Guideways for Change Project

Guideways for Change is an ongoing project I have been working on for the last ten years, ever since the publication of Total I Ching: Myths for Change. Its aim is to supply you with the most advanced text available today for the study and use of I Ching, the Classic of Change. Going on from where Total I Ching left off, it explores both the hidden transformative pathways of the Matrix of Change, traditionally said to embody all the possible changes and transformations we go through in the voyage of our lives, and the Language of Change, symbolized as an eternal and unceasing flow of meaning that permeates and supports everything everywhere.

The energy or process called Change this tradition embodies is simultaneously a quality of the world we live in, an inner creative energy; the name of an old book and tradition of wisdom divination book and the technique associated with the book. The term also points at those who use this mysterious energy and practice as a spiritual Way or Dao. A primary meaning of the term and the Way is “trouble.” It indicates sudden, disastrous storms, unexpected losses or times of political upheaval when confusion intervenes. It is meant to help us navigate the times a time when all our habitual structures of thought and culture melt down and something extraordinary emerges from the fertile chaos that results. It suggests a fluid personal identity, a fertile imagination and the capacity to move with the breakdown of normal values, a quality that is as mysterious, unpredictable and fertile as the Dao itself. The symbols of the book called Change connect Change in the universe to your inner Change, your creative imagination, if you choose to use them.

Change is without conscious thought and acts without purpose.
Like the way, it is still and unmoving.
If you stimulate it by asking a question,
it penetrates the causes of everything in the world we live in.
Change enabled the Sage People
to penetrate the extreme depths
of what is hidden in the profound.
They thoroughly understood
the infinitely subtle beginnings of Change.
It is only through what is deep
that we can penetrate the purposes of the world we live in.
It is only through what is subtle
that we can complete the workings of the world we live in.
It is only through our helping spirit
that we can hurry without haste
and arrive at our goal without going.
When the Master said,
“Change has the fourfold way of the Sage-Mind in it,”
this is what he meant.

Dazhuan, I.11, my translation.