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East of the sun and west of the moon....

RindaR

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New friends (if I may call you so),

I have a beginners question. Ok, ok, so I have two... (more in waiting, I'm sure!)

Would you help me understand the implications when Yi refers to a direction, (north, east, southwest, whatever)? I've dutifully done a site search hoping to find an explanation.

I'm also wondering if you would mind telling me more about blending, binding, bonding, etc...?

Rinda
 
C

cheiron

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Hi Rinda
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The Yijing is made up of the Zhouyi and 10 Wings or commentaries which were written much later. A lot of 'I Chings' do not separate out the wings which means the reader can become very unclear.

The 8th Wing - 'Shuo Kua' or 'Shuo Gua' - deals with the Trigrams

Here is a link to Chris Feeling's translation.

Remember South is at the TOP!

http://www.mindsports.net/I_Ching_Connexion/JavaVersion/Appendices/FrameSK.html

The direction South West (Top Right) is often taken as 'home' 'friends' 'family'

North East is often taken as a strange place; a difficult journey; strangers; an end to a cycle of change - It is also the direction of the mountains of the North East which were the gateway to the spirit world.

However if you were to ask the Yijing a question about direction South West would likely mean South West!

There are many approaches to working with the Yijing and over the years many of us develop our own favourite battery of techniques. One approach, in its pure form, just analyses the trigrams...

It is worth remembering that Yijing method has built up layers over many centuries... Some I like some I feel speak to me a little less clearly.

I believe there is very little which one can assert as truth when one looks at method. But the text (including the wings) is comparatively certain and is a very good place to keep ones roots. IMHO

I have not heard of blending etc....

Can I suggest... there are many hundreds of Yijings out there some of which move into their own space and others which I find are very good as they absorb coffee spills extremely well...

If you are starting out you might find one of the mainstream ones - a good translation - not an easy thing as many Chinese words have a number of meanings and the author(s) both had a great sense of humpur and liked word play which can get lost.

There is a sound review page here...

http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_resources/index.html

Hope this is helpful

Warmly

--Kevin
 
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cheiron

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Sorry R

To Clarify - These directions come from the trigrams which make up the hexagrams - The author(s) of the text probably looked at the trigrams to distil a meaning for the figure (hexagram).

That is why I have given information focussed on trigrams...

Read the Shuo Gua all will become clear(er)

happy.gif


--K
 

RindaR

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Kevin,

Thank you so much for your patience! I've looked at that diagram many times, and had not connected those directions with the directions mentioned in the hexagrams.



I'm toddling... I have used Yi for guidance (on and off) for many years. I now find myself hungry for a deeper knowledge of it and am seeing glimmers of the patterns that run through it and inform it.

I started years ago with Wilhelm-Baines, and gave up on it. Recently I've been devouring Alfred Huang's translation, and am finding it much more understandable. (Couldn't possibly be the 35 or so years life-experience in between them, eh?) My copies of Steven K's (and another translation that is recommended here at Clarity) just arrived in the mail yesterday from Amazon.

I think the blending, binding, etc. comes from some of Chris' work?

Rinda
 
C

cheiron

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Hi Rinda

I have very deep respect for Chris' work he has penetrated very deeply into many dynamics? But I believe these are not the original dynamics as portrayed in the text or are the concepts of Dao and the Yijing.

He has, I believe, taken a model and applied a lot of modern western science and conceptual thought to produce something else? Which I would class as a cognitive model of perception / behaviour with due regard to hard wired perception/disposition.

I am firmly rooted in Jung and Dao? the two do not mix easily
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I would suggest that at the beginning one should make a basic choice... Chris' approach or the Yijing... the two at once is a very difficult task!

(And please Chris ? do not come back to me here with reams of your work ? I am still happily gaining from your last posts on a number of threads which are pertinent to the key issues I am working now
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)

Karcher has written a number of books ? I usually recommend his ?How to use the I Ching? (simple and sound and very ?good? choice of English words for the Chinese multi meaning characters)? and his I Ching 2002 Which makes a good partner to the other in that it introduces some of the other meanings of the words in the text? It is based on his work with Ritsema with some very crucial corrections.

I like Mr Huang.

You sound like me? so many years and I am still toddling? but every now and then my nappy smells funny ? I wish it would not do that.

Welcome aboard

Warmly

--Kevin
 

bradford_h

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Hi Rinda
Old Chinese grammar is such that the two words South and West can mean Southwest, South AND West, South TO West and South OR West. Same with North and East. And from the context it is really hard to say which was intended here (at 2.0, 39.0 and 40.0). We also can't say with any confidence that the directions on the eight trigram wheel (representing the King Wen arrangement) had any meaning to the Yi's original authors. But we can infer from the tone that SW is roughly equivalent to "friendlier atmosphere" or "path of least resistance", and NE as doing things the hard way, the uphill battle.
South is also mentioned at 36.3 as the direction of a traditional winter hunt. This is just an historical reference. The South at 46.0 refers to the direction which the sovereign faces when giving commands, and the querent is being advised to be bold like this. North was the direction you faced when receiving orders.
These are the only mentions of the four directons (Si Fang) in the original Yi.
Hope this helps a bit.
brad
 

chrislofting

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Hi Rinda,

to summarise blend, bond, bound, bind, without pointing you to too many of the IDM pages

(1) our brains derive meaning from categorising information into a core set of universal distinctions, they being:

Wholeness
Partness
Static relationship ( sharing space with another)
Dynamic relationship (sharing time with another)

(2) These universals are common to all neuron-dependent life forms (at least) and as such at the unconscious level serve as sharable, really generic, meanings across all members of a species. - they appear to be derived from the brain's use of recursion (see the diagram http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/btree.png) in processing information.

(3) this sharing for our species is apparently through resonance of emotions, IOW at the species level we are naturally empathic due to the integrating nature of our species and its instincts/habits - one of which is the use of the fight/flight dichotomy to express emotions, IOW the pool of emotions allows us to resonate with another of our species (and even with other neuron-dependent, emotion-carrying life forms, just to lesser degrees of 'finesse'!)

(4) with the development of consciousness, these core qualities are taken and applied to unique contexts to elicit a particular quality-to-context link where we label the qualities to 'fit' the context - IOW we create a language, a specialisation, to communicate information about that particular context but using the ONE set of universal qualities that we all share as a species. Thus we make association of 'wholeness' to 'something' and label it 'tree' as compared to 'wholeness' to 'something' and labelling it 'forest' etc. IOW we have moved from the approximations, hand-waving, nature of our speciesness to the more precise, well stressed (by words) nature of our consciousness.

(5) PRIOR to the use of words, and even 'developed' emotions, there appears to be a set of feelings of these qualities that I have come up with as:

BLENDING - a sense of, a feeling of, WHOLENESS (an object)
BONDING - a sense of, a feeling of, sharing SPACE with another/others (static relationships, invarient)
BOUNDING - a sense of, a feeling of, PARTNESS (an object in relation to another greater object)
BINDING - a sense of, a feeling of, sharing TIME with another/others (dynamic relationships, varient)

(6) to GROUND these generic universal qualities in a context we need to add a local context-determined qualifier, such as expand/contract, positive/negative, explicit/implicit, (all synonyms of differentiate/integrate and so yang/yin)

(7) The context-determined qualifier, combined with the universal qualities, gives us EIGHT basic feelings with which to describe reality.

(8) Cognitive analysis of various specialisations indicate that these feelings, ak generic qualities, are reflected in our specialisations, e.g. the I Ching, MBTI, human emotions (fight/flight), and the types of numbers we use in Mathematics (these are the examples I use in my websites) - different labels point to the same qualities. ( we are in fact focusing on the source of 'noun/verb' languages in general)

(9) Thus, for example, the blend, bond, bound, and bind qualities are reflected in the trigrams of the I Ching since the trigrams are derived by our brains using recursion of 'yin/yang' to categorise, that is itself a label applied to the general sense of differentiate/integrate (aka yang/yin, aka expansive blending/contractive blending)

(10) IOW what we are dealing with here is the SOURCE of the I Ching, and all of the other specialisations, being the GENERAL set of qualities our species-nature uses to derive meaning, IOW the IC etc are all metaphors for what the brain deals with - objects and relationships, differentiating and integrating, the WHAT and the WHERE. Our consciousness, being more precise than our speciesness NEEDS labels to communicate PRECISELY and so moves past the level of species-nature communications that is too 'approximate' for consciousness to deal with. (it is this 'issue' that elicits paradox - e.g. wave/particle duality etc)

(11) Kevin in his post seems to have assumed that the IDM material is 'on par' with other perspectives re The I Ching, Daoism etc etc - WRONG. IDM deals with what is BENEATH all of these specialisations, the unconscious neurocognitive processes we all have as neuron-dependent life forms. (for IDM in particular, see http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/idm001.html)

(12) My ICPlus material is a specialisation derived from considering the IDM matieral applied to analysis of the 'traditional' I Ching etc. and as such has come up with material not published where we 'transcend' the traditional in that we include work in neurosciences, cognitive science, psychology, etc etc, IOW the last 3000+ years of research into meaning derivation etc, to aid in understanding how it is we find 'value' in the I Ching, when conservative Science says their should not be. Thus I call my I Ching material ICPlus (IC+) - see the home page http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/newindex.html

(13) the GENERAL set of qualities we use to derive meaning allows us to (a) form specialisations and so a specialist language and then (b) use that as a source of analogy or metaphor in describing some other specialisation.

(14) due to the 'trial and error' methods of the developments of our specialisations (we have worked without understanding neurocognitive processes, in that that understanding has only come about in more recent generations), so some specialisations are 'good' at this analogy making, other are not so good. The I Ching is one that is good such that we 'see' specialisations in the IC as we see the IC in other specialisations. What we are in fact 'responding to' are the underlying qualities of 'blend, bond, bound, bind' - the one GENERAL 'beneath' all of these particulars.

(15) many on these IC lists either dont 'get it' or dont 'like it' - the latter since the material opens the IC up really wide and moves away from the 'traditional, Chinese, I Ching' and into something applicable across the species and in all languages. A common language for all species-members ;-) - others dont 'get it' in that the more often see the IDM as a replacement of the IC, it isnt, it is a source of refinement of the IC and as such not IC. My ICPlus material is the specialisation, its roots are in application of IDM to the IC concepts in general.

(16) with all of this in mind, so the basic qualities of the trigrams, their 'IDM' level natures are:

heaven, earth : blending (expand, contract)
lake, mountain : bonding (expand, contract)
fire, water : bounding (expand, contraxt)
thunder, wind : binding (expand, contract)

These eight are then turned into hexagrams where the whole set of trigrams is applied to EACH trigram to flesh out more detail (this reflects the notion of the whole encoded in all parts - a property of recursion, the method in deriving the trigrams, hexagrams etc)

(17) thus we derive the 'Species I Ching' (see other threads on this list) where we have, for example,

context - contractive blending
text - expansive blending

hexagram : 12

focus : neutralising.

context - expansive blending
text - contractive blending

hexagram : 11

focus : harmonising (balancing)

(18) the common ground of all of these specialisations allow us to use one specialisation to 'refine' the expression of another - e.g. the IC to flesh out the MBTI:

http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/MBTIX.htm


Hope all of this explains things for you ;-)

Best,

Chris.
 
C

cheiron

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Thanks Candid

Reading Brads post I only did a little poop but made it right accross to the chair!

Grins

--Kevin
 

bradford_h

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Hi all-

(Kevin- that must be some sort of English way of talking English)

I misled a bit in trying to keep it simple above, when suggesting that South had little meaning at 36.3. South is an important direction to face in winter, although going far enough southward to matter much wasn't really possible before we had planes and autos. The Zhi Gua for this line is 24, which stood even back then for the winter solstice, when the sun is furthest South. It was maybe a happy coincidence that the winter hunt (which doubled as military training) was in that direction, but the authors seem to have seized on it.

brad
 
C

cheiron

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No Brad - Just poorly expressed English.

On reading your post I realised I had made a small error in mine.

A poop.

happy.gif


--K
 

hilary

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Didn't the Zhou march northeast to tackle the Shang? (Making northeast represent taking on destiny, entering hostile territory, taking the difficult course, isolating oneself from help...)
?
 

bradford_h

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Hi Hilary-
That's one of the theories that's tossed around a lot, or hypotheses at least.
Along with Southwest being the homeland of the Zhou.
I wouldn't present it as fact without a lot more data, and it should account for all three sets of uses,
at 2, 39 and 40. LiSe might have some more to offer on this.
But there might just as easily be a long lost cultural or sub-cultural set of associations to the compass points,
like most indigenous tribes have.
b
 

bradford_h

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and...
Just for giggles I ran an electronic search of both the Shijing and the Shujing
and didn't really find anything on SW & NE.
Just a few references to North alone as the place of difficult neighbors, but we all knew that.
Americans have to live in constant fear of the Canadians. But Britain had the Vikings.
b
 

gene

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Yeah, those Canadians are really scary. Dharma, are you there?

Gene
 

bradford_h

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This frightens me.
We are taught from a young age that Canadian women
sharpen their teeth and aren't allowed to take baths.
b
 
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cheiron

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You wanna worry Brad - When the going got really tough the Vikings sent their women in.

If it catches on in Canada the US is stuffed.

--Kevin

PS - What's a bath?
 
C

candid

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a bath is a shower that you sit in... I think? last I recall its also a place to play with little boats... no duckies though... that's for girls
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dharma

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Canada... Its the only place I wanta be eh. Our goverment is dumb but not evil eh. Not everyone up here is nice but the majority is. We are peaceful and not a war-like people, but we stand by our allies when nessacary eh. I love hockey here and we are really proud of our gold medal hockey team! If they never got it this year making excuses for them losing would be a part of canadian heritage eh. And our views of our neighbours....well lets just say im dissapointed at so little americans know aboot us compared to what we know aboot them eh. now then get out your thinkin' caps cause this here's a joke eh.

TICKETS PLEASE!

Three Canadians and three Americans are traveling by train to a hockey game. At the station, the three Americans each buy tickets and watch as the three Canadians buy only a single ticket. "How are you three guys going to travel on only one ticket?" asks one American. "Watch and you'll see" answers one of the Canadians.

They all board the train. The Americans take their respective seats but all three Canadians cram into a bathroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the bathroom door and says " Ticket please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on. The Americans see this and agree it was quite a clever idea. So after the game, they decide to copy the Canadian's trick on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all that).

When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the Canadians don't buy any tickets at all! "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" says one perplexed American. "Watch and you'll see" answers a Canadian.

When they board the train the three Americans cram into one bathroom and the three Canadians cram into another bathroom nearby. Once the train leaves the station, one of the Canadians leaves their bathroom and walks over to the bathroom where the Americans are hiding, knocks on the door, and says "Tickets, please!"
 

gene

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I think I will skip the Canadian Hockey games this year, at least if I have to go by train.

Gene
 
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dharma

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pssst Gene, have i got a deal for you...
no need to forgo the games this year. i know a guy, who has a cousin, who's brother has connections to the sister of the hockey ticket agent and she's friends with the ticket collector on the train.
wink.gif
wink.gif
he not only can get you the best boxseats for each game, but a whole season's worth of tickets get's you TRAIN tickets thrown in for free! - pretty wild deal, huh? i mean eh...
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wink.gif
are you in, or what?
 

lenardthefast

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I got lost somewhere around the ticket-takers uncle's great-grandmother, I think. But, will these shenanagans work if the person lives in California? If so, sign me up, (I've been so good lately, I feel like being bad.) Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Namaste,
bounce.gif

Leonard
 
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dharma

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heehee,
no need for all that nudging and winking now
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this is all on the up and up
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the line forms right here - drop the money into the pot as you pass... that's right, jus' keep a bouncing and it'll all be over quick
wink.gif
 

lenardthefast

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Ohhhh, it suddenly went from FREE to "drop the money', eh? You Quebecois are soooo durn tricky. Maybe Brad is on to something. (My Grammy told me there was no such thing as 'free' on the IT)

OK, how much?
happy.gif


Namaste,
hex04.gif

Leonard
 

gene

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Well, Dharma

I think it may just be Tampa Bay Lightning that is playing those pesky Canadians. I know they won the first round, so I guess I got no choice to take you up on your offer. This year the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team was giving Indianapolis a whacking, something like 37 to 10 til, four minutes left in the game, I went to bed only to wake up to the newspapers saying, what happened? When I watch they win. Well, I guess that isn't always true because I haven't watched the lightning. It would be a lot of fun. I'm not deep into sports, but I like to one time in my life go to a superbowl or world series, or some major championship game. Looks like you Canadians got us again. At least til the Lightning come to town. Ha ha.

Gene
 

gene

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Oh, and I was in Vancouver BC when the Atlanta Braves played either Montreal or Toronto for the last game of the world series a few years ago. My friend and I just quietly sat by as our favorite team, the Braves lost and all the Canadians were going crazy. But there is always the next time.

Gene
 

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