I Ching and Creative Thinking

by phil on Saturday Aug 23, 2003 8:00 PM
I Ching

I Ching is an ancient Chinese psychic method. I first discovered it on DeOXY. I also noticed it was mentioned by This Guy in my previous post--he's the guy who "proved" that God is Math using I Ching.

So, how can YOU join in on the fun. First, read the Basics of I Ching

Good tidbit from the above site.

Because our Western systems of writing are phonetic rather than graphic, we tend to believe that written words are only representations of spoken words. Chinese writing, on the other hand, is historically based on drawings, not sounds, and the earliest written characters were rough sketches or drawings of the objects in question. As time passed, written Chinese became more and more standardized, the drawings came more to represent spoken words, and the pictographic richness of the original drawings began to fade and be forgotten.

That site is simple yet comprehensive... unfortunately at one part it handwaves about it, so I found this Terse I Ching Summary that gives you a quick method for consulting the Oracle.

I haven't tried it yet but I think it's probably the Eastern version of the Western Roger von Oech's Think Cards. These are a deck of 52 cards with advice to stir up your mind. Likewise, while I doubt I Ching has true psychic powers, I do think it can help you think creatively about the problems you're trying to solve.

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