was a balm for the injuries sustained in my abusive, fundamentalist upbringing, and I spent the next few years studying Taoism as deeply as I could. For some reason, even though I read quite a bit, I never came around to studying the I Ching—I just wasn't ready for it, I guess, since it took most of a decade for me to open up enough to take up the tarot (which didn't work out very well) and geomancy (which did).

The I Ching has just sorta been sitting there in the background, quietly waiting for me. My family is presently in the middle of moving to Colorado, and my copy of the I Ching is stuffed away in a box somewhere, so I figured it wasn't the time to try taking up anything new... but I suppose there's something in the air, here, since when we visited here last autumn, I was led to a Taoist Feng Shui book; and just yesterday a copy of The Fortune Teller's I Ching jumped out at me at the local library's annual book sale. I took this as a hint that I should go ahead and play with it: not really for anything serious, since I can use geomancy for important questions, but more as an avenue for exploring Taoism more deeply once again.

So I thought I'd start putting the oracle through it's paces by asking the obvious question: "How can I expect my study of the I Ching to proceed?"

䷬

45: To Collect. Success. The king approaches the temple. It is good to see the great man. There will be success. It is good to behave properly. The use of large offerings brings good fortune. To move forward in any direction will also bring good fortune.

Top six moves. He sighs and weeps floods of tears. There will be no mistakes.

I am disciplined, I am committed to the work, and the path before me is easy. I will have success, but what comes easily doesn't last.

Do you know the story of the man who lost his horse? It's an old and famous parable from the Huainanzi, written a bit over two millennia ago. It's about a farmer who has various things happen to him, and the apparently good things turn out to be bad, and the apparently bad things turn out to be good. He simply does his best in the moment, and is successful in a way, since he never suffers any harm... but, on the other hand, neither does he see any material benefit from the "good" things that happen. His true success is the perspective he has to see through the illusion of each occurrence. This reading feels a bit like that to me: what success is to be found is abstract, rather than concrete. Studying geomancy required a lot of effort, and granted rewards commensurate with that effort; but since I've already put in all that work, studying the I Ching will go much easier but not really move the needle in my life, since I already have the tools I need.

Still, though, it's fun. Why not play a game with my angel?