I’ve not been blogging for long … Just started this winter.

I’ve seen Hexagram 36 called “Censorship” in R. L. Wing’s *The I Ching Workbook* and Jack Balkin’s *The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life*. The word “censorship” has helped me to understand two facets of 36 –> one being the need sometimes to intentionally “darken one’s light”; the other being a less conscious habit of self-censorship/muting one’s voice.

I love how meanings keep expanding and deepening in one’s study of this oracle…

Who calls hexagram 36 ‘Censorship’? I like that - it seems to sum up a lot of the possibilities.

I can’t imagine a soul being inherently negative; I see the soul as the individual animating force within each person — pure light; pure life.

One of the ways that I see Hexagram 12 is as the shadow-side of a soul, the “negative,” if you will … the “dark side of the moon”. (I see H36, Censorship, more as an act of shadowing … and H12 as being in a state of “shadowment”.) H12 is a polarity of two natural states of the soul: Peace (11) and Community/Friendship (13). I’ve been grappling with H12 for years — its many guises as Swamp, depression, impasse, paralysis, entropy, indifference, being in a limbo or bardo, desolation, retrogression … and also as brooding, composting, resting at some fundamental level; realizing that one is estranged, inert, in a rut. We resist change when we stagnate … and still, all is changing. That core principle of the I Ching sustains me when I feel stagnant … for even stagnation is not static. I think of stagnation as the mind’s lowest possible low-pressure system … **cold** soup, and nobody’s stirring the pot! But even so, there is minute movement…

I have a few “pet-peeve” hexagrams — like H12 — that challenge me to see the “negative” in me with a relational, compassionate eye, and to consider how the “negative” is simply one necessary passage in a whole process. The pivotal thing is that I choose to help move the passage along by living in sync with the principles and ethics of the Sage.

*Sigh* … Old habits die hard, don’t they? ;-D

…they take their own time in passing, just like the dourest weather. But pass they do …

Thanks.