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cesca
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I have an idea I'd like to bounce off y'all. Please forgive the lengthy preamble, and the downright lengthiness of the whole thing -- I'm just trying to set this up so it has the best chance of making sense:
Hexagram 4 is one of the hexagrams that describes childhood. The hexagram name MENG essentially means ‘covering’: veiling or hiding.
The nature of a child is not yet manifest; it is in potentio, an unknown. The process of life and learning uncovers the brightness of the child.
The Chinese term 'qi meng' refers to education; it literally means to lift the cover and reveal what was concealed. The word 'education' itself has a similar meaning, derived from the Latin educare "bring up, rear, educate," which is related to educere "bring out," from ex- "out" + ducere "to lead". In both cases, there is an assumption that one is revealing something already inherent in a person.
The knowledge we receive depends upon the direction of our curiosity, which shapes the questions we ask. It’s a basic principle of scientific research that we only get answers to the questions we ask, and that the way we formulate our questions is of primary importance in determining the kinds of answers we get. Learning to formulate a question that can yield a useful answer is one of the fundamental skills of the formalized learning we call research.
An important aspect of Hexagram 4 is about how to retain a healthy innocence into adulthood, without immaturity. Not-knowing and naiveté are two very different states; an open curiosity about the natural world (including that part of it that lies ‘inside’ us) actively invites knowledge rather than denying uncomfortable realities. A great part of wisdom lies in knowing how to wonder, how to be receptive, how to notice things that don’t fit with what is already known, how to imagine new possibilities and test them against experience.
But (and here's where my idea starts....) perhaps meng also refers to the uncovering of a different approach to knowing.
Meng is at least partially about education – but it clearly isn’t talking about linear ‘fact-accumulation’. In fact, it may be talking explicitly about NOT being linear, about accessing a state of attentive receptivity that allows you to learn in a different way.
In the book "A General Theory of Love", the authors (three psychiatrists) say that the human brain has two very different memory systems. ‘Explicit memory’ encodes event memories, including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts. It is closely related to imagination, and the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy.
By contrast, ‘implicit memory’ records complex knowledge that we cannot describe, explain or recognize. To illustrate, the authors describe a study in which subjects were given the task of predicting the weather in a simple computer model:
“On each trial, a computer screen showed one, two, or three … cues (in the form of meaningless shapes). The subject’s job was to predict whether such hints combined to herald rain or shine in the computer’s phantasmagorical world. Each subject looked at the cues and typed in his answer, and the computer gave feedback, telling him whether his meteorological prognostication had been right or wrong. Then he tried again.
“The researchers designed this experiment so that the displayed cues, as unhelpful as they look, did relate lawfully to the ultimate outcome of showers or sun. The relationship between cues and effect, however, was a complex, probabilistic function that even the smartest person couldn’t deduce. By deliberately making the task too difficult for logic to unravel, the investigators hoped to neutralize neocortical reasoning – so that subjects would confront the task with one brain tied behind their backs, so to speak. The cognitive obfuscation succeeded; none of the subjects figured out the scheme whereby clues pointed the way to a weather prediction. Despite their incomprehension, subjects nevertheless steadily honed their forecasting abilities…They gradually developed a feel for the situation, and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.
“Predicting a day’s real weather involves a different set of clues but, until the advent of modern meteorology, relied on the same process that this study explores….
“For the amateur predictor (as most of us are), this inner, so easily ignored sense may be the best available guide....
“Spoken language…is based on a labyrinthine array of phonological and grammatical rules that native speakers know but could not explicate; most could not even recognize the rules when spelled out in plain English…Implicit knowledge makes language structure available for automatic use but not reflection. Children learn to speak without instruction; they absorb linguistic rules as a sponge absorbs water.”
(end of quote)...(here's my idea
Very complex situations – like real-life situations – do not yield to explicit questions. Say you are meeting someone for the first time, and you want to get to know them. You could ask them a thousand questions, and they could answer them honestly; you would know all about them, but you still wouldn’t know them. But in the asking and the answering, your implicit mind would be observing and getting to know them.
There’s more than one way to learn. Traditionally, Chinese medicine – like all skills – was learned by apprenticeship. You can go to school to learn ABOUT things, but learning HOW TO do anything only comes with experience.
Maybe Hexagram4 is telling us to uncover our implicit memory, our intuition, our ‘knowing without knowing about’, or knowing why.
It’s the ‘explicit mind’ that asks a lot of questions. The Decision tells us not to do that. It tells us to seek the oracle.
Maybe it's (at least partially) about how you approach the oracle in such a way that it can UNCOVER a subject. Maybe it's saying we need to adopt an attitude of mindful receptivity that allows our 'implicit memory' to develop an intuitive knowledge of the question under inquiry, and perhaps even of the oracle itself?
Hexagram 4 is one of the hexagrams that describes childhood. The hexagram name MENG essentially means ‘covering’: veiling or hiding.
The nature of a child is not yet manifest; it is in potentio, an unknown. The process of life and learning uncovers the brightness of the child.
The Chinese term 'qi meng' refers to education; it literally means to lift the cover and reveal what was concealed. The word 'education' itself has a similar meaning, derived from the Latin educare "bring up, rear, educate," which is related to educere "bring out," from ex- "out" + ducere "to lead". In both cases, there is an assumption that one is revealing something already inherent in a person.
The knowledge we receive depends upon the direction of our curiosity, which shapes the questions we ask. It’s a basic principle of scientific research that we only get answers to the questions we ask, and that the way we formulate our questions is of primary importance in determining the kinds of answers we get. Learning to formulate a question that can yield a useful answer is one of the fundamental skills of the formalized learning we call research.
An important aspect of Hexagram 4 is about how to retain a healthy innocence into adulthood, without immaturity. Not-knowing and naiveté are two very different states; an open curiosity about the natural world (including that part of it that lies ‘inside’ us) actively invites knowledge rather than denying uncomfortable realities. A great part of wisdom lies in knowing how to wonder, how to be receptive, how to notice things that don’t fit with what is already known, how to imagine new possibilities and test them against experience.
But (and here's where my idea starts....) perhaps meng also refers to the uncovering of a different approach to knowing.
Meng is at least partially about education – but it clearly isn’t talking about linear ‘fact-accumulation’. In fact, it may be talking explicitly about NOT being linear, about accessing a state of attentive receptivity that allows you to learn in a different way.
In the book "A General Theory of Love", the authors (three psychiatrists) say that the human brain has two very different memory systems. ‘Explicit memory’ encodes event memories, including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts. It is closely related to imagination, and the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy.
By contrast, ‘implicit memory’ records complex knowledge that we cannot describe, explain or recognize. To illustrate, the authors describe a study in which subjects were given the task of predicting the weather in a simple computer model:
“On each trial, a computer screen showed one, two, or three … cues (in the form of meaningless shapes). The subject’s job was to predict whether such hints combined to herald rain or shine in the computer’s phantasmagorical world. Each subject looked at the cues and typed in his answer, and the computer gave feedback, telling him whether his meteorological prognostication had been right or wrong. Then he tried again.
“The researchers designed this experiment so that the displayed cues, as unhelpful as they look, did relate lawfully to the ultimate outcome of showers or sun. The relationship between cues and effect, however, was a complex, probabilistic function that even the smartest person couldn’t deduce. By deliberately making the task too difficult for logic to unravel, the investigators hoped to neutralize neocortical reasoning – so that subjects would confront the task with one brain tied behind their backs, so to speak. The cognitive obfuscation succeeded; none of the subjects figured out the scheme whereby clues pointed the way to a weather prediction. Despite their incomprehension, subjects nevertheless steadily honed their forecasting abilities…They gradually developed a feel for the situation, and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.
“Predicting a day’s real weather involves a different set of clues but, until the advent of modern meteorology, relied on the same process that this study explores….
“For the amateur predictor (as most of us are), this inner, so easily ignored sense may be the best available guide....
“Spoken language…is based on a labyrinthine array of phonological and grammatical rules that native speakers know but could not explicate; most could not even recognize the rules when spelled out in plain English…Implicit knowledge makes language structure available for automatic use but not reflection. Children learn to speak without instruction; they absorb linguistic rules as a sponge absorbs water.”
(end of quote)...(here's my idea
Very complex situations – like real-life situations – do not yield to explicit questions. Say you are meeting someone for the first time, and you want to get to know them. You could ask them a thousand questions, and they could answer them honestly; you would know all about them, but you still wouldn’t know them. But in the asking and the answering, your implicit mind would be observing and getting to know them.
There’s more than one way to learn. Traditionally, Chinese medicine – like all skills – was learned by apprenticeship. You can go to school to learn ABOUT things, but learning HOW TO do anything only comes with experience.
Maybe Hexagram4 is telling us to uncover our implicit memory, our intuition, our ‘knowing without knowing about’, or knowing why.
It’s the ‘explicit mind’ that asks a lot of questions. The Decision tells us not to do that. It tells us to seek the oracle.
Maybe it's (at least partially) about how you approach the oracle in such a way that it can UNCOVER a subject. Maybe it's saying we need to adopt an attitude of mindful receptivity that allows our 'implicit memory' to develop an intuitive knowledge of the question under inquiry, and perhaps even of the oracle itself?