Lifelong I Ching Readings

By Allen Young

All the troubles of the world—especially spiritual troubles such as impatience, hopelessness, depression, and anger—have roots in the human failure to communicate with the soul. Lifelong I Ching Readings is a lifelong workbook that makes apparent how you can receive answers to personal questions from the unseen guest that is always w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643454443

Book preview

Acknowledgments

The seeds of this work were planted in the summer of 1978, when I was introduced to the I Ching by Father Robert Ochs at the Jesuit seminary in Berkeley. Although I had consulted the I Ching before then, I had not taken it seriously. By the time I took John Blofeld’s packed workshop on the I Ching at the UC Berkeley extension a few years later, I was already hooked on the oracle.

My one year of study with the Berkeley Psychic Institute (BPI) created the opening for me to expand my interest in the soul. Even though people come to their interest in spiritual growth in different ways, the process begins with getting in touch with one’s feelings and growth as you expand your multisensory awareness. In this regard, I am grateful for learning how to do psychic readings for myself and countless others from BPI.

In addition to learning to expand my intuition with the I Ching and through psychic development study and practice, I want to thank Strephon Kaplan Williams for leading the numerous dream groups I attended, for teaching me how to interpret dreams, and about the psychology of C. G. Jung in the intensive yearlong training with his Jungian-Senoi Institute in Berkeley. This study in the realm of depth psychology added another layer to my multisensory awareness.

I am grateful for the many enlightened teachers who shared their wisdom with me over the past thirty years. Of the many other teachers from the West, I’m most thankful for the wisdom imparted by authors of the Bible, Howard Thurman, Ernest Holmes, Joel Goldsmith, and Emanuel Swedenborg. My most profound teachers from the East include authors of the I Ching as a book of wisdom, Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, and Paramahansa Yogananda. In addition, I want to thank my most recent teachers Amit Goswami, Stephan Hoeller, Robert Frager, and Alan Wallace for their specialized knowledge in helping to raise my consciousness in the areas of science and spirituality, Gnosticism, spiritual psychology, and Buddhism through the Holmes Institute Conscious Studies program.

When it comes to bridging the various disciplines or taking sides with one over the other, I recall an answer to a question put to the Dalai Lama by one of my teachers of Buddhism, Alan Wallace. When asked, Why don’t you recruit non-Buddhist to Buddhism in your travels across the country? His response was that since Buddhism had much to offer all people and all religions right where they are, there’s no need for anyone to change religions. He added that Buddhist ideas are universal and can be beneficial to all, regardless of religion.

Finally, I want to thank the three thousand clients and students who allowed me to express my soul’s potential through my nationwide intuitive counseling practice and classes.

Introduction

All the troubles of the world, especially spiritual troubles such as impatience, hopelessness, depression, and anger, have rooted in the failure to communicate with the soul. If you are ready to step beyond getting what you know and want as a personality you can learn to align yourself with the soul’s way of thinking. Receiving guidance from the soul is difficult without having multisensory perceptions and awareness. In the pages that follow, this book makes apparent how you can access the thoughts of the soul for guidance by answering your questions and for assurance that your intentions are aligned with the soul. You can expand your multisensory awareness by training yourself to hear, feel, see, and intuit the soul’s idea for your life or for any endeavor you want to understand.

Interest in the use of intuition is growing because more and more people are embracing their multisensory awareness and finding spiritual solutions for their lives and the world in general. The illustrations in this book expand the practice of receiving information and wisdom from the soul to answer your questions with deep clarity. Throughout this book, new ways to understand the I Ching, or Book of Changes in Chinese, and multisensory perceptions, which include imagery, are made apparent through answers to questions from numerous real situations.

The zodiac reveals the timing and circular movement of all nature and events in the life cycle, and the I Ching trigrams give symbolic names for these events. The zodiac perspective is integrated in this work to give you access to the deeper mind or voice of the soul in a common language: each system reveals the individual’s relationship to the laws of the universe. The zodiac circle of life is a form of intuition and thinking that can be read to understand the meaning of your stations in life, your changing interests over time, and the field of personal experience. In addition to the intuitive guidance questions in chapter 7, which address the personal, relationship, healing, and self-awareness areas, you will find insights and questions about your life cycles and stages of development, your soul and personality type, and the stages of development from thoughts and ideas to things in chapter 8.

Reason can analyze and organize, but only the imagination and intuition can create. The I Ching can help us to better control and direct our multisensory perceptions, imagination, deal with ambiguity and the absence of neat structure, accelerate the acquisition of knowledge and skills, sense the nonliteral implications of data, visualize the unseen and unprecedented, and create new worlds. With help from the I Ching, we can plumb the depths of the deeper mind and bring into consciousness soul information and wisdom from the sixty-four hexagram symbols.

Spirituality begins with being open to multisensory awareness and your own imagery. Imagery is what you see mentally and consists of what you hear in your inner ear, sensations, and emotions that you feel inside, and even what you smell and taste in your imagination. Some people imagine in vivid visual images with color, sound, smell, and sensation while others may experience sounds, songs, feelings, or thoughts in their heads without any pictures. It doesn’t matter how you receive information from the soul, just that you learn to recognize and work with your own imagery. The purpose is paying attention to what the soul is trying to tell you and not to get pretty pictures or straightforward hexagrams. In the broadest sense, your imagery may come through inner pictures, words, thoughts, sensations, feelings, or divination models that give voice to the soul such as the I Ching.

This book offers spiritual seekers a simplified yet reliable way to listen to the soul for enlightenment and guidance. The time-honored methods presented here are designed to provide you with direct access to specific guidance from the soul. Lifelong I Ching Readings helps learners discover and express the soul resident within them. When you follow the soul, you become an authentic person, live up to your greatest potential, and nurture all life. Without higher knowledge from the soul, greatness can never be achieved, nor peace of mind or happiness or wealth.

Throughout this book, the soul has the same meaning as the Creative Mind, deeper mind, the Divine, the heart, and the God or universe within. These names are interchangeable and refer to that spiritual part of a person that is immortal. It is the deeply felt emotional and moral part of us which is a distinct, yet united, entity that is separate from the body and ordinary personality. The wisdom resident in the soul is made available to conscious mind’s that seek it, and the soul may act upon orders from the conscious mind’s mortal ego and personality.

Throughout the history of humanity, methods of collecting intuitive information from the soul falls into three categories: direct communication through dreams and visions, simulation models for interpreting natural universal phenomena and human personality, and interpreting the symbolism of patterns and events observed in the outer physical world. Each approach has its advantage and may be better suited for your purpose than the others. Getting answers to questions that rely upon humanity’s oldest simulation model, or the I Ching, combine intuition with the intellect. These answers rely upon synchronicity—assigning inner meaning to random outer events, and they tend to have straightforward interpretations and meanings because they are limited to the hexagrams. They lessen the personal emotional perspective and the bias that comes with it in favor of objectivity. The I Ching is useful because it simplifies our view of universal phenomena and the language of the soul. As quoted from Richard Wilhelm at the beginning of chapter 5, New ways to Understand Hexagrams, the allegorical content of the hexagrams only presents the laws of the soul that pertain to various universal complexities and conditions.

All intuitive means of understanding communications from the soul start with the premise that the soul knows what is best and the solutions to your problems. With an open mind and attitude that the soul always knows more than you know, you can learn to receive its ideas for inspiration and answers to your questions. Multisensory perceptions happen while you are semiconscious, or awake, and open to listening to the soul. Multisensory perceptions and intuitions are often surprising forms of thinking without words. As long as you have the desire to receive and follow the soul, you have the right attitude for each avenue of hearing the soul’s wisdom. The answer to the question of how often you listen to the soul varies from person to person. A good rule of thumb is to do so as often as you want the soul’s guidance and answers to your questions.

The spiritual journey for every individual is a microcosm of the journey made by humanity in its history to become civilized. This journey has parallels to the historical developments of the Bible, Quran, Vedas, and the I Ching. Just as biblical authors worked with visioning long before creating the Bible, early creators of the I Ching used it as an oracle to listen to the unconscious long before religious philosophies were established. Without the use of intuitive information from dreams, visions, visitations, interpretations of natural phenomena as messages from the soul, and methods like the I Ching, there would be no communications from the soul or deeper mind, no sacred texts, and no religions. For instance, the I Ching was used as an oracle long before it developed into its use as a book of sacred wisdom as well. Over three thousand years of seasoned wisdom came about as many authors applied themselves to explaining the oracle and creating its spiritual and philosophical backbone. The development of the I Ching first as a book of divination used mainly by pagans, and then as a book of wisdom, gave birth to Taoism and Confucianism, which in turn supported the growth of Buddhism.

This book simplifies the I Ching by eliminating changing lines and giving modern interpretations of the ancient Chinese descriptions of the trigram and hexagram signs. My interpretations draw upon the relationships between the trigrams, hexagrams, C. G. Jung’s Personality Types, and helpful biblical wisdom.

Those unfamiliar with the I Ching will find it to be an excellent intuitive-thinking tool for getting wisdom from the soul. While I present examples of using the I Ching and other means of catching ideas from the soul in several chapters, let me present the I Ching here. An easy way to consult the I Ching is to ask your question, then flip or toss one coin six times, and record whether each random landing is heads (representing a Yang line _______) or tails (representing a Yin line ___ ___). You will get one of sixty-four patterns or hexagram symbols to answer your question. If, for example, you get three heads followed by three tails, you would look up the hexagram number for this pattern in the table titled Matrix of Trigrams and Hexagram Numbers at the end of chapter 6. The page and section before this table explains how to use it. In this instance, the first three lines represent heaven trigram, the second three lines represent the earth trigram, and the six lines together represent hexagram 11, titled Prospering.

For those who are ready for the assistance of technology, there are numerous online websites that allow you to consult the I Ching, and as of this writing, there are numerous iPhone apps, and even more for apps for consulting tarot cards, that allow you to consult the I Ching. This modern assistance speeds up the process of getting answers through the I Ching and can be an excellent method for making straightforward either-or decisions. As you speed up the rate of following the soul’s messages, you’ll speed up the rate of manifesting your authentic self. However, when it comes to questions of guidance and perspective, the speed of getting answers may also reduce the depth of meaning.

Manifestation is all about transforming ideas into forms on one hand and releasing forms to receive new ideas on the other hand. It is not limited to the activity of holding an idea in mind until put into physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual form. Manifestation also takes place when we release the old in order to make room for the new. While letting go is a form of life denial, it always becomes life-affirming. Many have found that a good day for the soul is a bad day for the ego. What you manifest and the meaning you give to your intuitive insights is what you say it is even though this meaning may change over time. For instance, receiving additional information or other possibilities may lead you to a new understanding. In addition, your understanding of the soul’s nature will always have an impact on how you interpret and manifest intuitive insights.

You should be skeptical of the things you desire. Before pursuing big things, you should ask the soul if it’s appropriate or beneficial to you. Before spending a lot of energy being attached to the things you want, it’s better to spend a little time asking the universe within for its opinion. Is it a workable idea to get what you want in the way you want it? If the answer is yes, you can bring it into manifestation with a high probability of goodness and success. If the answer is no, you can make the appropriate changes to align your intention with those of the soul. You may ask, What must I do or guidance I should follow to get what I want? Guidance from the soul always moves you toward manifesting unity and happiness more than personal success and separation, especially if that success harms others or adversely affects your character or peace of mind.

In pursuing the things you want, prayer and intuition are notable allies. Prayer and intuition function on a question-and-answer basis; they are like two sides of a coin. Prayer is often a question to the divine, and intuition is receiving an answer to your question. While most prayers are personal, a small number such as those requested by others and unsolicited prayers for others are not. Once prayers are spoken or formed in thought, they are received by the creative or unconscious mind and answered with a response that is both intuitive and objective. Though outer responses to prayer often take a long time, intuitive responses are instant for those ready to receive them. However, most people don’t look for intuitive answers and find it difficult to accept no and unclear answers.

Summary of Contents

This book is about how you can better communicate with that immortal part of yourself, which I refer to as the soul, deeper mind, and the God within. The pages that follow layout how the soul speaks to us in general and, specifically through the I Ching, how we can listen to the soul through our multisensory perceptions, and the benefits of doing both. As you learn to give up the need for approval from others, you can look to the soul for guidance on how to proceed. As you learn to pay attention to the soul, you’ll become more skeptical of the things you want.

This book is about modern interpretations of the sixty-four hexagrams. These interpretations expand the ancient Chinese meanings and allegories. They include a view of the eight trigrams from the perspective of the psychological types developed by C. G. Jung. They present polar opposite and inverse versions of the hexagrams to deepen your understanding of the natural origin and destination of each hexagram. In addition, the meaning of each hexagram is both supported and personified by a biblical message or principle.

Throughout this book, you will see examples of questions raised and answered by consulting the I Ching and by listening to intuition and imagery to catch the soul’s message. While these questions were asked to address the personal, relationship, and self-healing concerns for others, they can be used as written or revised and answered for your situation. The process of attempting to get answers to these questions can help you learn how to do the following: understand answers to questions from the soul in general, seek answers from the soul, and use and understand the I Ching as the soul’s voice.

The chapter before the modern interpretation of the sixty-four hexagrams introduces new directions to the I Ching based on the patterns of movement in circles that govern all nature. The new directions are connected to the eight trigrams in ways that give us a larger understanding of what the soul tells us about the trigram-related soul or personality types, the eight stages of life, and the eight-stage process of moving from thoughts and ideas to manifesting things. These new directions come about because the zodiac and the I Ching are impersonal intuitive models that allow you to listen to wisdom from the soul. We can make the connection between these models when we divide the zodiac into 45-degree segments and let them represent the eight trigrams. Like the twelve zodiac soul signs, the eight trigram segments also represent stages of development around the zodiac when they are linked to the earth’s rotations around the sun. Since they are tied to earth rotations around the sun, they represent continuous and recurrent changes that reflect eight universal soul types and eight stages of development within each eight-year cycle.

1

Relationship with the Soul

In the widest sense everything is a symbol

of that which constitutes its inner being.

—Thomas Troward

Strange though it may seem, one of the most productive avenues for growth is through the experience of letting go. Letting go is like dying and you can practice small deaths every day. How do you do that? Death is nothing more than withdrawing our consciousness from things. If you practice doing this a little every day, you can receive more consciousness. You can practice through meditation, the I Ching, or listening to your intuition as a start. In each case, you start with the premise that the soul knows more than you do, and if your mind is quiet and open, insights will come to offer you a better way. Every time you sleep at night, you experience a little death as well. Every morning, you awaken with a dream that offers wisdom to enlighten you about life. You can accept it, and in doing so, you experience another death. Anytime you say, Thy will be done, you’re opening yourself to a small death. The more you practice, the easier it becomes.

When you practice listening to the soul on an ongoing basis, you continuously reinforce a new way of being. The constant seeking and releasing your desire to do things your way is the key to the door of fulfillment. You must learn to draw on the soul’s wisdom to define yourself based on the feedback you receive from it rather than trying to fit yourself into ill-fitting, stereotyped roles. The world is in desperate need of people whose level of growth and faith in spirit is sufficient to enable them to learn to live with and serve others cooperatively and lovingly. Humanity will advance only through commitment and involvement of individuals in their own and others spiritual growth and development. This means the development of loving and caring relationships in which participants are as committed to the spiritual growth and happiness of others as to