In practice, I have found that most people value the I Ching for its ability to help in their relationships. The I Ching restores this - which is one reason why it is so constantly stimulating and challenging to consult. I know that this sounds like an extraordinary range of subjects, but I have a feeling that we respond in this way only because we have lost the connection between everyday life and spiritual practice. It's also been known to guide lawyers through important cases, offer very practical business advice, and help with investment decisions. I have seen the I Ching help to bring harmony to relationships, and deepen and strengthen spiritual practice, reassuring or challenging as the need arises. It brings deeper insight - and that in turn empowers you to make changes for the better. Its answers bring you into contact with something fundamental and unchanging, but at the same time absolutely, vividly connected to your present situation. The I Ching is simply an oracle: it answers your questions. This is a far better question than 'what can it do for me?' Whether you use Runes, Tarot, the I Ching - or indeed consult a psychic or a reader - the power actually to bring about change stays with you. The hexagrams are not so much static pictures as ways to move: Creating, Receiving and sustaining, Beginning, Learning, Waiting, Arguing. I Ching means 'Book of Changes', and change is really the one constant throughout the book.

A hexagram isn't just a convenient chapter heading - it's also a very simple, elegant picture of how the energy is flowing through the situation. And so you are pointed to a particular collection of texts - and, if one or more of your six lines is in the process of changing from solid to broken or vice versa, then there are also line texts to read, and the second hexagram that's formed after the lines have changed. All the translations will tell you how this works - it's absurdly simple. When you consult the I Ching, you build up a hexagram line by line according to the results of coin tosses or one of the other methods, such as sorting yarrow sticks or pulling marbles from a bag. These are the 64 hexagrams, which means simply a pile of six lines, either broken or solid. The I Ching as you buy it today will be a collection of texts - a wonderful mixture of imagery and advice, philosophy and poetry - divided into 64 'chapters'. There are so many ways to answer this one! The I Ching is the world's oldest oracle it's a book of Chinese wisdom it's the accumulated experience of over 2,500 years of diviners and sages, and beyond that of unimaginably ancient oral traditions it's the voice that has been offering people help and wise, genial guidance for generations.

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