INTERVIEW: The Oracle works and it’s always a mystery.

Photo: Hilary Barrett, founder of  the I Ching with Clarity online community, in Dorset, England

     By Bill Tarrant     

     For the first time in a half-century of consulting the I Ching, I had a professional interpret the hexagram I received. Over the decades, I’ve asked the oracle about work, romantic entanglements, current events, even about my softball teams. This query was seeking guidance about a dating prospect.

     I signed up for a free reading from Hilary Barrett, the founder of Clarity, one of the leading I Ching websites/communities in the Western World, to interpret the hexagram. It was #24, “The Turning Point”: I’m at the winter solstice but utter darkness is about to be vanquished by the first ray of light peeking through, the Oracle says.         However….hmmm. There’s a changing (moving) line at the top of the hexagram, which indicates my status will morph into a new hexagram, 27, This one called “The Corners of the Mouth” or "Nourishment." Richard Wilhelm in his acclaimed translation said it means “…the right people should be taken care of, and we should attend to our own nourishment in the right way”.

     “I’ve got a mostly positive takeaway,” I told Hilary. “The light’s coming back. Nourishing rain is gonna fall.”

     “I don’t know,” she replied. “That moving line at the top of 24 doesn’t look good. ‘Misfortune from within and without’, ‘one will in the end suffer a great defeat’”, she said, quoting the moving line from The Book of Changes.

     “To be honest, this sounds nothing short of disastrous.” She sounded almost apologetic.

     “But it yields a new hexagram,” I pleaded. The nourishing rains! “Perseverance is auspicious!”, it says.

     I had to admit. I’d never fully understood how to interpret a moving line.

     “It takes precedence,” Hilary said.” Think of it as the moving line illuminating the new hexagram in the background.”

     It instantly makes the old hexagram obsolete. So, forget about that ray of light in the darkness, I guess. And it dictates the outcome of the new hexagram. Alas, so much for the nourishing rains.

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     I’ve been writing about various I Ching study communities, most of them in the West. Hilary Barrett's Clarity is one of the most robust. She’s done thousands of readings like mine over the past three decades.

     The Dorset, England native is the author of two books on the I Ching and created the Clarity forum (https://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/) a quarter-century ago. Clarity offers its several hundred members Hilary’s readings, her courses, a newsletter and a forum for visitors to exchange messages and essays.

     Hilary, 53, told me in an interview after the reading she first came across the I Ching as a student at Oxford, looking for some creative stimulus. After finishing her degree, “…the idea dropped into my head like a letter through the letterbox, I could do this for other people.”

     She traveled around on bus distributing leaflets to clinics and shops advertising free readings to get started. “This didn’t work very well. My husband said you need a website.”

     He came home with a program for building a website and the modern languages major taught herself HTML, the language of the internet.

     When she first embarked on her I Ching journey she had little expectation “this was actually an Oracle.”

     That realization came when she started doing readings for herself, and realizing, "I’m not the only person present and involved here…It was a jolt, finding out it was real.

     “I had a perfectly good Western education, perfectly good, rational scientific background, a Church of England religious upbringing and none of that taught me that oracles work. It really requires a bit of an inner reorganization to accept that.”

     And how does the I Ching actually work as an oracle?

     “I don’t know. I think we just live in a universe where that happens to work.”

     Is there a mystical or a supernatural aspect to it?

   I'm personally agnostic about that. I tend to use the I Ching as an examination of my consciousness to reach decisions - and usually find the advice to be apt and often prophetic.

     Hilary says the I Ching from the beginning was used as a divination tool, which implies the supernatural.         

      “I would say the Oracle is a voice of God, one of God’s voices. The Christian tradition would call that an angel, I suppose, which just means a messenger.”

     She quickly adds it’s “nothing that I understand…I don’t know what God is…I sense a benevolent person behind (the universe).”

     “But people can be completely atheistic and have very happy, creative and productive conversations with the Oracle. Or they can be Buddhist, Jewish, or even Christian. Yes, oh and Muslim. I’ve read for a Muslim before. Or you know have some kind of fluffier New Age-y approach to the world."

     We bring our own frameworks trying to figure out the I Ching.

     Famed psychotherapist Carl Jung saw the I Ching as a tool for his theory of synchronicity - meaningful coincidences tying the psychological state of the person consulting the oracle with external events.

     Fritz Capra, a physicist who wrote the 1970s best-seller the "Tao of Physics", argued that Taoists and the I Ching itself, which posits an underlying entity or force behind a transitory and illusory physical world, is like quantum field theory.

     More recently in 2006 Richard Cook, professor of combinatorics (the branch of mathematics that studies the enumeration and permutation of sets) at Canada’s Waterloo University, published a highly technical book trying to prove that the sequence of 64 hexagrams, attributed to King Wen of Zhou in the 12^th century BC, is based on complex mathematical formulas. 

    Looking for rational explanations for how the I Ching works may be a fool's errand and a Western reflex.                 

     “I think we only ask why does it…how does it work because we’re starting from the assumption that things like this obviously don’t work," Hilary says. 

     "I suspect if you came from a culture where divination was current and more normal, you wouldn’t be asking how it works, because, you know, plants grow, oracles work. But I don’t think my mind is ever going to work that way. I think I’m always going to be astonished by it when it works.”

     The oracle was right in my reading with Hilary, which did not astonish me. The romantic episode in question did, indeed, turn out to be a disaster.