Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
Hi, Rosada:T... Alright! If you are reading this, please pour yourself a glass and raise it in a toast to Hilary for creating this site, and Hilary's Dad and meng's Dad and elvis' Mom, to whom we dedicated our study back at hexagram 7, worthy ancestors all!
I have just had a delightful evening with my sister and 95 year old mother. I hope you all are likewise enjoying the glow.
rosada
I will not tell you now what's the meaning of wetting one's head in 64.6. You can imagine it.
Ch.
Hi, María:Charly !!!!
Wilhelm usually didn't comment on the second hexagram, the one created when the lines changed, but here at the end he concludes with these thoughts on 64.6 changing into 43:
Thus at its close the Book of Changes leaves the situation open for new beginnings and new formations. The same idea indeed finds expression in the Tsa Kua, Miscellaneous Notes on the Hexagrams, in which Kuai, BREAK-THROUGH (43), is placed at the end, with these closing words:
BREAK-THROUGH means resoluteness. The strong turns resolutely against the weak. The way of the superior man is in the ascendant, the way of the inferior man leads to grief.
-Wilhelm
Where next? - Perhaps a wander into the EIC or Luis to post snippets of his hinted at book - start with Hex 1 and that gives him another 3 years to get it finished.
Hunh. Maybe the T'sa Kua is a different system of ordering the hexagrams and in that system 43 comes at the end. Does anyone know?
Meanwhile 40 is good advice for the the final word,
"If there is no longer anywhere one has to go, return brings good fortune.
If there is still something where one has to go, hastening brings good fortune."
Thus the superior man pardons mistakes and forgives misdeeds."
-Wilhelm
I am going to be away from a computer for a couple of days. Any ideas what we should take up next? The trigrams perhaps?
-rosada
Hey, I wouldn't mind focusing on CLofting's EIC for a while. It would be a good opportunity for a hands-on approach to his system. As for my book, I can say that it is gestating and it is also "novel" and a departure from the known symbology. I'm spending lots of time taking copious notes while studying archaeological sources, not only Chinese, but from almost every other civilization site, from neo-lithic times to the Bronze Age. The farther one goes back in time, the more common the symbology of duality in artistic expression, and that's key. The reason for all that background gathering, and the time I'm using in it, other than because it is fun, is to justify some of my conclusions to current and serious Yixue students and researchers. They could be controversial for Yijing traditionalists, of which I am one, used to some 3000 years of a standard system of firm and broken lines. My contention is that the lines we know today are an evolution, a morphing of an older system, perhaps in an effort to purposely obscure the divination system. But, standing alone, and sans any historical background, it is a simple and elegant system, it tickles your brain in a different way the current hexagrams do, and more than a few would say "how come I didn't think of that before?" Alas, the beauty of it is that it is still the Yijing, as far as the text is concerned, albeit with a different scaffolding. Still not ready to share more details, I'm afraid, lest I prompt faster and entrepreneurial writers to take advantage of the idea and present it as their own. I've seen it done... Thanks for remembering though.
i thank you all so much for this wonderful thread...
to our ancestors and great children!
:bows:
hi frank,Hi Neegula,
Are those smileys drinking and carrying on? What about the bowing scholar? Hex 41.3 >> hex 26? Let's roast the pig of the ruling line hex 26.5 (moving toward the open field of hex 9 and on toward hex 13) at least and have a BBQ party for everyone!! I add a Charlie Brown smiley to represent Everyman and make two couples...hex 58
Frank
may i ask: why are you talking about years for composing this thread? the date in posts speak about weeks ago...was it copied after a new board was done?
I won't speak for Chris; he can do that with abandon. I, however, believe you haven't read or understood his approach and/or the angle of his POV on the I Ching. For starters, his focus is not on dichotomies, although he integrates such concepts in his theories. His mantra for all of us of "being stuck in 10th Century B.C. mentality" should give you a clue. It took me a few years to realize that to understand Chris (well, at least a portion of it as I won't presume of understanding the whole of it... ) one needs to shed much of the exegesis and historical notions and take it in as something NEW. Prejudice based on what WE know of the I Ching would always be an unsurmountable obstacle to understand his work. I am a traditionalist and I'm not saying I accept his approach as a replacement of what I've learned about the Yijing over the years. I can, though, put his work in its own category and study it as a system that shares a common structure with the Yijing but is still its own entity.Exploring Elvis/CL EIC will help you note the difference between Chinese philosophy of gestalt and computer binary based on the simplistic notion of doing place-number math with just the math base system appropriate to technology built upon voltages just ON/OFF. Modern Chinese tend to speak of computer math as advanced, since computers are complicated technology, but it isn't at all. Philosophically it is confused.
Indeed, it is. I'm having a lot of fun with it. The only drawback is that the more I read, the more I have to read. Not only for the research for the book but also because it invites the compulsion to keep on taking information in. I'm a library rat...The research for your book sounds fascinating. Apparently a lot of new research is just being published or just filtering down to general notice.
Oh, yes, I have added what's being learnt at Gobekli Tepe into my research. Great stuff that supports some of my ideas.And the new research from the huge Temple complex in Turkey giving an alternative explanation of the origin of agriculture and animal domestication from nomads coming together for religious ceremonies, like archaic rock concerts. (also in that issue of Newsweek)
Well, yes, it is a quantum leap in the sense that it is a purposely made order with an apparent lack of logic, other than the grouping in pairs and the observation of certain milestones placed in strategic places in the sequence... I believe Richard S. Cook has taken care of the math behind the order. He hasn't touched the meaning of it. But, as you and other researchers have noted (as in your Decades, and also L. Scott Davies, with a similar but not equal concept), meaning can be derived from the apparent chaos. In my system, for example, I can visualize "paths" going from a number of hexagrams to others, sometimes connecting a few more than the obvious pairs. Further, in some of the pairs there are no "paths" connecting them and they appear to act as "hinges" for the hexagrams on both sides of them. I can derive meaning from those and I believe the groupings of hexagrams were ordered so that those connecting paths could be glimpsed if one knows what we are looking at. This is why I've said that "my hexagrams" tickle the brain in different ways. For example, you can visualize pairs, not only in the known sequences, but also those obtained in readings, as ONE symbol. Furthermore, from that, I can tag an individual, compact symbol to each one of the 4096 sections of the Jiaoshi Yilin, something that classic has been missing, perhaps on purpose, since its inception. If a translation of it is ever completed it can be actually put in a book format with its own images. Heck, even the Chinese can use them with the original text.If you are working on a system to explain the hexagrams from historical principles, great. The KWS, I believe, was a quantum leap; however the evolution of prior symbolism would be far more an evolutionary process of general principles of gestalt and number symbols and that abstract concrete reality as the ideograms do with concepts.
Exactly.Although the T'ai Chi Symbol is a late development in tombs the perspectives of the holistic, dualistic, and narrative (process) all find their expression in Chinese philosophy way back when.
Yes, indeed. And there are plenty of examples in ancient art expression, in China and elsewhere. Regarding ancient China, I contend that there was an implicit dualistic philosophy that was much older than the birth of the Zhouyi, that it was used in divination, of which we have records, and was expressed, very stylized, in art (jades, pottery and bronzes). Even though the Yin/Yang School of thought didn't officially started until Zuo Yan put it down on paper in the Warring States Period, that doesn't mean that a precise dualistic philosophy didn't exist before him and was used in divination. Personally, I don't agree with temporal cages only because we can put specific dates to the documentation of a philosophical thought. No philosophical thought, IMO, is created in a vacuum of preceding information and observation and, like in the case of the Yin/Yang School, a precedent can be traced back in time.The holistic is only available through meditation. The narrative development begins with story telling and only late is blended into number symbolism. That leaves only duality that easily is represented in art through the notions of figure and ground of gestalt and the use of 2-D drawing to represent 4-D reality.
Hi Luis,
Yes, YES, YES I agree with everything YOU SAY, except that the KWS is chaotic.
I did not know you were writing a book. A bit of advice from the History of a friend of mine, Rusty. She was a brilliant Tarot expert with the P.C. Smith deck. Her power with a single card reading, and her courses in Tarot great. He started working on her book based upon her system. She worked all her life and died still unable to put the final draft together and let the publisher have her baby to send forth into the world. Remember you are just writing your first edition and others will follow with the response and reworking after yours is out and crying and cooing as an independent book-creature.
sparhawk said:Even when I ask for some background help from some key fellow students and friends I am afraid my questions can provide clues that would prompt them to find the origin of my system and follow my path and get ahead of me in publishing it. The good thing is that I have placed some documentation in strategic places that bear witness that that system of mine is over 20 years old and indeed belongs to me.
OK, now I'm intrigued - and tantalised. When can I get my hands on this?In my system, for example, I can visualize "paths" going from a number of hexagrams to others, sometimes connecting a few more than the obvious pairs. Further, in some of the pairs there are no "paths" connecting them and they appear to act as "hinges" for the hexagrams on both sides of them. I can derive meaning from those and I believe the groupings of hexagrams were ordered so that those connecting paths could be glimpsed if one knows what we are looking at. This is why I've said that "my hexagrams" tickle the brain in different ways. For example, you can visualize pairs, not only in the known sequences, but also those obtained in readings, as ONE symbol. Furthermore, from that, I can tag an individual, compact symbol to each one of the 4096 sections of the Jiaoshi Yilin, something that classic has been missing, perhaps on purpose, since its inception. If a translation of it is ever completed it can be actually put in a book format with its own images. Heck, even the Chinese can use them with the original text.
Luis, this is tantalizing. Could you say-- not what your system is -- but what it does? Does it explain the KWS? Does it explain the appended text -- why a particular image is a associated with a particular line? Or is it a general approach to contemplative thought?
Tom
Frank, believe me, what you are saying isn't new to me and is present in my mind every waking hour; I take that advise to heart and the prospect of it is what scares the crap out of me. Even when I ask for some background help from some key fellow students and friends I am afraid my questions can provide clues that would prompt them to find the origin of my system and follow my path and get ahead of me in publishing it. The good thing is that I have placed some documentation in strategic places that bear witness that that system of mine is over 20 years old and indeed belongs to me.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).