my-view.html

<h2>My view on why it works</h2>

<p>The surprising thing about I Ching is that is <it>always</it> work.

<p>Note that in the I Ching online website, is written:
  <quote>Only ask serious questions; don't test the I Ching.  If you
    don't take the I Ching seriously, it will not work.
  </quote>
</p>

<p>I state that I Ching always works, indeed you are free to test
  I Ching, and get very misterious answers when you do that.
</p>

<p>There is nothing magic about it, and that's precisely why I Ching
  is so amazing.

<p>"There are two awesome things in the world, the sky above me and my
  mind above it" was used to say Kant, and these words perfectly catch
  the spirit of I Ching.

<p>Why a text which was composed more than two thousands year ago can
  say something about me and now? What's the secret of I Ching, what
  makes it suited as a device for discovering deep answers abouve our
  inner self, how does it work its magic?

<p>My answer is that I Ching is able to trigger something about the
  very inner nature of the human mind, and this is possible due to the
  profound understanding of the human nature which is condensed in
  this ancient book, which summerizes the knowledge accumulated in
  centuries by some of the most profound and greatest minds of those
  times.

<p>So like every true classic text, I Ching is about the very nature
  of human, which is still unchanged after more than two thousand
  years, and like a living entity is able to talk to us in an intimate
  and strikingly sincere ways.

<p>The real trick is inside ourself, or better on how our minds works,
  looking for patterns and creating working and living analogies
  between what we see and how we model the world around us. I Ching
  simply provides us with an untopped model of the various situation
  on which we can find ourself, and provide <em>answers</em> on how we
  should tackle each one of these situations in an extraordinarily
  universal way.

<p>Thus when we consult I Ching for divinations purpose, we compare
  our present situation with what I Ching presents us, and offers a
  sometimes novel point of views from which to look at the situation.

<p>The true answer comes from our inner us, and I Ching only provides
  some way to discover and re-discover the answer. There is an
  implicit question in each explicit question, and while we pose the
  question we are asked to focus on the problem at hand.

<p>While doing this, we can't be always be perfectly honest, or are
  unable to find the true question. Behind every question, there is
  often a more implicit question, which is not very well formed and
  which floats over our unconscious (just another way to tell
  something which still not reached a perfect state of consciousnes,
  but still layes somewhere in the deepest layers of our mind, somehow
  triggering neural circuits but still never perfectly formulated).

<p>The inner implicit question is sometimes more important of the
  explicit question, and I Ching helps us to figure out which is htis
  question, answering to the primary and more deep question.

<p>Thus even a misleading answer cast light on what we really are or
  on what we really desire, being this object known or not yet
  formulated explicitely in our mind.

<p>What I Ching offers us is a model of what the various states of the
  human mind and experience can be, and a state is interpreted as a
  state of transition, and this reflects the dynamic nature of the
  flow of experience, or in other words of what we perceive as the
  experience of our live.

<p>Why 64 hexagrams? Why not 8 or 1000? 64 is just a somehow arbitrary
  number, but surely this number provides a means to express with
  details the many states which we can use to describe the
  situations. There is something archetipical in the situations or
  states represented by the 64 hexagrams. In other words this number
  provides a fine level of granularity for analyzing the various
  states on which we can map the human mind state and behaviours.

<p>A model is so what I Ching provides, a model which allow us to
  interpret our own situation, and in this way is no different from
  the idea of a scientific model.

<p>You can believe that there is an intimate connection between what
  I Ching tells us and a sort of cosmic intelligence, or you can
  believe that what I Ching provides us was hardwired in the intimate
  structure of the universe since its inception, but a simpler
  interpretation is that it binds naturally to the way we interpret
  divinations, so we are naturally carried to give a correct
  interpretation of what I Ching tells us.

<p>There is nothing magic or mistic about it, or you can say that the
  real magic is just into this understanding of our own mind. For
  myself I consider I Ching just a beatiful and fascinating device for
  querying my own mind. By doing so, reminding of the initial quote by
  Kant, you can say that you're questioning the Cosmo.