Observations placeholder
Seabrook, William Buehler - Using the I Ching
Identifier
001373
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Along with the I Ching you find that people often have a set of bamboo or other sorts of sticks of varying lengths that can be thrown as a means of ‘divination’. The word divination in this context does not mean to tell your future, it means to make divine. They can be used to help you on the spiritual path.
I like the description given by William Seabrook on this so here we go
A description of the experience
William Seabrook
To send your soul into the infinite, you shake and toss your tortoiseshells like poker dice, then arrange the wands parallel and fix the resulting hexagram firmly in your visual memory.
Next, you must visualize an imaginary closed door with this symbol painted on it.
All you know about the imaginary door is that if it swings open at all, it will open away from you - as if pushed.
Next you sit quietly like a Buddha ……… You try to make your mind a blank, simply staring in imagination at the door and at the symbol.
You do it either in the dark or blindfolded or simply with your eyes closed, if you have the will power to keep them closed for what may be a long time.
After a while, maybe in a half hour, maybe in seven or eight hours, maybe not at all in any single given trial, the door will seem to swing slowly open. Then, in your imagination, you go through it. You don't merely look through it. You go through it, …. ‘You arise out of your body’, as the book says, and 'walk through the door.'
What you see, encounter, and experience on the other side is believed by the esoteric to be seen by the soul's eye – to be experienced by the astral body.
Whatever bell it rings, it rings it. Some of the university professors were amiably interested in our experiments, and I shall never forget the night when Morris Bishop of Cornell went through the door to become a monk in the old Abbey of Solesmes, and chanted pure Gregorian in the old Latin.
It was no proof of ….reincarnation …because he was a Latin scholar …. and had sung Gregorian plain chant long before he started writing Limericks after Lear. My own unhappy adventures beyond the door consisted always in seeking something I could never find, and were consequently not worth mentioning. What happened to various others beyond the door was often dull, but sometimes astonishing, and not always entirely respectable.
There was one memorable night when a chubby professor of Greek from Columbia - who in his state of normal consciousness disbelieves in one sort of fairies and heartily dislikes the other sort - became a wanton young female Corybant.