Expressions of love and hex 15

[cal val]

When I talked to the Yi today about my resolve to express love daily, they answered Hex 15, no changing lines. I'd love to get your feelings about the connection between the two.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Val

 

[chrislofting]

Val,

dont get too carried-away, keep 'words close to the chest'. avoid, or level-out, extremes of highs and lows - overall, be modest.

Chris.

 

[davidl]

Love is such a difficult thing to define. I remember a beautiful state of equanimity I once obtained for a period. It was a time in my life when I had no 'love' interest or 'love' one on one type relationship. I was very conscious of love just oozing out of me with no particular direction. People seemed to love me more during this time. There didn't seem to be a need to express it. It was there and all around me. I was reluctant to enter a 'love' relationship at the time because I knew that this would focus my attention and love onto one person and somehow limit my ability to exude love freely.
I don't know about you and Im interested in others views as to whether pure love can be expressed when one is in intense romantic love, are they from the same source does one block the other ? Am I making sense ?

I have always felt 15 is talking to us about equanimity as well as modesty. The state of equanimity I feel, allows pure love to radiate freely without the need for concsious expression or deeds to act out love.

 

[frandoch]

Hi David,

Romantic 'love' is too often about possession and control, and the wish to change the 'loved one', whereas love is about acceptance and respect.

To truly love someone is to allow them their right to freedom, and to give them all the space they need to grow in whatever way they need, even if that means they grow away from you. And if the time comes when they want to fly away, true love will support them in that decision, and wish them well, with love.

It is possible to truly love someone, and a result of that is that you begin to love everyone. It's a paradox - but then - everything that really matters is.

Michael F.

 

[martin]

Pure love is heaven
Romantic love is earth
Real love is a marriage of heaven and earth

Does that make sense?

Martin

 

[cal val]

Martin...

Absolute perfect sense, and now a dream I had right after the "fate" dream makes perfect sense as well.

Those 'guys in grey' gave me a project...(a symbolic project)...a couple of mornings or so after the recurring 'fate' dream ended. I alluded to it in the thread if you want to look...http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_community/messages/48/703.html?1055467317.

It was to make a web page about Hexagrams 1 and 2 and the marriage of Heaven and Earth. I really thought I was supposed to make a web page *dumb grin* and started a dialog with the Yi about it. And I got these ideas, like using a photoshop picture I did of myself for Heaven... http://home.earthlink.net/~lakatz/images/airhead.jpg and a picture of the man I love as Earth, and the Yi said it was all good.

Through the course of the conversation with the Yi, however, I figured out that I wasn't supposed to literally make a web page, but create a marriage of heaven and earth instead.

That dream was the first time I'd heard "marriage of Heaven and Earth" and your impeccably timed post is the second time...*grin*

Thanks!


Val

 

[cal val]

ooops. Maybe it's a good thing...the file extension is missing from part of the 'argument' for my heavenly image...*grin*

http://home.earthlink.net/~lakatz/images/airhead.jpg

 

[yellowblue]

As Val said, PERFECT sense Martin.... : )

Davidl-

Going through those phases in the present...

The direction I'm experiencing is (per Martin's compass) Pure Love by Real Love by Earth (N by S by E and W ????) Ha I must be confused... probably!!!

But when I felt the purer love, it did difuse and "radiate" out in all directions. And when that happens it reflects right back into you and your heart... your whole. It is very healing.

And with the Romantic love, Michael F. has some points that hit home, especially about the paradox.

But for me, after feeling the purer love, the romantic love includes the freedom of pure love. You WANT it for you AND them.... Kind of like Gibran's being two separate pillars that support each other, they support each others position but are still independent. And that is a reflection of the pure and romantic. Complete freedom that allows a pure resonation in accord, and when it gets off balance it rebalances because the need for the pure love too pulls it back into balance and makes it real love. It is more directed but maybe when you get to the balance it flows through that special someone and diffuses with even more brillance than before!!??

I wasn't looking for Romantic Love, it blindsided me, and for awhile I fought it all the way. I have been spinning out of balance for quite a while now, but with a lot of help from some dear people here I am beginning to understand and balance it...the spiritual (heaven) and earth.

For a long time I thought earthly love was crippling to attaining the right way, the center. Now I see that it is the only way to achieve the center, but you have to go through the crucible and balance the two. I'm not there yet, but learning leaps and bounds.... : ) and counting my blessings that despite my struggles are showing me a clearer way.

I think 15 is talking about the "middle way" which is the genuine or authentic way, and you cant do this if there is pretention, so on the heavenly side there is a pure unconsious flow of expression, and on the earthly side it is directed into the focus and the dimesions of the two disperses it out again to whoever is in the path.

Does this make sense to you??? Thanks for letting me share my perspective : )

Deb

 

[anita]

Val,

I think whether you're in love romantically or on a platonic plane, or with your child, it's bound to radiate from you and permeate all. And who says romantic love can't be true? It's harder to come by but some of us do find it.

I see 15 as balance. True love is about balance. And of course, there is no place for the ego in love. In love there are no winners or losers.

Best for your Quest

Anita

 

[yellowblue]

Anita,

If Real Love is the balancing of heaven and earth, accept for the extremes of heaven IMHO it seems there will be winners or losers on varying levels....it is just the nature of things, and there will be ego too until one attains pureness,...and as we are all here now, on earth, how can it be otherwise???? Unless we are the Buddha or Christ how can it be otherwise????

Deb

 

[martin]

Quiet a long time ago I wrote in a diary (don't remember the exact wording. I threw away all diaries - and never started a new one - when I began to feel that life had gone beyond anything that can be described in words. But it was something like this: )
"Reality is full of symbols. You can interpret reality as if it were a dream. It is the most far-out dream that you can have."

And now, in this reality-dream, you present us with a home earthlink link to a heavenly picture!
How symbolic can you get?

Your first link was broken, I got lost, but the second link worked and I found your picture.
It's lovely. Such tender beauty. And peace, well, this is also beyond words.
Thanks!

I would like to write more, about synchronicity/serendipity, the miraculous universe that is always on time, and so on, but I am late (!), have to run now ..

Smoooch

Martin

 

[martin]

And damned, a typo again, says one of my perfectionist selves, the first word Quiet should be Quite ..

Martin

 

[heylise]

From some mails in this thread:
.. Kind of like Gibran's being two separate pillars that support each other, they support each others position but are still independent. And that is a reflection of the pure and romantic.

For a long time I thought earthly love was crippling to attaining the right way, the center. Now I see that it is the only way to achieve the center, but you have to go
through the crucible and balance the two.

If Real Love is the balancing of heaven and earth, ..

---
The character qian, the name of hex.15, is composed of ?words? and ?unite?. Substituting the ?words? for ?bird? gives jian, a mythical bird with one wing and one eye. Two of them could fly: the perfect cooperation.

LiSe

 

[cal val]

LiSe...

Maybe that's the inspiration behind Tom Robbins' very beautiful words..."Even Sissy knows, having a way with birds, that the spirit cannot fly with only one wing."

I'm going to have to read "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" a third time now because of that. He's also got the "clock" guy, Ching, in there...hmmm...*grin*

And now that you've got me thinking about Kahlil Gibran...

THEN said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.

And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

~*~*~*~

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

~*~*~*~

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

~*~*~*~

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

~*~*~*~

Love gives naught but istelf and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

~*~*~*~

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

~*~*~*~

Sounds a lot like Hexagram 15 to me...*grin*

Cheerio the noo,

Val

 

[lenardthefast]

Hi Val,

Picture an American bison (buffalo), standing on the mid-western plains, contentedly chewing it's cud. There is a conversation balloon above her head, (it's a female buffalo), with the following sentence enclosed: "I never met an Indian I didn't like, with the possible exception of Kalil Gibran."

Couldn't resist, the devil made me do it! It's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the spoof!

Namaste,
Leonard

 

[candid]

Interesting thread.

I admit relating strongly to what David had said. Though I realize that the apostle Paul would hardly be considered noble among we Chingers, he did express much the same message as David's.

Attached love isn't the same as the kind of compassion we hear of which comes from acclaimed enlightenment. Compassion for all beings, all life forms, all energy forms, isn't the same love as that of attachment to a particular loved object. (Not very romantic sounding, I know.) The Greek would define it as Agape and Eros.

Still, I know I have much to learn about love, and I'm fortunate for a special one who has been teaching me. I'm also learning from the excellent thoughts, beliefs and ideas expressed here on this thread.

LiSe's thoughts especially intrigue me. "For a long time I thought earthly love was crippling to attaining the right way, the center. Now I see that it is the only way to achieve the center, but you have to go through the crucible and balance the two."

LiSe, the only way?

 

[candid]

Oops, my apologies, that was a repost from Deb.

Deb, the only way?

 

[spin]

Candid and David,

I agree with you that compassion for all beings is not the same love as romantic love. I believe they can coexist and nourish each other, enriching both lives. How much better can I love and serve someone, if my heart is big enough to care about All? How much better I would be to love, if I coexist with the universe, loving and giving to it?

spin

 

[candid]

Well met, Spin.

I guess I'd still ask, would it work the same in reverse? Could you love All more if your attention is on loving an individual romantically?

 

[cal val]

Hiya Leonardo el Speedo...

Hmmmm...

A Lebanese Indian...now there's an interesting image.

I just wonder if he was ever sober during any of his writing. He did have a passion for the fruit of the vine.

Yeah he seems to get that kind of either/or reaction from people.

Some I love...like his poem "On Children" and this one...some I've only read once. I've had the same volume of The Prophet since my teens. My mother used to read him to us when we were kids...along with Poe, Hitchcock, Omar Khayyam and some other of her favorites.

Do you like William Butler Yeats?

http://home.earthlink.net/~303/treadsoftly.html

I do.

Who do you like? What's your favorite love poem?

Cheerio the noo,

Val

 

[spin]

Candid,

Some people feel that love is a fragile little flame that needs to be protected and sheltered and kept away from others so that it will remain alive and safe. I think love finds a way and is a living force and runs its tendrils in the smallest of cracks and nooks and crannies and grows and breaks open barriers and walls and self-protections.

If I am in a romantic relationship that really is about real love, the growth and freedom that exists fills me and overflows in me and it is natural (to me) for that to help me give love to the Universe. That is not to say, of course, that one needs to have romantic love to love All, only that when one's bowl is full, one has more to give to others.

spin

 

[candid]

Spin, thank you for the lesson.

(is spun)

 

[cal val]

Martin...

You're sweet. That's a really old picture of me...when my hair was still very pale. Actually it's getting pale again...*grin*

I just got in a mood one day. I think it was a Yi kind of day...and I liked the expression and downward glance. So I colored it and pasted it onto a cloud painting I'd done. Then I snapped back to earth from the ethereal and titled it "airhead."

Cheerio the noo,

Val

 

[chrislofting]

"love" and the I Ching

Since the I Ching reflects "all there is" so it is a whole that is applicable to any concept. Thus the concept of "love" is reflected in all 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, in all of the parts that makeup the whole. This includes the dynamics.

Ordered into the binary sequence we have the following in general:

earth - issues of total trust in another/others

mountain - issues of 'small' betrayals by others

water - issues of big betrayals - the walls go up to protect 'in here' from 'out there'

wind - issues of total distrust in others (as in hex 18 dealing with corruption, hex 50 - 'cook your food', hex 44 'be wary of persuaders' etc - iow an overall sense of precautions required to deal with 'out there' without need of trust in others, the basic premise is distrust in others ('accepting' human behaviour) - thus gets into issues of management, continuous supervision, cultivation, and being influencial)

Thus in trigram ordering we move from issues of total trust in another/others to total distrust in another/others:

000, 001, 010, 011

For the yang based trigrams we have:

thunder - total distrust in self (and so create 'aids' like the I Ching, new paradigms etc etc - Science has its roots in 'fear' with a need to make maps to aid, to avoid the 'bad' etc)

fire - development of trust in the form of ideologies etc and so of acceptance, to enclose the 'known' from the 'unknown'.

lake - we move into a developing sense of assertion of self but cooperative

heaven - issues of total trust in self, competitive

Thus we move from total distrust in self to total trust in self:

100, 101, 110, 111


Emotionally devotion to others has its roots in fear and a need to hide and to do so through recruitment of context. The protection of earth.

Emotionally devotion to self has its roots in anger and a need to replace the context with one's own - the aggression, the exploitiveness of heaven.

Sexual love is related to Lake in that it acts to replace, as does heaven, but not by erradication but by reproduction and so the concept of 'reflection' common in Lake interpretations.

Love in fire is related to acceptence of an ideology, its promotion etc

Love in water is to protect/conserve what is enclosed, the border goes up as a consequence of big betrayals where there is no more trust in another/others.

etc. etc. etc. Iow we cover the range of 'agape' to 'eros' down to an extremely high level of precision.

The above ordering 'fits' onto the ordering of five-phase theory as:

EARTH (filtration)
earth
mountain
WATER (consumption)
water
WOOD (production)
wind
thunder
FIRE (distribution)
fire
METAL (exchange)
lake
heaven

What this order reflects is the energy required in each phase, from low (filtration - devotion to another in toto requires no thought, no 'checking' - and so it can be 'blind faith')
to high - the competitive exchange of self-love and so of egos etc.

Since these sequences are derived from recursion so the WHOLE is encoded in all parts such that the order of the trigrams of earth to heaven is repeated within EACH trigram in the form of eight hexagrams with that trigram as base.

Thus, for example, hex 23 reflects betrayals in a context of devotion to others and reflects the need to restore the relationship by pruning, removing the 'betrayals' (as the competitive side reflects the collapse that comes with betrayal)

hex 45 reflects sexual love in a context of devotion to a belief in the focus on celebration with others, a cooperative exchange focus, a focus on reproduction but in a context of devotion to another/others.

Hex 15 reflects devotion in a context of 'betrayals' and the need to even things out, just as the whole set of mountain based hexagrams touch on issues of 'little betrayals' and how to deal with them be it through:

52 - discernment, quality control
39 - bypassing obsticles as well as being obstructive
53 - gradual development
62 - exaggerating traditions etc to avoid social 'betrayals'
56 - issues of loyalty
31 - issues of 'wooing', intense stimulation
33 - issues of trickary, 'betrayal' of the enemy through drawing them 'in'.

The core dynamics from devotion to others (the dualmindedness of earth) to devotion to self (the singlemindness of heaven) is outlined in my original website, half-way down the page in

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond/tao1a.html

The overall focus on alchemy in the I Ching covered in

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond/tao.html

ANY concept is analysed through the I Ching as a whole and so every trigram or hexagram or dodecagram, depending on what scale you want to work with, describes aspects of the whole - be it 'love' or 'death' or 'consciousness' or 'species' or 'self' or 'others' or 'Chris' or 'Val' or 'spin' etc etc etc

As such, too much focus on one hexagram can reflect more a lack in precision is 'spreading the load' across the whole I Ching. IOW pick a subject and work through it using all hexagrams.

I emphasise this in that, IMHO, some of the prose on this particular thread seems to be too focused on hex 15 as a sort of 'be all, end all' - it is in fact really simple when seen in the context of the whole I Ching where we can even identify its roots in the form of an underexaggeration of the characteristics of the hexagram pair of 52 and 22 (think about it) - the focus on (a) discernment and (b) facading(cover up/over)

Chris.

 

[lenardthefast]

Hi Val,

Yep, I like Yeats. My favorite love poem? ...mostly my own, although the bard has written a few that I am partial to.

That cartoon that I mentioned in the previous post was alas, not my own, but was done by a former neighbor when I lived in Tiburon. His name was Kliban and he did stuff much like Gary Larson but he was pre-Larson. He did a book on cats, mainly for his wife at the time, and it became so popular that he had to do another book (after they divorced), to get the cat people off his back (he really hated cats). I think the second book was named "1001 and one things to do to your cat" and it worked, he didn't get a lot of fan mail from cat people after that.

Namaste,
Leonard

 

[cal val]

Hi there Leonard...

I think I may still have Kliban's book. Loved it. He's great! And I'm just an overall animal lover...cats, dogs, birds...etc.

I like the bard too. After I posted the Gibran poem, I went scouring the net for love poems, and the bards' came up frequently...much to my delight.

And, uh, would you mind terribly posting your favorite love poem...by you? Or, if you've already posted one here, would you point me to it?

Cheerio the noo,

Val

 

[yellowblue]

Candid--

The only way????

I guess that depends on what dot your at in the envelope....

All I can say is " Roooof Roooof!!! Bark!! Bark!!"

Deb

 

[yellowblue]

LiSe,

Curtsey.... you have such a beautiful and delicate (yet permeating way) and are so wise *little but sincere smile*

Deb

 

[yellowblue]

Val--

Your heart is so sweet!!! hmmmm....

That is one of my (and probably a myriad others) favorites from Gibran....

: ) and ; )

Love you,

Deb

 

[yellowblue]

Chris--

I know you have a wealth of wisdom, and again, I love your posts!!!

I really have to decipher what you say, (mathematically inclined but all subliminal... so I do catch the whispers of the thread in the "Great" web... : ) but have to take time to digest and assimilate before I can really comment.... Only Einstein (and a few of the classics) could respond spontaineously!!! : )

But again, a wealth of buried treasure here!!! Thanks for the map ... ----- then X marks the spot!!!

Love, Deb