One side note: I’ve been surprised by how much the presentation differed between the copy I originally read (Brian Walker’s translation) and various “get I Ching readings online” sites that I’ve gone to over the years. It might be worth looking at a few different translations to find the one that fits you best.
It definitely makes sense to track “am I discovering anything new?”, as measured by “I changed my plans” or “I explored fruitfully” or “my emotional orientation towards X improved” (instead of merely changing). It seems worth comparing to other retrospective / prospective analyses you might try; in the same way that one diet should be compared against other diets (not just on grounds of nutrition, but also enjoyment and convenience and so on).
I also attempted to track “how much of a stretch was the scenario/perspective/etc.?”, where sometimes it would be right-on and other times I could kind of see it and other times my sense was “nope, that’s just not resonating at all.” If something is resonating too much, either you have a run of luck that’s unseasonably long or you’re getting prompts that aren’t specific enough to be wrong. If you’re trying to train the skill of discernment, you need both to notice when things are right and wrong, and thinking that it’s right is worthless unless sometimes you also think it’s wrong.
I heard an idea on the Rationally Speaking podcast today of “befriending a straw man.” The idea is that rather than putting forth the most charitable interpretation of a poorly articulated thought, or just strawmanning it, you take the poorly articulated idea seriously exactly as stated and see if you can find merit in it that you’d otherwise not have discovered. This seems valuable. I think the idea here is to get out of your mental ruts, and to do that you might need to be exposed to ideas that don’t make obvious sense and really try to treat them as fact.
This “befriend the straw man” idea would imply that it’s most important to consider the aspects of the divination that make the least sense or seem obviously wrong. By contrast, a YouTube video I watched of an old lady giving lessons on constructing hexagrams said to ignore those bits.
So in the end, we’re sort of asking what we think the function of the divination is, and then determining how to interpret it based on that.
One side note: I’ve been surprised by how much the presentation differed between the copy I originally read (Brian Walker’s translation) and various “get I Ching readings online” sites that I’ve gone to over the years. It might be worth looking at a few different translations to find the one that fits you best.
It definitely makes sense to track “am I discovering anything new?”, as measured by “I changed my plans” or “I explored fruitfully” or “my emotional orientation towards X improved” (instead of merely changing). It seems worth comparing to other retrospective / prospective analyses you might try; in the same way that one diet should be compared against other diets (not just on grounds of nutrition, but also enjoyment and convenience and so on).
I also attempted to track “how much of a stretch was the scenario/perspective/etc.?”, where sometimes it would be right-on and other times I could kind of see it and other times my sense was “nope, that’s just not resonating at all.” If something is resonating too much, either you have a run of luck that’s unseasonably long or you’re getting prompts that aren’t specific enough to be wrong. If you’re trying to train the skill of discernment, you need both to notice when things are right and wrong, and thinking that it’s right is worthless unless sometimes you also think it’s wrong.
I heard an idea on the Rationally Speaking podcast today of “befriending a straw man.” The idea is that rather than putting forth the most charitable interpretation of a poorly articulated thought, or just strawmanning it, you take the poorly articulated idea seriously exactly as stated and see if you can find merit in it that you’d otherwise not have discovered. This seems valuable. I think the idea here is to get out of your mental ruts, and to do that you might need to be exposed to ideas that don’t make obvious sense and really try to treat them as fact.
This “befriend the straw man” idea would imply that it’s most important to consider the aspects of the divination that make the least sense or seem obviously wrong. By contrast, a YouTube video I watched of an old lady giving lessons on constructing hexagrams said to ignore those bits.
So in the end, we’re sort of asking what we think the function of the divination is, and then determining how to interpret it based on that.