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jilt

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I am having a bit of a heavy time. Quite literal actually. My head and legs are heavy, my lower back aches in heaviness, no energy. I even postponed my daily tai chi because of to much weight. And I need a lot of strength to pull me through hard times. Sharing my insights on clarity is one of those responsabilities that seems heavy at this moment. I will explain later.
So, I asked the Yi to give me an hexagram that would help me to understand and develop in this situation, but that also could be shared and worked out as a reading on clarity.

I casted hex 30, Some interpreting titles are: radiance, attachment, clinging, responsability and, of course clarity. fire doubled, light doubled, middaughters doubled.
A 9 on the first place and nine on the 6th place.

As in the first line, all kinds of thoughts rushed through my head, all kinds of “things to do lists”. “Footprins run crisscross, if one is of serious intent, no blame”

Indeed I am connecting to the 'outside world' again, after a long period of retreat. And it feels as if everything is coming together. Things are so demanding that I hardly can find time to paint and write.
firstly, I have to find new sources of income, else I can't paint and write at all. Art isn't making any income for me, on the contrary. I am thinking about giving therapies, but I have no social network to get a good start, and I am not good in networking and advertising myself. How I wish some mecanas (actually, my wife did, but that's not possible anymore) would support me as an artist, but that is probably an illusion.
Secondly, my wife's shop for organic food is giving us a basic income, but competition from the big sellers is rising, and that is under pressure. Now her busyness partner left, and all the work is on her shoulders. I am taking over the administration (heavy) and other supporting tasks, but as a shopkeeper I am no good. It takes a lot of energy from both of us, feels like slaving, we are in a constant struggle to keep the good spirits.
Thirdly, I am 54, very well educated, have many talents, am a gifted artist and a good therapist, but cannot get a place in society. Till now I could struggle on, in spite of all hardship and rejection (the Dutch can be very unkind and double hearted), but the energy seems to fade. It happens with people from 54.
Fourth, I have a bad relation with my parents. Giving them my hearth means that they will start to hurt, not sharing heart means an empty relation. So with them I am in an emotional 'splits' . Now my father has had some open heart operations and a coma (see at www.bertdalmolen.com under painting “not dead”, the first image). Always thought that there needed to be a possibility to forgive, but good intentions are “screwed up” all the time. Try to say farewall, but somehow it still keeps pulling.

Meanwhile we have, after our old cats died, two young cats. That gives a responsibility/clinging/ for at least some 15 years.

that are some aspects of the first line. I haven't been talking about my dreams, neither about interpretations and the relations to the YI yet.
:bows:
 
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jilt

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So. tonight I dreamt that I was going throught the harbours of Amsterdam, that I had a new home over there. After crossing some mudbanks with my son I came to deep water and the quays with my new house. When I was in the house I just came from bed (that first line). I stumbled around in pyjama's, then my grandma and sister came for coffee. I was to dull to organize coffee for them. But then strolled through that big house some more, came to a large table where some eigth persons were sitting. I finally found the button for the light. Strong blue-white ligt illuminated the room. Everybody lost the dullness and welcomed me. I inspected the walls if they were any good for an exhibition (they were, but a kind of antroposofic shaped). Then I set to work.

I intended to use the NI, Hua Ching as a lead for this item. But then I found that his interpretation of LI was quite opposite of mine. Interesting. That will be the beginning of comparing water and fire.
 
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meng

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But then strolled through that big house some more, came to a large table where some eigth persons were sitting. I finally found the button for the light. Strong blue-while ligt illuminated the room. Everybody lost the dullness and welcomed me.

This sounds like hex 30, and the 8 persons could symbolize finding your answer from the yijing in the form of 8 trigrams. As a practicing Buddhist (if I recall correctly), it could as well symbolize the 8-fold path.

It does seem that light is the answer to solve your heaviness. But you have to catch it, so be sure to be a diligent spider and construct a good net.
 

jilt

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thank you, yes, that is what I also thought about the eight persons. I love buddhism, I am very much influenced, even did a week course in the tibetan book of death. But my clinging to the Yi is much more intense and durable.

The guidance from master Ni, Hua: "Bright and progressive. Cultivating the heart will be prosperous." In Li the upper and lower trigram represent fire and brightness, thereby reinforcing the meaning. Fire symbolizes beauty and illumination. It can also symbolize a mind that is too active, unstable, desirous and lost in external beauty. Though fire is beautyfull. it is difficult to control. The mind is also difficult to control and keep still. Fire can mnifest as ambition which can easily burn onself if the fire is not managed correctly.
Water is necessary to balance fire. Without the interaction of fire and water life would be impossible.......... (p 385)
In my mind I thought water represented the heart, straight opposite to Mr. Ni's insight. That is derived from The Wilhelm Baynes interpretation: "In a man's world K'an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light inclosed in the dark -that is, reason."
I forgot about the "reason" in Wilhelm. It makes that dichotomy water/fire very confusing.
Normally that dichotomy states that fire stands for clarity and mind, thought and thinking and water stands for feelings, the abysses of the heart. I loved that rule of thumb, but now I have to rethink it and do a lot of writing.
So, for this exploration, let's stick to the idea of "clinging" and see what comes out.
A thought needs to cling to something, needs to attach to something, else the thought dies out. Why is that? What is the nature of thought? Why is it compared with fishnets?
To answer the first question bluntly, "a thought clings to something to get grip on it, to see if it can be explored, used, eaten, organized for living". Thought, thinking is a tool to make a living. It is a tool to conduct our hands, to manipulate. So the fuel of our thinking is desire. A tool to fullfill our needs, be it love, food, shelter, offspring. When the desire is fullfilled or if something else more desirefull comes on the road priorities change and other thoughts are fuelled. Our thoughts are nets to catch the fishes of our desire.
So, within this very cognitive vision something like objective thought does not exist. Thinking is connected with desire. That also counts for a scientist. The needfulfilling is only postponed, frozen as it were.
It is good to know that the word nerve and neurotic is coming from the greek root of hardening, being hard. We are able to solidify, postpone and by that solidifying and postponing can analyze and sythesise our desires and take manipulative action on that newly sythesized pattern of approaching the desired. That is a neurotic process. The brain needs a lot of fuel to maintain that neurotic process.

any questions so far?
:bows:
 
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meng

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A question can be likened to the clinging of desire, in that an answer is only the result of a question. Aside from questions, there are no answers.

So perhaps what you are clinging to can be made lighter? The question is your heaviness, correct?
 

jilt

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yes, I have some more thought on why it is so heavy. Thought, a lot of thought takes a lot of energy. I know this also -and forget it just as many times- that before any creative undertaking I feel depressed, as if all energy is used in unconsciously organizing the work to be done. At the moment I start to work, that is painting, writing, photography, things become lighter, as if the light is switched on. :)

but there is much more to be said about the fires and the waters.
 
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jilt

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radiation can only be seen, measured, detected when it is meeting, hitting something. E.g space appears to be empty, a vacuum, but that's untrue....... ehh, got cought up in Heisenberg....... When there is an object in space it reflects/absorbs radiation, e.g. light. Radiation, light needs something to cling to to make itself manifest. Without that object space would appear to be empty, but full of possibilities, implicit radiation. About Heisenberg.... when i said space is empty, and you put an object in it, it's not empty anymore. The German quantum-scientistHeisenberg said that you cannot measure something moving. When you spot the position it has already moved, when you measure the speed you need to spot a position: in the end you are only measuring your measuringsytem, it all appears to be a projection of your mind. I leave this quantumstuff for Applegirl, too difficult for me.

I return to the heart and the mind and differences in interpretation from Ni,hua and Wilhelm.
Why I think hex 29 is connected with the heart? Why I think Ni, Hua isn't wrong, but just uses an other interpretation of the word heart?
to be continued, our little cats start to make typing impossible.
 
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meng

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So then, radiation is not dependant only upon it's fuel, but upon the object it reflects off of. This makes me think of 22.
 

jilt

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you're right Meng, that would be 22. This would mean a changing 4th line.

When you take the inner trigrams, you get 29, k'an, the heart as I look at it for now.
30 and 29 make a real pair of mind / heart, swtching via inner trigrams into eachother all the time, like 63 and 64 do. In post-heaven sequence fire takes the place of heaven and water the place of earth.
Sticking to W/B this time: The abysmal repeated. If you are sincere, you have succes in your heart, and wathever you do succeeds.
first, in my vision, the heart gives the rhytmn and the flow. K'an is everything about streaming, flowing, be it water, electricity or wathever goes from up to downstream. The heart is also the big pump for that flow.
The heart generates a magnetic field that responds immedeately to other fields in the surrounding and tries to match rhytms. It is as if the heart is looking for the same patterns in the surrounding. mismatch gives incohearent rhytms, match cohearent. The neurons in the heart give this information directly to the lymbic system and the whole hormone and neurotransmitter -household responds to it. With our neocortex we can learn to manilpulate this basic respons. We can learn to listen to our heart and we can influence our heart by conscious action. Actually, that is an oldfashioned heartchakrameditation.
Start belly-breathing, concentrate on your heart-aria, give pleasant and good thoughts to the heart, just think of pleasant experiences or something nice. Your heart calms down, afters some time you smile, afer some time your chest gets warm. All the other thoughts are your fears and defenses: the abysmal, the fortress of your soul. With some effort is is easy to experience.

In modern neuropsychiatry the brain and heart are seen as one interacting system. The french neuropsychiatrist David Servan-Schreiber has written a book about this "healing without freud and prozac". hope I got this title right, my daughter borrowed it from my bookshelf.
 
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meng

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Very good thoughts. Thanks for sharing them. I especially like the kindred hearts, or the heart seeking matching rhythmical movement and responses.

I have a chf condition, so your comments about 29/water/blood flow through the heart has quite a literal meaning to me.
 

jilt

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Why is that so difficult to explain, it seems so plain, it appears compassion and the Yi need an essay.
I give it a try for now:
compassion is feeling with somebody (com is with, passion is feeling -not emotion). So some insight in your feelings is needed and the ability to observe them and recognize them in others. Empathy is the tool to come to compassion. So compassion is a regognition of a common ground with life and living beings.
So compassion is not only about love, but also about hunger, greed, separation, groing up, fear. Because you know you share those feelings you can care.
Compassion is also a drive in evolution, not to find something to eat and do some sexual competition, but to find rhyming patterns you can unite with, to form an organism within an entity and outside an entity, it is the basis for any enty to grow. Perhaps it is even something found on a very basic energy-level: pattenrs that want to unite.
But what has it to do with 29/30? Well, if you think about a buddhistic mandala, you find in the centre hte buddha, life, enlightment, nirvana, whatever. The first ring around it is the most heavy defense you can imagine: the most precious is also the most protected. The sweetest child surrounded by traumata in christian terms. It gives that 29 feeling as stated in W/B. The abyss protecting the basic rhytms that seek unison, compassion. In 30 that is reversed: passion, compassion outside and uniting, the kernel is fuelling it. Now the danger is burn-out when no company, compagnon for the passion is found.

to be continued, I still have to work out the top line.
:bows:
 

jilt

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coffee

Turning back to the dream, the moment that my grandma and sister wanted coffee. Grandma and sister look like eachother in character. They both love culture because it is a sign of high status for them. They also go through great manipulations to gain position, think everybody is like them, and when they appear not to be they are fools in their eyes. Indeed, a rather sad situation, also conidering it is my dream and my projection.
Anyway, the ladies want to shine without doing something for it, they want the lotus but not the swamp where the lotus is growing, they want the diamonds, but not the mines and the wars. It is all about unreasonable desires. Taking the signs of high position and status, but not the responsabilities. That is what you call a fellow traveller, the followers in W/B.
It is also the what is merchandising, marketing, consuming and consumerism, all about.
Things, desires, that rebel all the time in us according to NI,'s interpretation of the 6th line.

What does it have to do with coffee?

This morning I thought about coffee: an adrenalin-simulator. Speed. It gives "energy", but it ain't fuel. So, your energy-system is exploited. But, generally speaking, we eat to much, so no problem. Perhaps, except, that coffee needs the most fertile soils and a lot of fertilizer.
I love coffee, I grew up with people that drank tons of coffee. In modern ideology from the western world coffee is healthy and a need, especially in the morning. Without it -including that social moment of sharing the joint coffee- things don't go so well. There is even scientific research that says" coffee is good for you".
But to much makes me shaky, nervous. In the morning it can wake up my dull head, but I always feel a bit "split".
I decided not to take coffe for a few days. So, when I wanted to prepare my green tea, and was considering all kinds of things about tea and coffee, I found myself with coffee in my hand. I wanted to make tea, and the auto-pilot made coffee.
Indeed coffee is also a 6th line for me. It consumes the energy in me, like the society that embeds it.

some remarks about the 3rd and 6th line:
The 3rd line has always been about melachcholy for me. Everything must go, so why not enjoi it. But this line does not consider the "process" of things. When you feed life, existance properly balanced, like in line 2) things also come and stay. Here it is a throw away it doesn't matter anyway situation, in six it is reversed: greed. But the ground is the same, fear of loosing life, the parafernalia of life. In 3 it overcompensates by not caring, in 6 it overcompensates by riualistic signs of status.

What has it got to do with Clarity?

to be continued
 
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jilt

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I am just an image on your t - v screen. Internet consumes lots of energy to make all those screens shine.
When I'm doing things on the net it feels so insubstantial, also relations do. In real life one cannot maintain more then 4-6 intimate relations. Then comes the chatroom added, and come timeconsuming relations that are not substantial. They can be maintained only because we offer a lot of energy in deeds and in electricity to the internetboard. As soon as the energy source fails, there is nothing left from all the work. I love to talk with you all and exchange, but it ain't possible. Only one or two I can do properly and serious. That counts for everybody says the anthropologist/psychologist in me.
So, I have to change my expectations a bit, Meng.

I used to compare the screens with the archtype of the sun: we are staring in the eye of God, straight into the light, and then, on that screen, all kinds of messages appear. That is hypnotyzing stuff. "When you look into the sun, see all the things you could have done" "Let the suns shine" Who will pay the energy-bill, who will pay for the energy-war? But when you don't make that offer (sacrifice) you can't tune in with society anymore.
E.G., Elizabeth's shop provides for food and shelter. But all the problems arise when we have to maintain the car and all the internet-stuff, and have to tune up with modern beurocratic regulations. Also when I do photography: I love it, but it takes alot of resources. All that luxery is extra, not basic. Difficult position, you are an outsider immedeately when you would live such a basic life. People don't take you serious anymore. Imagine how your status would drop when you're out of modern tools -even when your mind, thought, insights, morality would be the same.
 
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jilt

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coming back to the heart-mind connection in the interaction of 29 and 30. 29 stand for danger, the fight or flight connected with adrenalin and corticoid stereoids. 30 stands for dopamines, serotinines and oxytocine, that help to relate and calm down. Those hormones are neurotransmitters. In daily life there is a balance between those homone-levels, but under stress people start to produce way to much adrenalin, and the whole system, including your well-being gets ill, e.g. depressed, burn out. If it endures other diseases come. Heartfailure is one of the best known. Prozac works on that system to help reduce stress, but also -as a sideeffect- sex. It appears that prozac (e.g. an incredible 15% of the French population, no exception in the western world) is so much used, that the waterflies can't procreate anymore and disappear, and breaks a whole foodchain.

What I see happening many times in interpretations of the changing lines from a hexagram, is that they are read with almost more importance as the whole hexagram, and then, when there are more, all the changing lines are used to make another hexagram. Over here, in this case, the first and the sixth would change and together would make hex 62, preponderence of the small.
I consider that most illogical.
A Hexagram develops in time, it is an itself unfoiling process. C.G. Jung compared the hexagrams with archtypes. Neither those archtypes are static manifestos. They are processes that develop in time and space, they begin and end and need a certain space, outside or inside events that initiate them.
The lines give the stages in the process, the first line is the initiation, the beginning, the outset. line two defines the field, line 3 how you react on it, line 4 how the surrounding reacts on it (hte ministers, the agents), line 5 the modes of conduct, how a ruler orders his agents/ministers, line six is leaving, evaluates, what is to be learned. From line 1 to 6 it gradually moves from past to future. It is on the nobel user of the I if it wants ti be strong or weak in the stages of the situation. But if I would have been strong in the first place from this hexagram nr 30, in the beginning, the situation would have moved to hex 56, wandering. Wandering is helpfull in explaining that line, but lingering in that movement would defenitely extinguish the fire because of no centering and looking for fuel all the time. So I accepted it as means of exploration, collecting all the whirling thoughts in me, and then set of in explaining.
The moving line is more a notion of care: when you are strong when the initiation is strong, it will burn out soon, so, if you want to stay in that situation, so temper a bit.
When it was a yin it would have been reversed of course: when the initiation is weak, don't be weak to, else this will change.
So, we stayed in 30, only went to 56 for exploring. That also counts for the top line.
That is what I am doing now, As a wise king I take a strong position to weed out some incohearent practices with the use of the lines. Hex 55 has something to say about it. But I can't linger long in that position> I have the choice to temper and move on to the next kua nr.31 or to celebrate authority and do a 55 situation. I will not, because 62 indeed has something to say about me over here, in Clarity: I am new, people start to trust me, I should not over do things, not take a leo-mars position as a new-bee, carefully look around and listen.
:bows:
 
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Tohpol

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Nice thoughts Jilt - enjoyed reading.

Topal
 
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meng

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I should not over do things, not take a leo-mars position as a new-bee, carefully look around and listen.

I doubt that what goes on in this forum will go down in monumental records of Yijing wisdom; and anyway, longevity has a few grave consequences. Newbies have the greatest advantage, as they've no history of mistakes. As far as I'm concerned, your heart-talk warms up the place.
 

jilt

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thank you for your kind and empathic remarks Meng, thank you Topal.

:)
 

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