Institute of Semantic Restructuring

Gu, Ku, Corruption/Renovation, Branch, "Work on What Has Been Spoiled", Decay

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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.

Pi: Grace, Luxuriousness, Adornment

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Stillness without, radiance within; that is, Ken, the eldest son, the mountain as the outer face of the hexagram, Li, the middle daughter, radiance and fire as the inner face. The notes in the Willhelm/Baynes mention that Confucious was once uncomfortable on obtaining this hexagram, due to the danger of getting caught up in the form and forgetting the function. There are contexts and subtleties that we simply can't understand in the same way these things were understood thousands of years ago. That is why so often in this journey I return to basic, basic, basics. Stillness without, radiance within. Surely that describes a state of grace, and surely that is a state to seek. But one does not perform the work of the world from that state. Instead it is a place to visit, to refresh and restore one's spirit. Too many curliques and the ornament comes to outweigh the structure.

Soon it will change.

A Superior Man Indeed!

I don't know where I first read this one, but I suppose I've most often read it in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". I have searched around for it before, but never found it. Today I caught up with page 144 of the book, on which is quoted from Chapter 15 of The Anelects:

Yu. When good government prevailed in his state, he was like an arrow. When bad government prevailed, he was like an arrow. A superior man indeed is Chu Po-yu! When good government prevails in his state, he is to be found in office. When bad government prevails, he can roll his principles up, and keep them in his breast."(emphasis added)

Ken

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Ken is the name of the trigram of the eldest son, it is also the trigram for mountain, and incorporates stillness and boundary. The trigram is binary 4, and this hexagram is binary 36. Note again how the increment of one unit has caused a flip of three lines; such is the nature of Change in the book of Changes.

A doubled trigram, of course, represents a condition in which the inner and outer aspects are aligned. The inner face of this hexagram is stillness and boundaries, as is the outer. This congruence between inner and outer aspects is a feature in itself, occuring 8 out of 64 times, once for each of the trigrams.

That said, the hexagram Ken signifies stillness and boundaries, just like the trigram. The text speaks in particular of bringing stillness to the back, and it is hard to imagine the rest of the body flouncing about whilst the back is thus stilled. To my eye, there is another relationship, that of the spine in the body to a ridge of mountains on land, like refering to the Rockies as the spine of the continent. Living as I have for the past few years nestled up to the San Gabriel foothills, I have come to appreciate this hexagram more than I ever could have growing up in Long Beach. But while the shore of the ocean or a lake or even the path of a river can be used as a logical boundary, mountains are different. If they are less binding today, thanks to rail travel and air travel, mountains are still barriers with which to reckon.

Perhaps one of the least understood aspects of what folks call "setting boundaries" is that announcing one is going to set boundaries largely defeats the purpose. When one draws a line in the sand, it is usually seen as a challenge (and, indeed, it is most often done as a challenge). But when one actually sets a boundary, rather than merely announcing it, one seeks to emulate the mountains, still, calm, impassive and unpassable, discouraging challenge rather than inviting it.

Ken, then, is the hexagram for stillness and boundary, within and without. Soon it will change.

Art Criticism

Had to list Oblio's Cap on a resume because my contact saw the last post and got a little worried. Bummer, but understandable. I've let this set without explanation long enough, I guess I can put up the following disclaimer, from Wikipedia

The Swastika is one of the 108 symbols of Lord Vishnu and represents the sun's rays, without which there would be no life.

Art

"Tolerance Test" - Robert Link, 2008. Electronic file, created in Adobe Illustrator, modified for web with Adobe Photoshop.

Toward A Philosophy of Language

A recent discussion helped clarify some of the foundational observations on which I rest much of my thinking about language.

Words don't mean, people do.
People make noises.
People hear noises they and other people make.
People respond to what they hear.
People gesture.
People see gestures they and other people make.
People respond to what they see.
People make marks.
People see marks they and other people make.
People respond to what they see.
"Language" is, generally, a reified subset of the noise, gestures, and marks people see and hear.
Discussion of "language" which strays too far from the basic observations is suspect.

It is this last piece that sets me apart from the mainstream, for there is nothing controversial about the rest (outside of those circles which have reified the domain so completely that they cannot undo their construction.) Keeping the above in mind means constantly taking conversations about language with a grain of salt, at lest to the extent that such languages rely on traditional distinctions and nomenclature which all presupposes acceptance of the reified domain.

Sun / Decrease

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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.

Loving Islam

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.

Meng / Youthful Folly

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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.