lindsay said:

all I can say is that the resulting hexagram is the future hexagram for 100 out of 100 Chinese interpreters. All the rest is Western imagination.

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This quote caught my attention, and even more the responses it received.

Made me remember how the ancient chinese people didn't know how to use this ancient chinese divinination tool. For example, let's see one ancient record about a divination, in the Shang dinasty (1):
"It will rain/it will not rain. The King said: it will rain"

This fool King Wu Ding... he didn't know:
a) You shouldn't ask for events, only intents or derivated meanings
b) You shouldn't ask for prediction of the future
c) You shouldn't phrase the question including 2 sides or options
d) You shouldn't use yes/no questions

Thanks God we know better than them!!!
(BTW, the fact that "on day renwu it really did rain" is recorded in the plastron has no relevance)

(1) Quoted in FIELD, Stephen. Who Told the Fortunes? The Speaker in Early Chinese Divination Records. Page 2

Western precision allows us to transcend the primitive notions of the old diviners by identifying the source of the IC not in ancient china but in brain dynamics shared across the species - IOW one does not need to understand ANY traditional IC material to understand what is going on - but the ancient metaphor is already filled out and so easier to extend it (keep the goods bits) rather than start anew.

The issues with scientific considerations is the demand for repeatability and falsifiability. The questiioning method gets over this hurdle IN GENERAL.

Sinc each moment of one's time is unique, NOT repeatable in toto nor falsifiable, so the focus on trying to determine the moment puts ome in the realm of the random/miraculous. IOW as science tries to reduce all chance in the prediction of events, so the IC exploits chance to capture 'the moment'. "Synchronicity" is where the random method correlates with the moment free of any causality (since with cause-effect we move into the use of algorithms/formulas and so a science model).

Given 64 hexagrams, 4096 dodecagrams, it is possible to use random/miraculous methods to derive a hexagram that 'fits' the context - but NOT to do this consistantly.

When we introduce questions and so a more scientific focus, the precision improves since variables covering context seed the interpretations - if you use random methods and try and see the context variables it soon becomes obvious when the random methods have failed in their prediction since the context variables dont fit (without th context variables you cannot tell if the random is correct or not - you are left take it all on face value and so open to the manipulations of your unconscious rather than any objective description of what is going on in general.

Chris.

jesed said:

For example, let's see one ancient record about a divination, in the Shang dinasty (1):
"It will rain/it will not rain. The King said: it will rain"

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Nah..., they had to write it that way. Do you know how hard is to inscribe characters on a tortoise shell?? Those guys were master stenographers...

Most likely the original question was something like this: "in about a week I have a date with a yet secret concubine who's the wife of my main advisor. Since I have to meet her in secret, in the Wu Li woods, and I must take my guards and those bastards hate rain and would start bitching about it, etc., etc., oh great Sage, do you know if that day we will have good weather?"

Try to write all that on a plastron...

BTW, he thought better and decided to stay in the palace...

L

of course, we even know better what they asked how i forgot that?

jesed said:

of course, we even know better what they asked

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Exactly!

L

Isn't that a little like saying that James Clerk Maxwell didn't know how to use an oscilloscope? As long as you're talking about the Yi you should be reading the Zuozhuan, and Zhou stuff, not Shang oracle bones.
Any way we can make Lofting do all his posts slowly and meticulously on synthetic polymer plastrons?

Glad you noticed that....

Is Yi only the Zhou Yi?

Best

jesed said:

Glad you noticed that....
Is Yi only the Zhou Yi? Best

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I was just assuming that nothing of the Yi existed in the Shang.
For me the narrowest term is Zhouyi, second narrowest is Yijing.
I'll tend to use Yi for Yixue, a term broader than Yijing and including
some of the Han ideas, but if I'm using it at all affectionately, only
the Han and Wing ideas I like.

bradford said:

Isn't that a little like saying that James Clerk Maxwell didn't know how to use an oscilloscope?

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That's my feeling as well.

I also feel like dusting off my time machine and send one of these back to the Shang Dynasty so they can elaborate those questions better on the plastrons...



IMO, it is a very broad assessment saying those ancient interpreters didn't know how to interpret (or even how to ask) That is assuming also that, the way we ask in the present, is the "right" way to ask and thus we have a better way to "interpret" the answers. That's a BIG assumption.

And my joke (yes, it was a joke) about the reason for "telegram" size questions/readings inscribed on a plastron has a base in reality.

L

I thought Jesed was being facetious or sarcastic, making a case for using Yi for future predictions and such, agreeing with how the oracle was used in early times. Maybe I misunderstood.

Hi Bradford

bradford said:

I was just assuming that nothing of the Yi existed in the Shang.

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(Underline is mine)

Isn't the Zhou Yi a Zhou adaptation of former similar Shang's works? (Gui zang, for example)

Aren't the oracle bones useful to understand Zhou Yi?


Best

bruce_g said:

I thought Jesed was being facetious or sarcastic, making a case for using Yi for future predictions and such, agreeing with how the oracle was used in early times. Maybe I misunderstood.

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Right, as usual. Not only about prediction questions, but about understanding the second hex as future, as Lindsay pointed

Best

jesed said:

Right, as usual

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Ha!! Damn! The man was making a joke himself and I missed it! Cunning... I feel way much better now. Thanks for clarifying.

L

jesed said:

but about understanding the second hex as future, as Lindsay pointed

Best

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5,000 years in the making, this controversial issue will never die...

L

5000 years?--- i think i should start studying yi's history again.

BTW.. when the controversial issue about the interpretation of the second answer started? Not in Zhou times.

Best

jesed said:

5000 years?--- i think i should start studying yi's history again.

BTW.. when the controversial issue about the interpretation of the second answer started? Not in Zhou times.

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I'm exaggerating, of course... The point of the "exaggeration" is that there is no consensus on the interpretation of the second hexagram.

L

"You shouldn't phrase the question including 2 sides or options"

They didn't, they asked "it will rain" and then they asked "it will not rain", including a 'maybe' in the one they did not like. In order not to give the gods any wrong ideas, like needing rain badly and telling them it will not rain.

LiSe

heylise said:

"You shouldn't phrase the question including 2 sides or options"

They didn't, they asked "it will rain" and then they asked "it will not rain", including a 'maybe' in the one they did not like. In order not to give the gods any wrong ideas, like needing rain badly and telling them it will not rain.

LiSe

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That's interesting and a little funny. I think that's what most of us tend to do, in our private dialogue with divinity. Hence being careful what we wish (pray/ask) for, even in our most quiet subconscious thoughts. Sorta like 28.1.

jesed said:

Hi Bradford
Isn't the Zhou Yi a Zhou adaptation of former similar Shang's works? (Gui zang, for example) Aren't the oracle bones useful to understand Zhou Yi? Best

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That's a REALLY good question. But it's not close to answerable yet.
My own sense of it is "not so much." I think there's more discontinuity than is generally assumed. I suspect that a lot of the Shang tradition was deliberately scrapped in an attempt to start over with the new Tian Ming (Mandate of Heaven). But - it would have been scrapped by diviners who were familiar with the Shang traditions. Given that, a lot of the "mantic sayings" and omen texts likely survived, but in a new light or with a much deeper and less superstitious understanding. Also, the written language was evolving extremely quickly during this transition, so that using Shang lingo to understand the Zhou terminology has some real drawbacks.

bradford said:

That's a REALLY good question. But it's not close to answerable yet.
My own sense of it is "not so much." I think there's more discontinuity than is generally assumed. I suspect that a lot of the Shang tradition was deliberately scrapped in an attempt to start over with the new Tian Ming (Mandate of Heaven). But - it would have been scrapped by diviners who were familiar with the Shang traditions. Given that, a lot of the "mantic sayings" and omen texts likely survived, but in a new light or with a much deeper and less superstitious understanding. Also, the written language was evolving extremely quickly during this transition, so that using Shang lingo to understand the Zhou terminology has some real drawbacks.

Click to expand...

If you go back further to what is BEHIND all languages we hit the basic categories of meaning derivation/communiation regardless of 'race'. All written/spoken anguages are metaphor used to communicate cognitions - with the initial, species-wide, form being in body language through the use of emotions and so the fight/flight dichotomy.

Basic observations of reality are through sensory systems and they are specialist tools that feed information into the brain in the form of patterns of frequencies, wavelengths, and amplitudes.

The universal responder to this form of information is emotion and this brings out the use of symmetric means to describe asymmetric, symmetic, anti-symmetric reality; we translate difference into sameness and then link the sameness with the context through the use of labels (and so difference as metaphor).

The development of written/spoken words/symbols served to refine the communication of cognitions coloured by emotions where the shared categories derived from the neurology allow for communication through resonance.

Regardless of culture, all else follows where the UNIVERSAL forms get customised due to ad-hoc/heuristic methods all due to lack of understanding re properties and methods of how 'in here' works.

The universal forms stem from the neurology, not ancient china. Their REPRESENTATIONS are local and so stem from ancient china. GIVEN the work over the last 3000+ years in science so we can now map out the universals as a set of POTENTIAL forms that will get coloured, exaggerated, marginalised or even expunged from the LOCAL context where the forms are actualised.

By understanding the methodology involved in information processing by our brains so we can in fact transcend the ad-hoc/heuristic approaches of the ancient chinese and so move into the 21st century AD rather than try to keep repeating the 10th century BC.

In that movement we take the IC out of its current box in the West of being categorised as 'ancient chinese mysticism' and clearly demonstrate it is far far more than that ... and in that demonstration show the current chinese that they have not completed the IC work in that THEIR perspectives, as communicated to others, is also still stuck in 10th century BC thinking (even though they recognise the philosphical aspects of the IC, they appear to have failed in application of scientific perspectives to flesh out exactly what the full methodology, the full spectrum, that IC can communicate - descriptions of 'all there is'.)

Chris.

Therefore, extremely primitive flatworms have been using the I Ching for hundreds of millions of years, stringing all of their journeys together out of a series of left and right (yin and yang) turns. At one point I just thought it ended with monkeys using yin and yang pant hoots to divine the location of fruit trees, but Chris has demonstrated that the I Ching began with neural tissue itself. So now I don't know what the hell to call the Book of Changes, since that name is already taken.

bradford said:

Therefore, extremely primitive flatworms have been using the I Ching for hundreds of millions of years, stringing all of their journeys together out of a series of left and right (yin and yang) turns. At one point I just thought it ended with monkeys using yin and yang pant hoots to divine the location of fruit trees, but Chris has demonstrated that the I Ching began with neural tissue itself. So now I don't know what the hell to call the Book of Changes, since that name is already taken.

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LOL! ;-)

What has made the METAPHOR that is the I Ching is neural complexity - more so the recognition of DEPTH and so with that the emergence of spacetime.

The 2 dimensional realm of Di-grams represents reality as a SLICE - as such there is no sense of time since time is a 'moment' and no more. Cartisian coordinates can be misleading in this context in that when we move from 2D to what we perceive as 3D we are in fact moving from 2D to 4D. We cannot 'see' this using Cartesian coordinates but we can when we use self-referencing of a dichotomy and note such in the forms of yin/yang or 0/1 representations.

So - we have basic, stimulus/response of yin/yang - this is the X axis of cartesian coordinates and, when we remove all of the repetition we have a unit form that is synonymous with the notion of the negative/positive dichotomy (where the representation is from -1 to +1 where in the IC we use 0/1)

Add-in the Y axis and the representation becomes:

00,01/10,11 where:

X axis is represented by 00/11
Y axis is represented by 01/10

Now comes the fun in that we introduce the Z axis, for in doing that we get the bit representations of:

000,001,010,011/100,101,110,111

X = 000/111
Y = 010/101
Z = 001/110 & 011/100

The SECOND set of Z (011/100) represents TIME dimension. IOW the moment we move from 2D to 3D we move from a slice of time (a moment) to a block of time (moments).

In a realm of instincts, stimulus/response, we do not move into 3D, we live in 2D - a slice perspective - and so most lower neuron-dependent, instincts-driven life forms have 2D lives ;-)

Increased complexity in neural development ment we can move PAST instincts and into their management/refinement and overall control/regulation - which is what consciousness does. As such we move into 3D perspectives where that includes the recognition of time (in the IC this is covered in the trigrams of wind and thunder) - and so the recognition of change.

If we go back to basic dynamics of noise/order we find the 'chaos game' where the CONTAINMENT of noise elicits order through self-referencing - IOW we can trace the roots of the metaphor of the IC to the beginnings of the universe - as well we can the ease of the isomorphism of the IC with other metaphors.

The IC as such comes with consciousness at the SPECIES level where it is then refined over the initial years of life by social interactions and so LOCAL contexts (Freud called this the superego). Thus all specialist perspectives have the one set of constant meanings that get customised to give us the IC, Astrology, Tarot, Runes, Mathematics, Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics - IOW they all map to blending, bonding, bounding, and binding.

What I have identifed elsewhere is the translation of form into process, process into form, where in the IC this is in the ability to map five-phase dynamics in IC structures. This mixing of form and process in the same representation is due to the roots of meaning being in the differentiate/integrate dichotomy (and so one of its metaphors - yin/yang)


Chris.

Gawd, I love youse guys...

Rinda