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julie

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My boyfriend and I have been informally engaged for a while now, but we haven't set a date. He would love to go forward with it, but I've been more hesitant -- less because I don't think he's the right person, and more because I've felt like our relationship just wasn't quite developed enough yet. As time has gone on, I've kept revisiting the question in my own mind: is it time yet?

So I asked the Yi about getting married this summer, and it said 29.2 to 8. I initially took that as saying, "It'd be dangerous -- bad idea." But then I was unsure if I was reading it right. 8 is certainly a very suggestive relating hexagram.

Today, I asked it again, "What about getting married this summer? I know I?ve asked this before, and I apologize." I got 52.6 to 15. Again, I can read this two ways: one is, no, don't do it, keep still. The other is, don't turn to me for this. Still yourself, and act out of that. Initially, I read it the first way, and I then asked why, and got 45.2 to 47.

So I'm not going to bug the Yi any further -- I've probably already asked more than I should have. What do you all make of this?

Thanks,

Julie
 

stuart

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29-2. I think the reading suggests that your situation is similar to a trickle of water that gradually gain momentun.
Hex 8 is a union.
52-6. Stilling desires for the moment.
45-2.An atraction that brings good fortune.
Overal good longterm prospects.
 

julie

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Hmm, that's a very interesting read on 29.2. It describes our relationship very well. It started slowly and has built up momentum.

That reading of 52 still sounds like it recommends waiting longer. Is that how you read it, too, Stuart?
 

pargenton

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Hi all,
29.2, 9 2nd
The canyon holds risks
Seek modest gains (Bradford)

A marriage is a big thing; I would wait, if you push too much remember you are in a canyon, there is danger.

The risks indicated by hex 29, taking in consideration also the 52.6 is that of rushing things, IMHO.
Given that, I agree with Stuart, there can be good long term prospects, but about marriage now, i.e. "this summer" Yi seems not too enthusiastic.

Quoting Balkin:
The Abyss is dangerous; try to achieve small things only.
"You must content yourself with small improvements now, because the situation is not entirely clear and you cannot achieve complete success overnight"

Peace
Paolo
 

gene

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Julie

It sounds to me like the I Ching is throwing the question back at you for you to answer yourself. I suspect down inside, you already know the answer to this question.

Hexagram 29 line two, W/B commentary... "We must calmly weigh the conditions of the time..." "...because for the time being success cannot be attained. " You are hesitating for a reason. Search your heart,("if you are sincere, you will find success in your heart") and you will find that reason.

Gene
 

julie

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I think the biggest reason is that I'm just scared. I was married before, to a man I loved deeply, and I was very committed to the relationship. He became very ill with bipolar disorder, and I just about killed myself trying to hang onto him. When I commit, I really commit. When I was younger, I had more faith in the world, more of an innocent sense of, "Hey, if it seems right to me, it'll work out well." Having the experience with my ex-husband be so devastating really shook that faith for me.

Has anyone else had the experience that turning to the I Ching for reassurance never seems to work? I find that when I do that, it'll often respond by throwing it back on me. Or, even worse, I've found that sometimes it will reflect my fears back to me. The first few times that happened, I took it really really seriously: oh my god, it's saying that all of my fears are really going to come true! It's happened often enough, though, that I've kind of gotten savvy to it. I think it's saying something like, OK, so you're afraid of that. That's *your* fear, and you've got to own it and figure out how to handle it. So what would you do if it really were true?

I think there may be an element of that going on here.
 

pargenton

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Hi Julie,
So seems that Yi answered exactly, you are scared (29), the way to handle your fear is indicated by the moving line (29.2)

I suggest to follow the hint, take small steps, develop your relation, and sooner or later you'll get out of the abyss, your past, your fears.

And I'm very sorry for your previous story.
Hug
Paolo
 

gene

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I think a lot of people don't realize that the biggest fear is not the fear of death, but the fear of rejection. And at this point, you are just not sure. (And by rejection, I don't mean, just, if he says, we are not together anymore, but, a persons death for example could be a form of rejection to our subconscious.) There is a saying in the book of Job, "The thing that I greatly feared has come upon me." We draw to us that which we fear. As long as we have fear, the I Ching can only answer in relationship to that fear. Therefore, it may seem to not work for you, but in reality, it is trying to make you take a look at yourself, and how you inwardly, below the level of consciousness, think. Because that effects what will happen to us, not chance. The opposite of love is fear. So we cannot truly love as long as we fear. The saying is easy, the living it is very difficult, I know. Until you let go of fear though, there is nothing anywhere that can reassure us.

Gene
 

julie

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I totally agree with you Gene, that the opposite of love is fear, and that letting go of fear is perhaps the biggest task that we face in life. The problem, as you say, is that that's a heck of a lot easier to say than to do. And it's not like it can be done up-front, like you can put the rest of your life on hold and say, I'm not doing anything until I get rid of this fear. You have to accept your fear and keep on living, looking for ways to reassure yourself, to slowly relax that knot of fear in the belly.

Fear has been the big issue for me for the last few years, because I went through a period when my worst fears -- worse than the worst things I had in my head -- happened. That inflamed fears that stem all the way back from earliest childhood, and I'm slowing working, bit by bit, to convince myself that the world isn't such a bad place after all. But the gut doesn't change quickly.

Actually, my boyfriend (M) and I had a wonderful conversation last night. We had gone out to dinner, and it was one of those things where clearly something was up, because we weren't clicking about things we normally would click about. I did my best to not get too worked up about it, and eventually, he told me that his best friend just told him that he'd gotten engaged, to a woman he's been dating for less than six months. Naturally, that made my boyfriend feel bad, rejected and insecure.

The wonderful thing about it, though, was that we had a really great conversation about it. I was able to make tons of room for what he was feeling, and to listen to him with empathy. I told him that I'd been thinking a lot in the last couple of days about proposing to him anyway. (A while ago, he told me that he wouldn't propose to me, that he'd wait for me to propose to him instead, because he didn't want to put me on the spot with my ambivalent feelings.) I also thanked him for his willingness to give me the time I need to figure this out, and that I know that's not an easy thing for him. Ultimately, his willingness to be exposed in the way he was with his friend is an act of love, and I'm grateful for it. We were really able to calm one another's fears of rejection -- for him, the fear that I would reject him through leaving him eventually; for me, the fear that he would reject me through emotional unavailability. Bit by bit, I think it's those kinds of experiences that relieve fear. It's not that either of us can directly relieve one another's fears, but that we can assist each other in relieving our own fears.

Actually, as I write that, it strikes me as connecting bang-on to the Yi's comment about it. Here's how I'm reading it now: "You're really scared. You can't expect that fear to go away in one fell swoop, to be able to just knock it out. What you can do is to make little steps to deal with it, like you did last night in the conversation with M. That path that you're on is the right one, and it's leading to real union."

I'm thinking more and more that I'm going to go ahead and do it. The times that I think about that in a positive way, I feel most solid and like myself. When I think, "Hmm, I don't know, maybe this isn't going to work..." I feel that knot of fear in my belly clenching up. When I think about getting married positively, it's not like I'm just sweeping any potential issues under the rug and ignoring them. I know life offers no guarantees -- who knows, it's possible that he'll go crazy just like my first husband did. But the fact is that we've been doing that slow, drop by drop sort of work that leads to a real union. Just like the Yi said.

Thanks, everybody, for your help with this. I feel like I've gotten a much, much better understanding of what I'm feeling. I'll keep you posted on what I do!

Julie
 

gene

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Hi Julie

yes, keep us posted. You have a wonderful story here.

Gene
 

julie

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Hi guys --

So I asked him to marry me last night. He said yes.

happy.gif
 

hilary

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CONGRATULATIONS!

I am so happy for you!
 

julie

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Thanks. I'm pretty darn happy for me too.
 

julie

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By the way, thanks Paolo. I didn't directly acknowledge your contributions before, but even though I ended up interpreting it differently, your thoughts were still really helpful to me in framing my own.

And, of course, thanks to everyone else too.
 
S

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Congratulations, nice to know there is life after marriage to a bipolar person. I too had a husband that was diagnosed bipolar 5 years into our marriage, so I can relate to what you have been through. My divorce is still in progress; he keeps dragging it out (sigh). Oddly enough, I have taken the oppisite approach, bound and determined to find love again. I am actually on the receiving end of someone who is afraid. My new guy is the one afraid because his first marriage ended with his wife cheating on him and leaving him for someone else, someone with more money
sad.gif
So, I will try to show him as much patience as your guy has shown you and maybe we too will have a happy ending.

BTW, I actually interpreted it similar to what you did, but by the time I looked at it you had made your decision. It also occurred to me that the taking things by step might refer to the steps involved in getting married. Anyway, wish you all the best. When the time comes, if you can, would love for you to post a wedding photo. So nice to see such happy news.
 

lightofdarkness

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the opposite of fear is anger.
the opposite of love is grief, a loss of love.

They form into trigrams:

heaven - anger
lake - love (sexual, different to devotion)
fire - acceptance
thunder - surprise
wind - anticipation
water - rejection
mountain - sadness/grief
earth - fear

From these basics come compound forms as well as 'positive' aspects of negative traits.

Chris.
 

gene

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Congratulations Julie

Wishing you all the best in the years ahead.

Gene
 

RindaR

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Chris,

Anger is a secondary emotion, and stems from fear or from loss, or from having been hurt. I don't see them as opposites at all.


Rinda
 

julie

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I was actually pretty determined to find love again too, once I recovered a bit. The first year after we split up, dating was not much on my mind. In the abstract, the idea of finding love was tremendously appealing. Concretely, hitching up with a particular guy, though, was pretty scary. How could I know if this is the right guy? I loved my ex-husband so much, and tried so hard to make it work, that it was (is) really hard to believe that this actual, real-life relationship, with all its peculiarities and blemishes and all of that, was really going to work. I'm glad to hear, though, that you're not so skittish -- good for you.

It's really amazing to me how helpful working through this reading was for me. It really allowed me to handle my fears and not just set them aside. Understanding the reading -- going through the process of understanding it -- allowed me to feel like I wasn't just "making a gamble." Life is uncertain, so who knows how it will work out. But regardless, even if every bad thing my busy head can dream up comes to pass, I feel like I've made a good decision.

M was really thrilled too. It felt wonderful. He's a gem. A real-life human being, with all his flaws and peculiarities, no superman, but a gem.

Thanks for your good wishes, everyone!
 
A

alexis

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<BLOCKQUOTE><HR SIZE=0><!-Quote-!><FONT SIZE=1>Quote:</FONT>

the opposite of fear is anger.
the opposite of love is grief, a loss of love.<!-/Quote-!><HR SIZE=0></BLOCKQUOTE>
Agreeing with Rinda here. It's fear that is actually the opposing side of love.

Grief is the healing remedy for love loss - grief is love's balm. Fear, on the other hand, restricts the grieving process, producing it's own version of a 'balm' (anger) which infiltrates the human organism in the same way as would grief. Only it's effects can be detrimental to the system rather than healing, whether we are talking of the individual body of the collective one.
 
C

candid

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LOL! Stomp on a dog's tail and see that anger isn't always a response to fear. It's hard-wired anger. You're making this way to human. The difference is that a dog expresses the anger and then it's over. Humans drag it out to absurd lengths, and only then does something completely natural become "emotionally disturbing".
 

martin

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Agree, fear and love are opposites. I think - and said so already in another thread - that fear correlates with mountain, not with earth.
Lake (love) and mountain are complementary.

If you stomp on my tail, Candid, I might very well bite you. Not because I'm angry though, it's just a reflex. Kind of automatic answering machine that yells GET OFF MY TAIL!
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lightofdarkness

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Rinda,

The fight/flight dichotomy is sourced in all of us, hard coded into the amygdala of the brain, as neuron-dependent life forms and applied recursively gives us direct mappings to yin/yang dynamics. Thus, after three steps we have the emotion/trigram associations given.

The DYNAMICS of emotional expression stem from 'instincts' and so energy conservation states, vs exaggerations, the extreme of which is the context-replacing focus of 'anger' - a state that is refinable to 'self-devotion', singlemindedness, etc etc.

'fear' is a position where escape is in the form of blending IN to the context, to dissapear through playing dead, freezing (hope that one's camoflage fits in with the context). The overall focus is on coexistence by dissapearing into the context. It is the 'natural' state in that it allows for survival in harsh conditions where one has to coexist with one's enemies.

This coexistence realm can express anger but due to the coexisting nature only through a focus on not trusting others and so on containment/control; If I cannot erradicate you then I contain you - and THAT form of anger will elicit control issues and so issues covering degrees of frustration, rejection, anticipation of wrong doing etc.

The basic spectrun of eight qualities is ordered:

fear, grief, rejection, anticipation, surprise, acceptance, joy(sexual love etc), anger

The recursion will encode all of these in each. The association of trigrams is in the binary ordering of:

earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, lake, heaven

and so 000 to 111.

The 000 position IS a 'basic' level in that it covers the use of LEAST energy in expression, it is REACTIVE and focused primarily on PROTECTION and is about POTENTIALS (fear is about what COULD happen etc)

anger IN fear is expressed as hexagram 12 and covers the preparedness to turn and fight to neutralise attacks on oneself and/or faith. Note the focus on neutralise rather than erradicate; that focus reflects the underlying 'drive' to COEXIST with one's enemies rather than erradicate.

With the development of consciousness so we move 'up' a level where the REACTIVE states become PROACTIVE. Thus from fear comes devotion to others, from grief comes discernment, quality control. From rejection comes rejecting, containment/control. From anticipation of wrong doing comes anticipation of right doing - cultivation etc.

So - in a sense, yes, fear is a 'core' nature out of which come the exaggerations to the level of the extreme of 'anger'. This reflects the overall focus on energy conservation. Our consciousness is 'driven' to mediate stimulus/response and in doing so will use the realms of sex and anger to aid in that mediation to develop 'universals' that can aid in dealing with the context - and so add to the set of filters used in the realm of 'fear', of being REACTIVE.

Since we are dealing with 'exaggerations' in energy, so anger is fear exaggerated and as such is the extreme of a dimension of fear-anger. The development of that dimension from recursion allows for dual methods in interpretations - one is structural, the other temporal. One allows for interpretations of OPPOSITES, the other for interpretations of COMPLEMENTS. CONTEXT determines which to use, and in the CONTEXT of STRUCTURES so fear-anger are 'opposites', in the context of EXPRESSION ,and so concern with energy expenditure, the focus is on complements.

Have a look at this diagram, http://www.austarmetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/btree.gif ; note the dual development of 'meanings', one top to bottom, the other left-right. One will give a n XOR perspective, the other an AND perspective. Reality is both.

For refs etc see http://www.austarmetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/emote.html

We can split the sequence into two:

'female' - fear, grief, rejection, anticipation (coexist thread)
'male' - surprise, acceptance, sex, anger (replace thread)

We can map one across to the other, thus 'female' anger will be in the context of issues of anticipation of wrong doing. 'male' fear in the need to come up with new paradigms to deal with reality - etc etc etc.

If you want to flesh out the details of each, as done in the line positions material for hexagrams, you can do this by using XOR at the level of trigrams. E.g. How is sex/joy/love expressed in a context of grief? lake XOR mountain = heaven, anger. Think about that one ;-) (and consider E. Kubler-Ross work on stages of grief).

IMHO you need to perhaps read a bit more on the relation of emotions and IC. See some of the refs given ;-)


Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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Martin,

earth and mountain share the same 'space' PRIOR to their assertion (IOW the first two lines are the same). Yin at the TOP reflects UNCONDITIONAL, Yang at the top reflects CONDITIONAL.

Now FEAR is a POTENTALS emotion, it covers what COULD happen and so relates to the generic 'flight' element of the fight/flight dichotomy.

earth reflects uncoditional fear as it reflects unconditional darkness as it reflects unconditional devotion to another/others. The focus is on integrating with the context, to blend in, dissapear, use the context for protection etc.

mountain is conditional and reflects fear due to 'something', expressed as a LOSS of loved one/thing, be it real or imagined, and the possible consequences of that act.

This 'blockage, stopping' is REACTIVE ("I can do nothing without X!") - but our nature is to turn the reactive into the proactive and so from loss, from grief/sadness about a PARTICULAR (and so conditional) is turned into quality control, discernment.

The patterns map to hexagrams, such that hex 15 reflects this unconditional total trust/devotion in a context of blockage; as hex 23 reflects the CONDITIONAL focus of discernment in a context of devotion (to faith - be it church or football club)

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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Martin,

if you want to flesh out the natures of emotions/feelings then move to the hexagram level and apply the XOR operator to extract the parts of each emotion; yes this level does give 64 core emotion structures but we can focus on the 'seed' emotions:

000000 - hex 02 - fear
001001 - hex 52 - grief
010010 - hex 29 - rejection
011011 - hex 57 - anticipation
100100 - hex 51 - surprise
101101 - hex 30 - acceptance
110110 - hex 58 - joy/love
111111 - hex 01 - anger

These labels are of course 'generic' when at this level in that we have to deal with the 'refinements' of the original trigrams into hexagrams (and so fear develops into devotion to another/others) where through those refinements we can fleshout these core states.

IOW we can flesh out details on 64 emotions through the IC and then, for each, their makeup through XORing with all of the others.

Apply the set of 64 'questions' I have come up with (http://www.austarmetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/linemean.html#Details ) where we XOR hexagrams with the one serving as context/whole to extract the parts.

e.g. 27 XOR 52 = 101000 (36); where we seek the skeletal form of grief - The 'feeling' of grief has its generic roots, its skeletal form in a trigram format of fear/devotion in a context of acceptance/guidance; 36 covers this 'hiding of the light' where the 'loved' but 'lost', not expressed 'out there' is still kept bright 'inside'.

etc etc. ;-)

Chris.
 

martin

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It all depends on how you look at it, IMO. From a flight-fight perspective fear corresponds to flight and anger to fight. So fear and anger come out as opposites.
But flight-fight is a typical yang perspective, I would say.
From a more yin perspective that focuses on receptivity and the like love corresponds to 'don't be afraid' and fear and love are seen as opposites.

I hesitate to replace yang by 'male' and yin by 'female' here, but it does make sense if we relate 'male' and 'female' to traditional (old fashioned) human role patterns or, perhaps better, to how male and female animals behave. I once spent a day near a herd of half wild horses and it seemed that the male animals were almost entirely focused on fight-flight games (the alpha male clearly the boss, and what a macho he was!) while the females, well, they had obviously more interesting things to do.
happy.gif

Evidently, male and female animals have a quite different understanding of what really matters in life - and what makes the world turn - and this is reflected in how they 'dichotomize'.

Another issue is how to relate emotions to trigrams. This is a 'fitting game' in which one tries to match different classifications and the 'fit' will probably never be perfect or anywhere near to perfect. Again, a lot depends on your perspective, on 'where you come from'.
Personally, coming from I don't remember where, I see the trigrams heaven and earth as emotionally neutral. They represent extreme poles that are outside of the game of life and emotions only come into play in between these poles, where yin and yang are mixed. Earth seems to represent a 'merging' state and this sometimes goes with camouflage, as Chris says.
Not always though. Merging doesn't necessarily imply a desire to hide (flight). It's a much more general phenomenon.
And camouflage - a prey may use it out of fear but a predator also uses it. Should we say that the predator is 'afraid' that the prey sees him? No, that's playing with words, the predator doesn't _feel_ fear.

So, camouflage, and in general any 'merging', is in itself neutral, IMO.
I see more fear, at least potentially, in mountain or perhaps wood. Mountain, among other things, because it reflects (as 'stop') the freezing behavior of a prey when it senses a predator. It's interesting that this behavior is a kind of camouflage ('I hope he doesn't see me if I don't move') that appears to be stuck between fight and flight. Perhaps it is similar to the 'deadlock' of computer programming.

Well, I could go on, about the heaven trigram and the others. But unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, I have to run now.
No, not flight!
happy.gif
 

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