Comments on: Trusting in stripping away

By: Hilary

Hilary — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:09:11 +0000

I like the sleeves connection very much, hadn’t seen that. Also, the sleeves are a surface layer, maybe a protective surface – that seems to be what gets stripped away, as often as not. (Was it for you, when you had confidence in stripping away?)

By: LiSe

LiSe — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:11:27 +0000

The most common meaning of dui, not as the hexagram but in texts, is loosen, open up (as far as I know about ‘most common’). Like 9.3, where the spokes of the cart “loosen”, dui. That comes very close to pruning.

I think in 58 the meaning is also in the first place this loosening. Joy feels like loosening, exchange is opening up to others, the shamaness provides an opening to the spirits.

When I look at line 5 and I put Harmen’s ‘inspiring confidence in others’ there, it is “inspiring confidence in stripping”. The fanyao is about the marrying wife who makes no fuss about her sleeves. She is the primary wife, that brings lots of honor, she doesn’t need more. Less is ok because she doesn’t need it. But in 58 you make others follow you in your ‘less’, maybe that is the danger? It did happen to me, someone making me believe I could do without, I got rid of something and later I regretted it a lot. No idea if that is what it means – just a thought.

Or it might mean that in all opening up you need a lot of discerning power so you connect only with the right things and right people. Trusting people too easily really is dangerous.
Don’t show the back of your tongue, play your cards close to your chest.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:53:23 +0000

Yes. I was thinking of the danger there might be in Ouija boards, or psychedelics taken without guidance or skill – trusting in what strips the self away.

By: Bradford

Bradford — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:29:47 +0000

Other takes are not inconsistent with the Yi’s approach,
but each take really needs to explain why there is danger in this trust.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:37:38 +0000

Yes.

Completely different take, and it makes good sense (and fits the pyramid marketing example well). You’ll be telling me next that I haven’t finished working on this…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:59:10 +0000

Anonymous can’t edit to add a name, but you must know who.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:57:35 +0000

My own take on this tends to be – what is passing, ephemeral, falling apart or dying probably should fall apart. A behavior that isn’t sustainable should eventually extinguish itself. To try and pressure the world into behaving otherwise is just asking for grief. To hope that the natural selection process won’t act when it impinges on sensitive feelings is bu dao, against the way. The Zhi Gua (54) suggests that what is being trusted in is ephemeral. This anecdote is one of the things that runs through my head when I get this line:

Spring, 1973, Atlas
Back on the commune we had a small herd of goats, ranging upwards to 24 in number. Several of the does had just given birth to seven kids in all. Late one evening one of our Nubian does, Honey, was last to give birth, to a pair of kids. The first was healthy and stood up right away. The second was small and had trouble getting to his feet. Honey got extremely agitated. First she started to snort and pace, and then she started trying to kill the second kid. There was a small crowd gathered to watch the birth. The ladies there quickly intervened to save the kid. They took him to the main house, made a little place for him to stay warm, brought him bottled milk and nursed him for a full six weeks until he could stand on his still-shaky legs. They named him Atlas, for all the weight that he had to carry. Finally they decided that little Atlas was ready to rejoin the herd and they set him free in the corral. Socialization wasn’t that much of a problem. Atlas started playing with the other kids right away.
Within three days, all nine of the kids, including Atlas, were dead from the disease that Atlas was carrying. In trying to kill her offspring, Honey “knew” exactly what she was doing, because she was following her Dao. It was the goodness of the humans that interfered with the Dao here and caused all of the damage.