new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host vicky thompson you may be familiar with new connection magazine which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than twenty years on new connection t v we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative health spirituality and personal growth today and like to welcome to new connection paul o'brien who is the author of visionary ichi the book of changes for the twenty first century paul welcome to new connections thank you vicky i'm happy to be here you know i'm excited to talk about aging it's such an ancient revered system can you tell us a bit about it and how it's used it's actually the old this book in the world but it's far more than a book it's a divination system or what you might call  oracle system along the lines perhaps of things that people might be more familiar with like taro cards etc but it's four thousand years old it comes out of a to china it's a taoist classic and  it embody is the wisdom that's behind the martial arts chinese medicine chinese astrology fox way it's primarily used to help people make better decisions and it was used by emperors and sages for thousands of years how did you get into using the iching well it all started when i grew up in the bay area during the one nine hundred sixty s when everything counterculture was flourishing and i became exposed to eastern metaphysics and chinese philosophy taoism and buddhism and one day on the campus of the university of california a young lady whom i found very attractive yeah wanted to show me this system that she had for answering questions for giving advice and helping people make better decisions so i went along with it but i have to admit that at that young age in my teenage years i was a bit of a smart alec and i basically was much more interested in her than any kind of flaky trick that she might have so i went along with it and she said ok think of a question and write it down and so i wrote down something that meant nothing to me really and i was basically making fun of the whole thing and so then she showed me how to cast the coins six times and that's how you do it you develop a pattern from casting the coin six times while you're concentrating on your question well i wasn't concentrating on my question i was kind of making fun of the whole thing and so we did that and then she looks it up in the big book which was the wilhelm baynes version of the iching which has the forward because the young the great depth psychologist and she looks it up and what do i get but hexagram number four which is intitled youthful folly now the gist of hexagram number four is that the student lacks respect for the teacher and i thought wow that's kind of interesting i mean a completely ignored my question but my question had no merit to begin with it wasn't important to me and i wasn't even thinking about it in a reflective my smart alec energy and called me on it at least that's what seemed to be happening well that made me a little more curious about it so i said he let me try that again and so then i wrote down something else that i didn't particularly care about just this time my intent was to test but i remember the text very clearly because it grabbing so much and it said questioning the sincerity of the seeker and i thought oh my god this time i'm testing it and it comes back  so that's when i had this epiphany is certainly strengthen my interest in curiosity and it to see that it was reflecting my energy no matter how i tried to manipulate it or no matter how i tried to abuse or make fun of it it was going to just reflect that energy back to me it was going to take any guff from me so i gained some respect for it and i started using it and i think using it for every major personal decision in my adult life ever since that's how it started and i became very interested in it and i studied it for years i studied it got me interested in curly young's work in these energetic sources of power that exist in what he called the collective unconscious that we can draw upon that's where all new ideas come from that's where all creative thought comes from and that's the iching consists of it's got sixty four chapters called hexagrams each one of them is an archetype like youthful follies one of those and so it's a collection of archetypes that basically describe a variety of human experiences or situations or dynamics that are possible in the world of social affairs or political affairs or even business dealings that we might we might bump up against that are all inside of us and so that's the theory about architecture all of these archetypes are actually inside of you to begin with every single one of them same thing is true of toro cards you've got seventy eight cards there are seventy eight archetypes and then of course there are all the m logical archetypes the gods and goddess's and different qualities of the sage the great mother cetera so the young to find all kinds of archetypes but he was particularly taken by the iching because he saw that this was a system that used archetypes in order to produce reflections that are going to help people make better decisions stimulate their intuition and then he came up with the  as a result of trying to figure out how the iching worked in the secretis of the principal is the other major factor of a divination system in a secret city principle says that everything that happens at a given moment in time is related to everything else that's happening at that same moment in time and so if you can get a fix or a mapping on a moment in time you could tell something about the general quality that moment that's going to be relevant to whatever you're focused on at the same time because you're focused on it when you cast the coins that create the pattern so basically a shorthand way of describing synchronicity principle is that there are no accidents everything happens for a reason and things are related in time as well as in space now physics and science western science it's all about how things are related in space and it's basically in the west we've been trying to answer the question what are things made of and how do we do that we analyze them we take them apart we put them back together and see what happens so it's a very logical process that has to do with the relationship between things in space or things in the material realm but we don't even take into consideration the element of time i mean we have expressions that we intuitively understand that timing is everything but we don't take it into account in science or in the scientific method for instance if i perform a controlled experiment on tuesday morning and i perform that same controlled experiment sunday in the middle of the night i expect to come out exactly the same and i don't factor in the time at all well in the east going way back thousands of years they were interested in answering a different kind of question rather than being obsessed with what are things made of and by the way we've we've done incredible things by examining what are things made of the figuring that out i mean scientific and technological breakthroughs in medicine and technology etc it's fantastic what we've been able to do taking that approach but they were interested in a different question they were interested in answering the question what kinds of things go together in time so they were very interested in timing and of course this is a question that is very relevant to the world of love affairs and politics and negotiations and waging war perhaps timing is such an important issue and they were very focused on that and that's what the iching was designed to help them with well let's talk a little bit more about timing you shared that in the responses that you've gotten from the iching some of them might be hard to follow can you share what you found well if you don't care about timing i wouldn't do the iching in the first place because that's what it really shines that's the kind of questions that it's good for it's not going to give you answers to questions like where should i go to lunch today or what's the weather going to be like tomorrow it basically generates advice that stimulates your intuition to think outside the box around timing questions or relationship questions now we don't always get answers that we like as my story about my discovery of the iching illustrates we get reflections on that moment in time that don't care about what answers we want what our ego wants to hear we're basically getting a reflection now i have found in my use of the iching over the last forty years that it always gives me one of three different kinds of responses i've never seen this written up anywhere but it's been my observation that it either tells you to assert yourself and fix it in order to effect change or do nothing but wait and allow things to change on their own because this too shall pass or number three run like hell retreat it out of there so that's always a kind of an interesting thing for me and sometimes that's only the only thing i'm looking for like for instance if i ask the question is this a good time to call so so and so it's going to give me one of those three kinds of of indicators and i'm just going to go without and i'm not even to worry too much about the specific text because the every teaching reading it's about four paragraphs long so it's going to give me an idea about whether i should try to fix it or whether i should pat let it pass or whether i should retreat now in the west we don't have that much flexibility unless we've taken martial arts perhaps because we have like one solution to every problem and that is fix it now you know we're in a hurry we're type a we want to make change happen we want to control things and we want to assert ourselves and we have sort of this trainings we don't have too many trainings in waiting we certainly don't have any trainings in retreating it's true i suppose the only training in waiting would might be meditating which is basically what's going on there so i have found that very helpful it's made me much more flexible to realise i don't always have to take action i don't always have to try to make things happen so the iching has been around for thousands of years but you've created a contemporary version of it what motivated you to create a modern version m p e chain well after using it for many years i realised the limitations of it particularly in conjunction with the studies that i brought to it researching the history of it buying every version i could find i must own about twenty different versions of the channel in the one that everybody sort of harkens to was the first one that i was introduced to which is the wilhelm baynes princeton version with the intro by carl young well the intro by carl young in and of itself is worth the price of admission to that version but i became aware the fact that that version even though it's considered the most orthodox and it's the best selling version is not necessarily the best version from the point of view of authenticity going back to the ancient taoist wisdom because it was a product of the ming dynasty of the nineteenth century which is when wilhelm got hold of it like thousand nine hundred in translated it into german and it's very patriarchal and it represents a very patriarchal flavor that that is more about confucianism than taoism in its very militaristic it has expressions in it like the army is marching to the southwest well personally i don't care what the army's doing and i'm not sure what movie the southwest means in that it has expressions like this a period man does this in the superior man does that it was kind sexist and i thought we can do a lot better than that we need a new modern version of the ching that is a little bit more taoist and less confucian that's not patriarchal that's certainly not sexist and not militarist for modern times and so i i never thought to do anything about it until i was inspired in one nine hundred eighty nine to create the world's first software version of the iching which was a program named synchronicity that i named synchronicity and at the time i was the vice president of marketing for a software company in the high tech industry and i found myself using the iching at work once in a while and i thought wow i sure would like it if i could do this on my computer and this was before the age of cd roms there were no cd roms in one thousand nine hundred ninety and there were no multimedia computers except for one that tiny little macintosh in the shape of an ice cube that thing could handle graphics so i got to idea i wonder if i could do it he ching on the computer in a software format that could give some graphics like  japanese garden and some soothing sounds that would facilitate the kind of mood the kind of meditative state of mind that would be ideal for any ching reading and that just captured my imagination in the lead to my career as an entrepreneur because i took my entire life savings and i designed something like that i hired a grad student and an artist and actually ended up creating one of the first multimedia titles which was on two floppy disks at the time which was an interactive version of so you actually consulted the iching to see if you should create the software version of it can you share that story yeah i didn't know whether i should do this or not or whether it was an irreverent thing to do or not so i did a reading about whether i should create a software version of the iching itself so i used the ching to inform that decision within myself and i got the hexagram enthusiasm was totally positive oh my god well here i was about to spend my entire life savings and then some it wasn't a trivial thing i didn't i had never developed a software program before but i was missing a pretty vital component which was the rights to any of the versions of the  are all copyrighted in so i had i more or less had to write my own version in order to do this thing that i wanted to do and then i really got into that was very inspiring and that's when i decided to make one this nonsexist not militarist less  confucian more taoist more poetic more lighthearted and just generally more accessible to a modern audience to the individual istic western audience was something that we've been showing on screen are the beautiful paintings that you've included with this version of the king can you tell us a little bit about the artist and inspiration behind this with that came which later because cd roms did come around about six or seven years later and i decided to do a c of version which i wanted to have beautiful art and i wanted to have a soundtrack and so i hired an artist and specified sixty four paintings this is never been done there never been an illustrator version of iching and then since then i came across artists jonah lehrer more who is the artist of the paintings that we use now and she had a whole selection a whole collection of sixty four paintings one for each of the six of the because she'd love iching as much as i did and they already existed it she was selling this art and so i made a proposal to her how would you like me to use scans of your art as  book that i want to in this new software that i want to make which is now become the e book that we're just publishing which is called the visionary iching so there's been this evolution and we've never put it out in a book format before and so now we have it in this e book format that is very convenient because you can read it on your i phone you can take it with her or your android phone you can take it on an i pad you can take it on your laptop computer and have access to this incredible tool wherever you are at your convenience and it's special gift that you're offering today to our viewers is a free version and think i'm glad you brought that up because this e book which we're going to publish well we've already published the free gift for viewers of new connection t v that you can get at divination dot com slash free book now there's no links on the site that lead to that this is a secret page that we set up just for this occasion vicki and i'm very happy to be able to offer it for free in p d f format for any of our viewers today wonderful paul you're writing another book on visionary decision making how does that relate to the iching each ng is is one tool that you can use to support intuitive decision making and now i'm writing a book that's much broader in scope called great decisions perfect timing it should be published in september of two thousand and thirteen and it's basically about the importance of making good decisions in your life and improving your timing in the iching is one tool there's a whole chapter on divination in the book with the book is much broader than that and it's basically dealing with the perception that the most critical thing that we do as human beings is making decisions you know we have this incredible capacity to visualize different possible outcomes the choices we might take and yet when it comes to decision making we're terrible we're either too emotional and impulsive or we're too procrastinating and we've got to do better i mean the fate of the world depends on it not to mention our personal success and happiness nothing determines your success and happiness more in life than the quality of the decisions that you make and it's the job that we pay c e o s and political leaders enormous amounts of of resources and power to affect for us and we need to do it for ourselves because everybody is the c e o of their own life so there's a whole system the seven pillars of visionary decision making that we define in this book divination being one of them and that is really what the divination foundation is all about the mission of the divination foundation the nonprofit i set up after i sold the software company that published the iching and to row and astrology and became the world's largest astrology website i set up a nonprofit immediately so that i could do the work that i really am called to do which is to help people make better decisions improve their timing reduce their stress and support the collective good well you've really done a great job of it and i'm really impressed with the way you can navigate through this book and your future but so it sounds like you are making this really accessible to the masses and using it as a change management tool well that's all i want to do vicki i was called to produce the world's first divination software and then the world's largest divination website and i did very well and now it's you know i'm in the last third of my life and i want to give back this is i'm doing exactly what i want to do and i'm so happy doing it and i really appreciate being on your t v show today to tell people about it because we do want people to take advantage of this free copy and become familiar there's chapters in the visionary iching e book that explain all the things we talked about today and how to get the most benefit from it how to use it it's pretty self explanatory and i think people are going to enjoy that and we're also coming out with a visionary iching app for the i an android i pad etc which should be out within a couple weeks of this broadcast so i hope people will tune back into divination dot com and take a look at that because that's that's going to be a lot of fun now that we're going to cost money but all proceeds go to the nonprofit work of the divination foundation so for someone who may not be familiar with the iching what are some of the benefits of using it well better decisions better relationships less stress less anxiety about changes it's a way to stimulate your intuition to think outside the box around problems that logic can handle if logic could handle it fine it's a great tool but there's some of the most important personal issues logic can't handle it all by itself like we said relationships to go she ations timing there's a whole slew of important questions that science doesn't even consider itself with because we can't define the mind we can't define intuition there's all of these things that we can't define scientifically these are the things where we need the most help so that's that's basically what it's for protesting in grade two that is to paul you've shared some amazing stories about readings but me on that first reading you had were there other ones that made you laughter surprised you oh i've had so many i couldn't i couldn't even tell you i mean i don't use the eating that often i only use it about once a month i only use it when i have a problem that logic can't handle but i've gotten a lot of interesting responses and i tell you this i can't name one really funny one some of them they've cracked me up pretty good but i can tell you that it has helped me think outside the box so many times in it my attitude is if it gives me one new idea if it gives me one new thought it's done its job and that's that really can be helpful because we usually think in black and white terms you know we're going to we usually think we only have two choices and i like to say we always have more than two choices we just don't always see the third one and the iching is there to provide some ideas for us along those lines wonderful would thank you so much paul for joining us today thank you for having me it's been a pleasure you can learn more about divination at our website at new connection journal dot com join us next time my new connection where you can tune in and grow