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How To Use The I Ching To Divine Your Future
October 21, 2008
An old yellow book I’d discovered in a dark, dusty corner of a nameless bookstore here in St. Louis sat on the bookshelf in my bedroom – undisturbed – for years.
It was called “The I Ching” – Chinese for “The Book of Changes.” My friend Jason also nabbed him a copy at the same time I got mine.
The book was thick. It looked like a daunting read about a subject of questionable value, and since we always had something else “better” to read or a business project to work on, neither of us really paid it much attention.
Until one night, we got bored. And finally we cracked the thing open to see what it was all about.
The I Ching is an ancient Chinese divination system of predicting how your current situation in life will change, or in other words, a way to predict your own future without needing any special powers, spells, potions, or whatever.
Despite all the junk information out there on the internet (especially the confusing Wikipedia article) it’s all really very simple and easy to do in your own bedroom.
Here’s how it works:
Your first step is to ask a question of the text about your life. Speak it and write it down.
The I Ching is based on a series of 6 binary (yes/no, true/false) decisions that are often decided by tossing 3 coins to the ground in the same way a guy at the craps table in Vegas would roll dice. When I do it, I like to use 3 quarters, but really any coin will do.
Each one of these coin tosses will produce either a positive (yes/true/yang) or negative (no/false/yin) result. If the coins are mostly tails, you draw a straight line. If they are mostly heads, you draw a broken line. Continue tossing the coins and drawing one line on top of the other until you have 6 lines.
Something like this:
Six lines stacked on top of each other (from bottom to top) is called a hexagram… which, by the way, has absolutely no relation to geometry’s hexaGON (as I was first confused about.)
In the I Ching, there are 64 possible combinations of doing this, so hence, 64 different possible fortunes. This is what reading the actual I Ching book will tell you; it’s to serve more as a look-up guide book of REFERENCE for these hexagrams than it is some tome you sit down and read from cover to cover.
So after you have your hexagram, the next step is to look it up in the book so you can read its meaning. The meaning derived from the hexagram is supposed to give you guidance on the future.
Easy enough… but does it really work?
This part is a little weird.
In one round when I asked about my financial life and the success of an upcoming business project, the I Ching called me “a prince trapped in a golden carriage”, leg broken and bloodied with difficulty moving, storm clouds gathering, and would be forced to make a very difficult personal decision (tasting some hell in the process) before real success would finally be attained.
Now all that might sound kinda funny and cryptic to you… but to a guy who (at that time) had money, but felt trapped by it, saw tons of possibilities but completely unable to make a definite decision on ONE of them, and was embroiled in multiple personal conflicts existing nowhere but in my own mind… well, let’s just say it hit a little too close to home.
Jason asked a similar question, to which the I Ching predicted success, happiness, daisys, and sugarplum fairies. Ok, maybe not the daisys and fairies, but I remember it as a pretty rosy outlook – especially when compared to my bittersweet raincloud of success.
Ain’t divination grand?
Our other tests were less notable, mostly because we weren’t quite sure what to ask next or how we should ask it. The business and financial questions were (at the time) the most pressing on our minds so we found little motivation to explore other areas.
Now that I know more about it, and my situation is changing, I’ll be experimenting more very soon.
When you get right down to it, all subjects of personal human interest boil down to 3 things: Money/Career (e.g. what you “do” in life and how well you do it), Health (how you feel), and Relationships (who you align yourself with and who you make enemies with). So any question you ask of the I Ching will probably have to do with one of those in some capacity.
As with most subjects, the I Ching can get more complex than what I’ve described here. It’s possible for the changes to be graphed and overlayed across a timeline of world history. When you do this, the I Ching has predicted many major world events, and even calls into play the infamous 2012 Mayan Calendar date many suppose to either be the end of an era (and beginning of a new one) in human history, the shifting of Earth’s magnetic poles, or… total doomsday and the end of life as we know it.
Maybe a combination of all three.
No one’s really sure about that one yet 
– though I have some ideas from my own research.
As for the I Ching itself… with the limited experiments Jason and I have done together, we can certainly say the whole subject warrants further exploration.
Go ahead, try it out with questions about your own life and let me know how it goes.
Here are some good resources to help:
YouTube video on The I Ching and the Mayan Calendar
Unhelpful, poorly done Wikipedia article on The I Ching (good for looking up the hexagrams though)
I Ching Hexagram Readings (in case you’d rather not buy the book… and I don’t blame you if you don’t)
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Tags: 2012, book of changes, chinese divination, classic of changes, divining the future, doomsday, fortune telling, hexagrams, i ching, mayan calendar, mayan cosmogenesis, mayan new year, predicting the future, trigrams, yang, yin, yin yangTopics: Strange & Unknown | 1 Comment »
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