The traditional I Ching material contains the hexagram images and prose covering attempts to interpret what the images represent. Some claim is to the original material being in the form of the 64 hexagrams and a name/ideogram for each and that's it.
If we focus on the method used to formally derive the 64 hexagrams we find ourselves dealing with the method of recursion, where a dichotomy, that of yin/yang is applied to itself and then to the output of that application six times. This gives us the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching but no more, the rest is supposedly up to interpretations. ( we can break this up to a process of (a) deriving trigrams and then (b) combining them to give us hexagrams)
However, in a cognitive analysis of the basic hexagram meanings, and so coverage of the many books describing hexagrams, we can draw-out common terms to form a set of generic meanings for each hexagram; these common terms are indicative of shared meanings we all have as emotion-using, neuron-dependent life forms; as such many different words cover the same underlying qualities of meanings where such are derived from our neurology and customised through emotion. With these meanings, combined with the use of logic operators (the source of our sense of syntax etc) we then find that we can in fact get each hexagram in the I Ching to describe itself through use of analogy to all of the other hexagrams in the I Ching. In other words all of the pages and pages of prose, spanning 3000 years, trying to describe a hexagram meaning becomes redundant when we can get the I Ching to describe a hexagram in good enough detail as a universal to then let our consciousness refine the meaning as it applies to some local context.
Thus arguments about what a hexagram means are generically resolved simply by 'asking' the hexagram to describe itself. The local details are then added by consciousness where it is consciousness that is the final arbiter in linking the generics of the universal form (hexagram) to the specifics of some local context interaction to then give us the full strategic and tactical situation and future developments.
As covered in the original work on 27-ness, we can 'ask' such as "from whence were you born" and get a generic description of such through XORing the hexagram with hex 27. "How do you begin" shifts focus to 24-ness; "How do you prune" shifts focus on 23-ness and so on. Furthermore, due to the language nature of the I Ching, each answer to a question can be analysed in its own right (e.g. "How do you prune" leads into "what signals the ending/completion of pruning?" (the 63-ness of 23 etc)) - what ties all of these together is the original context under consideration, lose sight of that and all meanings disappear or more so revert back to universal forms awaiting some local context in which to be grounded.
The Emotional I Ching focus covers (a) the ability to use emotional assessments of situations to derive a representation of such, and (b) to use the I Ching self-referencing to 'tell us' generally about that situation in the I Ching's 'own words' and we then fill-in the details.
Chris
http://www.emotionaliching.com
