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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
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The Lake on the Mountain, at least according to the combination of trigrams. Balkin talks at length of the Confucian family relations spin as well, the youngest daughter joined to the youngest son, hence "Mutual Attraction."
Today I am more mindful than usual of the approach to Tarot, which holds that no card of itself is good or bad, that each has potential in either direction, and that the goal is to use the energy in question because it is at hand, on tap. I find it harder to maintain this distance from the readings of the I Ching, but the concept holds true nonetheless. And so, taking the Balkin reading, I would say "infatuation" and "use the energy derived therefrom...but do not mistake it for love...but neither close your heart to its innocence and stirring power."
However, for me there is another part of the reading. I have used a metaphor of a mountain lake to describe the mind. Such a lake is fed by rain from above, a spring below, three streams, to correspond to the senses. Water leaves the lake through evaporation, through seepage into the water table, and through the spill at the bottom edge where it moves into the river that eventually makes its way to the ocean. Those represent different kinds of messages/interactions/outputs we give to the world, conscious, unconscious. It's a wider, more organic, less linear, and more suitable for meditative reflection, gloss on "Garbage In, Garbage Out," and I can't help so reflecting in the presence of this hexagram. I do not for a moment suppose that this is "the proper reading" for the hexagram.
The Mountain and the Lake can seem to be opposites, but finding a lake on top of a mountain points to the reality: They are complements.
Soon it will change.
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That's the Mawangdui translation for the name of the hexagram. The Balkin calls this "Joy", which is closer to what I would expect, what with the doubling of the "Tui" trigram, sometimes called, "The Joyous."
The outer and the inner are in harmony, are aligned the same. There is congruence here of above and below. Now is a time to reflect deeply on the nature of the trigram, "Tui," the Lake or Marsh, the Joyous, the youngest daughter. Doubled trigrams are also a good opportunity to introduce nuclear trigrams. Taking, from the bottom, lines 2-4 we get the trigram of Li, the clinging, fire. Taking lines 3-5 we get Xun, wind, wood. All of the trigrams involved in this are "daughters" in the Confucian understanding of things. So this is a female, receptive, but not prim ally so, hexagram.
What does Balkin have to say?
...take a different approach. If you want to find joy in the outside world, you must first learn to find some joy in your own heart.
Sound advice at any time; on target all the more anytime this hexagram results from our casting.
Soon it will change.
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From "A Sacred Unity," (Donaldson, ed.), some entries for the new Common Place Book tag (CPB). This actually applies to my complaints with Dawkins's work.
pg76:
One form of habitual error can, however be pilloried. this is the trick of drawing a generalization from the world of external observation, giving it a fancy name, and then asserting that this named abstraction exists inside the organism as an explanatory principle. Instinct theory commonly takes this monstrous form. To say that opium contains a dormitive principle is no explanation of how it puts people to sleep. Or do the people contain a dormitive instinct that is "released" by the opium?
pg134/135:
Other sorts of classification could, of course, be examined. It would be orthodox, for example, to classify information according to its relevance and usefulness for the various "needs" of the organism. The result would be a system of categories resembling "instinct" theory. A large amount of speculation and pseudoexlpanation is already associated with this way of thinking in economics, "functional" anthropology, and animal ethology. Masses of data have been dissected into this procrustean bed but it still seems to me that the explanatory principles, i.e., ""instincts" invoked in these studies resemble the "dormitive principle" proposed by Moliere's learned doctors to explain the physiological effects of opium.
pg170/172:
There are also questions of method. One of the characteristic methods which you have been taught is that science consists in collecting some facts, whatever they are, making a hypothesis, making then a prediction from the hypothesis, and taking that prediction back to the facts. I would maintain that this is mostly nonsense. And it is nonsense of a particular kind, namely that kind which Moliere has stigmatized as the creation of dormitive principles.
Let's say the problem is a Ph.D. examination in which the learned doctors ask the candidate, "Why does opium put people to sleep?" And the candidate, in dreadful Latin, replies, "Because, learned doctors, it contains a dormitive principle," whereupon they all cheer and say, "How right he is." Now about three-quarters of all the hypotheses in the behavioral sciences are fundamentally dormitive principles. "Anxiety" is a dormitive principle. "Emotion" is a dormitive word. It's just like "anxiety."
...Of course it's very difficult to talk about this stuff in a civilization which is, oh, at least seventy percent insane in its major premises about the nature of man and the nature of relationships. One of the interesting insanities is the notion which really came to a head in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, which was helped along by Darwin and other persons, namely that the unit of survival is either an individual or family line or a species or subspecies or something of the kind. Now, in terms of that premise, we have been building machines and fighting the environment. We have now achieved, I hope, empirical proof that that premise won't do any longer; in fact, the unit of survival is organism in environment, and not organism versus environment.
The question of whether it's you versus me, or you and me as part of something which includes us both, is, of course, right at the base of why you might think I was out to do you in, and why you might be right, because, after all, I am a member of this culture.
Question: How "dormitive" is the term "schizophrenia"?
Bateson: Well, a great many people use the term dormitively. that is, they talk as though there were something inside my skin which made me talk funny, you know. On the other hand, talking about schizophrenia in this way has sort of focused attention on some behavioral characteristics which I've paid a good deal of attention to---not supposing that there is a something called schizophrenia inside these patients which makes them do this. In fact, my main question has been, how is schizophrenia related to such things as humor, religion, poetry---obviously something bigger, a genus or family of behaviors which are all somehow related formally. This seems to me a nondormitive way of approaching it. Does that answer your questions? I mean, obviously, the word "schizophrenia" as used in law courts and such places, is being used in mainly a dormitive sense. And then you get the use of the term by the geneticists, who believe that the solution to all problems is to find a gene which will serve as a dormitive principle. Now geneticists are beginning to discover that genetics isn't quite like that...
That last sentence is too optimistic by far, for it fails to take into account the culture's preference for solutions in the form of consumable goods (medicines and machines for treatment, etc.)
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From the Mawangdui, "There are words that are not trustworthy."
Soon it will change.
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Following. The Balkin and the Mawangdui agree on which reading, although the are placed in different order. Balkin puts this at 17, the Mawangdui puts it as 47. They concur on the name, adjusted for orthographical followings. This might be a good point to mention that, on the heels of my comment last time about not knowing Balkin's sources, I was looking this morning at the "Bibliographical Essay" toward the end of the Balkin text which makes quite clear his sources. If his style is more wordy and Western than I would hope to achieve it is clearly a matter of studied choice rather than default as his research, if not fully exhaustive, was indeed extensive and incorporated everything on my paltry shelf and much more.
That said, Sui, or Following, but really "hunting/pursuing".
Very dissatisfied with the Balkin today, but equally with the almost absent Mawangdui which only says, "Following: Prime receipt; beneficial to determine; there is no trouble." How the hell that grows into the preachy feel goods of "follow your bliss" offered by Professor Balkin is beyond me.
What do the trigrams tell us? The joyous lake, Tui is above/outer. Thunder/the arousing is below/inner. Swelling energy withing, placid pleasantness without. Certainly that's a nice place to be.
Balkin says the word "Following" was originally "Hunt," with notions not of being a follower but of pursuing something. Balkin's reading is about the duty of leaders to serve their followers, but also the need to follow one's conscience. It puts me in mind of my discipline lecture. The root word for discipline is disciple, and those were the guys who gave up their worldly lives to pursue the gifts of heaven. Their leader was the world's quarry, eventually hunted and killed for sport, but willingly in service of that which he pursued. The loving Christ is the outer face, but mighty was his wrath inside the temple with the money changers. Hunting. Pursuing. Following. The arousing thunder within, the joyous lake without. There will be no trouble.
Soon it will change.
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Mawangdui and Balkin/Baynes differ on exactly which reading goes with this hexagram. We will deal with Balkin's take on the Baynes. (I haven't dug any further into Balkin's choice of sources, but generally his work seems an updated phrasing of the Willhelm/Baynes.
Cui - Coming Together, then, is the reading, about creating a group by creating a social order, being a leader, bringing one's proper followers to one in preparation. Today I am able to see the failure of the reading to apply to my current circumstances, even as I find myself looking for ways to make it apply. This latter, of course, is the primary trick on which most success with the I Ching rests, similar to the psycho-dynamics of cold reading, what the N-LP folks call "transderivational search". But I digress.
Whether looking at the Mawangdui or the Baynes, this hexagram is the marshy water female younger daughter energy as the outer face and the earth mother primal receiver as the inner face. This is, perhaps, where all reflection on the I Ching should start: Which of the 8 are outer, which of the 8 are inner. And in divinatory casting there would be the question also of changing lines, so there would be the initial outer/initial inner and resulting outer/inner to draw on, teetering back and forth like a balance coming to rest. Let that suffice.
Soon it will change.
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