The Sky Speaks — An Introduction to the I Ching for Astrologers — An Interview with Benebell Wen

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today I am going to be joined by Benebell Wen, the author of *The I Ching, The Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes*.

If you watch my channel regularly, then you know that I've been raving about Benebell's work. She is an absolutely amazing writer, author, thinker. I've been deep diving into her YouTube channel. Her work on the Tao and the I Ching are amazing. She's also into astrology, so just my kind of person.

For those of you who watch my work, you also know that for a long time on my channel, I occasionally incorporate the I Ching into the way that I deliver our talk for the day, and in a way that I kind of gather and organize my notes in the morning.

It was recently that I found this new translation of the I Ching, a really nice guide for people who may not know much about it or how to use it. Ever since then, I started diving into Benebell's work on YouTube, and have just been really excited to have her come on the show.

You guys know, I've been talking about the fact that she's going to come on for a while now, so I'm very excited that this is finally happening.

We're going to talk about the I Ching today and give you a sense of how to use it, what it is, where it comes from, and just have a good conversation about it. This is going to be ideal for people who want to go a little deeper with the I Ching, maybe want to take that next step, and get some tips for how to do that, as well as for people who have no idea what it is and where to get started.

We're also just going to see where the talk takes us, because Benebell knows a lot about Tao and astrology and stuff like that, too.

Alright, on that note, before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments and your reflections, all of that good stuff. I love hearing from you.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, which is nightlightastrology.com.

I'm going to keep promotions short for the day. Just know that when you are over there, be sure to click on the Events tab, because there are talks coming up. There are readings available. Our retreat to Mexico in June is happening pretty soon, so lots of good stuff to check out over there.

I'll keep it short because I don't want to waste time—I want to get Benebell on and chatting with her.

Benebell, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Benebell Wen
Hi, Adam.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, I'm so glad to have you. I've been raving about you to everyone on my channel for months now.

Since I found out—actually, it was a staff member at Nightlight who said, "I know you're really into the I Ching, have you read Benebell Wen's translation?" And I was like, "No."

There's so many translations, and you know when someone says something like that, I think, "Oh, there's a million, I'm sure I haven't read all of them." But then they stopped and they said, "You would really, really love this one."

I was like, "Okay, well, when someone says that, someone I trust that works at Nightlight, I'm going to check it out."

So I got it. I have the ebook version, I have the hard copy version, and I have the audible version, because there are different times in my life where it makes sense to be asking the I Ching a question. I often use an app on my phone to simulate a reading rather than having coins with me. So if I'm out somewhere, I may talk to the I Ching that way.

Now I can pull up your translation, which is a go-to for me, through Audible in my headphones, or through the PDF on the ebook. When I'm at my desk, I use the hard copy. I'm a huge fan.

I want to start here, just because there are a lot of people on my channel who know I use the I Ching but don't really know what it is. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about how the I Ching came into your life, and how would you describe it for total beginners?

Benebell Wen
I think it's always been in my life. I can't remember a time that I didn't sort of subconsciously know it existed.

When I was a very small kid, my bedroom was my dad's home office space. On his desk was always a copy of the I Ching. My mom saw it as a magical text. She would talk about how people who study and really understand the I Ching cultivate an ability to basically command different forces in the world and really learn to command control over their own life as well.

So there was both my father's rational perspective—he was a scientist—and my mom's more magical, superstitious perspective that came together.

When I was nine years old in Taiwan, the very first book that I wanted to get for myself was actually a copy of the I Ching. It was a translation side by side, English and Chinese.

So it's just always been in my life.

In terms of what it is—it's so hard now that you're into the I Ching to really explain what it is. But if you're asking me specifically, and you can't just Google or ask AI, how do you define the I Ching? I would say it's a telecommunications device between you and some aspect of your inner self that is connected to the Divinity, your perception of Divinity.

There's a seed within every one of us that's divine. And then there's you—your outward demeanor. It's very difficult to communicate with that inner, sort of primordial seed of divinity inside of you. So we have this tool that, for some reason, is able to help us connect to that piece of ourselves, or our perception of divinity, and then to have conversations with that inner self.

That's how I see the I Ching.

Adam Elenbaas
Sometimes people say it's the oldest of Chinese classics. Is it true that it is an ancient philosophical Chinese text? Is that basically a way of understanding where it got started?

Benebell Wen
It depends on who you ask, and how much of the mythology and legend you want to believe, and how much of it is historically backed.

I think most people, even historians, agree that it's likely to have dated back to 1046 BC, by all counts. We don't have a lot that disagrees with that.

It's in some way attributed to this historical King Wen, who brought about the fall of the Shang Dynasty that came before, and the rise of the Zhou Dynasty that his son became the first king or emperor of.

There's this belief that he took astrology and various systems of divination that were already in place at the time, and in some way put it together to create the I Ching. At the time, that was just the 64 hexagrams—the straight and dotted lines, the broken lines, the yin and yang lines.

You do eight by eight—the three trigrams, if you do the permutation of it, you get 64. He named all 64 and used these 64 named hexagrams as a divination system.

After him, the Duke of Zhou, his son, then wrote line text to connect to every single one of those 64 hexagrams. So we use the line text as our divination system.

Adam Elenbaas
And then there develops a huge, vast history of commentary around those texts as well. Is that accurate?

Benebell Wen
That's how it developed into a philosophy. You have millennia of commentary, commentators on what is the I Ching, what does it mean, what's it used for, what is its purpose, answering all these questions. Then develops various schools of philosophy around the I Ching.

Adam Elenbaas
I think for a certain population of people here in the Western United States, they may have come across the I Ching through Terence McKenna. Are you familiar with him?

He had these wild theories, and he was kind of a psychonaut. That was the first time I had ever heard about the I Ching. He had his own theories that were very specific, but he was someone who talked about casting it on the full moon.

I was listening to these talks as a young person trying psychedelics for the first time, and that was when I first heard about it. Through my exposure to Ayahuasca shamanism, I started meeting people who were actively using different systems of divination.

When I went to Peru and met other people from around the world who were going on a kind of pilgrimage to have healing experiences in the jungle with curanderos—and of course, the curanderos are living in the jungles, they're not using the I Ching—but the people I met were, from other places.

That's how it kind of came into my life, along with yoga and astrology. It was a door that opened for me at that time.

There have been a few moments where I can think of them—and I won't go into them because the stories are too complicated, it's hard to tell an I Ching story sometimes and how it makes sense and how it strikes like a bell, no pun intended.

The question I have, though: was there a point in time where, as more of an adult, you realized, "I'm going to dedicate a portion of my life to this, I'm going to write a text"? Did it become more real for you somehow? Was there an inflection moment where you became a more serious student of it? Do you see what I mean?

Benebell Wen
I would characterize it more as an inflection point around deciding to be more public about it. Deciding, I think maybe I want to share this with people, and maybe provide my perspective as one of many other options out there for people to access, take a look at, and see how they interact with it.

So it was, is it a private thing that I don't share with people, versus when did it become a public thing that I share with people?

It has always been a huge part of my life. Just like if you ask my father, the I Ching is a big part of his life. It was always one of the few selected books on his desk in his den. To this day, it's still on his home office desk. You think about a desk and how much space there is on it—why would you choose that one?

So it's always been part of my life, and I will always dedicate a part of my life to it.

But I think as I reached a point of seeing a need in this world for a voice that brought a little bit more of that mysticism, and also someone with the cultural, indigenous, native practice bringing in that cultural context to the I Ching, to the West—you don't see that as much.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, I love that. That's so rich.

One of the things I loved about your book was that you explore—and I highly recommend—when you're using the I Ching, you're going to want to cast it, you're going to want to use it, but it's really good to get to know a little bit of the history behind it.

Benebell's way of unpacking some of the history was truly unique compared to anything that I've read. Almost like this shamanic, animistic, and even more feminine side of the history that you brought out.

How did you get connected to that? Were you always aware of it? Did you have to discover that for yourself?

Benebell Wen
The stories are there.

When you talk about the various hexagrams, a lot of the hexagrams in Chinese culture connect to certain lore from the Zhou Dynasty or the Shang Dynasty. When you have the "Marrying Maiden," it's about a specific legend. A lot of the hexagrams talk about very specific legends and popular lore that most of Chinese history would have known those stories.

You see a hexagram—it's a lot like Tao at one point. A lot of the iconography spoke to virtues or mythologies and legends that everybody knew.

I think in modern times, we know less of it. We've sort of walked away from a lot of that cultural understanding of mythology. It's more obscure today. But there was a point in time when anybody saw a particular hexagram, they knew this was speaking to this particular concubine, this particular king.

I wanted to collect all of those stories from those old historical commentaries and bring them to the modern day public, because you don't see that as much. It's become obscure over the decades.

Adam Elenbaas
This is something I was surprised to learn.

I think some of the early texts I came across when I would get a reading and look at my hexagrams, studying the text, there would be Confucian commentary. What I really loved about your text was there was folk, almost talismanic and shamanic rituals and magic and medicine. It made me feel like I was living a couple thousand years ago, when people might have read this text and experienced it not in this super pure, scholarly, Confucian way—which I wasn't aware really existed until I read your text.

Benebell Wen
I'm glad, that makes me so happy to hear because that was my purpose, that was my objective.

I felt like—I mean, there are a lot of I actually very much admire and work with the more academic framing of it, and also being more conceptual and bringing in a lot of Confucianism into the I Ching. But I think there are other people who do that much better than I do. I don't need to produce that book. That's not the book that needs to come from me.

So when I came down to write and publish this book, I wanted to think about what most aligns with what I can provide and share with the world. For me, it was going to be that more mystical perspective. Also, how do native Taiwanese people and people in southern China actually practice this living text? How do they actually use it? How do the everyday people use it?

And how do I bridge that with the historical treatment of it as an exalted canonical text that was used by shamanic kings? How do you bridge that gap from the elite to the common man? How do you find a text that works for all of those groups of people?

Adam Elenbaas
It is so cool. I can't say enough about it.

My wife is an herbalist. She is the kind of person who loves ritual with plants, making them for specific purposes and specific ways, being conscious of when you make it. That kind of sensitivity between heaven and earth—you can just feel it in this text.

For me, that was a really unique experience as a reader and someone who's read a number of different translations over the years.

I guess one of the questions I have for you: you also ended up getting into astrology and Tao. It clearly seems like the I Ching came first in terms of your exposure to divinatory systems. But were you a teen? Were you older when Tao and astrology entered?

And a follow-up: what do you see the connection as? How can people who are into astrology think about the I Ching in terms of their relationship with astrology? How are they similar?

Benebell Wen
Oh, lots of questions there.

Tao came into my life around junior high. Then around college, I took a more serious deep dive into the Tao. I wanted to really understand the occult history of it, Western occultism, its role in Western occultism. The more esoteric facets of Tao became more of an interest to me and were highlighted during my college years.

Astrology, I got into after college, around law school. The reason I think it took me so long was because of pop astrology. When you say, "Oh, I'm a Libra," and leave it at that, or the Cosmo "this is your whatever for the month"—because that was my first impression of astrology, it took me a lot longer to get into.

Also, the same treatment—this is not a critique on Western aspects of astrology, Chinese astrology, I think people just love that fortune telling type astrology. Ba Zi was very fortune telling-ish to me. That wasn't what I wanted to do with divination systems.

For me, it was really about communion with something much higher and more exalted. So it took me a long time to really get into astrology. But then once I did, I realized that it was very similar to the I Ching.

In fact, when you look at the I Ching, a lot of it has to do with astrology. It's about looking at the lunar and solar cycles. If you think of the eight trigrams, the eight trigrams correspond with the Wu Ching, the five dynamic changing phases—like five elements, if you will—that drive the changes of the hexagrams.

Those five correspond with the five planets. When we say five planets, we're talking about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They correspond with those five Wu Ching changing dynamics.

So very much, what drives the changes that the I Ching is speaking to is what's happening in the world, what's happening in the cosmos. The I Ching is some way of capturing and diagramming what's actually happening in the macrocosmic world.

So they're very, very much connected, in my view.

Adam Elenbaas
And so flexible. It feels like I could get the same hexagram speaking to a different astrological transit several months apart, but that hexagram may still be completely appropriate for describing something that's at play in a planetary aspect that I might be trying to outline talking points for the channel.

I love that. It's so magical to me that it can speak that way.

Benebell Wen
I think it's because how one hexagram can play multiple roles, has multiple facets to it. There can be an archetypal energy that spans more than just one time period. It can sort of cross through several different transits, but then the energy shows up differently because of the different transits—just variations on the same theme that particular trigram or hexagram is speaking to.

Adam Elenbaas
It has—I always like to say that archetypes in astrology, if we're looking at an archetypal combination presented by two planets, we can think of it like a jewel, and we're turning that jewel and catching light bouncing off it on different angles of the face of the jewel.

For me, the I Ching has been so useful at helping me catch angles that I hadn't seen before, or that I wasn't thinking about. Has it ever worked like that for you, too, with Tao? Do you work with it that way?

Benebell Wen
Yeah, that's actually sort of my understanding of fundamentally how and why it works.

I think there's an intelligence, a super intelligence, inside each and every one of us. But the world biases living, a lot of the aspects of mundane life often mask that inner aspect of who we are. So these divination tools help us to unpack that, to finally be conscious of what you already know.

The hexagram or the I Ching reading that you did is just helping you to bring to the surface something you knew or intuited about a particular astrological reading deep down. But maybe something is blocking that knowledge. It has a wonderful way of helping to bring to the conscious level a lot of unconscious knowledge.

Adam Elenbaas
I love this so much. I am so excited to be having this conversation. I'm just so happy.

I know there's going to be people who are like, "I need the basics." Let's talk about what a hexagram is, what it's made of. I'm going to pull up an image and show people what one looks like, a basic drawing.

Could you—I'm going to pull one up, and maybe you could just kind of break down what we're looking at. I'll pull up hexagram 48. It feels like a good one for us to draw water from.

Okay, got it. A good one to draw water from, right?

I'm in Minneapolis, and there's been a lot of things happening here. I asked, "How can my channel and my work be of service?" and I got this hexagram. This was the primary hexagram. I could go into the lines and all that, but I love this hexagram. I'm a Cancer, so, you know.

Benebell Wen
The sound bite for this one is "the source of truth."

To answer your question, that's how I would answer it.

Adam Elenbaas
Oh, I love that. Totally. I absolutely love that.

Okay, so this is what a hexagram looks like, in case you've never seen one before. This one is sometimes called "The Well," but I think you have a different name for it. What do you call it in your text?

Benebell Wen
Fountainhead.

Adam Elenbaas
Fountainhead. I love that.

Let's just use this as an example. Tell us what these lines are. We're looking at—what are trigrams? Let's do that part first, and then maybe we'll move to a second question.

Benebell Wen
When you see the space, we'll call it the broken line, because that's how it's often described in English. The broken line represents yin energy.

There's the idea that everything in this world is coded in a binary—yin and yang only. So everything is zeros and ones, so to speak. It's the combination of those zeros and ones that creates different aspects of matter and reality.

When you see a broken line, it's yin. When you see the straight line, it's yang.

When you combine them into triplicities, you form hexagrams. We have to go back first. There's this idea of five dynamic changing phases—the idea of change. There's five ways or five phases of change, represented by wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

When you observe the world around you, both the skies, the heavens above, and also the changing seasons, the changing aspects of human life, those five drive the change into eight foundational elements. Those eight foundational elements are triplicities of yin and yang. There's a mathematical permutation down to how you get yin and yang down to triplicities, down to eight.

Once you get to the eight, what you do is—because you have that binary again, everything is stacked—you stack two trigrams together. Eight by eight equals 64. You get 64 hexagrams. That's why you get this image on screen.

Over the centuries, people either use the five dynamic changing phases or the trigrams to explain what this diagram itself means. That's one school of interpretation.

There's also line text that goes with each of these hexagrams. Every single line, all six lines, each one also has line text that dates back to the Zhou Dynasty. Other schools of interpretation say, "I'm just going to look at the story or the line text and read into what that line text tells us."

There's many different schools of interpretation. There isn't one right or one true way to read a hexagram.

Here, because what you have is water over wind. Over time, we have this idea of it representing a fountainhead, a well—something where you have to go deep down into the earth to find it, and then it comes up. Wind is energy, something that is pushing something up. You can see the water being pushed up to the surface. That's where you get this idea of well, or fountainhead.

Adam Elenbaas
I love that. That is so beautiful.

When you're reading Benebell's text—and we're going to talk in a minute about the method, because I want people to understand a little bit about that—you might cast the I Ching with coins or yarrow stalks, and there's some apps that do it. I will have to ask you how you feel about apps.

But anyway, you might get this in response to a question you ask, like, "How can my channel and my work right now be of service to the world?" That was my question when I got this hexagram.

I'll open this and read you what Benebell wrote about 48.

"Society may change, but people's primitive needs never do. Nourish the people's primitive needs. Failing to reach the depths of people's inner essentials will cause your undertaking to fall short. To succeed, reach deep into the people's hearts and deeper into the tempest. The situation at hand is much deeper, much more meaningful than you initially perceive it to be. Tensions arise from an ideological struggle, adversity and troubles. Take caution, keep the name of the Divine close by and at the ready, and invoke heaven in your times of need."

I put Benebell's text on my altar, which I show you guys every Monday, after I got this reading for the channel.

In the wake of some of the things that happened here in Minneapolis, there was a bunch of Aquarian transits. Some of the best feedback that I have gotten in at least a year came through really trying to name what was happening and speak to it the best I could, in terms of the astrology and everything.

A lot of people thought those episodes were particularly strong. They were hard for me, because these things that are happening stir up very strong reactions in people. It was a little scary, but it was this text that gave me some of the courage to make those episodes.

I wanted to use this as an example of just how practical it can be. That was such a straightforward reading for me in terms of having the courage to dig a little deeper and go a little deeper with some of the episodes in the astrology that was unfolding. That was right around when Pluto and Mars were conjoining in Aquarius recently.

There's more text here, and then there's individual lines.

My next question for you is: if you draw a hexagram, it could also be the case that it leads to a second hexagram, and that these individual lines also have text. Could you say something about that, so people have some context?

Benebell Wen
That gets into divination methods, and it can get contentious.

There's a lot of different ways to do readings, just like there's different types of tarot spreads. Sort of the canonical, what has really become an established, authoritative way of doing I Ching readings is a methodology that could potentially end up casting two hexagrams because you're observing changing lines.

The way the coins lay, or the way the yarrow stalks are counted, there's going to be what we call changing lines. It gets really complicated, as you know. But once you have the changing lines, it can lead to the transformation into a second hexagram.

Then you read the two. How you read the two, how you find bridges between the two, which lines are invoked because of the changing lines—there's many different traditions of how you interpret it. That's sort of where the second hexagram comes from.

A lot of really sort of home-baked indigenous fortune telling—if you go to the streets of Tainan and you see someone doing this—it can get very, very simplistic. The oracle message that I provide in the translations is often how perhaps a fortune teller might do a high-level summary to give you the high-level divination for one specific hexagram only.

I try to provide the different ways that I know diviners use the I Ching and provide the text for those many, many different methods of divination—and very specifically, divination.

Adam Elenbaas
And do some people just read one hexagram and they won't do changing lines either?

Benebell Wen
Yeah, absolutely.

One very popular way of just reading one hexagram only is if you're using it to—I don't like to use the word diagnose, because people start getting that in the medical profession—but if somebody has a problem and you go to a spirit medium, a psychic, a shaman who is going to be using the I Ching to, let's use air quotes, diagnose what the core problem of the situation is.

They might utilize a divination method that only produces a single hexagram. That single hexagram might also then help that medium or priest or priestess create a fu talisman, sigil, or create forms of cures—psychic or spiritual cures—to help you with that problem.

That's another very popular methodology for using just one hexagram.

Adam Elenbaas
That's so cool.

It's one thing I'm going to ask you about more in a minute: where people can learn and study. One thing that I've really struggled with is finding courses. It's hard to find classes. So we'll talk more about that in a little bit.

But going back just a second: when you have two hexagrams, because I know that people have actually asked this in the YouTube comment section when I've talked about, "This hexagram changed to this one. Does it mean this one happens and then this one, or does it mean this one happens and then this one could happen because there's some advice—do this or it'll break into that?"

How do you read the juxtaposition? Is there one typical way of reading it, or is the juxtaposition really open and flexible?

Benebell Wen
Two answers to that.

The first is: the practitioner presets it. You pre-program how the divination is going to be. Before you even start, all the power rests with the practitioner's intent. You say, "I set that this the way I'm about to do this divination method, this casting method, this is what the first hexagram is going to mean. This is what the changing hexagram, if one is produced, is going to mean."

You set that before you even start. You've created the skeleton, the program. And then you read consistent with the program that you have set. That's one approach to the changing hexagram.

Another one is a little bit more laissez faire. It's like, just throw it, whatever happens, happens. Once you see it, you just follow your intuition. Your intuition will guide you as to, "Okay, why are two hexagrams coming up right now? What does this mean? What's happening here?" Your intuition, because you've developed and honed it as a practitioner, can lead to the right answer for why things are falling the way they're falling in front of you.

Adam Elenbaas
I love that. I think strictly because I was not aware that the first option existed—I've been doing the second the whole time.

I would love to know more about, because my maybe my Capricorn moon, or my Saturn in Libra, is like, "Hey, give me the structures I can set beforehand." I really want to know about those. That is so cool.

Here's another question that I have.

When you're casting the I Ching, if you want to develop a relationship with the I Ching and get to know it, is there a way that you would—I don't know—what is a healthy I guess the question that I had formed prior to sitting down with you is: what does a healthy I Ching practice look like over time? Also, for beginners, what's a good way to start establishing? Because I feel like it's a conversation.

What do you think?

Benebell Wen
What is a healthy relationship? I think it really depends on the person. It's so hard to summarize or generalize.

I think it's just something that you dive into the deep end and you just start. You're going to make mistakes, you won't know what you're looking at, and that's okay. That's sort of life.

There are people who are really hard to read, and you just have to be open minded. Think about meeting someone that's really hard to read, but you know that they're a good person or someone you really want to get to know. What would you do? How do you get to know that person? How do you break down any barriers of communication between you and someone who speaks a very different language?

A lot of us have learned to build very strong, deep relationships, especially in a diverse culture now, with people who speak a totally different language. How do you break down barriers of communication—surface level communication—to speak heart to heart? I think if you think about how you approach that, you will be able to figure out how to have a relationship with the I Ching.

I also think, as a practitioner or as a medium learning many different systems, I find that the more—like astrology, Hermeticism, Taoism—the more you learn about the ways humanity have thought about life in the universe, and the more you try to understand how many different voices have tried to speak and express the divine, you are able to connect and see patterns.

You spot patterns. You see variations on themes. You really understand core archetypes. You see recurring archetypes. When you have that, it's much easier to understand the archetypes that the I Ching is speaking to, because it's universal at the end of the day.

Adam Elenbaas
Right, yeah. That's so nicely said.

I'm wondering, in your own relationship with the I Ching, but also historically—maybe there's two answers to this—do you see the I Ching as primarily kind of dialogical, conversational, instructive, or do you see it as predictive, or both? How do you know? One thing that I've struggled with is sometimes not knowing when it's which.

Benebell Wen
There's different schools of thought.

If you want to take a rationalist approach, there's this idea that the whole purpose of the I Ching is to be practical and to read temporal or worldly affairs. If I ask you a good question—you know when you read a barometer to see what temperature it is outside, and then it gives you the answer, what is the temperature outside? Or if you use a calculator and you plug in something and it gives you the result of something that you've typed in, who are you talking to? Are you having a conversation with somebody, or is it just a calculation methodology?

Some people see it as a calculation methodology.

Other people see it as a telecommunication device. Whether you want to see it as speaking to your inner divine, your higher self, or speaking to an externalized conception of deity—which a lot of people do utilize to have a better understanding of how they attune to the macrocosmic—that becomes very individual, by individual approach to how you want to talk about that conversation.

Adam Elenbaas
So in the history of its use, what I hear you saying is that all of these approaches have been utilized.

Benebell Wen
They've all been there. Seriously, they hate each other.

Adam Elenbaas
That's funny.

I have a bit of Gemini on my chart. I find they all seem to me like that common image of people who are blindfolded, touching the same elephant, describing different parts of it. It seems to me like it's that at times.

There are times where it feels like it's the calculus of energy, and it feels very dry and raw and in that objective way. I've found it very helpful. Other times I feel like I'm talking to God. Other times I feel like I'm conversing with something imminent just within me.

The fact that it can fluctuate, and does—to me, that is something about the richness of what's real, or the richness of what the I Ching is. Either way, I love it. I love that all of it's there. I couldn't imagine getting hateful about the different aspects of it.

Benebell Wen
Calculus is the mathematics of change.

In the Western world, you have the co-founders, Isaac Newton and Leibniz, who were the believed founders of calculus. There's connections between Leibniz looking at the I Ching, and the Pope was involved. There's a whole story there. I think in the book I have a section when I talk about the introduction of the I Ching to the Western world, sort of in the 1700s.

Adam Elenbaas
No, I remember, yes. I remember that part.

Benebell Wen
I actually feel like a lot of people, when you talk about people at the cutting edge of science and mathematics—because I know my own father was—they get deeply religious, or maybe the word is spiritual. They get very spiritual.

I think the more you deep dive into science or mathematics, at some point the lines really blur, because you do understand there's something spiritual about it. Also, if the spirituality of the divination system doesn't have some sort of methodological, mathematical, or scientific foundation to it, it's hard for me personally to then connect to it and feel like it's rooted in something real.

I do believe if something is true—like it's the true Tao, the true divine—it is going to be mathematically sound. I think the I Ching, for me, the diagrams, at least, prove it to me.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, totally.

There's a book that I read that's coming to my mind, called *The Master and His Emissary*. Have you ever heard of this book? I probably look into it after this call. It was so good. It's about the two hemispheres of the brain, and it's exactly what you're just saying—the logical and the objective and the subjective, however we want to talk about it.

I really think that's at the core of the I Ching, too. It's like the whole language is about this marriage of opposites, this interaction. I'm not sure what to call it.

Okay, a question that's total curiosity for me.

People who watch my channel know a while back I did a series called *The Tao Te Ching for Astrologers*. I just went through the texts and talked about how I thought some of the passages applied to living life with astrology. What do we have in common with this beautiful text?

At that point, I started wondering: is it safe to say that the I Ching is a Taoist text? Or does Taoism come—is it inspired by the I Ching? Is there one that comes before another? That's something I'm confused about.

Benebell Wen
Historically, the I Ching came before Taoism, and definitely before the institutionalizing of either Taoism or Confucianism.

The I Ching is from the Shang Dynasty, one of the three founding dynasties. It's very, very early on, pre-any of these schools of thought. I wouldn't say it originates in Taoism. What I would say is it inspires a lot of Taoist thought.

When you look at Taoism, a lot of it is inspired by what you see in the I Ching. A lot of the lines from the Tao Te Ching actually come from the I Ching. There's a lot of crossover between the I Ching and the lines in the Tao Te Ching, which came much later in time from the I Ching.

Over time, it became known as a Taoist text, mainly due to a lot of Taoist philosophers and also esoteric and mystical Taoism using the I Ching in their ritual practices and mystical practices. Because of that, it's known as a Taoist text.

But to be more accurate, it definitely predates Taoism.

Adam Elenbaas
That's so fascinating, because I've always thought that was true, but I didn't really know that until I was exposed to your work. You talk about this in your book.

There's another thing I wanted to ask about.

There is a goddess that you talk about invoking in relationship to the study of, or the cast of, the I Ching: the Lady of the Nine Heavens. Can we talk about her for a second? That was so interesting to me, and I would love for everyone to be able to hear about that for just a second.

Benebell Wen
Oh, there's so much to say. I don't even know where to start.

When we talk about esotericism, one of the frequently named divinities, or patron divinities, that come up in Taoist mysticism is the Lady, or the Mysterious Lady of the Nine Heavens. It doesn't translate well. It's very odd. One of the reasons for that is because the name that we use isn't a name like Bob or Adam or Benebell. It's actually an epithet.

She's a lady, or some sort of a maiden, some sort of spirit entity that came from the Nine Heavens, or the Ninth Heaven, however you want to interpret it.

There's this idea that there was this divinity that came throughout various legends that brought understanding of the mysteries to various shamanic kings and to various people of myth and lore to help them do something very, very important for humanity. She became connected to using the mysteries to do something productive and constructive for humanity.

Because of that, the more I personally worked with the oracle and had cultivated a relationship, it became, for me, a way of communion with the Lady of the Nine Heavens. It was my way of really connecting to the Goddess.

In fact, it was my relationship with the Goddess that inspired me, or motivated me, to make this public.

Adam Elenbaas
I love that. You can really feel that coming through your text. That is one of the reasons why it's my favorite.

I don't mean to demean or degrade any other text, but to have the voice of a feminine goddess presence in this text that, at times for me, has felt a little bit more rational and sort of intellectual—it could lean, at least in my understanding, towards something that feels a little bit more abstract and masculine. You infuse it with her presence.

I wanted to mention her, because that really touched me. That was really something.

I feel like, is there a way—a lot of people I know in the audience because of my channel and some of the work I do have taken an interest in the I Ching. I'm wondering, is there a way we basic people who are just getting to know her can bring her onto our altars in some way that's respectable? How can we touch base with her?

Benebell Wen
The reason I chose to publish this book—because I wasn't sure if I wanted to. From an author perspective, there's a lot of things that go into deciding what book to bring out into the world, what you want to do, how I saw my role.

What the I Ching for me was, was to connect to people who wanted to connect to the Lady of the Nine Heavens. This is my way of saying, "Hi, Adam. Adam, Lady of the Nine Heavens. Adam, good, good, see ya." And I walk away, and then you do have now a relationship.

That was my concept for the book itself. The oracle itself becomes a living oracle, and it's a tool for connecting people who want to connect with the Lady of the Nine Heavens with her directly.

Absolutely, that was my sole purpose for bringing this book into the world.

Adam Elenbaas
I didn't know how else to get her something on my altar—water, some food that I bring to my altar, candles, incense. So I just put your book on it, because I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna—she's in there."

Is it common for people? Is she someone—like in India, you see Ganesh, you see Shiva on family home altars, in temples. Is it common in Taiwan or China to see that?

Benebell Wen
Taiwan, southern parts of China, Southeast Asia—it is very big. There's a couple of huge, really well known touristy temples to the Lady of the Nine Heavens. So it's definitely a really big thing.

Over the centuries, at one point it was mainly martial artists, people who were into martial arts, warriors and soldiers, the generals, the military who were into her and invoked her for that. At some point, it was women who were experiencing difficult births who would invoke her.

Now, for various reasons, especially because of the lore that she descends from—a lot of mystics and people who are practitioners of various esoteric arts will have her as the patron deity.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, oh my gosh. I love this so much. I'm so excited.

Another thing that naturally I'm curious about: it seems like in order to get to know the I Ching, you would want to really deepen your relationship with it. Obviously you can start with the texts themselves, just read them and work with it, and that's what I've been doing for a long time.

But where can you go? Do you have any resources you would recommend for people who are like, "I want to understand how the changes work. I want to understand the trigrams. When I see thunder on thunder, I want to know how to think about that in terms of some of the underlying elemental things happening there." When you want to get down to that level, I don't know where to go, and I haven't known where to get to that level of understanding.

Your book does a great job, by the way, so I think that's fantastic. But if you want to go deep, there's tons of astrology courses, but there doesn't seem to be as much classroom material for the I Ching. Is this something that you offer? Or do you have resources that you would offer?

Benebell Wen
Yeah, I would love to offer. For me, it's more of a bandwidth issue. I don't have the time to create the courses and put the material or the content out there.

I tried my best to do that in the book—to give you the basic tools to understand what the five dynamic changing phases are, very helpful. I tried my best to provide that. You keep on referring back to those earlier chapters to understand how to deconstruct a hexagram.

I think there are a lot that go on in the Chinese language, in the Eastern world—courses and things like that. But in the Western world, it is really, really hard. It's hard to find material.

Unfortunately, I can't point to one thing. I think it's just about sourcing as much information as you can about the Wu Ching, the five dynamic changing phases, and also of the eight trigrams.

In every single page in the 64 hexagram section, I tell you exactly what the fundamental trigrams and the Wu Ching are. Just look it up, one by one. Look it up and understand what each of those components means, and just build your own meaning. I think that's the only way.

Adam Elenbaas
That is really helpful. I will tell you that I felt like I had plateaued with my understanding until I got your book. Now, because you're the only book that I found that does such a nice job with the trigrams, I am going a lot deeper.

Now it's making me want to go and enroll in I Ching universe university. Your book, to me, is just scratching an itch. It's so nice, so helpful.

Benebell Wen
One thing I do want to say, though.

If you think back to, let's say it's 500 BC, how did they come up with what everything means? Then you get into the 1100s, how did people from various parts and times know what things meant? Or did they kind of just make it up? Then certain figures became figures of authority. By sort of popular vote, we said, "Yeah, this person's right, and maybe this person's not as popular," etc.

What I'm trying to say is: I think we look for courses, or we try to find something because we're so unsure of our own connection with divinity and what is right for us. It comes from a place of insecurity that we're looking for someone to just tell us what to do or tell us what to think. I really want to encourage people to unpack that.

The only thing I would say is: cultivate a strong relationship with divinity. Know yourself really, really well, so you can discern between deception and source of truth. From there, you just have to really trust and use the hard way to understand what the hexagrams mean.

Instead of asking someone to tell you what to do, you really need to just do it the hard way.

Adam Elenbaas
Oh my God, that's like the advice I needed personally. I can't thank you enough for that.

Describing my relationship with this text—it started for me in 2008, so it's been a while now. It feels so dense. There's so much history, and it's coming from a culture and a tradition that is not my own. I feel pretty displaced from any culture aside from US culture, which is, what is it even?

Spiritually speaking, I was raised in the Christian church and departed from that way of life. I've been something of—I think of hexagram 56, the Wanderer, the Traveler. That archetype, spiritually, just wandering.

I have such reverence for these other traditions. There's been a hesitancy ever since leaving the Christian faith to feel like there's any place to stand. My dad was a pastor. That sense of having a place that you knew was yours—not in a possessive sense, but in a belonging sense.

My moon is in its exile in the ninth house in Capricorn. This feeling of being kind of a wanderer spiritually, connecting to traditions but never feeling like I'm on the inside of them, at home again—such a part of my life.

Over and over and over again, the teaching is always: trust that divinity is within you, trust that it'll speak to you and can speak through these other traditions, even if there's always a slight feeling of displacement at the same time. Hold that tension. You know what I mean?

Benebell Wen
I think a lot of spiritual practitioners, people who are brought here to walk the path that's not always the mundane, materialistic path, are always going to feel like the outsider looking in at somebody else's party.

I think there's a reason for that. If you are the popular one and you belong, it becomes very, very hard to leave the comfort of that and see the world as a bigger universe.

For those who are tapped to do something bigger—call it a curse, call it a blessing—it is to always feel like you don't belong. Because if you feel like you don't belong, it pushes you to wander. It pushes you to seek out answers and truths in many, many different, diverse and multicultural places. That's how you truly get to something universal and understand the macrocosmic.

If you didn't feel a lack of a sense of belonging, you would be so comfortable where you are, you would never go out into the world searching for answers.

I think that comes with the territory, curse or blessing, however you want to call it.

Adam Elenbaas
That leads me, Benebell, to thinking about an almost interfaith dialogue amongst divinatory traditions.

The more comfortable I get in astrology and I have a voice, I teach classes, and people put a certain amount of authority on me that I'm not even necessarily claiming—one of the things that has really helped me to take some of that off psychically has been to continually decenter myself in systems that I don't know as well. A different language, where I'm having to find myself and all sorts of new things in it. It really keeps that beginner's mind fresh in me.

The I Ching has always been like that for me. As I'm hearing you talk, I'm realizing, yeah, it needs to be, because it's something I go to regularly, outside of astrology, that kind of keeps me feeling like I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Did you have that experience when you started getting into Tao? Were you making a lot of connections to the I Ching? Did it feel like a totally foreign language? Do you feel pretty comfortable with it now?

Benebell Wen
I feel comfortable with it now.

Why I gravitated toward the Tao and also Western systems of astrology—when I grew up in Eastern systems of astrology—I think it's just intuiting that there's something. Why is something so different, in a completely different language, using different vocabulary, a different syntactical or grammar system, feel like home? Why does it resonate so much with the things that I know? How do I reconcile these two to understand something universal in what's going on with all of humanity?

Because I found that seeing something so far outside my comfort zone, but then seeing something home about it and being able to bridge those connections, is why I gravitated towards so many different esoteric or divinatory systems. It reinforced my faith and also my understanding of my own systems that I kind of grew up in.

That's where my fascination for other systems comes from. It's to understand my own system.

Adam Elenbaas
This is maybe a very simple question. You grew up with the I Ching. Do a lot of people in Taiwan or South China—if I'm remembering where you were referring to earlier—do a lot of people grow up with a kind of faith tradition? Is it Taoism? Is it the I Ching itself? Does it replace a religious path? Does it walk alongside something like Buddhism? Does it go along with some kind of more religious kind of path, or does it kind of act as a standalone folk magic tradition? How does that work?

Benebell Wen
That's a tough question to answer because of the politics and the history in that region.

Because of the Cultural Revolution and mainland China becoming communistic, there was a period where they really discouraged folk magic. The idols, everything was burned. You really had to divorce yourself from anything that was folk magic or too religious.

Because of that, it became a lot more secular, atheistic. You don't see it as much on the mainland. A lot of these folk practices ended up getting preserved by the Han ethnic group outside of China. So you're talking about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Southeast Asia, even Indonesia. That's really where you see the practice continuing.

Things pre-Cultural Revolution in China is one way. Things post-Cultural Revolution in China is one way. And things of those who escaped China into the other parts and informed diasporas across Asia is another way.

Prior to that, it got mixed and matched with Confucianism—because Confucianism, in some parts of history, became religious—with Mahayana Buddhism as well. There's also a lot of mixing you'll see, especially in Taiwan, of the I Ching and Catholicism.

Adam Elenbaas
Oh, interesting.

When I was a kid, one of the very first things that started drawing me in the direction of divination as a life path eventually was because my dad was the minister. I developed this habit when I was in junior high. He would always leave his keys to the church out on a table in the kitchen. I got old enough, I would sneak out, take his keys, and go into the church at night by myself and just kind of hang out in there.

There was one night—I had no conception of what bibliomancy was—but I was sitting in a pew by myself in the church, just hanging around. I would open to random pages.

Even now, when I look at the biblical history—I had a friend many years ago when I was just getting started in New York City, with a mystical Jewish background. He talked about this as well. The biblical texts, if we think about them holistically, Old and New Testament, have many examples of things that are pretty mystical going on. We could even describe them as divinatory, while in other spots it appears like they're anti-divination.

That's really interesting. I always find it interesting how people seem to still reach for that kind of exchange, that mantic, that oracular. Even as a kid, I was seeking it without knowing exactly what it was.

Benebell Wen
It's funny, the I Ching is exactly the same way.

There are periods in our history as well where people were anti—people who were huge proponents of the I Ching, well-known philosophers, that were anti-divination. But I think we have to talk about what that means. They were more anti fortune telling, or anti using it to try to predict the future, or try to know something beyond the capacity of the human brain. That feeling they were against it, but they were like, "Oh, we love the I Ching."

We have to really remember it's not a monolith. You have so many different, diverse, and often conflicting voices trying to speak for the I Ching or saying they know what the I Ching is all about.

Adam Elenbaas
I so appreciate your sensitivity around gatekeeping with the I Ching. It is so warm, so welcoming, so encouraging. It's a really good thing to do, because a lot of these sources of wisdom that are so rich and can give so much—people end up getting driven away from them because of the gatekeeping, who has the power or authority over things that really were meant to have a personal connection with, like you said.

I just really appreciate you coming on and talking about the I Ching.

Last question—and your book certainly covers this as well—but what does casting the I Ching actually look like? If someone were to say, "What do I do? Do I come up with a question?" What does the actual procedure look like? Describe it briefly. I'm going to give some resources for people to a couple of online apps where they could do it as well. Your book describes it, but maybe just go over that for people so they know something very practical about it.

Benebell Wen
There's many different approaches.

The three coin toss is the easiest. The idea is some form of calculation method that bridges finding a way to reach a sense of altered state of consciousness and also using statistics, probability, and just math. You sort of smash the two concepts together, and that's where you devise all these specific tangible divination methodologies.

There's this idea that for a divination method for the I Ching to work, it has to have some sort of probabilistic or statistical intelligence to it.

One way we do that is with the three coin toss. You take three coins, toss them six times. Every single time you toss them, it produces a yin or a yang line. If it's all three tails or all three heads, then it's a changing line. That's how you cast.

It's very hard to explain over a podcast, but essentially it's something like that. It's a divination method where you then build a six-line hexagram of yin and yang lines based on your probabilistic divination method. You find that hexagram inside the oracle, the book, and then you read the line text.

That's one approach. Some people will just look at the diagram itself and scry into it for the meaning, because they know what the trigrams mean and what the dynamic changing phases mean. Other people will rely on the line text. You can also rely on commentaries. A big part of divination is to also rely on the commentaries about each of the 64 hexagrams.

That's sort of the I Ching in a nutshell.

Adam Elenbaas
Would you say it's important to sit with and form the question that you're going to ask? Is there any advice you have in terms of how to approach it with a question?

Benebell Wen
Absolutely. But I think instead of giving instruction, I say just throw people into the deep end.

Asking a couple of garbage questions and getting garbage answers is part of the process. You have to kind of go through the growing pains of it. "Oh, okay, how I frame questions really matters." You start to build that relationship of, "Okay, now I know how to craft a question."

People from the Tao world, from a lot of Western divination traditions, know the importance of phrasing and crafting a question so that it can optimize the type of answer in a way that's going to actually be revelatory for themselves. You learn that very quickly—that you have to learn how to craft a question.

Then the thing with the I Ching: if you read the actual translations, the line text, it's very, very sparse. It's like, "The ox with the horns, locked. The ox's horns crash into a fence." Full stop. You're like, "What does that mean?" There's commentaries to help you understand what the horns crash into a fence and get stuck means.

Or, "The melon has fallen off the wagon." That's literally what you get. The melon has fallen off the wagon. Okay, I don't know what that is, because I'm asking about my career. What does my career have to do with a melon?

Learning to sit with it—what I love about the I Ching is it doesn't give you the answer. It teaches you to find the answer for yourself. A big part of the divinatory process is looking inside, meditating and reflecting, and trying to critically analyze the result for yourself.

Adam Elenbaas
Absolutely. One of the things I noticed—this is a little meta or whatever—but sometimes it's in how I'm perceiving what I think it said in a reading, a hexagram. Over a day or two of sitting with it, all of a sudden I'll see it in a different way, and then I'll realize that my misperception for the past two days was a part of the answer I needed.

It's just wild, man. I just love it so much.

I don't want to take up too much of your time. We're at a little over an hour. I want to tell people how they can continue connecting with you. I'm going to plug your book, your website, your YouTube channel.

First of all, let's start with your YouTube channel. You can find Benebell Wen on her YouTube channel. What kinds of—because there's a lot of really cool content on your channel. There's the I Ching, but then there's a lot more. Could you talk a little bit about what kind of stuff people will find on your YouTube channel?

Benebell Wen
A lot of Taoist mysticism, a lot of esoteric Tao approaches to Tao. But I also like to talk about different ways of approaching different divination systems.

Sometimes I don't talk about myself. It's more of a mouthpiece. "I go look at this book, or look at this deck, or look at this whatever," and talk about other approaches and historical ways to look at old mystical traditions.

Adam Elenbaas
I told Benebell before we got started, I go to the gym pretty regularly. When I hit the elliptical or the treadmill, I just watch. I've watched a lot of your channel now, because I'll be on for 30 minutes, 35 minutes, and I'll get through one of yours, and then again. I love it. I can't speak highly enough.

Obviously we all have to find spiritual information that really speaks to us. But I think what I can say safely is that if you like my channel and you watch regularly, there's a really good chance that you're gonna like Benebell, because she feels like a kindred spirit to me.

Benebell, you also have a website, benebellwen.com. What can we find there?

Benebell Wen
There are a lot of free downloads. I try to make as much of it free or budget friendly and as accessible as I can for the public. Just use the search bar. That's all I can say. Use the search bar. Type in something that you're interested in and see what pulls up from my website.

Adam Elenbaas
Absolutely.

I would love to see you start a non-gatekeepy Benebell University for the I Ching, because that would be so awesome, and I would be the first to enroll.

This is my, now, my favorite translation. Let me just show everyone. This is Benebell's book, *I Ching, The Oracle: A Practical Guide to the Book of Changes*. There is history and practical teachings about the trigrams. Then you'll find this gray part in the middle, the gray pages, where you can get the hexagrams and the line texts. It is so amazing.

There's more, too. Talking about ancient Chinese shamanism. It's just like, boom. This is so good. I think so many more people need to know about this book who are into esotericism and divination and all the good things.

Thank you so much for coming and being here, and just gracing us with all this wonderful information. We really, really appreciate it.

Benebell Wen
I enjoyed being here.

Adam Elenbaas
For sure. So if you want to stay in touch with Benebell again, YouTube is Benebell Wen, website benebellwen.com.

Let's stay in touch, Benebell. We'd love to have you back sometime, catch up, talk more about other things you're up to.

Benebell Wen
Awesome, for sure.

Adam Elenbaas
Alright, take it easy, everyone. Bye.