pairs

[dobro p]

I'm looking at hexagram pairs, at the idea that there is a meaningful relationship between ALL hexagram opposites - hexagrams in which every line is the yin/yang opposite of its pair.

Okay, so in the existing King Wen sequence, we have these opposite pairs already:

1 and 2
11 and 12
17 and 18
27 and 28
29 and 30
53 and 54
61 and 62
63 and 64

This makes exactly one quarter of all the hexagrams.

Okay, now let's explore this a little, one pair at a time to see if there are meangingful relationships between ALL opposite pairs. Before we begin, it's important to understand what I mean by 'meaningful'. By 'meaningful' I mean that the meanings of each pair has something in common - they are polar modalties of the same issue, dealing with it in terms of oppositeness or similarity. I'll start.

20 and 34 are an opposite pair. 20 talks about just contemplating something rather than doing anything about it for the time being, and 34 is all about exercising power in the situation. To my mind, they have a meaningful pair relationship, and the meaning falls into the 'opposite' category - 34 is all about doing, and 20 is all about not doing. (For the time being, please disregard the Yao Ci, the changing lines.)

What do you think about 20 and 34? A meaningful opposite pair, or do they have nothing in common?

 

[crystal_blue]

What do you think about 20 and 34? A meaningful opposite pair, or do they have nothing in common?

Nothing meaningful in common.

 

[dobro p]

Why not? Why are they not opposites in the sense I've described?

 

[crystal_blue]

Why not? Why are they not opposites in the sense I've described?

I just don't think #34 is about exercising power as opposed to contemplating.

 

[fkegan]

compare and contrast hex 20 and 34

I would see the pair's meaningful connection as a matter of opposites. would explain their connection from each hexagram being composed of 4 lines of one kind in the first 4 places and the final line places being of the opposite kind.

Thus 20 is basically a yin hexagram with only a minority of yang lines in the final places, so a situation where the focus is upon the next, not as an action motion there (23) but as an organized consideration of what has been up to this point (fifth line place--overall organization). The result is looking back over what has developed so far. Like the retrospective analysis of what the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is all about.

In contrast 34 is fundamentally a yang hexagram, with again its final two places of a different ilk. This is a process with all the stages in active focus, except for the overall organization and what is coming next. The result is thrusting on without clarity about how this fits into any pattern or what will be the consequences of the process. That is George W. Bush following Chaney's drive to get his Halliburton contractors as much work in Iraq as possible without any thought to what the unintended consequences might be.

Given the blind drive to get personal advantage continuing 5 years, it forces journalists, etc to look back and wonder what this thrust was all about. Action-Reaction. leads to

Frank

 

[dobro p]

I find your take on drive and organization, depending on the preponderance of one type of line and where they're positioned, to be really perceptive.

 

[Sparhawk]

I think Hilary's post in the other thread about "complementary pairs" is right on the mark and deserves discussion here.

 

[fkegan]

Structural analysis of Yi hexagrams

I find your take on drive and organization, depending on the preponderance of one type of line and where they're positioned, to be really perceptive.

Hi Dobro,
Thank you. There are all sorts of pairings in the universe of the hexagrams, having always 6 places and only binary markings in those places makes pairs of all sorts inevitable. The question gets to be which pairs are accidental, which are meaningful and which are part of a larger context. It is a rule of gestalt analysis that one must work through the forest of details, first looking for the overall gestalt. Then from that gestalt each detail can be given clear and certain meaning.

That is an insight from Sabian Astrology, which Marc E. Jones pieced together from starting college in his 40's (he left high school to do his own translations of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek), and as a philosophy major he was a special student in a biology class where the teacher taught them to identify an entire skeleton from a single bone. I know well the feeling to stand on the shoulders of giants and by the timing get to see new things come over the timing horizon they never got to see.

The analysis of the hexagrams in terms of the yang lines, yin background structure was my first awareness that the Yi could be understood independent of the references to the translated commentaries. Adding the next insight that the dot patterns on dice neatly explained the meaning of the 6 line places of the hexagram (as well as the signs, etc of astrology) allowed my first inkling that Pythagorean dot-number patterns were generally useful to understand ancient systems. Given the Pythagorean connection to the hexagrams it was just one more step to relate the 10 dots of the 4 perspectives (tetraktys) to the sets of 10 in the King Wen Sequence. That is my Flux Tome (I Ching) stuff in a nut shell (cf. www.stars-n-dice.com/fluxtome.html).

It also explains why I don't relate well when folks try to point to particular numerals in some number system or language as the true roots of the system. There is just too much of the depth analysis that can be done with dots as numbers in various patterns.

Frank