Blog post: Accidental Yijing commentaries

[hilary]

These are something I can’t write – I can’t help seeing the world through ‘hexagram glasses’ – but I love coming across them: articles about other things that just happen to be really excellent hexagram commentaries.

Havi Brooks has been writing some very nice inadvertent Yijing things lately, even to the point of accidentally writing about the connections between hexagrams – and then she’s had to put up with me bouncing around in her ‘comments’ section ranting on about hexagram sequence, trigrams and nuclear hexagrams on a blog that has nothing to do with the Yi at all. (You can find all those comments via the following links to Havi’s posts.)

Havi’s been writing specifically about being visible, or invisible, and that desire to hide the light under a bushel. She actually suggests ways for small business owners to be a little less visible, so they can feel safer… and of course I think of and comment about Hexagram 36 (wouldn’t you?) and how that inner light moves on into 37 (as Havi opens a real, physical ‘home’ for her work) where it can have its influence and start to make its presence felt through the outer trigram.

The nuclear hexagram – the hidden possibility – in Brightness Hiding is 40, Release. Of course if you hide your light, you are liberated from the need to be something for someone, and your path isn’t defined by anyone’s definition (including your own) of what you should be doing. Havi’s ‘invisibility hacks’ hint at this.

But the difficult thing to grasp – in the abstract, anyway – is how, if Hexagram 36 contains the possibility of Release, Hexagram 22 can do so as well. The two feel more or less like opposites: not that they’re structural opposites, but in experience. If a small business owner received Hexagram 36, it would be time for some of those invisibility hacks, keeping the sensitive insight hidden away, safe from destructive criticism. Whereas one who receives 22 – Beauty, Making Beautiful, the creation of images to express and communicate the essence – needs to concentrate on marketing, making herself visible and understood. (I’ve even seen 22 talking specifically about website design quite a few times.)Marketing. Ugh. Where’s the release in that?

And then Havi talks about when visibility leads to safety, and it all becomes clear.

 

[pocossin]

Drat! Havi doesn't believe in Mt. Hood

 

[knotxx]

This fits in very beautifully with a reading I did recently about acting. I am a stage actor (have been for many years) myself, and I asked the yi to tell me something about acting. I got 36.4.6-30. I am not sure I have ever had a reading unfold so rapidly and clearly for me, maybe partly because the yi and I seem to agree about how acting works. You wear a mask in order to be able to tell some truth, to make something clear. And yes, inside the mask is huge liberation. And the changing lines -- 36.4, yes, you do go down into muddy depth of feeling, into your gut, to pull up what you need to use on stage. And 36.6 sounds EXACTLY like the line of a play to me, the rising action, the climax, the falling action -- or like the line of a tragedy, in which the hero rises and then falls.

And this reading is the only time I have ever understood the Image of H36: "Thus the noble one, overseeing the crowds, uses darkness and light.' I never understood where the _crowds_ came in, but in a reading about acting it is startlingly clear.

Anyway! This doesn't relate very well to your post perhaps, sorry! But that reading has been haunting me for a month or so.