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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It seems the ideogram for this hexagram is a bowl of worms, or, as one of my sources puts it, "The sacraficial bowl is full of rotting meat with worms." This brings up a point worth emphasizing with a quote from Qiying:
Bred and born in the Foreign regions beyond, there is much in the administration of the Celestial Dynasty that is not perfectly comprehensible to the Barbarians, and they are continually putting forced constructions on things of which it is difficult to explain to them the real nature.
One can easily replace "the adminstration of the Celestial Dynasty" with "the Book of Changes". This is one reason for taking all sources with, perhaps not a grain of salt, but a measure of caution, as one simply cannot pick up the received texts and plunk them down into modern Western society and expect to maintain relevance in the new context.
There are at least three separate modes of contextual influence on the "meaning" of each hexagram. The first, the most primal, is to look at the relationship of constituent tri-grams, while looking at the same time at each tri-gram in terms of its constituent lines. When one allows for changing lines, the full range of hexagrams explodes from 64 possibilities to 4094 shades of grey between all unmoving empty to all moving full. In addition, mystics who have lived with these hexagrams have come to see, much as we see shapes in clouds, shapes and images in the hexagrams themselves, and in many cases this has come to influence the reading of those hexagrams. Next there are the Chinese ideograms for each hexagram, themselves essentially pictures, and thus adding to the interpretive milieu in which the changes were traditionally studied and understood.
All but the first of these are arguably culture bound and largely irrelevant to the herenow of my explorations. So I take the received texts and try to hear them, try to let them connect herenow to therethen, all the while knowing that therethen never imagined herenow and likewise my imaginings herenow about therethen are only that, imaginings. Letting those thoughts bounce back and forth along the conduits of time, I eventually settle into a kind of melange of all that I have read or thought.
So much for process. I was disturbed by the wide range of titles for this hexagram in my three sources, and my initial response to the image of the bowl of worms, which was the single word, "Fecundity". What to me is a vile mass of rotted meat is to worms and bacteria nothing short of mana from heaven. And as repugnant as these things might be to me, they have their place in the grand cycle, and, indeed, my very existence is as dependent on them as on anything else. I will one day soon be nothing more than exactly that which now offends me, and this, in turn, is the whole teaching of the Book of Changes: Change.
We have the mountain, stillness, boundaries, the eldest son as the outer face, with the gentle wind, the eldest daughter, as the inner face. Perhaps it is the idea of wind and wood gently, persistently penetrating the base of the mountain, not even so much chipping away at it as eating it up over the eons, that resonates with the traditional reading. The subtle, visible-only-after-the-fact nature of the trigram, like roots upending paved walks or the wind slowly scuplting the land, is very much part of the energy of the eldest daughter.
I cannot pretend to be pleased with my understanding of this hexagram. It is arrogance to suggest that the traditional text fails. But the oldest source I have, Shaughnessy's Mawangdui translations, calls this hexagram "Branch". There is enough change in the presentations of this hexagram that I feel justified in trying to stick to the roots, the public face being Stillness and the inner face being Persistence.
Soon it will change.
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