SKY CHING

Along came the new millennium, and welcome to a total outer-planetary onslaught! In a desperate bid to get some sort of handle on inner meltdown before I lost it altogether, out came my dusty volumes of the I Ching. As the Web had provided a splendid free download of the I Ching to my PDA, many hours were lost to its exploration in the June sunshine - and I came rapidly to the conclusion that I would never, ever be able to translate its antique world-view adequately into my own. Unless it would cross-reference to astrology. In which case there was Hope.
For a while I really thought I'd cracked it. A lovely system arranged itself over the hexagram table in the back of my workbook. Yet doubts nagged. Nothing quite fitted completely. It was a bit like the cheerful swimsuit I tried on one very, very sweaty morning, and which fitted really nicely round all the usual dodgy bits of body - except for one utterly intractable dimple on one side of the bust - so it was abandoned in despair. As was Fu Hsi, King Wen, Wilhelm, Jung, and Crane's optimistic transliterary effort.
THEN the penny dropped!
The whole point about pure divination (perhaps with the exception of astrology - but WHO KNOWS???) is that it is you who make the rules.
Hands will no doubt fly up in horror at this point after all those head-pounding hours spent memorising the mesmerising pronouncements of so many honoured adepts on the telling juxtapositions of cards, runes, tealeaves, coins, yarrow-stalks, flying geese, entrails, bits of beach and God knows what else, and the painstaking intensity of practice, in fear of contradiction. The workshops. The seminars. The Conferences. The dreaded exams. The expense.
But all you are doing in every case is agreeing to a set of rules devised by another human being living in the same world as you, often at a considerable distance in time, space and culture. These rules may have been intuited, or rationally planned. They may even have been divinely inspired. Or concocted for the current incarnation of a tabloid rag! None of this alters the fact that all worldly systems of divination have their origin in the world (spiritual and material) and are organised and passed down the generations by the denizens of the world to further their collective and individual insight into that world.
And they only work if practised by folk who agree to the rules.
Hence the utter impossibility of so-called scientific testing. No sceptic agrees to the rules.
At this point I must stress a) that astrology by its very nature, being Bigger Than All of Us, and being the notes of the complex music that is our eternal development, is not under discussion here despite its differing systems, since astrology as a phenomenon applies descriptively and predictively to all lives with or without their awareness or consent.
Nor b) is spiritual healing, which can be so effective for patients who have no faith in it at all, and may even be unaware that it is flowing to them.
But how many of you have picked up a pendulum and forgotten whether right or left, circular or straight movement means Yes or No? ...and decided one way (which works just fine) only to find the book said the complete opposite?
You made the rules.
You initiated and entered into agreement with the Cosmic/the discarnate/the Higher Mind.
Your questions received their proper answers.
All chosen paths, followed upwards, lead to the Summit.

The Book of Changes
... has very high status among divinatory systems due to its extremely antique and doubly royal provenance. It asks to be treated with respect; it will reward you with ancient imagery and utterances of sibylline ambiguity. 'It' may also argue with you, its answer bearing little relation to your question and seeming to scold or criticise your motive or current attitude. Coming from such an august source, such castigations can provoke much unproductive anxiety.
What is going on?
You have agreed to be counselled in a language which is unfamiliar and out-of-date.
You have deferred to a couple of
long-dead Kings instead of the living guidance you know and trust - or obliged your guidance to battle through an alien channel.
You have accepted uncritically translations of the oracle which may not do it justice, even from a famous pen.
All the above is of course the preferred and honoured practice of many, many people...
...but after taking thought, may there not be other ways to truth that are more appropriate for your corner of 21st century culture, and more enriching?
After taking thought, the idea came to me that counsel in the symbolic language I best understood would be most welcome; also that the built-in fluidity of the I Ching's divinatory system could hardly be bettered.
Therefore it was necessary to combine these in a way that compromised neither.
(I am writing these words to you at an exact Lunar Eclipse!!! Just noticed this. Make of it what you may!)
The result became what I call - for want of a better term -
SKY CHING.

The Mechanics.
You use your stalks, your coins, your software - whatever means you have chosen to generate static or moving lines of Yang or Yin energy, just as you would in normal I Ching consultation.
But instead of 8 trigrams, columns of 3 Yang or Yin lines that combine to form the 64 6-line hexagrams, Sky Ching forms 16 four-line 'Quartets' that combine into 256 possible 'Octets'... multiplied yet again if three Quartets - a Dodecet - are generated.
The lines may be displayed in columns as usuual - or, in deference to the 21st-century's adoption of the Bar-Code, as a sequence from left to right.
Instead of solid Yang and broken Yin lines, the energies may be represented by thick/thin lines like a bar code, or by the other pair beloved by those of binary bent, 1 and 0. Or if you are keen to stick with matters closer to the astrological, + and -. It really doesn't matter.
Because you are setting the rules of a new and valid contract between your consciousness and the source of Truth.
As in the venerable I Ching, if you throw, say, three coins all Yang, that line is then a moving line, transmuting to Yin in a second, derived Quartet that adds to the message of the initial Quartet.

The Symbolism

Quartets

As in the I Ching, from a Creative Monad (O ... or @ ... or * ... or even ? or ! ...?) spring two polar energies, Yang (1) and Yin (0)
From Yang come Fire (11) and Air (10); from Yin come Earth (00) and Water (01)

FIRE yields Mars/Aries/1st (1100 - Mars exalted in Earth), Sun/Leo/5th (1111 - fixed Fire), Jupiter/Sagittarius/9th (1101 - Jupiter co-ruling & exalted in Water), Asc/Desc (1110 - Fire-Air angles)

AIR yields Mercury/Gemini/3rd (1000 - Mercury also rules Earth), Venus/Libra/7th (1001 - Venus exalted in Water), Uranus/Aquarius/11th (1010 - Fixed Air), Dragon's Head (1011)

EARTH yields Earth/Taurus/2nd (0000 - fixed Earth), Chiron/Virgo/6th (0011 - concrete, physical), Saturn/Capricorn/10th (0010 - Saturn exalted in Air), Mc/IC axis (0001 - Earth-Water angles)

WATER yields Moon/Cancer/4th (0100 - Moon exalted in Earth), Pluto/Scorpio/8th (0101 - Fixed Water), Neptune/Pisces/12th (0110 - abstract, intangible), Dragon's Tail (0111)

Octets and Dodecets

A Quartet will supply much helpful imagery to illumine the subject-matter of a question.
However, you may like to generate the idea of Planet in Sign, or a full sequence of Planet/Sign/House. This is achieved as already suggested by throwing coins (etc) till 3 x 4, 12 lines are formed.
These can then be read in exactly that way. The symbolism of the 1st 4 lines will be planetary, that of the 2nd 4 its sign position, that of the 3rd 4 a house position.
If there are moving lines, then the corresponding Quartet will transmute to a different Planet, Sign, or House according to its ranking in your sequence. This new information may imply a 'conjunction' in a static Sign, or an 'aspect' between two planets in two signs, or a change of conditions over time, perhaps, when the Sign or the House changes but not the Planet.

You see how rich and flexible this is? And any astrologer can read it. It is something you can carry in your head and your smallest pocket; I have a tiny dice (I know it should be 'die' but it looks odd!) on which I have agreed that a 1 or a 5 (Aries, Leo) gives a Yang line, a 2 or a 4 (Taurus, Cancer) gives a Yin line, while a 3 or a 6 (Gemini, Virgo) means a moving Yang or Yin respectively. It's all you need.
The results will depend, not on the means of divination you have chosen or on written rules, but on your symbolic understanding, and the integrity of your spiritual agreement.

TIME - A SENRYU

...And here is a tiny poem (I think not a Haiku but a Senryu, as it breaks the rules of season and place) that emerged out of all that mathematical pondering;

Time in reflection

Mirrors that face each other

Scales fall from our eyes

Rev.Pam Crane June 2008

Here is a poem of mine where I have some fun with ideas of God and Cosmology....

BIG BANG

One day which never existed, God
in solitary rage surprised Himself with a Thought
so unsustainable in the here-to-fore
He cracked the unflawed sheer shimmer of Monad in Equilibrium,
He broke Mind
mirrored in all directions,
He shivered Infinity
and the incorporeal mighty Hand that held it,
thus beginning seven days of Bad Luck as Time was born in the vortex.
Being God,
Resourceful, He stretched forth His other hand
upon the vortex, with an opposite charge -
And Said: LET THERE BE LIGHT, and There Was light
flashing from splinter to splinter,
aeon to age;
suns of a shattered hand blinked fire into and out of a myriad million dizzy reflections
glinting Godhead back,
curled time-shards
reduplicating spin-drift, inkblot, starclot and coalsack -
by which light a God could see His scattered parts
And Being
God, He Said:
LET THEM FLY
Asunder upon the wind of
My unparalleled Imagination,
LET THEM SEED where a
plus-minus meets in the heart of light
a microcosmic god in the anti-mind, for this
is Matter of Moment; let there be Life, therefore,
so let there be Soul - let there be male, and female
warring and mating; let there be holes for light to penetrate,
dramatic poles, north and south in collision, upwards, down -
as in My excess I find
sorrow I cannot drown
in the necessity
for light to
mend Me by,
so will mySelf,
enantiomorphic
twin of Me and
friend
be lover of that Light,
his flesh a bandage for My fractured dignity
for a seven-night.
Till then,
Let every action have its equal and opposite reaction.
Let there be
Polarity, pendulum, fractal, parabola
And parity.
Thus Spake God.........
.........One Day that suddenly existed,
as
a myriad million fragments of Forever
took their first lesson in strife and alchemy;
towards which sex, war, succour, science and sainthood,
the long, vain struggle to tie the strings of symphonies
between grass and the galaxy, Caligula and Christ -
So many poles of puzzlement, poor man-thing! -
making itself slowly in God's other image,
feet on a star, head in the coalsack.
God forgot
to make men like snails. Here it is Sunday lunch
And still we have not mapped our route for the last afternoon
of our life; the future winks only briefly at us
out of the healing mirrors.
Some are struggling
To put their eyes out on stalks and see around corners
of the inconceivable before the last trump
is played, the last supper indigested and
the disbelievable unMichaelangelic Hand
reach forth to converge the silver trails
of the slow, vulnerable, visionary sun
housing the soul in helix.
Here they come,
a few at a time,
the unrejected cells;
a Miracle is made.
The Wound closes.
Thy Hand, O God
may close the eyes of Time - but it is built of us!...
We who have put out the cat may be most unwilling to
put out the stars the cat and we have hunted our dreams by,
may be discontent;
may fidget with the smoothed fabric of Space,
finger the substance of the Maker's Dream,
flex the muscles of a new idea -
Spring a surprise.

PS! After pondering along these lines (instead of sleeping, of course) I thought - "and here I am, living in the town that celebrates Lewis Carroll, in a house with Alice characters on the bedroom doors (carefully painted round by me, as they are delightful) and Carroll was of course a mathematician, Charles Dodgson!" When he came here to stay with Alice Liddell and her family, and later (probably in Oxford) told her the tales we love - the mathematician/cosmologist was working overtime. He created a rabbit obsessed with time, a tea-party that went on for ever, a hatter and a hare who each lived in their own universe, a dormouse who spent its time going in and out of the sleep-state, a cat that kept shifting dimensions and a heroine who was alternately normal, transported, extremely tiny, unmanageably huge ... and retained her identity valiantly through every vicissitude! There are so many big concepts in this 'child's' tale.

I'm going to have to read it again!

MIND IN THE COSMOS

A couple of days ago I was watching, fascinated, the film 'Dangerous Knowledge', re-screened on BBC2. It concerned the obsessions of mathematicians and the consequences for their sanity.

Georg Cantor spent his life trying to get a mathematical handle on (of all things) infinity. He got to the point where he was even adding 'infinities' together and making them jump through conceptual hoops. It drove him mad.

With a south node in Aquarius I must be careful where I send my thoughts!... but it did get me pondering. A number of questions arose in my mind which may or may not make much sense, but here they are for what they are worth.

Cantor was tantalised by the number of possible points on the circumference of a circle ( and we astrologers deal with circles Great and small all the time.) Take a circle, draw radii from its centre to the edge until there is no room left on that edge - and the area will be black with lines - and you have a finite construction. But as soon as you widen that circumference, the original radii will of course fan out, leaving spaces on the new perimeter! So the number of radii in a circle is infinite, assuming the potential circumference is infinitely far away.
My question is - why start from the centre? Wherever the outer limit of any Great Circle is (and if it is Infinity, so be it, because it is beyond the conception of a finite mind) it can be completed with as many nano-nano points as it has room for, and then they can form the origin of radii to the circle's centre.
Maybe a silly thought, but let's play with ideas!

This whole conundrum arises because mankind insists on dividing things. So another question is, why assume division is appropriate? Why not try the other assumption that some phenomena function as unified Wholes?
As Astrologers we work with wholes in the form of Ideas that are grouped in twelve sections of a circular heaven. The Great Circle is the Ecliptic, and the 12 sections are what we call the Zodiac. These can be subdivided (yes!) into 144 subsets known as the Dwads; and there are a number of differing great-circular frameworks that place these Ideas in different contexts of human life and earthly existence. We also deal in Degrees - 360 of them in each circle - and in minutes - 60 to each degree; and degrees themselves carry individual meanings. But small as these are, detailed as they become, they are still Wholes, and we don't need to mess with them too much! We also work with the geometry of the circle to assess the harmony or lack of it between zodiacal Ideas that are focussed by the presence of a planet, or the Moon, or a key spatial node such as the Ascendant, the Midheaven, or the Nodes of the Moon (there are others.) But there is little to be gained in understanding by straying beyond the kind of geometries that would produce recognisable music on a taut string. So beyond 12ths or 24ths not many 'aspects' are used; 11ths are, but odd geometry is tricky to understand and work with. So why not work with Wholes elsewhere instead of constantly dividing? Maybe lines spread out into membranes? surfaces into mobius loops and toroids? Waves, particles, strings and superstrings all fall into this category, I daresay. And as astrology is more wave-like and rhythmic and musical than particulate, my feeling is that it is in this category of cosmic phenomena that the astrologer and the physicist/chemist/cosmologist will eventually meet.

And then there's Pi.
Following on from that last argument, why are folks not content with the elegant fraction, 22/7, and forever going on about Pi not resolving to a neat decimal place?
1/3 doesn't either - it's 1.3333333333333 on into good old infinity again, and yet we recognise a third of something when we see it. It doesn't have a fuzzy edge that wafts us away into hyperspace (unless you insist on examining the quantum conditions around your slice of short-cake - in which case there may be no hope for you.)
I say, let's get back to fractions. Decimals are all very handy but they do throw up this infinity problem again, as does any BaseN arithmetic. Yes it's very entertaining, and people spend their lives pushing Primes and ratios and divisions to their impossible limits - but where is understanding in all of this? (Except to recognise, forcefully, our own limitations as an incarnate family!) Look at Phi. Beautiful. Not because it's 1:1.61803...(etc) but because of the proportion itself that is built organically into so many living and wonderfully architectural things.

Somewhere in all this maths and cosmology there has to be the place where Mind Is. When you have knocked around the worls for 65 years as I and many of you have, and spent 40 or so of them as an astrologer, healer, and and general mixer with friends unseen, you know the spiritual dimensions are a reality, that they interpenetrate the apparent world, and Science will always fail until it allows for that reality in testing its own propositions. It tends on the whole not to. I've met quite a few scientists in various fields and even if they profess a belief in spirituality, or in God, I don't really see this in their work. It gets parked just outside while they go in the lab for the day to study multi-dimensional theory. One day the penny will drop, and some bright young person will get the most deserved Nobel Prize in history.

This ubiquitous Mind - consciousness - meaning - purpose - is ultimately the basis for our Astrology. The Universe is permeated with it. It is our Matrix. We are the Cinderella of Science. Look - astrologers recognised millennia ago the 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' that is integral to modern Chaos Theory. Astrology is likewise fractal in its nature (numbers 12 and 60 being key to our work with the intelligent cosmos.) We are manifest Thought.

I have a paper that I wrote a few years back, on the properties of the Circle and muliple dimensions, that I may put up here later on if I can get the diagrams to go on the blog with it. Watch this space.

That'll do for now. Have to get tea at some point this evening!