Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
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The text notwithstanding, nor the received order of the hexagrams, the first thing to note about Sun is that while the upper trigram is still the purple mountain's majesty the lower has transformed from that of the raging abyss, which manifests at the foot of a mountain as an abundant spring, into the joyous lake. This is an easy extrapolation, one repeated 8 times throughout the cycle of cycles we see as we build and explore the hexagrams in what I would today call construction order or order of building light. Perhaps there was reason to submerge the cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels aspect of watching the hexagram grow from all yin to all yang, but when taking them in this order it is hard to miss. So today I digress and look for a moment at the trigrams each in turn.
K'un, Mother, all yin, Earth, receiving and nurturing all things (good and bad, if it needs repeating here.) This is binary zero.
Chen, youngest son, first light, "the arousing thunder", energy springing up from the earth. This is binary one.
K'an, the middle son, the gorge or abyss or ravine. In Meng/Youthful Folly it becomes an abundant spring. There is pressure and speed and even danger here, but a more manifest power than the potential of his younger brother. This is binary two.
Tui, the youngest daughter, joyous, the marsh or lake. Note that the six mixed trigrams take their gender from the odd line rather than the predominating lines. Combining the potential and shock of first light with the manifestation of the abyss we get a joyous lake. This is binary three.
Ken, the mountain, boundary, stillness, the oldest son. Where Chen is fleeting and evanescent but scintillating in its energy, Ken is the stately older brother, slow, placid, solid. The boundaries of the kingdom are set in nature by the existence of impassable mountain ranges, and Ken gives us that kind of manifest delineation, telling us, and keeping us, where we are. This is binary four.
Li, radiance, fire, brightness, the visual opposite or complement of her brother, K'an, she is a dark line of potential in the middle of two light lines of manifestation. This is binary five.
Sun, Wood and wind, the eldest daughter, with her receptive yin submerged beneath two ascendant lines of manifestation. This is binary six.
Ch'ien, Father, all male, all light, all manifest, no receptivity, all convex, no concave, making making making, never taking. This is binary seven, and completes the move from all dark to all light.
We will travel that cycle eight times, and each time we travel it we will visit it for eight sub-cycles. Hexagrams zero through seven have K'un as their top trigram, public face, conscious theme, outer hook, and in turn we contemplate this upper, outer, conscious state with each of the others in turn as the inner reality, then we do the same with Chen, the arousing as the outer, each of the others in turn as the inner. And so we go through the cycles within the cycles, the wheels within the wheels, and we attune ourselves to the ebb and flow of the light and the dark, knowing that neither is good or evil of itself but that our capacity to work for the good or suffer evil is predicated largely on our ability to discern the subtle differences between shades of grey.
That might be the most compelling view of the hexagrams. Where the peasant seeks a simple yes or no answer, a vision of the future as holding good or ill, evidenced by a simple single yin or yang, the seeker strives to encompass the difference between old yin, new yin, new yang and old yang, shown by two lines. But even this state of sagacity, encompassing twice as many distinctions as the prior level of development, is not enough, and so we add one more line, and now have eight gradations from absolute no to absolute yes and rather than mere flip-flopping alternation we are drawn to think of progression and cycle.
Did the ancients first try to encompass a 4 bit moral logic, four lines yielding 16 subtle shades of yes/no/maybe/maybe-not? Or did they instantly jump to the 6 bits of the hexagram by positing outer and inner and observing the cycles within the cycles? We know that the received texts offer analysis of so-called nuclear trigrams within hexagrams, so it is not far-fetched to think that at one point the ancients sought directly to distinguish 64 points from all dark to all light. But the easier way to achieve that goal is to observe them as the two chunks of outer and inner, upper and lower. Still, if we accept that challenge, of learning to discern the hexagrams as 8 cycles of 8, do we view it as simply a mnemonic to hold us steady as we learn to discern and distinguish the various arrays of energy more directly?
Back to Decrease. I've received this many times, and have always been a little off-put by the unevenness of the reading. I tend to hold to the parts that seem most essential, the reversals and reframes. Decrease is not always bad, the breath must go out before the next inhale can begin. But the Wilhelm/Baynes also says:
This is out and out decrease. If the foundations of a building are decreased in strength and the upper walls are strengthened, the whole structure loses its stability.
Frankly, that doesn't fit for me in the conversion of the inner trigram from spring to lake. The only decrease I see is one of pressure, from a gushing to an easier state of simply being, with the flow hidden from the casual eye. The Wilhelm/Baynes, contradicting itself, also says of this hexagram:
The lake at the foot of the mountain evaporates. In this way it decreases to the benefit of the mountain, which is enriched by its moisture...By this decrease of the lower powers of the psyche, the higher aspects of the soul are enriched.
Sympathetic as I am to that observation, it conflicts with the earlier metaphor about foundations, and it doesn't really flow from the image---evaporation isn't the first thing one thinks of when one thinks of lakes. And the moisture on the mountain probably comes less from such evaporation than from the same rains that feed the lake; the lake is the beneficiary of water that the mountain could not hold.
So I'm left at odds with the received text. Such is the arrogance of the self-taught, about which we read in other hexagrams. For now I close with the simple teaching device, that we are waltzing through the cycle of eight from K'un to Ch'ien, repeating each eight times, holding the outer constant while the inner cycles. Perhaps, on reaching 63, that is how I will cycle back down, holding the inner solid and letting the outer whirl through the cycles.
The mountain sets the boundaries, the lake brings joy. Soon it will change.
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Original here:
This must be our stance, our language, our work. We must shun the language proffered by Horowitz. We must not give further circulation to his hateful, hate provoking phraseology, we need not repeat the words or otherwise do his advertising and reinforcement for him. It is enough that we choose the week of October 22 as our week of Loving Islam. If this concept isn't self-evident then this wiki is a good place to discuss it further. The Horowitz action is an attempt to pick a fight. If we fight, he and his win.
We must instead love.
We first must each love our God our way. We must each love our faith, our people, ourselves. Then we must love our neighbors as ourselves, however that rule might be expressed in our particular faith. And then, during the week of the Horowitz action, we must visibly, publicly, lovingly love Islam and our Muslim brothers and sisters. We must not fight fire with fire; water works so much better. We must starve this fire of fuel and oxygen and even heat if possible. By loving Islam.
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From the Wilhelm/Baynes:
...If mistrustful or unintelligent questioning is kept up, it serves only to annoy the teacher...and the chun tzu fosters character by thoroughness in all acts...the spring escapes stagnation by flowing on and filling up all the hollow places in its path...confusion with subsequent enlightenment...
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers....danger and standstill, this is folly...To strengthen what is right in a fool is a holy task...
13 in the Mawangdui..."beneficial to determine...the Karcher is so removed from the European assumptions, no hint of the first Tarot in its reading...arguably closer to Rumi's "Wean yourself,"
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed
Listen to the answer
There is no "other world."
I only know what I have experienced.
You must be hallucinating
Balkin almost makes it "out of the mouths of babes", but continues with "The wisdom that lies beneath the surface and can be brought out through education and proper training" and "Remember that your goal is to learn, not show off what you already know."
Then Professor Balkin sidetracks into theorizing about whether the references to importuning the oracle should be taken literally, "...there is no evidence that Meng is more likely to appear through random selection than is any other hexagram." I eschew the coins in no small part because there is much less of the random in the stalks, much more of the meditative, arbitrary, unconscious. A skilled diviner could indeed manipulate the stalks with relative ease, like forcing a card in a magic trick, and cause any given result. This is not that case with the coins. The possibility of such forcing, however, is part of what makes the stalk technique superior, not because it can be done, but because of the delicacy of approach required to avoid doing it, the intentional putting into abeyance one's ability to hear what one wishes to hear, similar to the 18 iterations of the cycle of not knowing (will the first half bundle yield big or little?) to knowing (given the results of the first bundle, the second bundle results serve as a check of our work and hold no mystery.) Balancing these states of certainty and uncertainty, willfulness and acceptance, such balancing is itself valuable, and cannot be acquired through flipping coins.
The reference to importuning, also, need not come on multiple consultations; it serves at an initial consultation to exhort the supplicant to take heed of the first casting, for it is better to meditate on the hexagram that comes up than to keep fishing for one that makes easy sense to us. If the first answer doesn't make sense supplementing it with more will often only cloud the issue. Recall, however, that there is at least one hexagram which, in essence says, "Ask again." Balance and timing in all things. Soon it will change.
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Use the comments to say what you like. Click "writebacks", below, then the "Add comment" button. Name and email are required, as is the little reading test, all to save us from spam. Looking forward to it!
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I had quite unintentionally forsaken Language Log, mostly because I had come to rely over much on my rss reader and last time I checked Language Log's feed didn't play nice therein. Which, in turn, has me thinking about filtering effects of infrastructure choices on cognition. Enough for now to repeat the old "What you pay attention to determines what you miss", with the added thought that the technology you indulge will determine what you can, and thus do, pay attention to.
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I have been guilty of letting my political pursuits commandeer the majority of my time, and can't remember the last time I made a substantive addition to this site. Partly that's because I've been lazy, and the occasional post which would have arguably fit here ended up at Oblios Cap.
I got to thinking maybe I should try to find some feeds which could prompt more for this blog. So I tried this google search. Let me ask: When was the last time you had a search return only 55 results?
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Outside boundaries, thunder within. Stoic and calm in one's presentation to the world, but electrified power in one's inner world, driving one to ever new achievement.
Like the previous hexagram, the pattern here begs to be interpreted as a whole rather than merely as the sum of the two trigrams, but such interpretations are suspect despite being the focus of the received text. Perhaps it is a difference between a particulate representation of language such as English versus a pictographic representation of language such as Chinese. I am increasingly inclined to think the hexagram names started life as mnemonics and only accreted their interpretive meanings after students "lost quotes" on the process. But I have similar views about mnemonics in Western tradition too, and the magic that makes something memorable can seem more important than that which was to be remembered. We are good at losing track of the levels at which we intended to operate.
If we wish to know what anyone is like, we have only to observe on whom he bestows his care and what sides of his own nature he cultivates and nourishes...tranquility keeps the words that come out of the mouth from exceeding proper measure, and keeps the food that goes into the mouth from exceeding its proper measure.
Terribly unimpressed by this hexagram as treated. The Willhelm/Baynes reading is barely a page of text, this despite the attractive memorability of the hexagram pattern. Ah, but the particulate, the elemental, the inner/outer of the trigrams. Today we see the value of starting with basics. Truly learn the trigrams and any reading is simple in terms of inner and outer.
This is also a good time to look at the "nuclear" trigrams, that is, the trigrams formed by lines 2-4 and 3-5. In this case they are both K'un, and so we get a "nuclear hexagram" of K'un as well. Despite my preference for the elementalistic analysis, I don't much like this term, "nuclear". Consider, then, that each hexagram is a manifest public trigram layered on top of a manifest private trigram, but in the building of the hexagram from the bottom up we pass through the inner or transitory trigrams traditionally called "nuclear". What really tickles me about this description is it seems to call for a new axis of movement for which I lack a word. Maybe it's because so much of the discussion is of binary events, inner outer, static or changing. But this view sees a total of four trigrams created as the six lines are determined, lines 1-3 being the base, the foundation, the most enduring and tangible core related to the essential self of the person for whom the casting is done. Lines 2-4 represent a transitional trigram, lower and thus older, closer to the source, the root of things than what follows, but removed from the "inner" trigram of lines 1-3. One could even take a four line reading and derive a hexagram from it using these two trigrams. But the addition of the fifth line permits analysis of a third trigram of lines 3-5, and allows of two more hexagrams, one consisting of the initial trigram under that of lines 3-5, another consisting of the trigram of lines 2-4 under that of lines 3-5. The first of these could be considered more strongly rooted in nature, being built on the first three lines, but the interaction of trigrams in the second could be considered in some ways more robust as there is more overlap of lines. Add the sixth line and now there are four trigrams from which to build no fewer than six trigram pairs, with the traditional pair from which we determine "the" hexagram arguably viewed as where the energy enters and departs into the world of the supplicant and the other five allowing for a sense of progression from entry to exit even where there are no changing lines. This, then, is the aspect which seems to call for a third dimension, a third distinction, something like the inner/outer and changing/static distinctions which is both and neither.
I. Space, my Lord, is height and breadth indefinitely prolonged.
STRANGER. Exactly: you see you do not even know what Space is. You think it is of Two Dimensions only; but I have come to announce to you a Third --- height, breadth, and length.
I. Your Lordship is pleased to be merry. We also speak of length and height, or breadth and thickness, thus denoting Two Dimensions by four names.
STRANGER. But I mean not only three names, but Three Dimensions.
I. Would your Lordship indicate or explain to me in what direction is the Third Dimension, unknown to me?
STRANGER. I came from it. It is up above and down below.
I. My Lord means seemingly that it is Northward and Southward.
STRANGER. I mean nothing of the kind. I mean a direction in which you cannot look, because you have no eye in your side.
(excerpted from E.A. Abbott's "Flatland")
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First, notice that from Resolution to Splitting apart we have only incremented by one, numerically, but that in this case the result is reversal of every line in the hexagram. I simply have not yet fully absorbed this phenomenon, having only recognized it recently. Resolution was binary numeral 31, the 32nd hexagram in the sequence from the all-open-lines of K'un as zero to the all-full-lines of Ch'ien as sixty-three. So it is not entirely inappropriate that these two hexagrams should be complements each of the other.
Splitting Apart is the first hexagram of eight which have K'en, the Mountain, Stillness, the Youngest Son at their head. It is only happenstance that the survey of hexagrams conducted by numerical increment yields a treatment of each of the 8 trigrams as the public face of 8 hexagrams. Yet another interesting arrangement would be to group the hexagrams by lower or inner trigram, looking, for instance, at all eight of the hexagrams with Tui as the inner trigram. For now we content ourselves with the survey we have started.
Splitting Apart, then, is K'en, Keeping Still, Mountain, above, as the outer or public face of the hexagram, and K'un, The Receptive, Earth below as the lower or inner or private face of the hexagram. At first blush this would seem natural and stable, for a mountain is but earth heaped up upon the earth. But that seems at odds with the title given this arrangement.
From the Wilhelm/Baynes:
The dark lines are about to mount upward and overthrow the last firm, light line by exerting a disintegrating influence on it. The inferior, dark forces overcome what is superior and strong, not by direct means, but by undermining it gradually and imperceptibly, so that it finally collapses.
The lines of the hexagram present the image of a house, the top line being the roof, and because the roof is being shattered the house collapses...The yin power pushes up ever more powerfully and is about to supplant the yang power altogether.
One hates to disagree with the masters, so one can only express confusion and failure to understand. But on this I am sure, there is a terrible mistake being made over and again with the multi-ordinal terms superior and inferior. By and large the Wilhelm/Baynes uses these terms within a Western conceptualization where white is Good and black is Evil, where light is God and dark is the Devil. But that is not the way of the yin and the yang. Superior and inferior apply to yin and yang only with respect to the notion of yang being above, as the sky, and yin being below, as the ground. Neither is worth a damn without the other, and evil comes either from neither or both, depending on the view, for it is failure to balance and live in harmony with the ebb and flow of each which brings misfortune. Just as we play indoors when it rains and outdoors when it is sunny, so too we learn to comport ourselves one way when yang is in ascendance and another when yin prevails. But instead of living by a simple, binary, sunny or rainy distinction the trigrams offer 8 different variations from all sun to all dark, and we combine those trigrams in pairs to give rise to the 64 hexagrams, again giving us 64 shades of grey ranging from the all dark of K'un at numerical zero to Ch'ien at numerical 63. The point being that readings such as the quote, above, really are out of place for a true and deep understanding of the principles of the I Ching. There is no struggle between yin and yang, that's a holdover of Western thinking in the minds of the translators or possibly even a corruption from earlier sources. But there can be no doubt, yin and yang are equals, and there is no struggle between them, only dance and delight from which all things rise. Without their dance nothing exists. This is not your Western "light/dark, God/Devil, good/evil" dichotomy, and that one lesson may be the single most important distinction to cling to as you learn to use the oracle.
Back to the hexagram. Certainly, after being presented with the received title and the house metaphor one can be drawn to see, perhaps, a wish-bone type construct, with the two legs only barely held together. A useful arrangement, this kind of fork, good for tongs, etc. (I suddenly wonder if observations such as "a house about to collapse," were originally mnemonics, divorced from the actual reading or interpretation, but which over time suffered a failure to preserve the symbol/referent distinction. How would we ever know?)
The Karcher translation calls this hexagram "Stripping," and the reading is quite different indeed. I tend to take the Karcher as more reliable, but it is unarguably more inscrutable. On the other hand reliance on the Wilhelm/Baynes comes at the cost of this Western preoccupation with a Good-versus-Evil cosmology. And there probably is no way to reconcile it all. So we turn inward and meditate.
Finishing up the reading in the Wilhelm/Baynes I am again aware of what seems a total disconnect between the Image, which is fairly straightforward in looking at the trigrams, and the Judgment, which seems to come from what I have just today hypothesized as being a mnemonic value of the hexagram. At a later point I might one day try to resolve that disconnect. For this survey it will suffice to limit myself to study of the trigrams in relationship to each other giving rise to the hexagrams.
[The Mountain's] position is strong only when it rises out of the earth broad and great...those who rule rest on the broad foundation of the people. They too should be generous and benevolent, like the earth that carries all.
This certainly is in keeping with my first blush reading, which is a comfort.
Soon it will change.
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From the Wilhelm/Baynes,
"Even a single passion still lurking in the heart has power to obscure reason."
This seems a particularly Western reading, for only in the West are passion and reason seen as antithetical forces in opposition. This walk through the hexagrams has as one of it's goals a removal of such biases. Where reason kills passion then reason should be shunned. Where passion kills reason, there passion is to be shunned. Whenver one seems to come to dominance it is in truth at the beginning of its decay, and only by working wisely with the rise and fall of each can the superior person benefit from the wisdom of the hexagrams.
"Passion and reason cannot exist side by side---therefor fight without quarter is necessary if the good is to prevail."
Again, this seems born of the same kind of Western thinking that pits lightyangmalecreativemanifest energy against darkyinfemalereceptivepotential energy, rather than recognizing them as necessary facets of a single unity.
The mis-casting as enemies of the complements reason and passion need not obscure that the Judgment for this hexagram refers to a time when reason must rise to balance a previously overdeveloped passion.
"...resolution must be based on a union of strength and friendliness."
and
"...the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good."
Next, from the Image we read:
"The lake has risen up to heaven..."
This is the final hexagram of the Tui cycle, the last where we see the joyous lake/youngest daughter raised above the others. The trigram of the lake is the outer face, joyous, over the a lower trigram of the Father, the all-solid-lines of Ch'ien.
"All gathering is followed by dispersion...remain receptive to impressions by help of strict and continuous self-examination."
Soon it will change.
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The traditional title of this hexagram is, "The Perponderance of the Great."
The lake over the wind, the youngest daughter facing out to the world, the eldest facing in to the family, and a pattern which begs to draw attention from the primary trigrams and re-visit the notion of nuclear trigram, which in this case are both Ch'ien, the manifest male yang energy.
The Wilhelm/Baynes says, "The hexagram represents a beam that is thick and heavy in the middle but too weak at the ends. This is a condition that cannot last..."
Again the image speaks more directly to the trigrams, suggesting that Sun, in it's guise as tree, rather than wind, is just as happy standing alone while Tui, in her guise as the Joyous, combine well such that a person caught in such times as when the lake floods higher than the tree tops need not fear:
...
Thus the superior man, when he stands alone,
Is unconcerned,
And if he has to renounce the world,
He is undaunted.
Thinking a moment about how this arises from the previous. Two lines have reversed as we move from Skin Shedding to Sagging Roof Beam, but that is outer manifestation of a simple numerical increment of one, the pattern by which we currently explore the hexagrams. Puppy Love is 28th in the sequence of binary numbers in which the all-open-lines of K'un represent binary number zero and the all-full-lines of Ch'ien represent binary number 63. Skin Shedding is 29th of that sequence, and the present hexagram is 30th of that sequence. But the shift from Puppy Love to Skin Shedding was the reversal of the single line at the bottom, whereas the shift from Skin Shedding to Sagging Roof Beam, although still a single binary increment, results in the reversal of two lines. I had not given this phenomenon any thought previously, that simple numerical increment can invoke reversal of more than one line. This certainly speaks to a disjoint between the methods of representation, which is something dear to the heart of Semantic Restructuring.
Meanwhile, the image is easy enough to see on my bookshelves, overloaded with texts. The heavy books are the solid lines, the little metal pins going into weak particle board are the open lines. One day the pins or the sagging board itself will give unless I take action first to lighten the load or strengthen the support. Recognize limits, respect boundaries, understand that which holds back the thresh.
Soon it will change.
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The Wilhelm/Baynes calls it "Ko / Revolution (Molting)". I've seen this one a time or two and pretty much cut to the chase and arrived at the title I've chosen. From memory it's not entirely unlike the Death card in the Tarot, not about dying so much as about change, whether of season or life cycle stage such as moving from egg to larva to moth or a bird's molting. Let go that which is to be let go, especially that which is only the dead surface detritus. Be not afraid that it looks like dying. Care not that others finding the skin you leave behind might mistake it for a monster or even your corpse. Shed it, get out of it, before it becomes your funeral shroud.
The traditional reading includes, from the Wilhelm/Baynes, observation that the trigrams involved are water above fire, each holding potential disaster and even oblivion for the other. The judgment includes:
Revolution. On your own day
You are believed.
Supreme success,
Furthering through perseverance.
Remorse disappears.
Note how this arises from the simple reversal of the lowest line of the previous hexagram. By the reversal of this lowest line infatuation becomes seemingly abrupt and profound change. But note also that the change from egg to larva to moth or housefly or Monarch butterfly isn't really change at all. Only the surface appearance has changed, and that change is an inherent and integral part of the the egg and the larva and the Monarch. It is only our separateness from that organism and our inability to understand except in terms of our experiences which brings the sense of wonder or fear.
Paraphrasing the reading,
"Enlighten the people in times of revolution, to prevent excesses."
The image contrasts from the judgment by being less focused on Confucian preoccupations with social order, instead focusing on the metaphors easily read from the trigrams themselves. Forget not that fire below water heats your tea.
Soon it will change.
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With a footnote pointing to "A neural basis for social cooperation," Neuron 35 (2002): 396-405, Damasio says of the Prisoners' Dilemma:
...the Prisoner's Dilemma, an experimental task that effectively separates cooperators from defectors.
I will need to revisit this to explicate the flaws in such a statement, and I'll have to track down the original reference material before I can ascribe the error to the original researchers rather than to Damasio. But, in simplest terms, it is a long-standing peeve of mine that so many people who should be thinking a little more precisely about such matters keep framing the Prisoners' Dilemma as inherently exemplifying the "social wisdom" of cooperation. If you haven't already seen it, you can get a taste of where I'm going with this here.
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The Lake on the Mountain, at least according to the combination of trigrams. Balkin talks at length of the Confucian family relations spin as well, the youngest daughter joined to the youngest son, hence "Mutual Attraction."
Today I am more mindful than usual of the approach to Tarot, which holds that no card of itself is good or bad, that each has potential in either direction, and that the goal is to use the energy in question because it is at hand, on tap. I find it harder to maintain this distance from the readings of the I Ching, but the concept holds true nonetheless. And so, taking the Balkin reading, I would say "infatuation" and "use the energy derived therefrom...but do not mistake it for love...but neither close your heart to its innocence and stirring power."
However, for me there is another part of the reading. I have used a metaphor of a mountain lake to describe the mind. Such a lake is fed by rain from above, a spring below, three streams, to correspond to the senses. Water leaves the lake through evaporation, through seepage into the water table, and through the spill at the bottom edge where it moves into the river that eventually makes its way to the ocean. Those represent different kinds of messages/interactions/outputs we give to the world, conscious, unconscious. It's a wider, more organic, less linear, and more suitable for meditative reflection, gloss on "Garbage In, Garbage Out," and I can't help so reflecting in the presence of this hexagram. I do not for a moment suppose that this is "the proper reading" for the hexagram.
The Mountain and the Lake can seem to be opposites, but finding a lake on top of a mountain points to the reality: They are complements.
Soon it will change.
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That's the Mawangdui translation for the name of the hexagram. The Balkin calls this "Joy", which is closer to what I would expect, what with the doubling of the "Tui" trigram, sometimes called, "The Joyous."
The outer and the inner are in harmony, are aligned the same. There is congruence here of above and below. Now is a time to reflect deeply on the nature of the trigram, "Tui," the Lake or Marsh, the Joyous, the youngest daughter. Doubled trigrams are also a good opportunity to introduce nuclear trigrams. Taking, from the bottom, lines 2-4 we get the trigram of Li, the clinging, fire. Taking lines 3-5 we get Xun, wind, wood. All of the trigrams involved in this are "daughters" in the Confucian understanding of things. So this is a female, receptive, but not prim ally so, hexagram.
What does Balkin have to say?
...take a different approach. If you want to find joy in the outside world, you must first learn to find some joy in your own heart.
Sound advice at any time; on target all the more anytime this hexagram results from our casting.
Soon it will change.
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From "A Sacred Unity," (Donaldson, ed.), some entries for the new Common Place Book tag (CPB). This actually applies to my complaints with Dawkins's work.
pg76:
One form of habitual error can, however be pilloried. this is the trick of drawing a generalization from the world of external observation, giving it a fancy name, and then asserting that this named abstraction exists inside the organism as an explanatory principle. Instinct theory commonly takes this monstrous form. To say that opium contains a dormitive principle is no explanation of how it puts people to sleep. Or do the people contain a dormitive instinct that is "released" by the opium?
pg134/135:
Other sorts of classification could, of course, be examined. It would be orthodox, for example, to classify information according to its relevance and usefulness for the various "needs" of the organism. The result would be a system of categories resembling "instinct" theory. A large amount of speculation and pseudoexlpanation is already associated with this way of thinking in economics, "functional" anthropology, and animal ethology. Masses of data have been dissected into this procrustean bed but it still seems to me that the explanatory principles, i.e., ""instincts" invoked in these studies resemble the "dormitive principle" proposed by Moliere's learned doctors to explain the physiological effects of opium.
pg170/172:
There are also questions of method. One of the characteristic methods which you have been taught is that science consists in collecting some facts, whatever they are, making a hypothesis, making then a prediction from the hypothesis, and taking that prediction back to the facts. I would maintain that this is mostly nonsense. And it is nonsense of a particular kind, namely that kind which Moliere has stigmatized as the creation of dormitive principles.
Let's say the problem is a Ph.D. examination in which the learned doctors ask the candidate, "Why does opium put people to sleep?" And the candidate, in dreadful Latin, replies, "Because, learned doctors, it contains a dormitive principle," whereupon they all cheer and say, "How right he is." Now about three-quarters of all the hypotheses in the behavioral sciences are fundamentally dormitive principles. "Anxiety" is a dormitive principle. "Emotion" is a dormitive word. It's just like "anxiety."
...Of course it's very difficult to talk about this stuff in a civilization which is, oh, at least seventy percent insane in its major premises about the nature of man and the nature of relationships. One of the interesting insanities is the notion which really came to a head in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, which was helped along by Darwin and other persons, namely that the unit of survival is either an individual or family line or a species or subspecies or something of the kind. Now, in terms of that premise, we have been building machines and fighting the environment. We have now achieved, I hope, empirical proof that that premise won't do any longer; in fact, the unit of survival is organism in environment, and not organism versus environment.
The question of whether it's you versus me, or you and me as part of something which includes us both, is, of course, right at the base of why you might think I was out to do you in, and why you might be right, because, after all, I am a member of this culture.
Question: How "dormitive" is the term "schizophrenia"?
Bateson: Well, a great many people use the term dormitively. that is, they talk as though there were something inside my skin which made me talk funny, you know. On the other hand, talking about schizophrenia in this way has sort of focused attention on some behavioral characteristics which I've paid a good deal of attention to---not supposing that there is a something called schizophrenia inside these patients which makes them do this. In fact, my main question has been, how is schizophrenia related to such things as humor, religion, poetry---obviously something bigger, a genus or family of behaviors which are all somehow related formally. This seems to me a nondormitive way of approaching it. Does that answer your questions? I mean, obviously, the word "schizophrenia" as used in law courts and such places, is being used in mainly a dormitive sense. And then you get the use of the term by the geneticists, who believe that the solution to all problems is to find a gene which will serve as a dormitive principle. Now geneticists are beginning to discover that genetics isn't quite like that...
That last sentence is too optimistic by far, for it fails to take into account the culture's preference for solutions in the form of consumable goods (medicines and machines for treatment, etc.)
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From the Mawangdui, "There are words that are not trustworthy."
Soon it will change.
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Following. The Balkin and the Mawangdui agree on which reading, although the are placed in different order. Balkin puts this at 17, the Mawangdui puts it as 47. They concur on the name, adjusted for orthographical followings. This might be a good point to mention that, on the heels of my comment last time about not knowing Balkin's sources, I was looking this morning at the "Bibliographical Essay" toward the end of the Balkin text which makes quite clear his sources. If his style is more wordy and Western than I would hope to achieve it is clearly a matter of studied choice rather than default as his research, if not fully exhaustive, was indeed extensive and incorporated everything on my paltry shelf and much more.
That said, Sui, or Following, but really "hunting/pursuing".
Very dissatisfied with the Balkin today, but equally with the almost absent Mawangdui which only says, "Following: Prime receipt; beneficial to determine; there is no trouble." How the hell that grows into the preachy feel goods of "follow your bliss" offered by Professor Balkin is beyond me.
What do the trigrams tell us? The joyous lake, Tui is above/outer. Thunder/the arousing is below/inner. Swelling energy withing, placid pleasantness without. Certainly that's a nice place to be.
Balkin says the word "Following" was originally "Hunt," with notions not of being a follower but of pursuing something. Balkin's reading is about the duty of leaders to serve their followers, but also the need to follow one's conscience. It puts me in mind of my discipline lecture. The root word for discipline is disciple, and those were the guys who gave up their worldly lives to pursue the gifts of heaven. Their leader was the world's quarry, eventually hunted and killed for sport, but willingly in service of that which he pursued. The loving Christ is the outer face, but mighty was his wrath inside the temple with the money changers. Hunting. Pursuing. Following. The arousing thunder within, the joyous lake without. There will be no trouble.
Soon it will change.
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Mawangdui and Balkin/Baynes differ on exactly which reading goes with this hexagram. We will deal with Balkin's take on the Baynes. (I haven't dug any further into Balkin's choice of sources, but generally his work seems an updated phrasing of the Willhelm/Baynes.
Cui - Coming Together, then, is the reading, about creating a group by creating a social order, being a leader, bringing one's proper followers to one in preparation. Today I am able to see the failure of the reading to apply to my current circumstances, even as I find myself looking for ways to make it apply. This latter, of course, is the primary trick on which most success with the I Ching rests, similar to the psycho-dynamics of cold reading, what the N-LP folks call "transderivational search". But I digress.
Whether looking at the Mawangdui or the Baynes, this hexagram is the marshy water female younger daughter energy as the outer face and the earth mother primal receiver as the inner face. This is, perhaps, where all reflection on the I Ching should start: Which of the 8 are outer, which of the 8 are inner. And in divinatory casting there would be the question also of changing lines, so there would be the initial outer/initial inner and resulting outer/inner to draw on, teetering back and forth like a balance coming to rest. Let that suffice.
Soon it will change.
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Ever enigmatic, the Mawangdui says simply, "Ru (Short Coat), Moistening: There is a return; radiant receipt; determination is auspicious; beneficial to ford the great river."
22 centuries later this has grown into Xu, Waiting, and Professor Balkin offers two and on half pages of discussion.
Kan, The Abysmal, Water is still the public face for this hexagram, but this is the last such we will see during the rest of the build up to hexagram 63. The inner face is Chi'en, the primal male principle, Heaven. Water above Heaven, clouds? The ideograph, according to Professor Balkin, is either rain falling from clouds in the heavens or a person praying for rain. The judgment, per Balkin, is "Waiting. Sincerity and faithfulness bring shining success. Perseverance brings good fortune. It is beneficial to cross the great river." Absent other insights today, note the two frequently recurring portions, about perseverance and crossing the river. These metaphors deserve more attention than I have given them, for they are used so often one really can't be said to understand the judgment if one hasn't internalized the use of these metaphors.
Moist waiting in prayer for rain. Keep at it. Do what you know you should, even if it is a risk. Radiant receipt. There is a return.
Soon it will change.
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The Well. Here we have a clear indication of the value in reading the hexagrams in creation order rather than canonical order. The received text puts Jing, the Well, right after it's bitwise complement, Oppression. But there is likewise a complementary nature from Ji Ji, Detumesence to Jing, the Well, from the decreasing flow to that which is endlessly self-renewed.
I am less inclined to go with the received text after a quick look at the Mawangdui. Also, what we think of as a well is typically only the man-made interface to an unseen river or lake. There is much to reflect on in this hexagram, and the received text, longer for this than many other hexagrams, seems to be trying a bit too hard.
One can change the town
But one cannot change the well.
This seems, to me, the central point, know what you can change, what you rely on to endure beyond your superficial, surface level changes. Know your source. And have a mind that you take care of the tools for drawing from that source, too short a rope or a broken jug might as well be a dry well.
Soon it will change.
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