Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
You would recognise it; because it is coherent, because it is rational, because it stands out in contrast to any beliefs.
There is no game I'm suggesting, only that its seems we keep talking and often disagreeing about theory and method and words, so - as Hilary said - how about letting the oracle into the conversation?So no I am not going to play your game, and if you had read what I havebeen saying you would realize the pointlessenes of that and realize what the suggestion of that means.
Unfortunately, divination does take faculties that not all posses. You'll notice that there have been many artists and musicians on this forum over time, and not many red baseball cap wearing neanderthals. This should tell you something.
And just what do you have against red baseball caps or neanderthals? I had my DNA done by 23andMe and I happen to be very proud of my oh-so-slight amount of neanderthal. You're just being a damn Homo sapiens-ist is all!You'll notice ... and not many red baseball cap wearing neanderthals. This should tell you something.
Freedda
There is no game I'm suggesting, only that its seems we keep talking and often disagreeing about theory and method and words, so - as Hilary said - how about letting the oracle into the conversation?
Dave, can you give us an example of the kind of thing you mean by 'underlying principle'?
Things I can imagine different people might describe as an 'underlying principle of the Yi:
And I'm sure other members could come up with a dozen more.
- synchronicity
- probability and randomness
- yin and yang
- truth
- compassion
- change
What's your idea of an underlying principle?
Well no, there's nothing special about artists and musicians is there ? I don't think so I don't think they are sort of in a realm above any one else.
There's a heck of a lot of factors in who gets to be an artist and a musician hardly a level playing field is it !
But no less I hope? (as he strums his air guitar - Power Chord!)Sorry I have no more respect for artists and musicians than I have for any other member of the population. I mean that.
He still doesn't realize he is operating on a hypothesis of his own devising,
a construct of his own mind.
...And is evasive when asked about the specific readings he got about being here and persisting with his line of argument, even feeling insulted that another person could possibly comprehend a reading, and he may not have comprehended it...
How dare they!
Unfortunately, divination does take faculties that not all posses. You'll notice that there have been many artists and musicians on this forum over time, and not many red baseball cap wearing neanderthals. This should tell you something.
Sorry I have no more respect for artists and musicians than I have for any other member of the population. I mean that.
But would they have sung if it wasn't you playing the cello ?
I don't know. I tend to think not.
If I had to do it over, I'd maybe be - and not in any order of preference a) tug boat crew, b) musician, c) soil scientist, or d) - from my childhood - a combination viking/mayan-warrior/space-explorer/dinosaour-scientist/soldier! And there would be at least one or two maidens being held by a) dragons or b) evil emperors whom I could rescue.There was someone asking about which job to do in SR and it was telling no one said anything working class like 'yi says be a road sweeper' or 'Yi says be a hairdresser' it was all arty stuff
There is no game I'm suggesting, only that its seems we keep talking and often disagreeing about theory and method and words, so - as Hilary said - how about letting the oracle into the conversation?
It's a sort of 'rubber-hits-the-road' kind of suggestion. It gets us away from anyone needing proof, or needing to provide proof, or evidence, or anything really. It seems to me that it would be getting us back to the basics.
After all, didn't you say that part of why you're here is because of what the Yi recommended (at least that's what I remember hearing), so maybe doing a shared reading would prove to be just as constructive.
And just what do you have against red baseball caps or neanderthals?
I trust my readings, but I certainly dont trust anyone elses interpreation.
In the interests of clarification...
Is the existence of synchronicity an underlying principle of the Yijing? Or the fact that the Yi answers people? If not, why don’t these qualify?
In what way is qi 'rational'? Compared to, for instance, electricity - which can be measured, controlled and understood in terms of underlying physical laws - it seems more like an article of belief.
@Freedda - I completely agree that discussing a reading and the process of interpreting it would be far more constructive. If this ever happens, though, I suggest putting it in Shared Readings anyway, because it would be a reading and we would be sharing it. And I agree with your suggested questions - definitely not anything personal. If you think people interpret political readings in a way calculated to support their own biases, you should see what we can do with interpersonal ones...
Jukkodave, over to you. How about letting the oracle into the conversation?
Dave, as I said, we don't have to agree or disagree on anything. And we would not have to trust anything.... how would we ever agree on an "interpretation" of any reading.
I trust my readings, but I certainly don't trust anyone else's interpretation.
Behold, the root of this all.
Hilary, please close the thread?
"You would recognise it; because it is coherent, because it is rational, because it stands out in contrast to any beliefs, because it is seen to endure, because it resonates with other things that make sense, because there is direct experience of it. Because it "fits" with other things that work like Astrology and Chinese Medicine.
Qi, Complimentary opposites, call them Yin and Yang or anything else you want to. Those at least I can stated that I have direct experience.
They are pretty fundamental and basic."
So what - that doesn't mean anything at all. Good Bye.
No, try to be honest with yourself, you really cannot afford yourself the conceit that you are 'shaking up a few old beliefs'. This is a common enough conceit possibly because all it takes to support itself is the assertion of 'I am shaking up their beliefs so they are resisting me'. You want to be in that role of a belief shaker but the drawback is you don't know what your beliefs actually are so you have come royally unstuck.
Yi means something to me and why do you bother to post, you aren't making any progress just repeating yourself.
Also can you please learn how to quote as you have just quoted yourself under my name so it looks like I said your words.
I second Moss Elk's proposal to close the thread.
Hi Hilary
"Hexagram 3 is the first hexagram where the two kinds of line mingle,"
Could you clarify what theory you are using that has determined the order that we have the Hexagrams today.
Has always seemed to me that there are huge contradictions and inconsistencies in the "ordering" of the Hexagrams. It make little sense to have Hex 1 and the Hex 2 with each line tranforming to its opposite and then with Hexagram 3 and 4 a differernt principle applies. Even if it could be shown that 3 and 4 were connected as a pair in the same way that 1 and 2 are, where would the rational, coherent and logical theory be that progresses Hexagram 2 to Hexagram 3. It seems like one enormous leap, from 2 to 3; no unbroken lines to two, with one inf teh 5th place, so no coherent movement.
It ahs always seemed me that perhaps, in the sequence of moving from 2 to 3 that what we call Hex 24 would be the next and then, applying the same principles as from 1 to 2, that the 4th in the sequence might be 44.
The turning point and then coming to meet can be seen as a logical progression.
But this is just speculation. I have never consdiered that the "pairings " or the "ordering" ever made any sense.
Where are the theories that underpin the understanding of the order that we have the Hexagrams today.
Love the graphics.
Looking forward to the new site. I really am rubbish at formatting.
I hope my posts are more readable than they were originally.
All the best Dave
But I'm sure we have some dragons round here for you somewhere.If I had to do it over, I'd maybe be - and not in any order of preference a) tug boat crew, b) musician, c) soil scientist, or d) - from my childhood - a combination viking/mayan-warrior/space-explorer/dinosaour-scientist/soldier! And there would be at least one or two maidens being held by a) dragons or b) evil emperors whom I could rescue.
And all I got out of the lousy deal was being on this website (while at work, but don't tell)!
d.
I'd be happy to, if I could get any clarity on what you're asking. I appreciate that in your most recent replies you've made some effort to point to what you're looking for, but it's still not remotely clear what could correspond to those things in the world of the Yi.It isnt about me, or what I know, I am not putting anything forward other than questions and observatons. How about addressing the detail of those questions and observations.
All the best
Dave
Hilary, please close the thread?
Originally Posted by jukkodave It isnt about me, or what I know, I am not putting anything forward other than questions and observatons. How about addressing the detail of those questions and observations.
I'd be happy to, if I could get any clarity on what you're asking. I appreciate that in your most recent replies you've made some effort to point to what you're looking for, but it's still not remotely clear what could correspond to those things in the world of the Yi.
I thought that I had been clear, but in order to provide the clarity I will take it back to the logical basics. As there seems to be much confusion for most that might be a good idea anyway.
The puzzle then is if anyone is not getting any clarity from my posts how are they able to post anything in response and know that it is particulary connected or relevant to what I have posted.
Having quite a lot on at the moment and want ing make sure that I get it right I wont rush it.
But the essence is really rather simple.
If there are fundamental underlying principles for the Yi then that sets the measures and framework for how, why and what the Yi is.
If there are no underlying principles, then anything that we care to believe is possible and that sets the Yi as no differerent to any other form of human created divination, and includes what Neuropsychology tells us how the human brain works, which is mostly that we "create" our own picture of the world based on self deception, and the world we think is real is nothing other than the most fantastic and complicated illusion. Noyhing wrong with that, the lack of conscious awareness and the world of the subconscious , is a central part of being an adult human.
But if we are considering the Yi as anything other than just an elaborate illusion then the knowing, the understanding and knowedge of underlying principles becomes imperative.
Otherwise all the academic, scholastic, translations, interpretations, the purpose of Trigrams and everything else about the Yi would be revealed as just something that could have been made up by someone and becomes irrelevant. There would be nothing to teach and nothing to learn other than a randome set of beliefs, originated by someone thousands of years ago and added to as we have gone along. The fact that one can make up a form of divination, without any concepts of any underlying principles, and it works just as well as the Yi does for day to day questions, reveals, that unless the Yi has something more than just a set of divinatory tools, that it would help us no more than a made up method of our own devising, with the adavantage in that there would be no doubt what the one devised by ourselves meant.
It comes down to that basic question. Is the Yi something that has a reality to it, that links it to common principles, energies, wahtever one cares to call them, or is it a manufactured entity of the human mind that wouldnt matter if it was manufactured 5000 years ago or yesterday.
The use of such tools as logical, rational and coherent examination are ways of revealing if there are any common aspects at play, if there might be fundamentalsm underlying principles or ordinances.
If there exist the presence of contradictions and discrepancies, if there has to be cherry picking to pick the parts we like and agree with and ignoring the parts that we dont, they all suggest that either there are no underlying factors present in the Yi or we dont know them. Which amount to the same thing and limits our use of the Yi to that of just any other method of divination, whether that has existed for thousand of years or just days, we would only be able to get out of the method whatever it is that any form of divination allows us to access. Without the presence of something that is "beyond" us as individuals, which would then be a fundamental underlying factor, then all we are doing is accessing a part of ourselves, whether that is the subconscious or something else, it is still constrained to just us, and unless we have the potential to access any underlying qualities in oursleves then we are only going to get, in any response from any divination, what we already know, even if we dont know it consciously. And if that is the sole domain of the Yi then the access to things that are usually hidden from us would be a fantastic tool and set all forms of divination as rather precious. But it wouldnt be anything to do with the Yi specifically and it wouldnt matter if the translations or the interpretations were correct, it wouldnt matter if there were Trigrams or anything else, because there would be no foundations to the Yi, there would be nothing fundamental, it wouldnt have been constructed on any underlying principles of commonality. That would make all the teaching and learnings, the rights and the wrongs, pretty much everything that seems to be presented as part of the Yi, as being reevealed as the imaginations of the human mind, and no different to anything ekse that might give us access to the parts of ourselves that we dont know how to access.
There is one ohter important consideration. Without the measures and frameworks of fundamentals we have no way of knowing if the interpretation of the reading we get is accurate or if we have distorted it in our minds just to make it seem as though it fits.
That is certainly a distinct possibility from the perspective of what Neurology and Pyschology knows about how the brain works. It is a distinct possibility, as some rudimentary tests done nearly 40 years ago, by the people that I knew then that used the Yi extensively, revealed. Amongst other things we were puzzled as to how one person could get a reading and someone else would get an identical reading and still have a different understanding, we were puzzled as to how it seemed that we could ask the same question, get the same answer and yet still manage to consider it meant something fundamentally different, we were puzzled as to why there were some that used the Yi for almost all of their lives and their lives were a complete mess, just to give a few of the observations that were considered. So we did a little test. We got a load of questions, randomised the possibilites of the Yi, and the outcome was that it was completley possible to take any random question, match it to any random answer, and still make sense of the reading the majority of the time. When it was difficult to match random questions to random answers, which wasnt that often, we knew that it was because the answer was perhaps to "specific ", you cant beat a method of divination that can be interpreted in many ways to get an "answer" that fits.
For myself, having witnessed the Yi's potential to transform lives in a very profound way, Irealised that there must be fundamentals contained in the Yi, which the clarity of understanding how and why to ask questions and a better understanding of what the Yi was trying to say, beyond its cryptic messages, might possibly reveal. I realised that because the method that one uses to cast affected the range of Hexagrams available, that it was important to use methododology that contained no possibility of any artificial skewing.
As part of my journey I learnt Chinese Medicine to add to the knoweldge base, which included Maths and Physics, Neurology and Psychology, lots of beyond the physical realms, what we might terms Metaphysics, lots of direct personal experiences of the fundamentals of life, including those of Qi and Yin and Yang, including brain damage which, because of how the brain compensates when it is damaged in some way. allows one to get to see the way the various parts of the brain function independently from each other and then as they begin to come slowly back "online" again, how they function together. Which is revealing and illuminating in ways that I cant even begin to explain, but oh so relevant to what might be considered the fundamentals, the underlying principles and to how the brain self deceives itself so much of the time.
Perhaps Yi just doesn’t have anything you would recognise as an underlying principle, or perhaps my mind just doesn't work that way. I'm interested in how Yi helps people; that’s how it reveals its true nature every day.
But the Yi does have underlying principles, what would anyone be teaching if they werent findamental. If it doesnt then it is no different from any other method of accessing whatever other forms of divination access and non of the translations matter if they are correct or not, there is nothing to teach, because it would all be arbitrary.
Without knowing if the Yi is helping people in a fundamental way or only appearing to help poeple because that is what they want to believe how would one know if it help at all.
Would it be consiered to be "helpful" to maintain someones delusion or would it be helpful to help someone know the inner realities for themselves.
What is the saying about giving a man a fish and you feed him for a day but teach a man how to fish and he is fed for life.
I will send you a comprehensive explanation so that there can be no lack of clarity on yours, or anyones part. The I will look forward to your postings on the matter.I do need to stop posting here. (I'm planning on taking a holiday in a couple of weeks' time, and before then I have to complete forum migration, technical set-up for the Foundations Class, lesson planning and extra content for said class, and also queue up some emails and blog posts. )
All the best
Dave
It sounds like you are asking the questions that philosophers have always asked about the meaning of life, perception of universe and self, subjectivity of understanding, nature of belief, origins of the universe, what is thinking, what is emotion, perception, and so on.
Much about these questions can never be fully answered, so then, the question becomes, how to make peace with knowing that there are no clear answers, and how to live with ambiguity.
By the way, you may find Eric Kandel's writings of interest (medicine, history of medicine, perception, brain, etc).
Barbara
I am sure you would like that Moss Elk. But where do you not get that this is a discussion about the Yi
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).