Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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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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It seems the ideogram for this hexagram is a bowl of worms, or, as one of my sources puts it, "The sacraficial bowl is full of rotting meat with worms." This brings up a point worth emphasizing with a quote from Qiying:
Bred and born in the Foreign regions beyond, there is much in the administration of the Celestial Dynasty that is not perfectly comprehensible to the Barbarians, and they are continually putting forced constructions on things of which it is difficult to explain to them the real nature.
One can easily replace "the adminstration of the Celestial Dynasty" with "the Book of Changes". This is one reason for taking all sources with, perhaps not a grain of salt, but a measure of caution, as one simply cannot pick up the received texts and plunk them down into modern Western society and expect to maintain relevance in the new context.
There are at least three separate modes of contextual influence on the "meaning" of each hexagram. The first, the most primal, is to look at the relationship of constituent tri-grams, while looking at the same time at each tri-gram in terms of its constituent lines. When one allows for changing lines, the full range of hexagrams explodes from 64 possibilities to 4094 shades of grey between all unmoving empty to all moving full. In addition, mystics who have lived with these hexagrams have come to see, much as we see shapes in clouds, shapes and images in the hexagrams themselves, and in many cases this has come to influence the reading of those hexagrams. Next there are the Chinese ideograms for each hexagram, themselves essentially pictures, and thus adding to the interpretive milieu in which the changes were traditionally studied and understood.
All but the first of these are arguably culture bound and largely irrelevant to the herenow of my explorations. So I take the received texts and try to hear them, try to let them connect herenow to therethen, all the while knowing that therethen never imagined herenow and likewise my imaginings herenow about therethen are only that, imaginings. Letting those thoughts bounce back and forth along the conduits of time, I eventually settle into a kind of melange of all that I have read or thought.
So much for process. I was disturbed by the wide range of titles for this hexagram in my three sources, and my initial response to the image of the bowl of worms, which was the single word, "Fecundity". What to me is a vile mass of rotted meat is to worms and bacteria nothing short of mana from heaven. And as repugnant as these things might be to me, they have their place in the grand cycle, and, indeed, my very existence is as dependent on them as on anything else. I will one day soon be nothing more than exactly that which now offends me, and this, in turn, is the whole teaching of the Book of Changes: Change.
We have the mountain, stillness, boundaries, the eldest son as the outer face, with the gentle wind, the eldest daughter, as the inner face. Perhaps it is the idea of wind and wood gently, persistently penetrating the base of the mountain, not even so much chipping away at it as eating it up over the eons, that resonates with the traditional reading. The subtle, visible-only-after-the-fact nature of the trigram, like roots upending paved walks or the wind slowly scuplting the land, is very much part of the energy of the eldest daughter.
I cannot pretend to be pleased with my understanding of this hexagram. It is arrogance to suggest that the traditional text fails. But the oldest source I have, Shaughnessy's Mawangdui translations, calls this hexagram "Branch". There is enough change in the presentations of this hexagram that I feel justified in trying to stick to the roots, the public face being Stillness and the inner face being Persistence.
Soon it will change.
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Stillness without, radiance within; that is, Ken, the eldest son, the mountain as the outer face of the hexagram, Li, the middle daughter, radiance and fire as the inner face. The notes in the Willhelm/Baynes mention that Confucious was once uncomfortable on obtaining this hexagram, due to the danger of getting caught up in the form and forgetting the function. There are contexts and subtleties that we simply can't understand in the same way these things were understood thousands of years ago. That is why so often in this journey I return to basic, basic, basics. Stillness without, radiance within. Surely that describes a state of grace, and surely that is a state to seek. But one does not perform the work of the world from that state. Instead it is a place to visit, to refresh and restore one's spirit. Too many curliques and the ornament comes to outweigh the structure.
Soon it will change.
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I don't know where I first read this one, but I suppose I've most often read it in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". I have searched around for it before, but never found it. Today I caught up with page 144 of the book, on which is quoted from Chapter 15 of The Anelects:
Yu. When good government prevailed in his state, he was like an arrow. When bad government prevailed, he was like an arrow. A superior man indeed is Chu Po-yu! When good government prevails in his state, he is to be found in office. When bad government prevails, he can roll his principles up, and keep them in his breast."(emphasis added)
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Ken is the name of the trigram of the eldest son, it is also the trigram for mountain, and incorporates stillness and boundary. The trigram is binary 4, and this hexagram is binary 36. Note again how the increment of one unit has caused a flip of three lines; such is the nature of Change in the book of Changes.
A doubled trigram, of course, represents a condition in which the inner and outer aspects are aligned. The inner face of this hexagram is stillness and boundaries, as is the outer. This congruence between inner and outer aspects is a feature in itself, occuring 8 out of 64 times, once for each of the trigrams.
That said, the hexagram Ken signifies stillness and boundaries, just like the trigram. The text speaks in particular of bringing stillness to the back, and it is hard to imagine the rest of the body flouncing about whilst the back is thus stilled. To my eye, there is another relationship, that of the spine in the body to a ridge of mountains on land, like refering to the Rockies as the spine of the continent. Living as I have for the past few years nestled up to the San Gabriel foothills, I have come to appreciate this hexagram more than I ever could have growing up in Long Beach. But while the shore of the ocean or a lake or even the path of a river can be used as a logical boundary, mountains are different. If they are less binding today, thanks to rail travel and air travel, mountains are still barriers with which to reckon.
Perhaps one of the least understood aspects of what folks call "setting boundaries" is that announcing one is going to set boundaries largely defeats the purpose. When one draws a line in the sand, it is usually seen as a challenge (and, indeed, it is most often done as a challenge). But when one actually sets a boundary, rather than merely announcing it, one seeks to emulate the mountains, still, calm, impassive and unpassable, discouraging challenge rather than inviting it.
Ken, then, is the hexagram for stillness and boundary, within and without. Soon it will change.
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