Oracle For the Week of 10.4.21
The I Ching is a book of Chinese wisdom, the accumulated experience of over 2,500 years of diviners and sages, and beyond that of unimaginably ancient oral traditions; it’s a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state. The book of divination is based on eight symbolic trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams.
The oracles have been offering people help and wise, genial guidance for generations. It will tell you what challenges and opportunities you are likely to face if you take a particular path, and how you can negotiate the obstacles you meet. This is the opposite of 'fortune telling'. Being told what will happen, as if your own choices had nothing to do with the outcome, is deeply disempowering. The I Ching tells seekers what effects their choices will have, and helps them to develop strategies to achieve their goals.
One needs to apply wisdom received in this post to upcoming events as they unfold during the coming week. The developing oracles will be posted for your convenience every week on Sunday evening.
Huan
Dispersion
(Dissolution)
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Wind blowing over water disperses it, dissolving it into foam and mist. This suggests that when a man’s vital energy is dammed up within him, gentleness serves to break up and dissolve the blockage.
THE JUDGMENT
DISPERSION. Success.
The king approaches his temple.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.
The subject here is the dispersing and dissolving of divisive egotism. DISPERSION shows the way, so to speak, that leads to gathering together.
Religious forces are needed to overcome the egotism that divides men. The common celebrations of the great sacrificial feasts and sacred rites, which gave expression simultaneously to the interrelation and social articulation of family and state, was the means employed by the great rulers to unite men. The sacred music and the splendor of the ceremonies aroused a strong tie of emotion that was shared by all hearts in unison, and that awakened a consciousness of the common origins of all creatures. In this way disunity was overcome and rigidity dissolved. A further means to the same end is co-operation in great undertakings that set a high goal for the will of the people; in the common concentration of this goal, all barriers dissolve, just as, when a boat is crossing a great stream, all hands must unite in a joint task.
But only a man who is himself free of all selfish ulterior considerations, and who perseveres in justice and steadfastness is capable of so dissolving the hardness of egotism.
THE IMAGE
The wind drives over the water:
The image of DISPERSION.
Thus the kings of old sacrificed to the Lord
And built temples.
In the autumn and winter, the water begins to freeze into ice. When the warm breezes of spring come, the rigidity is dissolved, and the elements that have been dispersed into ice floes are reunited. It is the same with the minds of the people. Through hardness and selfishness the heart grows rigid, and this rigidity leads to separation from all others. Egotism and cupidity separate men. Therefore the hearts of men must be seized by a devout emotion. They must be shaken by a religious awe in face of eternity — stirred by an intuition of the One Creator of all living beings, and united through feeling of fellowship experienced in the ritual of divine worship.
THE LINES
▢ Nine at the second place means:
At the dissolution
He hurries to that which supports him.
Remorse disappears.
When an individual discovers within himself the beginnings of alienation from others, of misanthropy and ill humor, he must set about dissolving these obstructions. He must rouse himself inwardly, hasten to that which supports him. Such support is never found in hatred, and always in a moderate and just judgment of men, linked in good will. If he regains this unobstructed outlook on humanity, but at the same time all saturnine ill humor is dissolved, all occasion for remorse disappears.
▢ The constituting ruler is that line which gives the hexagram its characteristic meaning, regardless of whether or not the line indicates ability and goodness of character. The idea that this line is resolutely to be cast out is the constituting factor of the hexagram.