Earlier this evening, kafkananda posted a clever diary, wherein a photo of Obama and Biden smiling together suggested an I Ching hexagram, and thus a possible intuition of the future. I like his idea and his analysis. After you've finished this diary, go read his.
At least one commenter was baffled by the whole thing, being entirely unfamiliar with the subtle catalog of wisdom that is the I Ching. It occured to me that a brief description, with pictures, would be a help. But when I was done, my description wasn't so brief. So I thought that instead of just letting it languish as comment, I'd re-post it, as its own diary. Here. Your simplified introduction to the I Ching.
The I Ching is a catalog of 64 patterns. Each pattern is just a stack of six parallel lines, where each individual line can either be "whole" or "broken", that is, solid or split in two. Each stack of 6 lines is called a "hexagram".
Here is the catalog of all 64 of the I Ching hexagrams:
and this particular one:
is named "Shih-ho" a/k/a/ "Biting Through"
In the I Ching, the hexagrams are arranged in a specific order, and each of them has a number, a name, a description, and some commentaries. Sometimes the name and description treat the particular hexagram as a little picture. So this one (No. 21) "Biting Through" is supposed to look like a little mouth, with the first line (strong, at the bottom) like the bottom row of teeth, and the sixth line (strong, at the top) like the top teeth. The "mouth" between them is mostly empty (the "weak" or divided lines) except for the 4th line, which is also strong. The image is of the "teeth" biting through that strong line -- the "obstruction" between the teeth. See it?
All that stuff [in kafkananda's diary] about "thunder" and "lightning"? That comes from looking at the three top lines of a hexagram as one group and the three bottom lines as another. If you think about it, you can see that there are only 8 possible patterns of three stacked lines (called "trigrams"):
-------- --- --- --- --- --------
-------- --- --- -------- --- ---
-------- -------- --- --- --- ---
(heaven) (thunder) (water) (mountain)
--- --- -------- -------- --- ---
--- --- -------- --- --- --------
--- --- --- --- -------- --------
(earth) (wind) (fire) (lake)
In the I Ching, each of these trigrams is identified with a natural force or object: thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire, lake, heaven, and earth. (Yes, I know, there's both a "lake" and a "water". Leave that for now.)
When you look at a hexagram, you can identify the bottom and top trigrams. In the case of Shih-ho, it's thunder underneath, fire (or "lightning") above.
The I Ching patterns attempt to collect all the kinds of Change in the world, and classify them into 64 different patterns. So there is a pattern for "coming together" and one for "dissapating", one for completing an action safely and one for losing concentration and failing just at the end, and so on. You could find a pattern that would symbolize McCain's faltering ability to rouse a splintering base and one to be an emblem of Obama's use of internet social networks to obtain the resources for a successful campaign from many small donors. Learning the 64 basic patterns is easy; learning to identify them in life -- as change melts into change lurches into change jumps into change flows into change freezes into change -- is the wisdom of a lifetime.
Like fractal patterns, the I Ching is scale-free -- that is, the same shapes of patterns can appear at any size, from the briefest interaction in a coffeeshop to the movement of great nations over centuries, and everything in between.
That's it for now. If this garners any favorable attention, I'll do a second chapter, introducing the usual methods for consulting the I Ching, recommending a couple of translations, answering questions, or whatever else seems good.