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A series based on Philip K. Dick's novel (1962).
Philip Kindred Dick was a Northamerican science fiction writer, from Chicago, Illinois (b. 1928, d. 1982, Sagittarius). He wrote several novels and much more brief stories, among them Solar Lottery (1955), The Man in the High Castle (1962), We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
Do Androids...? and We Can Remember... were adapted to film screen and became better known as Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott) and Total recall (1990, by Paul Verhoeven). The author received the Hugo Award for The Man..., which was either rewritten as a TV series to be produced and released by Amazon, although more than 40 years after the novel was written (2015). Dick told he used to toss coins for writing the book, and he included the answers as script predictions and decisions the characters made after they asked the oracle what to do. So the book was partially written by I Ching!
The novel is a historical fiction where the USA lost the World War IInd in the XX c. and, instead, Japan and Germany won. Japan have even taken control of the US West coast, and Germany of the East coast, while a dangerous noman's land remained in the middle area, called the Neutral Zone (Italy is not mentioned). In the TV version, the whole narration was displayed during four seasons although it included just a few questions to I Ching, and not all those the author mentioned in the original book. Only the last season's first episode was entitled "The Hexagram 64". Anyway, even though not all of the questions became a TV scene, the very story tells of simultaneous realities, some alternatives to the end of the War mentioned before, circumstances playing as chances to be taken or not. Oracular readings are a way to read those chances (a term used as a way to refer to times-spaces).
At the time of asking an oracle, different chances are available in the opened space. Those who don't see the oracular value of the moment, ignore physical matter and think on random answers. Those who are at the oracular moment, think on time & opened space, at the present. The moment of fortune-telling includes all times and places, and relates them to the querent, who is in the past, present and future, at the moment. But space, chance, as displayed in a reading, is out of place and out of time, and this is not a metaphor. Space is not opened or closed, it just is. It seems to be opened when is translated in a reading, and it seems to be closed when is not sensed. But it's always there, with all of the available chances to be condensed here, when be possible to talk about before and after.
Asking an oracle is about getting the values of those chances and alternatives because they'll become concrete material circumstances only if characterized by values (coordinates, weight, shape, volume, mass, light/dark phases, etc.). In the end, it's all about reading densifying processes on Earth. For that purpose, the characters in the novel handle yarrow stalks, the traditional ancient way to assign symbolic values to the emerging paths. The entire process of grouping stalks (or tossing coins or any other physical medium utilized to translate values) is definitory since the read values are about to be condensed (expressed) in the world! Then, some chances won't be out of place and out of time anymore. They'll be located at a place, while people wake up, move and rest, and hours pass by.
If you're not acquainted with the traditional performing technique, it's explained in Moon, time and I Ching, in this website.
The same logic can be appreciated in Tarot cards readings. Moon and fortune-telling is an article you'll surely find interesting!
Unlike chances, some physical characteristics are important at the time of forecasting facts and describing situations. A reader uses a mean to translate the available out-of-place time-matter into more densified expressions of it: the mean's physical characteristics (assigned by the reader) translate the very paths' values. Those grasped values are the oracular moment, the "text" to be accurately understood in the terms of the mean's owner. So, some chances finally acquire a physical dimension: energy paths are translated into numbers and symbolized by lines. The reader's expertise will later group them in bigrams, trigrams and hexagrams, and will understand them according to I Ching's worldview.
Every I Ching hexagram describes or predicts paths for the querent, at the moment of choosing stalks or tossing coins, a moment that is all of the moments. In the novel, those oracular moments are represented in several ways. The script takes place across different dimensions where the characters live in, as if they would have taken chances (predictions) and would have understood their situation in the oracle's terms. And, sometimes, those realities are physically interlaced: the characters can even access other dimensions by walking through physical gateways, which are at hidden locations and highly watched, since a wrong handling of the passage may disintegrate flesh and bones.
Amazon's photogram of The Man in the High Castle series.
Do you remember those stories from the XX c. about sea ships disappearing misteriously, to be found later with only dead bodies on board? Specially in the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean, people believe that the magnetism from the sinked ancient Atlantis might still be altering energy flows in the area.
Another way to represent oracular moments in the series is by gathering films. The novel's title specifically refers to Hawthorne Abendsen, a man who had joined the US Army Signal Corps during the War and recorded battles in the Pacific Ocean. After the US surrendered, Abendsen settled down in the Neutral Zone, where he saves films of different scenarios, some of them now actually turned into facts in the story, some of them still eventual, possibilities, chances, alternatives... How those scenes became initially observable and the way Abendsen produced those films remain unknown in the series. But he's The Man.
Amazon's photogram of The Man in the High Castle series.
I Ching becomes part of history in each time-space dimension, and connects the characters' personal circumstances to collective situations, since they're involved in movements to resist the invaders and in negotiations at high governmental spheres, so their decisions finally involve a lot of people. The characters ask for advice, predictions or simply a description of the situation. Some of the questions refer to diplomatic relations and business connections, and some others are of a more private kind. Some include quite specific terms, and some others allow a more generic (unspecific) answer. And even though the TV series doesn't include all of the oracular moments the book mentions, the entire series can be considered as a representation of the ways of fortune-telling. The following video is the official series' trailer, available on Amazon Prime.
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