Yi-Blog

Much like Don Quixote and his monomania with knights and chivalry novels, my non-fiction "monomania" is with the Yijing (or "I Ching," as popularized by the Wilhelm/Baynes translation and the Wade-Giles transliteration of Chinese). I read extensively on the subject and I know for a fact that I'll never exhaust it in a lifetime. The thing is, for those reading and still stuck in the conceptual visualization of the Yijing as the exotic Oriental version of the Tarot and a hippie Ouija board, the classic is so much more than an usable oracle that the exegesis inspired by it, over thousands of years, is only second to the Bible (although, if I request a recount, it would most likely come up in first place). Unfortunately, most Western media, and users, focus only in the oracular usability of the classic and, because of it, it is often derided and belittled as quackery. Well, their loss, not mine.

In the meantime, my so called "monomania," takes me to the most varied reading paths. Hard to believe for most, I know. See, serious students of the Yijing can find many parallels between the inherent imagery of the classic and subjects that, at first sight, seem unrelated to it. One of the cornerstones of Chinese philosophy is "correlative thinking" and, although it runs against the grain of Western philosophy and its use of logics and analytics, its metaphorical toolbox is a spring of ideas and associations. Carl Jung, to name just one philosopher (yes, philosopher), realized the truth of its potentiality and applicability in Western thought. As the classic, and its exegesis, becomes more available to Western philosophers and writers, its use in metaphorical comparisons and the pursuit of meaning is slowly becoming commonplace. One such writer is the psychologist Stan Gooch. In the early 1970's he published "Total Man, an evolutionary theory of personality" and, in part of it, he touches on the Yijing. The book has fourteen chapters divided within six parts. Part five, "The Rise to Tyranny of Western Consciousness," includes Chapter 11, "The Momentary Universe," which talks about the Yijing from a Jungian perspective.

I had to chuckle at this statement in said chapter:

The foregoing is not in any sense offered as evidence of the value or validity of the Book of Changes. There is nothing to prevent one regarding it still as a very complex folly, as a tragic monument perhaps to the wasted energies of a considerable section of humanity over a considerable period.

Of course, the disclaimer was perhaps needed as part of the natural Western defensiveness against all things outside "rationality and logic" and as a service to the those readers that would automatically take exception to such concepts. Such disclaimers are chicken soup for their sensitive souls, in my opinion. Finding comfortable shelter while confronted with incomprehensibility.

The chapter is actually very good and goes on to explain some points of view on synchronicity.

What I really like to quote though is not directly related to the Yijing. I comes from the preface and I think it is a handy way to put things in the proper perspective, specially for those attached to "rationality and logic" that think they can make a "science" out of everything that can find its way towards an empirical explanation:

The social scientist, erroneously, as I believe, has adopted many of the practices of the physical scientist on the implicit, often explicit, assumption that psychology and sociology are  sciences. I myself on the other hand, together with some other psychologists, consider the wholesale application of the methods of the physical sciences to the study of human behavior to be among the major disasters of our time. This does not mean, however, that I believe those methods have no place at all in behavioral studies--though I have no space here to outline my precise position. The point I do wish to make very briefly--a slightly different one--is this. Because of the fact that we ourselves are the objects of the psychologist's and sociologist's studies, we cannot grant the psychologist the same automatic authority that we grant the professional physicist or chemist. Rather, the position resembles that which pertains in democracies in respect of Parliament. The people elect representatives to govern them--individuals whom they consider particularly suited to do so--granting them by such election a mandate to run the affairs of the country as they think best. It is when a point is reached that government behaves in ways deeply unacceptable to the people that that mandate is withdrawn. So it must be, I think, with the social sciences. We in a sense grant, or have granted, a mandate. But we do not thereby lose our inalienable right as human beings--the objects of the psychologist's study--to reject not merely his findings but, if necessary, even his methods.

The book is out of print and hard to find, cheaply. A good read, nevertheless.

Technorati Tags: I Ching, Yijing

OMG! Watch this space and mark your calendars for when this was first posted. The Yi may be going mainstream. Our children and grandchildren will be will be talking Yi-esque and discussing its intricacies like we discuss football. We will be yawning at the whole of it, of course...

This week’s conference will attempt to sort out the universal aspects of existing communication paradigms and explore the possibility of adapting them to suit Asian cultural peculiarities. Conference participant Eddie Kuo, professorial fellow at Nanyang Technological University, calls this the “harmonizing” function.
The conference will also look at giving the nod for communication paradigms derived from the axial Eastern philosophies of Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Hinduism. It will examine, among other things, whether the Buddhist paradigm of dependent co-arising (paticca samuppada) or the Chinese Yijing paradigm of 64 hexagrams could provide the architecture for a universal communication paradigm.

In a recent spat of comments to one of Hilary Barrett's posts, Ewald had this to say:

Emotions very much depend on what someone is keeping in their unconscious, which makes people not see situations as they really are.

“If something “feels” wrong, most of the time, it is.”
I think that there is so often “without fault” in the Yi, because people way too quickly are let to believe by their superegos that something is “wrong.”

Ewald's opinions are some of those I pay attention to. Specially because he writes so much about matters of the self, the ego, and the Yijing. For the above, my reply is: No, not really.

That POV detaches the querent/subject from the whole and that, IMO, is an illusion. I'm not saying we are open books, even to ourselves, but we are books, nevertheless, and we can be read and be anotated. Intent, for all intents and purposes (pun intended), is a conscious decision focused on a purpose. The so called "superego" isn't separate from the self nor should it be seen as an evil sidekick with its own agenda. There's only one agenda and that is the agenda of the self. Efforts have been made to invent parts that make a whole, to comprehend it and explicate it, but the self is much bigger than the sum of its perceived parts. If a subject would embark into a minimalistic approach to his own destiny, separating and segregating the parts that make his "self," as if watching from above to a discussion panel around the table of his mind, then all hope of finding his integrated whole will be lost. If "something feels wrong" means that one of your senses--one of those usually dismissed as belonging to the sidekick...--is working as it should. Ignoring them is done at your own peril.

Now, 'emotions' are reactions, yes, but the question is, reactions to what? IMO, they are reactions to stimuli. Said stimulus can be conveyed to the self by any, some, or all of our available senses and they form our intent. How can emotions be relegated to the plane of the unconscious when they are in the forefront of our actions? Emotions are not formed, in an obscure back room of our minds, by a third party named "unconscious." Some emotions are limbic, hardwired into our selves, like the love one feels for his/her child. The stimulus for that emotion is the mere presence of the child. It is limbic because it is what holds a species together; it is existential. Without it, any species would perish.

Yes, a Yi answer can be that stimuli and it does affect our selves by, in many instances, rewiring our emotions and thus our intent. It is one of the important reasons it should be used sparingly. in the Shujing (Book II, The Counsels of the Great Yu), there's a good piece of advise that, IMO, should be heard and applied:

Yü said, 'Submit the meritorious ministers one by one to the trial of divination, and let the favouring indication be followed.' The Tî replied, '(According to the rules for) the regulation of divination, one should first make up his mind, and afterwards refer (his judgment) to the great tortoise-shell. My mind (in this matter) was determined in the first place; I consulted and deliberated with all (my ministers and people), and they were of one accord with me. The spirits signified their assent, and the tortoise-shell and divining stalks concurred. Divination, when fortunate, should not be repeated.'

These were people that lived and breathed though divination and knew the perils of using it haphazardly in important decisions. The temptation is always there but discipline should be part of the practice.

When it is said that:

"the Yi is primarily about the intent in situations. Emotions are reactions to that and the Yi is not primarily about those reactions"

The order of those factors does affect the result of the equation. Futhermore, there's a contradiction in it. Intent and emotions go together, in tandem; they are a polarity. One feeds the other. Now, in order to manipulate one or the other, and thus steer your life, first you must see them as part of the whole. The "self" is the whole and you can only play your instrument effectively by using all the available strings, not selectively deconstructing it and giving some parts arbitrary priority over others. A symphony is not a single note.

As I said before, the Yijing is holistic. For that I mean that all goes into it and all is contemplated by it. That includes, but is not limited to, intent, emotions and situations. Situation is hereby defined as those slices of reality that affect us directly and, in this case, prompt us to consult the oracle. As such, a 'situation' is made up, in great part, by the polarity of emotion and intent. (Those paying attention, within the framework of the Yijing, will note that both definitions apply conceptually to yin and yang.) External factors do affect the outcome of that "slice of reality" that is the personal situation. However, by defining the Yijing as holistic, we can see the whole of it: the slice by itself, where it fits in the whole and how can both be adjusted to make them fit together. Of course, what I'm describing is the ultimate ideal use of the Yijing. Very few, and I don't count myself among them, can reach that level of holistic integration.

While feeding my Yijing OCD of reading all I can get my hands on related to it, I found the following passage in Richard Smith's latest book, "Fathoming the Cosmos and ordering the world":

A certain "word magic" gave early hexagram line statements social and psychological power. Long ago the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski pointed out that word magic could be found not only among so-called primitive peoples such as the Trobriand Islanders, whom he had studied, but also among Westerners in his own time. Advertising slogans, political campaigns, and legal formulas, for example, al provided illustrations for Malinowski of the magical power of words. They represent, more or less, what more modern scholars describe as "performative" utterances, statements that have the ability to create what they refer to, such as the seductive phrase I hereby promise.



Word magic, as Malinowski observed, can describe conditions that are "objectively" false but subjectively true. That is, language is capable of reflecting a kind of "pragmatic" truth that is "reasonable" in terms of addressing certain psychological needs of the individual and "sociologically true in the sense that it affects intentions, motivations and expectations." Much of the appeal of the Yijing as an explanatory device can be understood as a product of this sort of word power, specially in a society such as traditional China's, where plays on words were so powerful and where the written language exerted inordinate social influence by virtue of its seemingly intrinsic magical qualities.

All of a sudden, "maverick," "9/11," "terrorism," "change," "country first," "fight with me," "McCain," "Obama," "Biden," "Palin," started making a different kind of sense to me.

By the way, it was interesting to find out that "maverick," as a transitive verb, means:

1 West : to brand and take possession of (an animal) as a maverick

2 West : to obtain by dishonest or questionable means

Technorati Tags: parrhesia, maverick, Yijing

From our local newspaper. This goes to show what kind of area I live in... It reminds me of Garfield, the cartoon, and his "owner" (yeah, right...) Jon with his tales of growing up in the farm...

I think though this is a good metaphor for 26.4


Beef show draws hearty contestants - NJ.com

PILESGROVE TWP. - Parading their steer around the pole barn in the 4-H Invitational Beef Show on Thursday, young handlers spent a last night to remember with their animals before they are put up for auction today.

It was a bittersweet moment for kids who spent months building a bond with the cattle, working to get over 1,000 pounds of beef moving when they pull the reins.

"It's like a pet. But it's still getting sold tomorrow," said Bill Morris, whose grandchildren Kaitlyn and Nathan Crim each exhibited several times. "They work with them a lot. You got to walk them around at least an hour or so every night. The more you do it, the more it pays off."

Oh, the irony and hypocrisy of it all.


Medication increasingly replaces psychotherapy, study finds - Los Angeles Times

Psychiatrists who said they provided psychotherapy to all of their patients declined to 10.8% in 2004-2005 from 19.1% in 1996-1997, according to the report. Consistent with previous studies, researchers found that patients who paid out-of-pocket, generally the wealthiest patient group, were more likely to receive psychotherapy.

Sorry to sound cryptic. Is just that I see psychotherapy exemplified in Hexagram 18 and I see shotgun, chemical treatments, as exemplified in Hexagram 23.

So in the readings that you’ll find here, there will be no discussion of the Confucian “Image” section of the hexagrams. Indeed, our business here is to draw on the insight of the cosmic teaching voice that speaks through the I Ching to learn how to expel self-images, be they of the personal or the cultural variety. As Lao Tzu says in Chapter 12 of the Tao Te Ching:

Rampant color impairs vision;
A profusion of sound obstructs the ear;
Gluttonous tastes poison the mouth;
Attachment to belief warps the self;
Predatory impulse reviles the treasure.

The Sage uses the outer to point to the inner;
By exposing the image, it shows us ourselves.

In his very personal interpretive opinion, Brian Donohue is trying to simplify the real effort it takes to dive into the depths of the Yijing, by peeling away some of the layers that he considers "superfluos" late additions and/or biased exegesis. I will not go into the detail of a response like Hilary's because, while worthwhile, I believe there is a more practical way to answer such simplifications: "You can't cut down the trees to see the forest"

Of course, I understand where Brian is coming from and he's not alone. Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, whom he quotes in his note, could be other such examples--but only in appearance. See, the way the Anthony/Moog commentary is quoted is a bit oxymoronic and taken out of the context of Anthony's work. If I know anything about Anthony's take on the Yi is that she doesn't discard any commentary or ancient exegesis on the classic. Her apparent dismissal of the Wings is an effort to digest and 'Westernize' the Yijing for those looking for shortcuts. And here is the crux of the matter: the Yijing cannot be 'westernized'. While Anthony has a very good insight into the Yijing she has reached that point, not by dismissing layers, but by embracing them. If anything, Anthony 'easternized' herself in order to find her way through the maze of the Yi and thus provide a more familiar, Western-minded view of the classic, which have coalesced in her works. But she didn't skip any steps to reach her comprehension of it. They don't ignore the Third and Fourth wings, the so called "Images," on the contrary, they have integrated them into their interpretation. And that's what the Anthony/Moog duo are providing to the world: their own interpretation and understanding of the Yijing.

A diligent student does not, however, relies on others to chew their food for them. Anthony and Moog certainly did not. The Yijing is a Chinese creation, as well as is their millennia worth of countless exegesis and philosophical interpretations, until Leibniz and his Jesuit pen-pals took a whiff of it. For anybody to point, or imply, that the Chinese are more "image" oriented than the rest of the world, as something of dubious value, while seemingly embracing one of their key gifts to the world, is an open invitation to a plethora of unflattering adjectives, not to mention exposing how far from understanding the classic they really are. The Yijing is all about images... I don't care if the images came with the canonized version--which is the Yijing as we know it today, that is, the Zhouyi+The Ten Wings, for the uninformed--or if they are formed anew in our heads everytime we approach the Yijing: There's no way to properly interpret the Yijing without comprehesively embracing the whole of its imagery.

Many people don't know this, but Richard Wilhelm wrote and edited several books that were not directly related to the Yijing and associated themes. One of them is a collection of Chinese fairy tales, published in English in 1921, called "The Chinese Fairy Book." Here is a sample from the section named "Legends of the Gods":

Something I posted in Clarity today that I like to record here too.


38.K'uei / Opposition - Page 10 - I Ching Community

It really tickles me to death the ongoing effort of stripping Confucius and his school from the Yijing, like some kind of taint soiling the work. As if one should wash the mouth after uttering his name... As it is, the Yijing IS a Confucian Classic. The Zhouyi is another story. From whatever old extant exegesis we have available, that school has been commenting the Yi (Zhouyi) from a time earlier than the oldest version of the Yi found thus far (Mawangdui). There is no Yijing without the Confucian School. Furthermore, what we have received is the Yijing, not the Zhouyi proper, which remains a mystery other than a few quotes found in old history records like the Zuo Zhuan. We do have a proposed separation of the Zhouyi text, what it perhaps looked like, within the received YIJING itself, which comes from what classical school?? Yes, the Confucian School. So, if we follow that train of thought, how do we know the whole thing, all the text received and attributed to the original Zhouyi--and we are talking about the text here--, isn't a Confucian fabrication in its entirety? Can we trust them to tell us that the Tuan Ci and Yao Ci is the original Zhouyi part of the Yijing but distrust them in the parsing of the text?

So, my point is, dismissing the received parsing of the text because of the possibility of it being a biased pipe-dream of a bunch of Neo-Confucians under the orders of the Kangxi Emperor, is in itself a biased, non-objective view, in the opposite direction, of their work.

As I've said, or at least implied, I'm not a revisionist regarding the received Chinese text of the Yijing. And I'm not because if we are going to revise the text, then we have to revise the whole classic, not only the attributed Zhouyi part of it. At that point we may as well realize to be holding water in our hands as the reality of the Yijing itself will shift. Mind you, I'm the first one in line to bury my head in obscure books, searching for the historical origins of the text, however, at some point I realized that I had to separate the material studied from the received text as they are, although related, completely separate entities.

On the other hand, anyone is free to play with the text. Just don't expect serious arguments of interpretation based on the free-handling of it as it will be only a game...

Allan Lian posted an interesting note about the Yijing and what really takes to study the classic: A Lifetime

It is also good to note that, while it is a good idea to read and learn about the Yi, it is also a good idea to know one's limits in its knowledge. Many people, with a only few years of reading and using the Yi, feel otherwise compelled to, and capable of, holding debates about it with those that have spent most of their life dedicated to its study. Even those life-timers, if sincere, will tell you that they are but mere students of something that cannot be exhausted.

A touch of Ancients, Buddhas, Immortals and Zhouyi

Like any earnest and sincere student, try to remain hidden until you are ready to appear in the field, or the Kung Fu version to ‘descend the mountain’ (xia shan), so to speak, to enter into discourses with likeminded fellows. (Think of the first and second lines of Qian / The Creative) If our basics and foundations are not strong enough, we could be easily influenced by incorrect teachings of others in the World Wide Web or by some New Age translations.