As I've come to see it, the Yijing, particularly the Zhouyi, is so archaic and multilayered, with so many reinterpretations through the ages, that it is impossible to reconstruct its "original meaning" . If you look at various classic translations, like Wilhelm-Baynes and Legge, and also some more recent scholarly translations like Lynn, you'll notice that some passages have radically different translations even though the underlying text is the same. Just look at the titles of the hexagrams, which consist of one or two characters that often have complicated histories, resulting in translations that seem completely unrelated. Having dug down into the etymology/ philology/ commentarial tradition of some of these passages, I've found that there is usually a good evidence-based argument to be made for each of the variant readings, even though they can't both be right (or can they?), so that it's very hard to decide which is actually correct, or even if it is possible to say there is a correct one.
The Great Commentary and other important commentarial material was written by people already several centuries away from the text's origin, in a really different social and political climate, and different concerns.
There is already an interpretative tension embedded in the text itself with the judgment and image texts and this later blooms into rival schools of interpretation, most importantly the image-number and meaning-principle schools. The modern traditions of interpretation more or less descend from ways of thought that coalesced in the Song dynasty. So with the Wilhelm I Ching, for instance, we get an excellent presentation of a Qing dynasty scholars' reading of the book that ultimately traces back to Zhu Xi and his school. This Confucian reading is the one westerners know best. In China itself the more popular mode of Yijing divination is the plum blossom method which is attributed to the Song philosopher Shao Yang, and which is very much in the image-number vein which largely ignores the text, focusing on the hexagram lines.
It might be worth noting that the yarrow stalk method, as we have it, which is often presented as the older or more traditional method, is actually a reconstruction by Zhu Xi based on some educated guesses. The original yarrow stalk method was lost in the mists of time and the coin method is actually older than Zhu Xi's.
My point in saying all this is not to say Yijing divination is hopelessly ambiguous but that you more or less have to decide for yourself which interpretive mode works best.
Conversely I did the Latter of Ascent ritual from the GoM book series and I got generally positive responses and good internal feelings from the Angels telling me everything's fine.
Of course I trust the Angels more but there's a hint of doubt and fear inside of me, how do you guys rectify something like this? Thanks in advance.
The question here is, who do you think is speaking through the Yijing? Generally it is not held to be book speaking for itself but the ritual voice of gods and spirits. For the Bronze age diviners that would be, perhaps, the Zhou dynasty ancestors; for Confucians it was the deified sages (especially Yao, Shun, Yu, and the putative author of the hexagrams, Fu Xi). So if you think you are getting conflicting methods from other oracles, it may be because there are different entities with conflicting opinions.
That said, as someone else said, Yijing interpretation is not usually about a simple “do this” or “don’t”, even if that might seem obvious from a bare reading of the text. It is more about where a given action or situation will lead and also how different outcomes may be obtained. Here the moving lines are key.
