Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
58.5 implies an influence of characteristics of hexagram 08 and so a condition described by analogy to hexagram 54.
Image (from my original interpretation):
""[With self-reflection comes intensity] : The Joyous. One joins business with friends to explicate repetition."
...
Your rigidity in understanding is at times disturbing Frank. The CLASS nature of the hexagrams, their UNIVERSAL forms warrant better consideration than those of Wilhelm. ...
There are times Frank when you remind me of the long-term caged bear suddenly set free and who can do nothing but pace in the same pattern as it did in its cage! - or more perhaps the fundamentalist who cannot read past their 'bible' and take it all literally, 'what is written is what you get'. No way Frank. We are dealing with classes, universals, colourless forms then coloured by local contexts (such as Wilhelm's or the ERANOS project or your focus) and so particularised.
There is no cage Frank. Explore. Think. Enjoy.
...In this way learning becomes many sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always [and in all ways] something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.
Hi Elvis,
Do you have a reference to an actual observation of this myth or just your extrapolation from Plato's story of the prisoners in the cave?
So you reject all divination,
Let me reduce Wilhelm's text to just the few words I meant to ask you about since you reject his efforts in general:
As to the associations of the trigrams of the two youngest children Lake and Mountain representing bonding and passion that is pretty standard for youngest children in family dynamics. The rest of your comments are more about early and primitive thinking of the 6-bit byte than anything relevant either to this new century of the eternal I Ching.
The nature of the I Ching line symbols reflects encoding of meaning free of any associated language (e.g. Chinese) and as such covers a universal property of our species rather than something unique to ancient China.
Hi Elvis,
..
Clearly, although you insist everyone read your links, you have not read any of my website either on Flux Tome (I Ching) or Science is Magic! Try it if you truly believe in out of the Box thinking.
No, it is not required to only believe in current dogma or only accept what is presented to complete a degree. It is required that you work at it and prove your novel ideas. I find it amusing you find my degree with honors in Chemistry and Other Religions so non-innovative-- which I obliged the totally Old School Committee On Academic Standing to accept as its designation and you dismiss my Colloquium to the Science Faculty I gave on my new thinking which was universally recognized as good science although they wondered why I included the other stuff--and the Religious Studies and Philosophy profs who recognized my work as deeply spiritual and philosophical but wondered why I included dull science stuff too.
- you REALLY do need to step out of that cage Frank.Clearly you have no experience with doing work anyone else appreciates or even finds plausible--and given the limitations in your ability to manage critical thinking or discussion I can well understand why.
By the way, have you ever been to Kansas?
Do you know it is one of the Heartland US states?
Have you ever met anyone from Kansas?
Your Oracle was hex 1.7, you don't get to evade answering your own EIC questions or to choose other hexagrams-- you aren't Generalissimo of your own banana republic. There is nothing unstable about any simple sequential odd then even pair of hexagrams--it merely requires six moving lines-- the same as 27/28 or 61/62. Do you think of yourself as unstable?
Hex 1.7 is all about process without personal thought or individual understanding, thus the flock of dragons without any heads.
But you reject anything but your own caged thoughts so why bother?
You have supplied your own contradictions and illogical conclusions.
When you can present any ability to even notice reality I would be glad to go through some segment of your misunderstanding and explain your errors.
Up to this point you have failed to even notice the issues I have raised, responding only with jokes like your bear story set up and the constant repetition that you are too special to have found anything worthwhile in the vast work in the I Ching which you clearly don't understand let alone have anything interesting to add to at all.
Hi Elvis,
Ever heard of Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth...?
I don't have a problem with Values, I think highly of them. Are you aware that "facts" refer to history in the sense of what has been done (cf. Latin)? You seem to have your own totally value laden notion of 'facts' which is peculiar since you are only allowed your own opinions and values--facts must be shared by all equally.
You object now to rhetoric? That was the whole of Aristotle's teaching. That is why The Rhetoric is the final volume of Aristotle. Science is merely one of the three available translations for a "Book" of Aristotle from the ancient editors translated by the Scholastic Monks. You should study more history of science and the Medieval University.
It is a symmetry-grounded phrase Frank and so 'corrupt' in that a symmetric perspective comes with an aesthetic element that can be illusion.
In the context of identifying the foundations of meaning in the neurology there is no room for rhetoric Frank. Empirically derived material is better and the EIC offers such and is more consistent and testable than your traditional divination methodology. IOW Frank you seem to be still living in medieval times! (or earlier in the 10th century BC)
That is just dead wrong. I have drawn parallels between the notion that patterns of brain synapse structure could be likened to the ability of Yi trigrams and hexagrams to give rise to meaning without coding or Divine intervention by their simple sequence and line values, so I am aware of what you are trying to see through the glass darkly.The facts of brain dynamics lead to the facts of classes of meanings
That is just dead wrong. I have drawn parallels between the notion that patterns of brain synapse structure could be likened to the ability of Yi trigrams and hexagrams to give rise to meaning without coding or Divine intervention by their simple sequence and line values, so I am aware of what you are trying to see through the glass darkly.
What you obviously failed to comprehend was the properties and methods of the neural hierarchy...
“Dui is the lake, is the youngest daughter, is the shamaness, is the mouth and tongue, is the deterioration [of plant life] and the breaking-off of what had been attached.”
Hi Elvis,
Here is the essence of the bottleneck. I do no accept that any part of the general functioning of the nerve firings controls anything at the level of conscious understanding.
You seem to feel there is a deep connection between Boolean logic operators in computer systems and the essence of what our brains can comprehend.
You cite articles and insist that is what much be the ONLY TRUTH. However, your conclusions do not stand up to the slightest logical or substantive analysis. So you are left with only your own beliefs and values expressed in the most simplistic of choleric rhetoric.
Do better or let the point go. I find nothing interesting or persuasive in your stuff though I have worked with very similar insights but gone beyond your stuff long ago.
What's the topic again? Trusting in stripping away, as it relates to 58.5?
This is a rich place, potentially dangerous and frighting. There are bogs and bones, and god knows what else in there. This is the same Dui who is typically depicted as social and joyous? I believe it is, and I'm glad to see this other side discussed.
Not sure what to make of that wicked witch mother of the west though. Was she a catalyst in transforming Dui into something dark?
A thought about Hexagram 58, line 5… not yet completely confirmed by experience, just a thought…
Hexagram 58 is Opening, Joy and Communicating: the human figure with the great mouth who seems to dance and sing. This post is about its fifth line - the peak and culmination of the hexagram, as a rule, and its place of greatest choice - which reads, ‘Trusting in stripping away, there is danger.’
A little background should help to show where I’m coming from…
The Shuogua says of the trigram dui that is doubled to make this hexagram:
“Dui is the lake, is the youngest daughter, is the shamaness, is the mouth and tongue, is the deterioration [of plant life] and the breaking-off of what had been attached.”
(RJ Lynn, The Classic of Changes, p124)
There might perhaps be an old association with the Queen Mother of the West (the direction for dui in the Later Heaven bagua), a goddess who lives far, far to the west of human habitation:
“In appearance the Queen Mother of the West is like a human, with a panther’s tail and a tiger’s fangs, and she is a fine whistler. In her tangled hair she wears the sheng crown. She is the official in charge of vile plagues sent from heaven, and of the five dread evils.”
(The Shan Hai Ching, as quoted in Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology)
So she and dui have womanhood, and the West, and ‘deterioration’ of one kind or another in common, and maybe also tigers and leopards (thinking of hexagrams 10 and 49).
All of this is thoroughly vague and inconclusive, and I’m only starting with it to create a context for looking at 58, line 5 - the place of the ruler within the hexagram of Opening. If there is a place for a shamaness or a queen anywhere in the hexagram, this must surely be it: the dancing mediator in authority, ruler in her own domain.
And then precisely in this place of authority, she is connected (by the changing of 58.5) to Hexagram 54, the Marrying Maiden: the young girl, not yet a woman, who becomes only a junior wife and takes second place, where she has no authority at all.
Might Dui, the shamaness, be entering into marriage with the spirits as a junior bride?
To marry is also to ‘come home’ - and Opening to the spirits must needs involve letting go of ‘bringing order’ and relinquishing her personal ‘direction to go’, as the Oracle of Hexagram 54 says.
Then the moving line itself, 58.5, would show what it takes to make such a marriage:
‘Trusting in stripping away,
There is danger.’
This is the same ’stripping away’ as the name of Hexagram 23: the knife that cuts away the surfaces, leaving one feeling flayed, raw and exposed. The normal defences of the personality are stripped away - which is the work done by a shaman’s drugs, drums and dances. Then there is danger - a word that also means there are ghosts and spirits - and no protection to separate the shaman from the spirits.
It’s worth noticing that the line doesn’t actually say that this means misfortune. Sometimes, in the Yijing, it can still be worth going ahead even in the face of danger. Having said that… I can’t remember ever seeing a real-life reading with this line where the trust was well-placed. (I can remember twice seeing it refer to joining pyramid schemes, which is interesting!)
To discover whether this danger is to be braved rather than avoided, you’d need to ask what you are trusting, so that you allow your defences to be stripped from you; what ‘marriage’ you are entering into that warrants accepting the second place and surrendering control; what kind of ‘home’ you are joining. Perhaps a supremely wise and skilled shamaness could trust in stripping away and emerge unscathed?
This original post shows the problems of invoking mere words as the be all and end all of I Ching understanding.
I doubt Hilary was implying anything as a be all, end all. I know I wasn't. I spoke to a specific element of personal curiosity, and of where I would expect to find it, i.e. in a lake.
The cat woman is an interesting mythical figure, as is the shaman, as well as the personification of a lake. How would you know for certain the cat doesn't protect her? And why judge anyone a whore? How do you arrive at these crystallized conclusions at the exclusion of everything else?
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).