I Ching Life: Becoming Your Authentic Self

By Wei Wu

An insightful and empowering book that shows how to apply the unerring guidance of the I Ching to make decisions that are right for you, protect yourself from danger, and attain success in all areas of life.

Living in harmony with the ways of the Universe allows you to naturally express your authentic self. In this practical and insightful work, Wu Wei shows how you can live in harmony with the universal laws embodied in the I Ching so that your life will be filled with long-lasting good fortune and happiness.

Step by step, I Ching Life illustrates how to apply the profound and ancient wisdom of the I Ching to all areas of your life today--including business, relationships, health, wealth, children, work, recovery, and your personal goals--to enable you to achieve sublime success in all you do. You will discover how to flow with changing events so that anger, frustration, and despair disappear from your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 10, 2005
• ISBN: 9781483547114

Wei Wu

Wei Wu received his PhD in 2011 from the Department of Physics, Wuhan University, China. He then joined the group of Prof. Daiwen Pang at Wuhan University (2011) and Prof. V. A. L. Roy at City University of Hong Kong (2014) as a postdoctoral fellow. Now he is the Director of Laboratory of Printable Functional Nanomaterials and Printed Electronics, School of Printing and Packaging, Wuhan University. He has published over 90 papers, which have received over 2200 citations. He received the STAM Best Paper Award in 2017, Hong Kong Scholars Awards in 2016, and Advanced Materials Letters Award in 2013. He is also the editorial board member of four international journals, and his research interests include the synthesis and application of functional nanomaterials, printed electronics and flexible wearable electronics.

Book preview

i·ching life

BECOMING YOUR

AUTHENTIC SELF

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006930175

Copyright © 2006 The Prentiss Trust of June 30, 1998. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-0-943015-52-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-943015-69-9 (e-book)

For information, address:

Power Press

6428 Meadows Court

Malibu, California 90265

Telephone: [phone]

E-mail: [e-mail]

Website: www.power-press.com

Cover design: Roger Gefvert

Interior art by Wu Wei

The symbol on the title page is the Chinese word picture for change. It was painted with five quick slashes of Wu Wei’s ink brush.

For you, my companion,

who is traveling with me through

space and time, inside the consciousness

that is the Universe, on our way to a destination

yet to be known, just existing, just experiencing,

just being a part of It all. How glorious!

What an honor!

Contents

Preface

Author’s Apology to Women Readers

Author’s Apology to All Readers

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgments

A Brief History of the I Ching

CHAPTER ONE

On the Wings of Six Dragons

CHAPTER TWO

How the I Ching Works

CHAPTER THREE

The Joyful Journey

CHAPTER FOUR

In Harmony with the Universe

CHAPTER FIVE

The God Game

CHAPTER SIX

Cause and Effect

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fate

CHAPTER EIGHT

Relationships

CHAPTER NINE

Overcoming Fear

CHAPTER TEN

Time, Eternity, and You

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Children

CHAPTER TWELVE

Work

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gain and Loss

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Recovery

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Health

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Business

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Wealth

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Stillness

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Personal Goals

CHAPTER TWENTY

Words, Deeds, and Intent

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Death

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Superior Person

Index

Preface

The information in this book has been set forth with one goal: to enable you to enjoy a better, fuller, easier, more productive life, free from the pitfalls that may have earlier beset your path. It is a guide, showing you the way to be what the I Ching describes as a superior person and suggesting ways to use the I Ching to accomplish that goal and others you desire.

Why should you want to follow the life of a superior person? Because of the law of cause and effect, which states: Every action produces a result, and the result is in perfect accord with the action. Therefore, if you live the life of a superior person, meaning a person of worthy motives who always strives to be the best he can be, you will naturally achieve a life of peaceful harmony, having what you want and being who you want. Your path will be straight, the wind will be fair, the sun will shine upon you, and your progress will be as an eagle in full flight.

I have written a book called I Ching Wisdom: Guidance from the Book of Answers, which sets forth some of the volatile sayings from the I Ching. I use the word volatile because one the meanings of volatile is having the power to fly. These volatile sayings from the I Ching will give you the power to fly, will give you the power to break loose from that which has held you back, will empower you to reach lofty goals, will provide the means for you to soar to the heights of success, and will show you how to avoid the pitfalls that beset the path of the unenlightened.

In I Ching Wisdom, after each saying I have written a comment that expands the meaning of the saying to help readers grasp the wisdom contained within the saying. The sayings in I Ching Wisdom demonstrate the function of Universal laws, and because they elaborate certain basic concepts in I Ching Life, I have incorporated some of those sayings and comments into this book. This serves a twofold purpose: one, to further clarify the concepts in this book, and two, to further expand on the meanings of the sayings in I Ching Wisdom. You will see those sayings from the I Ching set off throughout this book.

The I Ching teaches:

Knowledge

is the key to freedom.

Knowledge comes in many forms. Knowing how to earn a living frees you from poverty. Knowing how to keep healthy frees you from sickness. Knowing how to entertain yourself frees you from boredom. And knowing the path of the superior person frees you from misfortune, failure, and suffering.

The knowledge that you will gain from living life according to I Ching precepts is knowledge that is coming to you from across the span of thousands of years. It is the knowledge that has been carried to you in a direct line from Fu Hsi, the great Chinese sage who created the I Ching. That knowledge has sustained your predecessors, sustained their very lives, and carried them to the greatest heights attainable in world affairs and personal life. Emperors and common folk alike who have possessed this knowledge have savored the best that life has to offer and have gone their ways fulfilled and happy, content as a puppy after drinking his fill of his mother’s warm, nourishing milk.

AUTHOR’S APOLOGY TO

WOMEN READERS

I sincerely apologize for using he, his, him when speaking generally. Using he/she throughout becomes cumbersome for the reader and disturbs the flow of thought. I chose to use the masculine form because it is what we are accustomed to seeing in print and because the goal is to make the reading easy.

AUTHOR’S APOLOGY TO

ALL READERS

I humbly apologize to you for my presumption that I know something that you do not and for my egotistical assumption that I know anything at all. All information comes from one source, the Universe, and since we are all part of it, its information belongs to us all and is available to each of us. On the small chance that I have spent more time seeking out information about the I Ching and ways to use it than you have and therefore may have received information which you may not have yet received, and because I want you to have as much information as possible about the I Ching, I risk this great presumption. Please overlook and forgive my immodesty. That I undertake this work at all is only because of my love for the great wisdom and my sincere desire to impart it to you.

Your humble and insignificant servant,

AUTHOR’S NOTES

The concept upon which this book is based is that the Universe is alive, conscious, and aware. By using the I Ching, we can communicate with the Universal Intelligence of which we are a part and which will guide us to better, fuller lives, filled with abundance and well-being. That we can control our destinies and that we can, by taking the appropriate action, enjoy a lifetime of great good fortune and supreme success are the basic assumptions upon which this book is written.

I strongly recommend the use of yarrow stalks in conjunction with I Ching divination. All other methods of divination using the I Ching are, at best, poor substitutes for the use of yarrow stalks, the original method. I have given complete instructions on how to use yarrow stalks in my books The I Ching: The Book of Answers and The I Ching Workbook, published by Power Press. Yarrow stalks are also available through the publisher (see copyright page or the products page at the end of the book for more information).

In this book, the word Universe is capitalized to acknowledge its greatness, its uniqueness, and its complete originality, but other words used to refer to the Universe, such as it, are not capitalized because that practice seems to detract from the flow of thought.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the inspired and dedicated publishing team who helped me shape and produce this work:

Nigel Yorwerth for his guiding hand and heart on all my books and for his unwavering efforts in promoting my work, helping me to get excellent distribution, and presenting my work to foreign publishers.

Patricia Spadaro for her enlightened editing and suggestions that helped me express the concepts in this work more clearly and accurately, allowing the I Ching wisdom to shine more brightly.

Roger Gefvert for his beautiful cover designs for all the books in my I Ching series, which reflect so well the timeless quality of the I Ching itself.

Kathy Lange and Martha Lonner for their patience and skill in layout and production, and Janet Chaikin for her expert proofing and editorial work.

A Brief History

of the I Ching

Thousands of years ago, before the dawn of written history, legend has it that there lived a great Chinese sage known as Fu Hsi (pronounced foo shee). He is credited with leading the Chinese people from the age of hunting and fishing into the age of agriculture. As you can imagine, that was a long, long time ago—six thousand years at the earliest, and, more likely, ten thousand.

A man of enormous intellect whose psychic channels were obviously open, Fu Hsi drew forth from the Universe, over a period of time, a perfect mathematical model of itself, complete with all its conditions and stages of change—the sixty-four six-line symbols that the Chinese call the kua and that make up the I Ching. The complete story of how I believe Fu Hsi formulated his model can be found in my book A Tale of the I Ching. That book will open the heart of the I Ching to you.

To form the sixty-four kua, Fu Hsi, it is said, surveyed the vast diversities and movements under Heaven, saw the ways that the movements met and became interrelated, and saw how their courses were governed by eternal laws. He thought through the order of the outer world to its end and explored his own nature to its deepest core. He perceived the beginning of all things—things that lay unmoving in the beyond in the form of ideas, concepts, and forms that had yet to manifest themselves. He put himself in accord with those ideas, concepts, and forms and, in so doing, arrived at an understanding of fate.

It is also quite possible that he simply received that information in the form of a communication from the Universe as a waking dream, a sleeping dream, or a vision in meditation or that he received it in a moment of clarity while walking through the forest, as we ourselves do when we perceive a new idea. Or it could be, as one legend tells, that Fu Hsi saw a giant turtle climbing out of the Yellow River with the markings of the I Ching on its back, or, as another legend tells, that he saw a great horse with the I Ching markings on its coat. When the Universe wants to communicate with us, it uses whatever means are at hand.

Writing did not exist at the time of Fu Hsi, so his teachings were handed down in the oral tradition, with one generation faithfully teaching another for thousands of years. It was the most valuable information on the planet, and, as such, it was treasured and passed on. When writing came to China five thousand years ago, about the year 3000 BC, the I Ching readings were the first information to be recorded. During the next two thousand years, the I Ching and its teachings flourished.

In the twelfth century BC, the tyrant Chou Shin ruled. He was to be the last emperor of the Yin Dynasty. He was a cruel and heartless man who tortured people to please his equally cruel and sadistic concubine. So cruel was