The Ten Minutes Before a Reading Matter More Than the Reading
A friend asked me last spring whether she should take a job offer. She had already cast the hexagram. She read me the answer, then asked, “So, should I?”
The reading was fine. The question was not. In one sentence she had bundled three separate questions: whether the job was good, whether she wanted it, and whether leaving would hurt someone. The I Ching answered all three at once, which is another way of saying it answered none of them.
Most bad readings I have seen were not bad readings. They were bad questions, asked in a hurry, at a desk covered with other things.
There is a version of divination that treats the oracle as a slot machine: put in a question, get out an answer, repeat. That version is cheap, and it produces cheap readings. The other version treats a reading as a conversation with a text that has been in use for a very long time. Conversations go badly when one side has not decided what it is asking.
What follows is the ten minutes I now spend before casting. It is not a ritual in the religious sense. It is closer to clearing a table before you cook. Ten minutes is not much. It is roughly the time it takes a pot of tea to go from too hot to drinkable, which is how I started measuring it.
One sentence, one verb, one decision. If you need “and” or “or” to hold it together, you have two questions, and you should pick one.
“Should I take the job in Hangzhou or stay where I am?” is not a question. It is a comparison, and comparisons need criteria before they need an oracle.
“Should I take the job in Hangzhou?” is a question. It can be answered, argued with, and acted on.
The constraint does more than tidy things up. Writing one sentence forces you to notice which half of the problem you actually care about. That noticing is often the whole reading.
Before you cast, write your current answer on the same page. Be honest, since nobody is reading it.
This is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes a reading legible. A hexagram is a picture of a situation. If you do not know what you were planning, you cannot tell whether the picture is agreeing with you, warning you, or describing someone else entirely.
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I have watched people read a difficult hexagram as encouragement because they had already decided. I have done it myself. The hexagram did not lie. I simply had no baseline to compare it against.
Give the question a time horizon
“What should I do with my life” has no edges. Nothing can answer it, including you.
“What should I do about this job in the next three months” has edges. You can check the answer in three months. You can be wrong in three months, which is a feature.
A time horizon also keeps you from asking the same question every week and drawing a different hexagram each time. Different hexagrams for the same question usually mean the situation moved and you did not notice.
This one is not mystical. Writing by hand is slower, and the slowness is useful. You cannot backspace a sentence you have already committed to paper, so you tend to write what you mean the first time.
It also leaves a record. I keep a small notebook of questions and dates. Reading back through it, the pattern is not that the I Ching was right or wrong. The pattern is that I asked better questions in some months than in others, and those months went better.
Put the phone face down while you do this. Not for spiritual reasons. A reading interrupted by a notification is two readings, the one before and the one after, and you will remember the one that fits.
By the time you throw the coins, the reading has less work to do. You are not asking it to invent your situation from nothing. You are asking it to look at a situation you have already described clearly, and to say something you had not considered.
That is a smaller job than most people give it, and it is the job it is actually good at.
The friend with the job offer did the ten minutes the second time. She wrote one sentence: “Should I take the job in Hangzhou?” Then, underneath: “I want to, and I am afraid of the move.”
The hexagram she drew was about a cart whose axle is not yet fixed. She laughed. She had been describing the axle for months and calling it a career question.
