Divination

How to Approach the Oracle

Every path leads to and from the Source. There is no right or wrong way to encounter the divine. But certain methods allow insight to arise more readily. Mindsets and settings carefully prepared and arranged can clear the skies, peel our eyes, and prime our hearts to absorb the truth of the matter in this moment.

As a relative novice with a sporadic practice involving the Yìjīng and the Tarot de Marseilles, I am not here as a teacher, but as one who experiences profound revelations when I open my heart to the big questions in the presence of these ancient systems of soothsaying. I am making Nameless to share my joy and enthusiasm for this very old book, and hopefully to usher you toward that softly echoing well of being yawning out of the void of all possibilities housed at heart center.

With a cursory search we can turn up manifold sages and mystics who hold (or claim) expertise in this timeless realm of interface with the divine. If it be authority ye seek, authority ye will find, and not within ye shall it be. If I may offer a bit of unsolicited advice regarding solicitation, we must, when navigating the sublime, beware the hard sell, the up-sell, and really the sell altogether. The answers we seek cannot be bought or sold, or taught or stolen. But when we find a good teacher, we also often find that it doesn't matter what they teach us.

Defining the Yìjīng

Resources for Understanding

If you would like to dive deeper into the history and (potential) meaning of the Yìjīng, I can offer little outside of recommending you to the resources that have enriched my journey to the oracle. In no particular order:

• Hilary Barrett's I Ching with Clarity

  Hilary Barrett presents a wealth of knowledge and guidance about and around the Yìjīng, and offers us a delightful translation and interpretation for the new millennium, free of the trappings of androcracy, careful to treat power as responsibility rather than as dominance, and ready to reveal the light as our eyes adjust to the shining brilliance of the oracle.

  Early in their wonderful introduction course to the Yìjīng, we learn the meaning of the book's title:

  易

  Yì

  Change

  經

  Jīng

  Classic Book

  Jing, "classic book", is the same word as in Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching), the Book of the Way and its Power. It literally means the warp threads on the loom. The oracle's given name is simply Yi: Change.

  Hilary's book I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future is a fantastic resource for those of us who look to the oracle for clarity and sense.

• Russell Cottrell's Virtual Yarrow Stalks

  Russell has explored the I Ching from many perspectives, and offers us documentation and often interactive experiences mapping those explorations. As I began to research the probability engine for Nameless, I discovered (thanks to Russell who hosts the paper among a wealth of resources) Stuart M. Anderson's attempt at "Bringing the Yarrow and Coin Methods into Agreement", which fuels the lion's share of the probability engine here in Nameless. Russell offers us a wide array of I Ching explorations and perspectives, like Virtual Yarrow Stalks, Fractal I Ching maps, and the Takashima Ekidan translation.

• Deepware Changes

  The most in-depth and full-featured digital experience of the I Ching I have found comes to us as an Android app called Deepware Changes. With this app, one may resolve a hexagram by taps, or simulated coins, or a painstaking digitization of the meditative but somewhat laborious yarrow stalks method. Interestingly you won't be guided to offer a question to the oracle, or to hold the question as you tap or flip or swipe. The authors also attempt to frost and layer the hexagrams with semantic characterizations of body, mind, and spirit for each, the significance of which remains opaque to me. Luckily a bewildered but curious student will also find links to several more web-based resources and various translations and interpretations, including…

• Paul O'Brien's Visionary I Ching

  A wisdom tradition that already spans three thousand years is not particularly fertile soil for superlative contribution. Certain among us like Hilary Barrett and Paul O'Brien undertake a complete recodification of the sourcework. These efforts span decades, lifetimes. Paul's ouevre stands apart with Hilary's as a non-patriarchal renewal of this ancient spirit of clarity and insight.

Devsigning Nameless

A New Take on a Timeless Classic

Originally conceived in a fever dream deep in a frozen pit of winter, Nameless seeks to make the Yìjīng (the Classic of Changes known in much of the West as the I Ching) more accessible and understandable to those who might otherwise approach this resource only to ricochet off of its castle wall of a learning curve.

The initial vision came all at once as I was leafing through the Wilhelm-Baynes translation/interpretation of the Yìjīng:The I Ching or the Book of Changes. My favorite Tarot de Marseilles deck sat on the desk beside me: 78 cards in a timeless cycle of birth, becoming, decay, and death. And here in the Yìjīng, I found sixty-four hexagrams describing the full set of Changes we, the nameless, may experience.

Sixty-four, as we know, is the square of eight. Which got me wondering how the Yìjīng might look in an octal base8 number system. What if eight were 10, so to speak?

Examining the hexagrams I also noticed that one can easily transpose them into binary numbers, taking an active or yang line as one, and a receptive or yin line as zero. I began to assemble a small database.

For each hexagram I figured its corresponding binary number, then shifted it into octal. Then I plotted the hexagrams in an eight-by-eight grid following their octal sequence. This is the orientiation in which you first encounter the tiles here in Nameless.

Naming (or not) Nameless

Consult the Yìjīng regularly for any length of time and you may start to conceive of the world as composed of its nameless characters experiencing this extraordinarily finite set of Changes or moments in an infinite manifold of nested, fractal, spatiotemporal, and up-to-ten-dimensional networks. Among the facets of this odd but expansive perspective, I found myself called to seize upon and highlight the profound anonymity of the stories in the Yìjīng. These are barely fables. There be dragons, but seldom a tortoise or a hare.

Consulting even the more modern scholarly English interpretations, one will encounter a deeply androcratic bias: the "superior man" makes no less than 73 appearances among the translations around the 64 hexagrams in the ubiquitous and often revered Wilhelm-Baynes version. Given the profound focus placed upon balance between mutually defining opposites throughout the Classic of Changes, I doubt that its authors and early architects intended to portray such a stark power imbalance among genders or along any spectrum. Students of the Yìjīng, along with Hermetics, Taoists, Yogis, and a multitude of mystics, are starkly aware that the pendulum swings to any and every extreme then away to its opposite, sweeping through the shades between.

So when it came time to crystallize the spirit of this fresh take on a three thousand year old book, I recognized the moment, then let it go. Later in the shower, I realized that my app was still nameless. And suddenly I realized it has always been Nameless, just like those we meet in the Changes, just like us.