I Ching Insights

Taoists practicing in the 24 points of the solar term

I have also added a solar term calendar to the home page.
Be sure to set your time zone and location to ensure accurate time calculation.

You can instantly see where we are in the solar year and relate your practice directly to the Heaven and Earthly energy relating to that time. Watch carefully at the major changes (equinoxes and solstices).

See Kathy Li's article on the Long Men Pai web site for more details:
http://www.longmenpai.com/forum/showthread.php?98-Taoists-practicing-in-the-24-points-of-solar-term

Hsien Tien Method page upgraded

The Hsien Tien method of accessing the I Ching is the most popular page on the Energy Master site by significant margin. I recently updated the page and method to include the option of correcting the calculation for your local time zone. The ancient Chinese were extremely precise in their time calculations. All official time related to one reference in the imperial capital, and even today, China lives under one time zone (+8) and Chinese are used to there being an 'official' time and a 'local time'. Local time is Sun time. The time the sun is highest in the sky and directly south is local noon. Taoists use local noon for all astrological and biological calculations. The possessed incredibly accurate solar water clocks in relative antiquity and could easily determine longitude to great accuracy before western civilization had even primitive time-keeping.

Previously, the Hsien Tien method calculation used Bejing time. Now you have the option of using your local time ( like a Taoist, or Imperial time, like a Confusian ). For the original method, set your time zone to 8 West(+). That's exactly 12 hours difference from my local time in zone 4 E(-) and a completely different hexagram. After all it's approaching midnight in Bejing at the moment while it's still before noon here.

This is a long standing issue with Chinese astrologers I have met, who in preparing a chart want only to know what time it was in Bejing when you were born. The Imperial powers did not have that level of control over the Taoists by any means.

New Features Added

The updated main page now includes a local time calculator ( thanks to Google and the GeoCoder) and a graphic display of the local hour according to the Taoist 12 2 hour segments that make up the 24 hour daily cycle.

The displayed hour will be correct for your location when you enter your Country and City.
If you have a postal code entering that will often correct the calculation by a few seconds.

Local Sun Time will be 12:00 noon at your location when the sun is actually crossing your local meridian ( ie, true local noon).

In the Long Men Pai, Complete Reality tradition, the shen returns at the moment of the change of the two hour period. There are twelve of these moments each day. These will occur locally when your sun time is exactly on the odd hours. The 'living midnight' usually refers to the beginning of the hour of tzu, ( 11:00 pm). In stillness, the subtle return of the shen in one of it's many forms marks the 'huo tzu' or living hour of the eternal return.

To continually see the corrected time, you must refresh the display. ( F5 on a PC)

By observing the clock time (right under the time zone tool) when the sun time is exactly on the hour, you will see the exact difference so you will then know, for me, here at my location, the transit of the hourly meridian takes place at so many minutes and seconds before or after the hour. You may then notice in your meditation an event like a block of wood being struck, a gong, or other time marker. Glance gently at the clock. Was the calculation correct?

New Life for an old friend

If you are having trouble accessing an existing account, my apologies. Some upgrading to the logon and subscription requirements have resulted in a numer of accounts being deleted. This was necessary where insufficiant information was present to calculate an accurate reading. This has now stabilized.

If you cannot access your reading, please simply recreate your profile using the updated interface. This will ensure all required information is present, and result in more accurate and consistent readings. Please be caeful to get your birth longitude and time zone correct. Even with correct and accurate birth times, without the remaining data, significant errors can occur.
The profile entry for includes a link to an on-line resource with excellent tools for determining the longitude, time zone and daylight savings times for practically every city in the world.

You can now edit your reading profile (including changing your password), so if you believe your original profile needs updating, or if you cannot remember what data you entered, you are now able to review and update all the information provided.

I have updated the subscription date for all existing members until the end of 2008. You will be able to view your daily hexagram every day for that period. I will be starting an email subscription program, where for a minimum yearly fee, you can receive your daily hexagram and brief analysis every day by email. This service will include season tips and reminders about important energy change dates.

On the Book of Balance and Harmony

Changeless Change and changing change.

As part of this year's Asian trip, I've decided to seek new insight from The Book of Balance and Harmony, a perenial source of inspiration into the inner design and meaning of the I. I have the standard Cleary edition, worn and a little marked up after 14 years of constant attention Many of my earlier comments in the margin relate to correspondances to the Kan and Li practice as taught in the Mantak Chia's Healing Tao (now Universal Tao). On this re-reading, these relationships certainly still apply however new more direct meanings are now apparent.

It is the time of the winter solstice. The great yin culminates. The first true yang arises. Gather it quickly.

The origins of Energy Master

I started working on Energy Master in 1989. At that time I had a 386 and Turbo Pascal 5. I wanted an easier way to do the tedious calculations required to get an I Ching horoscope using W.K. Chu's Rational Number method as described in his "The Astrology of the I Ching". Seemed like a simple enough undertaking at the time. Years passed before the original Energy Master 2.21 for DOS was released. There were periods of intense effort. In 1992 I was working in Vancouver for 6 months, away from home with lots of off hours time on my hands. This was the first big push. A year later it was St. John NB for another 4 months and by that time I was pretty much done. That silly little DOS app had a complete graphical user interface complete with mouse support, SVGA suport, graphical printer support and auto generation of web page reports. Then Win95 came along and all those speciality drivers compiled into the code killed the whole thing. I fiddled around and rewrote about 2/3 of EM in Java. That was a steep learning curve, but calendar support and other graphical goodies were a real attraction. I got to the daily hexagram part of the code (a black hole) and bogged down. I also had to start earning my living on-line as I was done with marine design. Slowly through the late 90's I built an on-line presence for EM, and fiddled with PerlTk, the graphical toolkit for perl. This made sense because I had extensive perl exerience on the web by that time, and Activestate had released the PDK (Perl Development Kit). This made it possible to distribute a PerlTk application as a Windows executable. No need for perl (or Tk) on the target machine. No module bloat, just a clean working app. So EMTk is still under development, but one offshoot was the development of related modules to support a higher value EM version on-line. This is what you see here. You have about 90% of the original Energy Master, on-line and free. Just create a profile and log on.

Energy Master site rebuilt

It's taken months, not all of them productive, to restore the basic Energy Master web functionality. I used the opportunity to move everything into one interface at Energy-Master.com. The I Ching browser, Energy Master itself, the Hsien Tien hexagram and the compatibilty reports. Still lots of look-and-feel stuff to clean up.
I added the blog because I want to explain (gradually) the origins and current configuration of the Energy Master interface and how to use it. It has been so useful to me in my practice that I want to share this.