James Lewis describes what I know as the yang, ‘inspiring’ pattern of change as the Key Hexagram:
If you consider that lines that do not change are yin, and that lines that do change are yang, then you can write down a third hexagram. This is what I call the KEY.
The KEY hexagram shows the relationship between the first & second. Now if there is a theme that runs throughout the entire I Ching, it is all about relationships, and the leverage to make things happen. Consequently, understanding the relationship between the two hexagrams you get when you consult the I Ching is essential. It is like a sentence has been constructed : You should do this (1st hexagram), in order to accomplish this (2nd hexagram), BECAUSE of this (the Key hexagram).
You know I don’t sign up to the formulaic ‘do this to accomplish that’ idea of first and second hexagrams. But the idea that you can look to the change patterns for why – that’s a keeper, I think.
I wonder how many people out there have independently ‘discovered’ the use of these hexagrams. The interesting thing is that James Lewis, like most other people who take an interest, represents change with yang and stops at that. Karcher’s first idea for a ‘pattern of change’, though, was to represent changing lines with yin, so that’s what I ‘grew up with’.
The yang pattern is like the pattern of force behind the change, like a magnetic field patterning iron filings. Maybe a hidden archetype; certainly a ‘reason why’ you arrived at the particular moment of this reading.
The yin pattern? More of a ‘space for change’, the shape of things that allows the change to become manifest. That might explain something I’ve noticed from very early days with the (yin) ‘pattern of change’: that when the question doesn’t ask for advice, this pattern may still offer some.
If yin does not change then there will never be any yang.
While yang is, broadly, dynamic, and yin passive, to equate this with changing and unchanging, however much it is intended to be a loose association for another purpose, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of yin/yang.
Yin has the potential to change just as much as yang (let’s forget for a moment the arguments based on late-version yarrow rite skewing of probabilities). The thing is how they change. Yang changes in a different way to yin. Obvious, perhaps, but worth emphasising. When people see yin as not changing, while I can understand how they might arrive at that idea, it is something that needs to be nipped in the bud right away. As the Chinese saying goes: “Off by a fraction in the beginning, way off the mark at the end”.
Potential for change is equally distributed between yin and yang. Those who think otherwise might like to take another look at the familiar taiji diagram….
Well, yes (though how old is the Taiji symbol?). For me that means it makes sense to look at the two change patterns together.
Could you say more, or point me to some good reading?
I didn’t understand how to obtain the
“key” hexagram.
Nelson
Sorry, Nelson. Fair point. It’s just the pattern of which lines are changing, regardless of whether they’re changing from whole to broken or vice versa. So for instance if lines two and five were changing, the ‘key hexagram’ as James Lewis describes it would be #29. But there’s also a yin pattern of change, where you’d represent those two changing lines with yin, giving you #30.
Illustrations here:
https://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/practical_I_Ching/change.html
I can’t think of any good reading on how yin and yang change, it’s all in my head from personal observation. But, for instance, yin might undermine a structure until it collapses, whereas yang might storm it. This is the shadowy nature of yin and the full-on nature of yang. But think of different sorts of changes and ask yourself whether they’re yin or yang changes. A snowman melting: yin or yang change?
Changes have different natures. With familiarity with the natures of yin and yang you can form an opinion whether the changes are yin or yang. Of course, yin to yang is a continuum. Nothing is wholly yin or wholly yang, and the same change may have yin aspects and yang aspects, depending on the nature of the analysis applied to it.
Of course, none of this is of any importance unless you can draw any practical benefit from it. But many like to put the cart before the horse. I tend to think that by the time someone is in a position to make use of knowing the nature of change that they know how to recognise what kind of nature it has. In other words, people tend to want to know what is yin and what is yang but are not in a position to do anything with that knowledge. It is all academic. So what if it is yin or yang? But in time, when you know how to apply such knowledge, that knowledge will have already formed on its own.
So when you ask me to say more about it, bear in mind there are two sides to this: recognition of yin and yang aspects, and knowing what to do with that information. The former is useless without the latter. Just dead categories. No life. But later, slowly, once the desire to know and understand has abated, perhaps then it becomes a lot clearer than it ever was before.
Much understanding of the Yi is like that. My advice: stop trying to know. Know when you know. Don’t worry about it otherwise.
Concerning Yin/Yang and the I Ching, I would like to know three things:
First, is the power of Yin equal in strength and effectiveness to the power of Yang? Are Yin and Yang a match for each other? Do they exert influences of the same magnitude on the unfolding process of change? Sometimes it seems like Yang overwhelms and out-performs Yin by the way they are presented in discussions.
Second, are Yin and Yang present in equal amounts in the universe? This would certainly seem to be the case according to the Taiji symbol – the amount of Yin appears to be equal to the amount of Yang. But if this is true, then why are the skewed odds of yarrow stalks more accurate than the 50/50 odds offered by coin tossing? I would think any method that equally represents Yin and Yang would be preferable in divination, a truer representation of the coequal influences in nature.
Third, why are gua that are mostly (but not entirely) Yang referred to as Yin symbols – and vice versa? Again, I would suppose – from an unsophisticated standpoint of common sense – that Yang symbols would display a predominance of Yang, and Yin symbols a predominance of Yin. Yet this does not seem to be the case.
Can anyone help me understand? Thank you, Aleyn.
From the universal perspective, there are two basic forms of change derived from the properties of the dichotomy being used. A dichotomy whose elements reflect the pattern of differentiate/integrate will have a bias to the differentiating being easier to change, reflecting, in a hierarchy, the more particular is easier to change than the general where the dynamics is differentiating FROM integrating, part FROM whole, XOR from AND.
Apply this dichotomy recursively and the ordering reflects a SPECTRUM and so ‘red light’ to ‘blue light’ – noting that blue light is high frequency and EASILY scattered – (and so the sky is blue – at sunrise/sunset the ‘depth’ of the atmosphere scatters the lower frequencies as well to give us the red etc)
SO – in a spectral form of dichotomy, yang is easier to change than yin but is also ‘purer’ in form – and so the sensitivity of ‘pure’ forms is manifest in the ease in which they can be corrupted, destablised, etc (and so special rooms etc needed to build computer chips – incestious brother/sister relationships easily producing ‘deformed’ offspring etc etc)
If we zoom-in on a PARTICULAR level in the hierarchy we zoom-in on GENERAL sameness and so the yang/yin dichotomy is balanced by opposition, here both yin and yang have the same ‘chance’ of changing.
The IDM material identifies the SPECTRAL dynamics of differentiating/integrating being a property of the universe – and reflected in our neurology as it is reflected in the dynamics of the DNA of a virus – one end changes of millenia, the other over minutes/hours 😉
Recognising these properties of the universals ‘behind’ the traditional IC can aid in understanding what is going on, what is possible.
BTW the ‘why’ or ‘how’ of change is given in ICPlus through consideration of context pushing and so eliciting change. As such, the overall focus on the dynamics of HEAVEN and EARTH – stimulus/response, and so the response is ‘hard coded’ for the stimulus after a considerable time of development.
With MAN comes our mediating bias and we find ourselves in the MIDDLE of the HEAVEN/EARTH dynamic. CHANGE is where HEAVEN is ‘pushing’ our buttons to give the EARTH response to its stimulus. Being mediation-driven (being conscious does that) so deriving a hexagram reflects US being inserted in the middle of some context (HEAVEN) that elicits a preferred response (EARTH) – If our hexagram is not the one required so it will shoe changing lines (which are BTW more a reflection of dodecagrams at work!)
In these sorts of scenarios WE have the choice of (a) adopting the preferred response (fit in to the local context), or (b) trying to assert our own context and so ‘take over’ from HEAVEN, or (c) move on.
These dynamics are covered in the proactive IC material – see
http://www.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/lofting/icplusProact.html
to add more fuel –
the traditional yarrow stick method favours yin states over yang and so NOT changing – this reflects a low spectrum perspective across a hierarchy – IOW the use of an asymmetric dichotomy (0/infinity, PULSE nature)
Coin tossing reflects the use of a symmetric dichotomy, LOCAL conditions, GAUSSIAN distributions (+1/-1 – WAVE nature)
Symmetric perspectives derive DIFFERENCE from SAMENESS (as in IQs (diffs) across all species members (same))
Asymmetric perspectives derive SAMENESS spanning DIFFERENCES (and so the spectrum perspectives – across the spectrum of differences in expression is the common ground)
..forgot examples:
in the TRADITIONAL sequence we have hexagrams pair of 1/2 that are DIFFERENT but out of that we can extract SAMENESS in the form of a focus on PURITY by the pair (and this extraction is mapped across all pairs in this sequence)
In the BINARY sequence we have the pair of 02, 23 that are SAME other than the TOP line that is DIFFERENT and that line gives us the extracting of difference from sameness – 02 is unconditional with its devotion to another/others, 23 is conditional.
Aleyn — Bear in mind that yin and yang are not ‘present’ in the universe at all. They are not objects or matter. Yin and yang are simply arbitrarily defined natures invented by people in order to understand something about the way things change and why they change.
Also, a lot of people make the mistake of thinking yin and yang are fixed properties of things. But an example I like to give is that the yin side of the mountain in the morning will become the yang side in the afternoon, after the sun has moved round. (I go into this further on my website.) In addition, an object can be yin or yang according to how you look. A black ball is yin in colour but yang in shape, for instance. When people talk of yin and yang I have noticed a tendency for them to harden concepts that are really best handled lightly.
As for whether yin and yang are equal in power and effectiveness, it entirely depends on the time and the coalescence of forces at that time. Some of the most dangerous situations in the Changes are when yang is powerless to defend itself against yin (yin being such insidious forces as corruption, undermining, etc). This despite the fact that yang is regarded as powerful and yin as weak. Sometimes weakness wins, depends on the situation.
There is good reason to fear yin as an enemy more than yang. Yang you can deal with out in the open, yin is sly and takes advantage of your own weaknesses. Yin, for example, is often overlooked. Overlooking something gives it power. A chink in the armour, Achilles heel, loose wheel coming off wagon. So when you ask are yin and yang ‘equal in strength and effectiveness’ I cannot form an impression of what you mean by ‘equal’. This to me is like asking is the sun equal to the moon. Let each be what it is, you can’t compare the strength and effectiveness of one with the strength and effectiveness of the other simply in terms of the abstract of ‘equality’, but rather you have to go deep into each situation as it arises in order to assess the strength of yin and yang in that situation.
In practice, this for me is an entirely intuitive and split-second affair. You don’t have to understand yin and yang, for instance, to know someone is lying to you or deceiving you. But if you have formed that judgment then you have in effect made a yin-yang analysis.
A massive army outside the gate (yang) and a single spy inside the fortress (yin). A massive army is hard to defeat on its own terms, a single spy only has to be caught, but if not caught can do a lot of damage. You can’t compare these things purely abstractly, as in your question, because it loses real meaning.
The yarrow rite, you should know, is a late reconstruction. No-one knows what probabilities the original yarrow rite may have had. The equal possibility of change with coins is to my mind more balanced, and in tune with the insight to be derived from the taiji tu symbol. Those who say yarrow is ‘more accurate’ are wrong and need to catch up. But it is true that yarrow is more meditative and less amenable to impetuousness. Better than consulting the Yijing quickly is not consulting it at all.
Incidentally, I doubt yin and yang was a consideration in the early use of the oracle. This philosophy emerged 500-600 years later. The form of hexagrams may imply yin and yang, but we shouldn’t imagine that what we know of yin and yang now had anything to do with how the oracle and its workings were originally understood.
People interested in the Yi in general think too much, and manage to think themselves out of a more intuitive understanding of yin and yang. It is best understood through observation of the natural world.
I was just checking out Referer URLs on my website, and was pleased to discover this page. I’m glad I’ve given you something to think about 😉
I believe that if you use the Key Hexagram, when you consult the I Ching, that you will find that the answers to your questions will be more fully answered. Having a more comprehensive grasp of a situation, and what to do about it, and why, is always a good thing. Don’t you think?
At the moment I only have 2/3 of my translation up on my site. It’s a conceptual translation, NOT a literal one, but my acupuncturist who is from Taiwan, tells me that it is just like what she had to study in the original tongue in college in Taipei.
I will get all of it up, plus some more articles, and also the Solar Calendar system I’ve developed, (and have been using since 1976), prolly before the end of this year. At least that’s my current plan. I should also point out that I use the original Natural Order numbering system, rather than the beautiful thematic King Wen numbering system. The Natual Order is binary, which fits this computer age, and has an advantage in that the shape of a Hexagram tells you which number it is…
Absolutely!
Drop me a note when you make updates to your site. There will be readers here who’d like to know.
I’ll definately do that. The Pagans I generally associate with, usually want me to write about more occult matters, dealing with Principles, Processes & Techniques.
Here’s the link to my main I Ching page. Please understand that it is a work in progress, and that I’m likely to up date some of the pages already there.
http://www.jamesclairlewis.com/pages/iching/hexagramindex.html
This page came up in my Referer URLs again, so I figured I ought to update you on what I’ve been doing… especially since I’ve taken soooooooooo long in development.
The first draft is complete, and below the Table of the Hexagrams, I’ve added a Table that shows the calendar system I’ve been inspired to create. It is a Solar calendar, rather than the Lunar calendar that the Chinese have used. Essentially, it shows a correspondance between the lines of the I Ching, and the 360 degrees of the year. I’ve used this calendar for many years and found it to be astonishingly accurate. Since I created the calendar, I’ve noticed that all of the big mistakes I’ve made in life, happened when I wasn’t using it…
This calendar system is based upon Nuclear Hexagrams. So the Four Seasons, (Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn), are at the core. There are 12 Hexagrams that also have the Four Seasons as their Nuclear Hexagrams, so those form the 12 months. Each of those has four Hexagrams with them as their Nuclear Hexagrams, so those are the ‘weeks’ of the months. Taking the Hexagram of the month, as the first ‘week’ of the month, gives you five ‘weeks’ in a month, each with six lines, for a total of 30 degrees.
This calendar arrangement is also a thematic arrangement. It is very different from the King Wen arrangement, (which is also thematic arrangement). I’ve heard that, (was it Terrance McKenna?), found a deep order in the King Wen arrangement, that pointed at synchonicity, and 2012. I’m sure that a similar analysis of this arrangement, will show something equally important.
A major feature of my translation, has to do with what I call, The Circle of Friends. Each of the Hexagrams has a unique Circle of Friends, 12 relationship types, with other Hexagrams. You will find this on each Hexagram’s page towards the bottom, and they are all LINKED, which makes my online translation sort of like an I Ching computer chip.
On the left side are the Hexagrams you get, if you change just that one line. I call those the Outside. On the right side you’ll see six other relationships, which I call the Inside. The Outside deals with external changes in the world, and the Inside deals with internal changes within yourself. The relationships on the right side begin at the bottom with the Nuclear Hexagram. Above that is the Complementary Hexagram. Above that is the Inverse Hexagram. The three above that show the Spring, Summer, and Autumn relationships, (derived by using the Key Hexagram).
I find it interesting that this page came up on my referer URLS again in my website statistics, because right now I am about to begin work on the 2nd draft. The 2nd draft will include Community lines as well as the Dragon lines. I’ll explain what that means, after I complete the 2nd draft. There are 8 Hexagrams which are ‘further away’ from the 4 core Hexagrams, than all of the others…
Your Birthday, and the Cycle of Years
http://www.jamesclairlewis.com/pages/iching/birthday.html