Reading Between the Lines

Part of my mission in developing the IChingPortal has been to create a tool that can enhance people's street smarts and inner savviness. To create a way to hone the fine skill of reading between the lines, and I want to do this in a way that is both educational and entertaining.

We find ourselves in a new environment today. Caught between two worlds right now, we're living in a post-COVID inflationary repercussion period, where the chickens of pandemic policy decisions, overspending, and massive deficits are coming home to roost. And then to top it off, we've been thrust into this  Aldous Huxley - Brave New World of AI, where big tech now threatens our livelihoods and we're basically being told - DEAL WITH IT! Other than going outside and touching some grass, what is the best way to deal with this? My method has increasingly been to read between the lines on everything. The institutions we once trusted have been devalued. It seems that not only are they no longer serving our best interests, they want to fleece us both fiscally and intellectually. Here is an example. About a week ago I wanted to do a deep dive on alternative treatments for cancer. I do not have cancer, but as a free-thinking individual, I have deep distrust of the health care system and wanted to do my own research. There was a Joe Rogan interview with Mel Gibson recently where he mentioned alternatives to chemo that worked for several friends of his friends with stage 4 cancer. So being curious, I went to Google and the various AI platforms, constructed a well-thought-out prompt, ready to go down the rabbit hole of alternative treatments. Well, lo and behold, I got the online version of HOW DARE YOU! Claude, ChatGPT, and a host of other platforms suddenly turned into Greta Thunberg. Terms like misinformation, unproven, and trust the science flooded my results and gave me nothing of value for what I wanted to find. But to be honest, I kind of knew those responses were coming because I read between the lines. Lawfare and institutional capture are slowly gnawing their way into our information flow. It's been happening for a while, but unfortunately, from my perspective, most people don't see this. For the record, Grok was the only platform that gave me everything I was searching for without any bullshit.

Becoming a Rebel in this Huxleian environment.

Thinking for yourself has become the new counterculture, the anti-establishment. I'm Gen X, and growing up in the 80s, I was fascinated with the late-60s hippie movement. I even bought the Freedom Rock CDs! But looking back in retrospect, the movement has faded into nostalgia and schtick, an endless play loop on classic rock radio. Those musical icons I adored from 50 years ago have now become angry curmudgeons who pulled their music from a platform because one guy questioned a government-sanctioned vaccine. The same people who preached peace and love became the mask Nazis during COVID, demanding vaccine passports. That's why I'm focusing on the I Ching to make my small lasting impact on the universe. It's been around for 3,000 years, has timeless wisdom, and can't be co-opted into a nostalgic boomer retrospective. And yes, I may be guilty of using the I Ching to promote my website, but my mission behind this has always been clear. Developing a method of using APIs and news feeds to give people a way to enhance their ability to read between the lines. What better way to be anti-establishment in today's world than to provide a tool that allows people to look at media from a removed perspective, to transcend the bias and the group think. To put the individual in a position where they are outside of the bubble looking over it. Giving in to the cynicism, the pessimism is a cop-out.  The cycle of negativity has always been spinning, it's the free thinkers who put their concepts and ideas to work who break free of its spell.

IChingPortal is a unique kind of platform that can be used effectively in navigating and extracting ancient wisdom from today's media landscape. It's a data-aggregation/divination mashup site, pulling in various APIs and news feeds from across the web and running them through the I Ching framework. It highlights each hexagram through a phrase and keyword association system. It's a system that revolves around filtering various web APIs and data feeds through the unique and inherent meanings of each of the 64 hexagrams. It's kind of like a data-driven litmus for the individual psyche, looking at the collective consciousness from different angles (I think Jung would have liked this site). I originally started this platform with the idea of using memes and GIFs as a way of interpreting the meanings of each hexagram. Memes and GIFs are some of the best ways of expressing human emotions online. My gut feeling was that they could do the same for I Ching. The original idea came to me after reading The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. Earlier this year, I started adding newsfeeds to the platform. The results were interesting in the way each hexagram was able to filter news and current events. So I started to build out different sections, like a traditional newspaper. That evolved into The I Ching Insight, a 24/7 news aggregator that shapes the news by each hexagram. As a result, I discovered I had created a unique system of reading between the lines when looking at news and various subjects presented in digital media.

The beauty of the I Ching is that its meanings are archetypical, yet they are perceived uniquely by the individual's psyche. By filtering news and information via this method, I've found that media bias becomes thought-provoking entertainment. Legacy media outlets become a left/right dog-chase-tail scenario while good writing and reporting stands out. Reading between the lines becomes a game of viewing language and the way it is constructed to influence and shape opinion. The I Ching Insight pulls in thousands of news, blog, and website feeds narrowed down to specific sections (News, Business, Sports, etc.). AI helped in the discovery process, but curation is all human. So you won't find a partisan bent here. I pull in from all angles - left, right, independent, and many more interesting publications that don't touch the political sphere. Which brings me back to the thesis of this post: reading between the lines. The most surprising aspect I've found since I launched The I Ching Insight is that the randomness of the news cycle, filtered through the I Ching, has been serving me a unique array of articles and news that I would never get if I stayed inside my traditional media bubble. So give it a try and let me know if this method of reading between the lines gives you a new perspective on the world.