The Dark Side of The I Ching

[django]

Hi all
If I could quote from an article on one of the Jungian websites....The Christian emphasis on God as love,ignoring the dark side of the Self is the result of an infantile chidish wish for endless love from a parent with "no ambivalence"

Is this not how so many approach the I Ching? You know..."Where are the lost car keys"?... I wonder if he/she will phone?....will these shares keep their value? and so on.

I have no wish to frighten off anybody from taking up the I Ching, but for those who should be using the The Changes as a medium for their religious quest one has to come to terms with the dark side of the I Ching....
There is a love that moves the stars, but we dont always experience it down here.A new image of the Self/I Ching is emerging, that has both a light and dark side. By struggling with the dark side of the I Ching we are actually involved in a realistic relationship with it,rather than an infantile playful fantasy.

Who is the "Commander of darkness" of the fourth line of Ming I[36 hex] Have you met him??

Who are "they" in the 3rd line of the same hexagram??

Have you been duped by the hidden enemies in the 2nd line of the 57th hex have you experienced the insidious suggestions?.

Have you suffered at the hands of the churlish ruler in the 2nd place in the 55th hex.

how about the powerful inferior who is hindering your deliverence in the 6th line of the 40th hex.

Course, you really can avoid all the above by using a "dumbed down" version of the I Ching, you know, one for the truly modern person using a lot of obtuse exotic sounding phrases which lead you nowhere really, but are part of the secret conspiracy between the "shallow" author
and the perpetual flaky reader.
Django.

 

[hilary]

Hm - I think that this Jungian website may be creating a straw man to joust with. It's one thing to say that God is Love (which is not the same as saying that God is nice); another to say that there's no such thing as darkness. (Is there? Probably it depends on what you mean by 'is'

.)

Similarly, is the undoubted ability of Yi to talk about dark things we might prefer to avoid the same as a 'dark side of the I Ching'? What would that be - an occasional desire of the oracle to deceive us??

Other comments... not sure that playing is such a bad thing. Sometimes I wonder about the merits of talking about 'inner work, working with the oracle...' I get the feeling some Daoist masters might be laughing at us.

About your particular examples... I think perhaps they can be felt at a deeper level - and hence maybe a more finely-tuned, specific one - by looking closely at the words of the Yi itself.

57,2 just says there is penetration under the bed (whatever that is...), and you do well to use the services of chroniclers and shamans. It doesn't mention what is hidden: that's what you'll be finding out...

And 55,2 mentions no churlish ruler - 'only' a crisis of confidence, doubts and suffering, the juxtaposition of terrifying darkness and signs you never asked for...

40,6 has a hawk on a towering rampart, nothing so easily grasped and labelled as a 'powerful inferior'...

36,4 enters the left belly and seizes the heart of brightness darkened...

Let's not conspire, either, to reduce these to something we can grasp within a system we can 'work with' in a mature and controlled way.

Sorry, Django, I'm in danger of constructing a straw man of my own. There is an interesting question you raise - the effect of limiting our questions to Yi to more manageable things (not that whether s/he will phone is always manageable!). Does this limit the scope and reach of the answers? What kind of question do you think we should be asking, to allow Change?

 

[gene]

Hi Django

I might submit that the dark side is our own, not the I Ching's, though the I Ching might point this out to us often.

As for a powerful inferior, that sounds similar to the language Carol Anthony uses in her "Guide to the I Ching." The powerful inferior man very well be a part of our own dark side. Not sure where the dark commander in line four of 36 is, I suspect this is a reference to the leader of the dark side being captured in line 3. And yes, on one level this could refer to a breakthrough of a new understanding of our own interior nature.

More later,
Gene

 

[gene]

Okay, I see the commander of darkness, in my mind, I knew there was something there related to the fourth line. It is in the Wilhelm Baynes commentary. And the powerful inferior is there too. These things can be read on different levels, and can relate to what is going on outside of us, which ultimately is inside anyway, or what is inside of us. The commander of darkness can be our own dark side. Luke Skywalker found this out in "The Empire Strikes Back" when he entered the cave. He came face to face with his own dark side, but did not deal with it appropriately, which is why Yoda said, "remember your failure in the cave." The same way with powerful inferiors. They can be others or they can be parts of ourselves which sabotage our own best efforts.

I understand what you are saying Django. At least I believe I do. There are many levels of the I Ching. And we can use it to know ourselves, or who might go to the Saturday night Prom with us. Those, though, who ask about the Saturday night prom, or whether he might call us , or about the stock market, being on that level of understanding, the answer to the question is still very important to us, and I believe the I Ching is very accommodating to anyone who approaches it in sincerity. This applies even if the questioner doesn't know the proper manners to use in asking the question. It meets us at our own level.

Gene

 

[louise]

The dark is only the abscence of light isn't it ?

 

[louise]

Moreover, possibly every question is a spiritual question - even 'will he ring'. We are little apes, looking and looking, ultimately I believe for the same thing. That thing is only reflected in parental love. It may be foolish to persistently ask 'will he ring' - but if thats the headspace you're in at the time, then thats part of your path - your're living it, you're grappling with your 'dark', learning about your intense experience of obsessive love or whatever.
I can't see that process as separate from your 'spiritual' development.

I have wondered who the 'commander from the dark side' is though ? But I'm not sure what Django means about the dark side of the I Ching ? Is it just an objection to the more 'new age' translations that make the most negative of lines sound pleasing ?

 

[louise]

I tired of the notion that a wish for an all loving parent fueled our spiritual and religious longings a long time ago. Freud came up with that anyway, much more so than Jung didn't he - seeing all such wishes as sublimated libido and death wish (return to womb, morbido ?) I found it reductionist, dead, and well, just not true.

Can't tell me those blissed out times in meditation, prayer, yoga, or whatever are to do with some fantasy about my mum ! They're real and they're what we want more of aren't they - and we'll get em the best way we've found. Might be tai chi, might be sex - but ultimately aren't we all asking 'how can we get there'? Thats a spiritual question, how can we get that bliss of union - so thats why i say ultimately even 'will he ring' is a spiritual question.

 

[louise]

Although stock market questions do leave me a little cold. I think i find 'will he ring' infinitely more worthy

 

[lindsay]

Dear Louise,

Surely you are right about all questions being spiritual questions, or at least indicators of one's spiritual condition. But what if light is the absence of darkness? Which is more characteristic of the universe, darkness or light? When you look at the heavens, you don't see little points of darkness in a field of light, do you?

Lindsay

 

[louise]

Hi Lindsay, I just meant darkness - as in nighttime, closed curtains, creepy cupboards, ie 'physical'darkness had no energy source of its own. It doesn't emanate from anywhere, it has no source, it just happens when light is shut off, blocked.

In the other sense it is said that evil,
hatred, wrong doing, emanates not from its own source but is merely abscence, lack of love, or the light of love seeming far away, innaccesible.

That is why in stories of heroes and villains, baddies and goodies, the good wins. The evil has much less to feed on, an insufficient source of energy to maintain itself. In stories it often relies on some spell or talisman to remain at all.
Faced by light and love it disappears in a puff of smoke. The evil figure becomes a heap of ashes.

When you look at the heavens in daytime, no there cannot be points of darkness, as darkness cannot remain in light.. You could say light is the abscence of darkness, but light would be there, remain there, even if shrouded by darkness - the clouds over the sun. Whereas darkness cannot be anywhere the light shines - can it ? Darkness is not permanently emanating out its rays, it has no rays, no source.

 

[lindsay]

Well, Louise, I think a pretty good case can also be made for the independent existence of evil in the world, for evil that is not the absence of anything but a real force in itself. I?m not convinced that evil just crumples into a heap when exposed to the light of goodness. I believe there?s a bit more struggle involved in living a good life.

On the subject of light and darkness, whenever I see astronomical photos of outer space, I am amazed at how much more darkness exists than light. In fact, there appears to be a lot more of nothing in the universe than something. The universe is, all in all, rather empty. And of course incredibly vast. And very cold. Empty, vast, cold - lifeless. (As for the existence of life out there, let me just say there appears to be no evidence for it about which reasonable people can agree.) How does that view relate to our people-centered spiritual ideas?

Most of the time I?m content to live on earth thinking this blue-green world contains everything important to me. Most of the time the cosmos seems irrelevant. The big, dark, empty cosmos. But I cannot escape the fact that I belong to the cosmos, that the cosmos is the Big Picture. When I look at that picture as clearly as I can, mostly my ideas of good and evil fail me, and I feel alone and insignificant in a life-hostile environment. Nothing personal, just cold and empty and immeasurably vast. **shiver**

Lindsay

 

[louise]

Well i guess equating light and dark in our world to good/evil, love/hate, is just a popular analogy
And if one relies on an analogy too heavily one can get very tangled - so i shan't pursue it.

Who said exposing evil to light was easy though-never is in stories, usually does involve struggle, fight and cunning to root out those wicked forces - like in Star Wars or whatever.

But i thought what we were skirting around here was not the existence of evil in the world, but whether there were an independent force of darkness, so to speak....and if there were such, which you seem to imply there is, as you say you think there is much evidence for it as a real source in itself, what is it ? Do you mean like Satan ?

Still not really sure what Django was meaning when he spoke of the dark side of I Ching in his first post. Maybe he will elucidate ? And if he doesn't do you know what he means by the dark side of the I Ching Lindsay ?

 

[django]

Hi all
I think lindsay is a bit closer to what I was pointing at, that is, the reality of evil. I dont know whether Louise is a Roman Catholic or not but her view that evil, is, but the absence of good is the privatio Boni doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Jung was attacked by the Vatican for opposing this doctrine,he maintained that evil was a very real entity and had to be confronted as such.

Gene....States that The "Commander of darkness" can be our own darkness. I would say to that, be very, very, careful to what you claim "to be your own".
I think our "inner world" is as vast as the outer world, indeed I would go as far as to say the outer world is a reflection of the inner stellar depths of the psyche.If this view is accepted then we are in as much danger from within as without. What has this to do with the I Ching? well quite a lot really I think that Wilhelm [and Jung]went a very long way to explain
that the foundational base of the I Ching was in fact Archetypal.[Wilhelms edition highlights this more than any of the other's imho]If this is true then we have to accept that Archetypes have two sides,Good and evil, dark and light and so on. If we are going to go to any depths with the I Ching, then we must experience the dark evil side of the Archetypal situations we meet, if one is really serious about using the I Ching as a medium.
Django.