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Trigrams - light on the mountain, a bit like the light shining through the film projector.
er yes but they were huge glasses which I hadn't noticed. I was seeing each glass as a normal sized wine glass but I think they were huge ones.But I know my limits well. I had only 2 glasses of wine *.
"Stillness, Ken, in the upper trigram of cosmic ideals, brings illumination and clarity, Li, to the lower trigram of human affairs. GRACE in an unmoving form suggests the moment is isolated in time. While you can see the true perfection that might be in the situation of your inquiry, it is not necessarily consonant with reality.. You are dealing with idealisms. There is no redemptions in your illusions, however fervently you feel them. The perfection in the heavens has put stars in your eyes."
Problem is, Grace is a bad word to use to summarize the hexagram's meaning.
It's more about things that catch the eye in such a way as to prevent the deeper
and longer view. The mountain is lit up by the flame below, and it looks pretty.
But you can see no farther. Closer to the core meaning is nearsightedness,
but more literally, ornamentation or superficiality. The mountain goat needs
to be nearsighted to pick his way up the mountain - he wants each of his steps
to be real, so there is a place for nearsightedness in how graceful his ascent is.
It's a common rookie error to get a single English word stuck in your head to be
the primary representative of a hexagram's meaning. It's also a big mistake to
think of one hexagram as more fortunate than another.
Example: how will this relationship develop? I was friendly, understanding, patient ..... while inside I broke into pieces
this has become rather funny for me at this point, how people react at the thought that there's more to find in the surface than their cultural misgivings . .
The rest, imho, is simply, our own impressions.
You’ve got to be able to separate your sense of yourself–your ego–from the self you show the rest of the world–your persona.
You find this first big tension within the psyche between the dark inner potential of the cell’s unconscious portions on the one hand and the persona system on the other. The ego learns about the outside and inside and tries to reconcile them.
Now, one of the great dangers, from Jung’s standpoint, is to identify yourself with your persona. In dramatic contrast to the aim of education in the Orient, Jung declares the ego must distinguish itself from its role.
This is a concept that does not exist in the East. As Freud put it, the ego is that function which puts you in touch with the empirical actualities of the world in which you live; it is the reality function. And it’s from developing ego that you develop your own value system. Your judgment, your critical faculties, and so forth are functions of your ego. In the Orient, the individual is asked not to develop his critical faculties, not to observe the world in a new way, but to accept without question the teaching of his girl and to assume the mask that the society puts on him. This is the fundamental law of karmic birth. You are born into exactly that role which is proper to you. The society will give you the mask to wear. You are to identify with it completely, canceling out every creative thought.
. . .
What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it’s not you. It’s a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, separating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play the social role; it simply means that no matter what you choose to do in life, whether it’s the cop out or to cop in, you are playing a role, and don’t take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you’re wearing for this game.
Joseph Campbell (Pathways to Bliss, 71-2)
Rodaki, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be mean, I'm just painfully experiencing how useless it is to try to escape one's conditioning.
'Sister, speak to me of God.' And the almond tree blossomed."
Was in office when I learned some devastating news. I couldn't leave, I couldn't react, trapped in my office with people around me. Inside I was crying but outside had that smile... That's was my role in that time, a pleasant person serving their client. Facade, mask, persona.... probably yes but in this specific occasion that was what I should do. I was in a "role" and I had to play it and that ,imo, had nothing to do with deception or such. I asked " what is this ? " : 22u.
I'm just painfully experiencing how useless it is to try to escape one's conditioning.
I see your point here. But as I thought about it, while not denying the perfect fit of 22 to this predicament, I began walking through each hexagram, from 1 to 64, and could apply every single one as advice coming from the Yi, except for the fact that you specifically qualified and therefore narrowed it down to asking, What is this? But all the others could easily be corrective or supportive council to that situation.
No major point to make with that, other than it again causes me to consider Lofting's theory, that all hexagrams can apply to every question in some constructive way, providing ones mind is limber and receptive enough to find useful applications. To me it demonstrates that no hexagram is an island, and that getting too hung up on "core meanings" is like memorizing an auto's manual but never driving the thing to learn from actual experience.
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I don't buy the 'all hexagrams apply to everything' approach. Yes, yes, we can find ways to apply anything to anything, the human mind is ingenious that way. But divination does actually work; you can rely on it to give you the 'best fit' (to coin a phrase) -
(btw, PG, I think fire on mountain and smoke signals would work better for 56 rather than 22 - just saying . .)
So, 22, I say is the the mask we wear for the world.
The most radical idea I could manage was that I might stop doing readings for a whole month. I asked about that possibility, and got 22 unchanging. I seem to remember other readings at the time were advising 23, so I took this as not going far enough. I wonder now if it also indicated being a bit stuck on my identity as 'diviner' (and projecting it consistently) - maybe that was the unchanging part, having the image but missing the sense of direction. Not sure.
I agree that divination works because of some reading that were very literal, not that I can prove it ..its just my belief. However , I'm not sure if there are rigid borders between hexs and the one doesn't has grains of others, even when they don't share similar hexs. When we get changing lines the two hexs blend together and that mix highlights , imo, the interrelation between them.
Lightness not as in trivial or unimportant, lightness as in the opposite of heaviness. If I say 'I am a diviner' and take that very seriously as Who I Am... I'm stuck, and if that's taken away from me I'll feel as though there's nothing left. (23 time!) But if I can put it on with delight like an especially beautiful piece of velvet I found in the dressing-up box… that would be 22, I think. Which does not mean that being a diviner is a small thing....I'm not so sure how you mean the lightness of h22, because giving a form to something otherwise invisible feels pretty big to me. Artistic expressions are very 22 and their essence is spread, their energies vibrate , their light travels in waves.
there is a song here saying " life that is not share is a Stolen life" meaning that you waste it by restricting it. I'm not saying that 22 has not its dark/negative side but it has light too and that light isn't that insignificant.
Masks - as Anemos was saying - are not just about deception.I've shared this reading before in these forums, might as well share it once more.
A couple of years ago, during our summer holidays, my father got injured real bad by a fishing hook while fishing at night. The hook had gotten deep into his leg and the only way to get it out without damaging any major nerves/tendones was by pushing it through till its point made full circle and exited in a different point - gruesome, I know, and rather frightening for all of us at the time. Mind you, we were moored in a deserted island and the next best thing would be . . I don't know, wait for the morning and call for help, perhaps. In any case, he was determined to go ahead with it right away to prevent any infections. Luckily enough, he had a very strong light on board, cause, at the time, it was the one thing that could help him do what he had in mind. That, and someone holding the light very, very steady so that he could focus (later on it came to me, that that might have had more than its practical use for him, perhaps it also soothed him to feel that someone was 'holding steady' for him).
Anyways, the incident ended well, luckily. When I asked Yi about it, I got 21 for what he had to do, 22 for the person holding the light - and sure enough anyone can argue how the job of 22 was not as hard, but I doubt anyone can argue against the importance or gravity of it.
For me it looks rather simple: equating 'surface' with masks or superficiality (or 22 with 'sth inconsequential')) is misleading and leaves a big part of its meaning out. Sometimes 22 is the only thing that helps 21 from turning into a bloody 23
They say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but was thinking of the peacock's plumage and it's evolutionary advantage; maybe beauty is in our mind/genes too, we are hard-wired to seek beauty and not for the sake of beauty for for what it represents. Most of male's animal have those kind of adornments to impress the females that are seeking for a reliable partner to have kids. Its about survival- life in the most pragmatic way.
Beauty, aesthetics, arts are a universal part of human experience, why not a chapter in Yi ?
eta: Yijing is full of symbolism, We read about dragon's goats, mares horses pigs fishes, threes, wells tings, thunders lakes but we aren't actually talk about them
.. isn't Yi-the book , a very 22-ish expression ?
Um. All I can conclude from that lot so far is that unchanging hexagrams are weird. Maybe especially when Trojan receives them, as her examples are the ones that I'm finding particularly baffling.
Yes, exactly! And (not 'but') you can also say that the changing lines show the points of difference between the two hexagrams. 22.1 is exactly the difference between 22 and 52, as well as the connection. The more you can penetrate into the specific quality/essence/feeling of each hexagram, the more you can get a sense of those relationships.
(And distinctions, regardless of structural closeness. I love the exquisite specificity of it as a 'tool to think with' - this change and loss... is it a 23, a 59? a 49? This feeling lost... is that a 59, a 29, a 4? - and when that tool/image/22-shape is given to you by an oracle, then this is something beautiful.)
Lightness not as in trivial or unimportant, lightness as in the opposite of heaviness.
All I can conclude from that lot so far is that unchanging hexagrams are weird.
Here's a recent overlooked thread about 22 http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/showthread.php?16917-when-it-s-all-about-22 I just thought a lot of ideas discussed here would be worth discussing there
Masks - as Anemos was saying - are not just about deception.
One of my favourite basic phrases for 22 is 'being something for someone'. Not small, not superficial - I like what you say about 'holding steady' for him. Being steadiness, being light. I find that one quite a recognisable 22.
Sometimes I wonder if the meanings each one of us finds to fit more to their experiences, if they are also signs of what we have still to learn in our path - with each Tao if the same things-symbols change signification and/or depth
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).