Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
I shall look forward to it. (Now, which gua is Olive?)
oh but yes of COURSE you can lie under oath, and make a promise and not keep it (even make it KNOWING you won't keep it). And you can make a marriage vow and not mean it--or mean it, and not be able to keep it.
But that doesn't mean those word-actions have no meaning or no power. To lie under oath, to break a vow, to break a promise to a friend, to refuse to apologize--those are all quite serious things.
"Sacrament" is an excellent choice of words for a Christian view of Grace, an outward display of an inner covenant - a blood covenant, and is or can be related to knot's intended meaning of a marriage or a promise. None of them mean anything if they're not sincere or if they do not originate from within. As with any outer form, without authentic life existing within, it really is just empty and ornamental bling, which I'd choose to illustrate more through 54, and line 6 in particular.
That's not limited to just lightweight sentimentalism either. My grandparents never met until a two family covenant was arranged to marry their daughter to the other family's son. They didn't even meet until the daughter was sent to this country for the explicit purpose of marrying my grandfather, for the purpose of starting a family in this country. The family and family name did indeed flourish outwardly, producing all sort of individuals who went on to proliferate and extend the family. It all sprouted from a covenant between families and that seed. Flower power indeed.
I do like 22 for mindmapping - that's brilliant. Not only because it's important to adorn your mindmap, but because they are supposed to make it possible to relate to the ideas. Absolutely 22.
'Secular' is the opposite of 'ecclesiastical', by the way - but your meaning is clear. And now you have me reaching for the dictionary to look up 'charisma'…
If we wanted a Christian word for 22, it could almost be 'sacrament'. I remember reciting in Sunday school that a sacrament was 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. That's 22. (But then so is branding, and suitors, and so on.)
Somewhere in the ancient history of this thread, I said ancient China didn't have the idea of a meaningless ritual (and hence reading 22's marriage imagery as 'just superficial' didn't work). Trojina said, not unreasonably, 'What about 54.6, then?' and I forgot to respond in the midst of our 22-flurry.
Anyway... I've been reading up on offerings as well as marriage, working on the expanded glossary for the journal software, and one theme that keeps coming back is the vital importance ofsincerity in offerings. Same theme we know from Yi, come to think of it. The Shang's offering of great stacks of oxen is not as real as the modest efforts of the Zhou.
...where was I? Oh yes. Ritual must be performed with truth; the evils of ritual without truth are well-known, so I was being too vague and sweeping saying there was no such thing as an empty ritual. What I should have said: no such thing as a meaningless ritual - it's never just trivial/ superficial/ insignificant. If you perform ritual without truth, there will be consequences.[/SUP]
22 is nearsighted in a sense that isn't pejorative, Shortsighted carries a more negative connotation. Nearsight only speaks of an ability to see the close-up more clearly than the far away. Near-sightedness happens to be very useful to a mountain goat climbing a cliff. It would be deadly to get distracted by all the great distant views until he got to the top.
22 is nearsighted in a sense that isn't pejorative, Shortsighted carries a more negative connotation. Nearsight only speaks of an ability to see the close-up more clearly than the far away. Near-sightedness happens to be very useful to a mountain goat climbing a cliff. It would be deadly to get distracted by all the great distant views until he got to the top.
I think 'near sighted' might be the American English for 'short sighted'. 'Short sighted' is what I was diagnosed as when I got my first pair of pink plastic NHS glasses at the age of 6.
I always thought that 'short-sightedness' referred mainly to a frame of mind while 'near-sightedness' to a frame of sight but what you said, Hilary proves different . .
I find 'Refinement' to be a great term for 22
What fascinates me is what Bruce hinted at with his comment on the 'flourishing' aspect of 22 . . What for us, humans, may be just a beautiful flower, is a vital part of an organism's proliferation, a call to action, the proof of someone's/something's power to regenerate itself, to give produce, to produce wealth . . In another thread I likened Bi to porcelain and I still find the comparison to be very productive and rich without losing ground with the basics of 22. If 21 is the dynamic breaking through the mountainous rocks and smashing them down to fine dust to find what we're looking for, 22 comes to refine those materials into something that shows the degrees of sophisticated practice that someone can attain. Plus, refinement can apply to very different situations and contexts without losing its strength at gesturing towards attentive, sometimes even delicate, courses of action that have as their purpose to show off or promote a sophisticated point of view
. . how does that sound?
It sounds good but I need to use progressive lenses to catch your meanings, or squint a little , in that when using a single focus lens, I see gold, diamonds etc, within a mountain in 26, and I see refinement, such as in the creation of fine porcelain through refinement of grosser materials as being expressed in 50. :bows:
What question is she asking? If it's 'what to do about age spots?', how about 11.6?
Just to revisit this re 50 (26 didn't make much sense to me to begin with in this context);
While I can definitely see where 'refinement' comes into 50, I would more likely identify it with more comprehensive processes, going from raw to processed - I think 50 talks more about the creation of new 'technologies', and their cultures while 22 is more specialized than this, as we already have an infrastructure in place and the question lies on perfecting it to achieve a certain goal . . In that sense, 'refinement' still feels a good fit for 22 and going back to my readings feels right for many of them.
I think I'm gonna stay with this one for a while and see how it works out
:bows:
Probably still 11.6. One of those 'can't put Humpty together again' lines, anyway...No, advice to her over her extreme concern of showing her age. Maybe I should have been more specific.
What for us, humans, may be just a beautiful flower, is a vital part of an organism's proliferation...
Pull up a chair, stay as long as ya like.
26 - "Heaven in the center of the mountains: great accumulation." This is where I was coming from regarding mining for gold or diamonds, or knowledge buried there from the past.
50 deals with refinement. An example Brad likes to use refers to alchemy, which is a metaphor for turning our dross or lead into gold, our impure into pure. It's inner working that 50 deals mostly with. "The noble one corrects the situation to solidify fate."
For my question, I asked for an unchanging hexagram, no lines. Referring back to captions or titles.
My own answer would be any or all of the above. I like 36 too, from a different angle than I was considering. But I was mostly, as mentioned to Hilary, looking to reckon with her inordinate concern for retaining her youthful appearance. I take accountability for that lack of detail because it was part and partial of my conversation with her, which I'd failed to elaborate in my question to you.
22 is nearsighted in a sense that isn't pejorative, Shortsighted carries a more negative connotation. Nearsight only speaks of an ability to see the close-up more clearly than the far away. Near-sightedness happens to be very useful to a mountain goat climbing a cliff. It would be deadly to get distracted by all the great distant views until he got to the top.
Probably still 11.6. One of those 'can't put Humpty together again' lines, anyway...
Oh, just seen you want an unchanging hexagram. Well, then, probably 11. Even on its own it has that 'life happens, do you think you're going to stop the river?' feel to it.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).