Sam Crane has a great Taoist blog, the Useless Tree, where he’s branching out into I Ching divination – it looks as though he’s making ‘Friday I Ching blogging’ a regular thing.
At the beginning of August, he asked: Will the six party talks on North Korea succeed?
Yi says: Hexagram 22, Beauty/ Making Beautiful, changing to 37, People in the Home.
Sam read this as indicating ‘possible success’, depending on the quality of leadership in the US camp. He identified Hexagram 22 as refering to ‘a graceful diplomatic style’ – that sounds exactly right. Hexagram 22 very, very often has to do with how to present yourself or your opinion in such a way that the other person can accept it. It’s an image of courtship, and marketing, and undoubtedly of diplomacy also. (Though the thought of trying to ‘court’ anything quite as sick as North Korea is mind-boggling.)
But the most startlingly pertinent part of the reading is the moving line:
‘Beauty in a hill-top garden.
Rolls of undyed silk: small, so small.
Shame. Good fortune in the end.’
At the ‘summit’ of the hill (a low pun from Yi), one side has very little to offer in exchange for what they ask. In the original imagery, the rolls of silk would be betrothal gifts. Rutt says of this line:
‘The garden… sets the scene in a high social stratum. This poses questions about the paucity of the betrothal gifts.’
And the article Sam linked to at the Washington Post said:
‘Diplomats say the talks are deadlocked over the North’s insistence on retaining a peaceful nuclear program and the question of what it would receive in exchange for disarming.’
This was the first stumbling block, apparently: the US wanting the nuclear facilities dismantled first, North Korea wanting a promise of aid first.
Looking behind the line to its ‘inspiration’, 21 line 2, you see signs of the spirit in which both sides went into the talks. Biting into the meat of it so hard that the nose disappears: with gusto, with determination to get through, this time. (BBC reports say the length of these talks was regarded as a sign of both sides’ determination for them to succeed.) But there have to be limits to how far determination can take them, when the negotiators can only offer embarrassingly small rolls of silk.
22 moves towards 37 – ‘Diplomacy’s home making’? The objective is to use the presentation skills of 22 to create a working relationship between two nations on one small planet. Looking at hexagram 37, Sam sees the importance of authority, and emphasises Bush’s role in particular. That ties in with the fan yao of 22.5, 37 line 5, where the king approaches his family. A vision of indisputable authority: if the king is involved, all’s right with the world. But since this is just the fan yao, the position as it might appear to some, I would think it represents a US desire or imagining, rather than reality. The North Korean spokesman is quoted as saying pointedly that ‘we are not a defeated nation in war’.
Three days after Sam’s reading, the sticking point was North Koreas’ desire to retain a ‘peaceful’ nuclear capacity. The talks are in recess for three weeks, with each side hoping the other will make concessions. It’s hard to be exactly optimistic – it sounds as though this encounter might end in ‘shame’ – but Yi does say there will be good fortune in the end.
I read part of this site, and with some trepidation (since this is such a loaded subject, with sincerity on all sides and little consensus on what is truly ‘right’) I asked the I Ching the following question:
“If Aidan were granted one moment of clarity, for the purpose of commenting on his own existence, what would he say?”
(Aidan is the site owner’s profoundly disabled 12/13-year-old son.)
Answer:
Primary hexagram 36, Darkening of the Light
Changing line 5, “Darkening of the light as with Prince Chi. Perseverance furthers.”
Relating hexagram 63, After Completion
I really have no idea what to make of this. Those hexagrams – each of them – are hard for me to make sense of, even when I get them for relatively mundane questions.
Lanie,
A more perfect answer would not exist for your question. Prince Chi is known as a man who pretended to be mad in order to save his own life. He pretended to be disabled (to make the king believe that he was no threat) by behaving abnormal – yet he was not.
Aidan is not disabled, he just ‘hides his light’. What we see, what we perceive, is not the true and only Aidan. His mind is perfectly sound and clear, but it has no way to show that.
This is what he would want us to know. His outer shell may be disabled, but he himself is not. But those who need to deal with this need perseverance, because it is hard not to forget the inner truth.
Harmen.
Harmen,
Thank you so much for your response.
Your explanation of the reading makes good sense to me, which – in the context of the I Ching – is quite gratifying. A while back when I was discussing 36.5 with my word processor (which serves as my sounding board and debate partner!), the notes I made are very much like what you said, but I didn’t trust that I was ‘getting it.’
In the context of Aidan, though, I’m still struggling with this. ‘His mind is perfectly sound and clear’: okay, that’s what 36.5 is supposed to mean…the trouble is, Aidan’s disability is entirely neurological. He has what they called a ‘vanishingly rare’ combination of neurological malformations which have left him at the developmental age of an infant who can’t yet hold up his own head. He can’t see, and he must be fed through a tube. His brain fires in odd sorts of seizure patterns.
So what on earth makes it reasonable to assume that he’s ‘okay in there,’ so to speak? People who have milder forms of neurological scrambling – who can still articulate their experience – often do NOT find it ‘okay.’ They often find it chaotic and terrifying. I’m trying very hard not to make knee-jerk conclusions, but why is it not MORE reasonable to assume that he’s NOT ‘okay in there’?
One possibility, I guess, is that he doesn’t know anything else. If he actually IS experiencing what the rest of us would consider to be mental or emotional distress, he has nothing to compare it to and might therefore find it ‘okay.’
Another possibility might be that it’s not a valid comparison. His mental experience might be profoundly – and incomprehensibly – different from ours: along the lines, perhaps, of how we speculate about alien species from other galaxies or whatever. We very diligently remind ourselves that other intelligent life forms need have NOTHING WHATSOEVER in common with us.
But Aidan has a lot in common with us. He’s a biological human, who lives on the planet Earth, who needs oxygen and water and calcium and protein and vitamins just like every other human. What, then? Aidan is a biological human with some sort of extra-terrestrial intelligence module swapped in? He’s been ‘sent here’ as some sort of ‘sample’?
Isn’t that just absurd? Have I watched entirely too much Star Trek or something? Or is that what Yi is trying to tell us?!?
Lanie
P.S. I almost forgot to mention that I did one other (prior) reading about Aidan. I didn’t bother to mention it since I then came up with the other question, which I thought was better (as a question.) But for what it’s worth, here’s the first reading:
Q: What emotion(s) does Aidan most often experience?
A: Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning, unchanging.
I didn’t know what to make of that one, either, except I wondered if ’emotion’ was the appropriate word to use for what Aidan (or any infant, for that matter) experiences.
P.P.S. It might be worth mentioning how Aidan’s case is different from Terri Schiavo’s (as best as I understand it.)
Terri Schiavo had a perfectly normal brain until she was, I think, 41 or so. She then suffered catastrophic brain trauma of unknown origin which caused her cerebral cortex (the seat of higher mental functioning), to “dissolve.” I assumed they meant the cranial equivalent of necrosis. At autopsy, her brain weighed significantly less than average.
That’s not what they’re saying about Aidan. In his case, he (1) was born without the structure that connects the left and right brain hemispheres, (2) has ‘polymicrogyria,’ described as ‘an overabundance of undersize folds’ in his brain, and (3) has dysmylenation, or underdevelopment of the myelin sheaths that protect neural pathways. (DEmyelenation, the deterioration of existing myelin sheaths, is what causes ALS and so forth.)
The article this is from, eloquently written by Sam Crane (Aidan’s father), is at http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/12/06/aidan1/index.html
Also wanted to ask what you think hexagram 63, After Completion, means as the relating hexagram? I never understand that one either…..
Thanks very much 🙂
Quote: “‘His mind is perfectly sound and clear’: okay, that’s what 36.5 is supposed to mean…the trouble is, Aidan’s disability is entirely neurological.”
I think I did not use the right word when I said ‘mind’. Maybe I should have used ‘Mind’, that part of us which is not affected by physical limitations. Maybe ‘soul’ comes close to it, but I hesitate to use that word because it has too much to do with religion.
We are all limited by our physical body, some less than others, but in a way we all are. What we see with our eyes is not the whole picture, just a part of the visible spectrum. All our senses just give as a small part of our world. If we want to release our full potential we have to leave that behind. Some people are able to do that.
Neurologics is physical, but what I meant with ‘mind’ goes beyond the physical part. For instance, people who have Alzheimer or Korsakov’s Syndrome are also affected on the neurological level. But that does not change who they really are, it only changes how they are able to show themselves.
Quote: “So what on earth makes it reasonable to assume that he’s ‘okay in there,’ so to speak?”
Actually, nothing makes it reasonable, this is beyond reason, reasoning does not make it any better, and we should also never assume that he’s ‘okay in there’. But we should try to realize that mental and physical disabled people are more than their body and what they do with it.
Quote: “People who have milder forms of neurological scrambling – who can still articulate their experience – often do NOT find it ‘okay.’ They often find it chaotic and terrifying. I’m trying very hard not to make knee-jerk conclusions, but why is it not MORE reasonable to assume that he’s NOT ‘okay in there’?”
Lanie, it is never okay. The situation with Aidan is not okay, it is not how it is supposed to be. But instead of focussing on what is not right it would be better, and more gratifying, but much much harder, to focus on what has (still) not changed. The answer from the Yi gives me the impression that Aidan is able to detach himself from his body, and thereby giving himself moments of relief. That which detaches is what is still ‘okay’. And that is what matters, that is his ‘light’, which is ‘hidden’, or appears damaged through his body. It appears damaged, but it is not. Fire gets its colour from the substance it burns on, and in the same way Aidin’s light is coloured by the state of his physical body. But without that it would be a perfect light.
Quote: “I almost forgot to mention that I did one other (prior) reading about Aidan. I didn’t bother to mention it since I then came up with the other question, which I thought was better (as a question.) But for what it’s worth, here’s the first reading:
Q: What emotion(s) does Aidan most often experience?
A: Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning, unchanging.”
I think this agrees with what you said about Aidan being “at the developmental age of an infant who can’t yet hold up his own head”. Hexagram 3 is generally seen as the baby, the infant who has to learning everything. Since there is no change indicated this could mean that this is the state Aidan constantly experiences, a constant initial learning process, with the emotions that come with that.
Quote”Also wanted to ask what you think hexagram 63, After Completion, means as the relating hexagram?”
Hexagram 63 is the hexagram of the most perfection, everything is in place, nothing is ‘wrong’. In 36 the fifth line was moving, the line of the king, which could mean that despite everything Aidan is still in control. That the outcome is 63 could show that essential (litterally ‘at the essence’) there are no limitations. But in 63 the Fire inside controls the water (=emotions) outside. The pressure that gives (steam) should not be kept inside.
But Sam teaches Asian studies, and I would not be suprised if Aidan’s name is originally Chinese. ‘Ai’ 爱 can mean ‘love’, ‘dan’ 丹 could refer to ‘cinnabar’, an important compound in daoist alchemy for the quest of immortality. Ai-dan, ‘Love for the cinnabar’ – a perfect name for an immortal.
Harmen.
Wonderful interpretations, Harmen.
– exactly! Both as a description of 36.5 and in putting intelligence in its place.
My brother has Down’s Syndrome – a mental handicap, nothing like as severe as Aidan’s. But from him and people I’ve met through him, I’ve been able to learn that intelligence is no more the seat of the self than is the body. Less intelligence, less rational understanding, fewer activities within one’s scope: these things do not mean less complete or less alive.
Yi’s answers are not only beautiful and utterly to the point, they also have a very sharp edge. If Aidan is like Prince Chi, then the rest of us are like the Shang court: too drunk on our own intelligence and ‘clarity’ and ‘being OK’ to know what day of the week it is. (Let alone the inner life of a boy we’ve never met.)
Wow. You folks are great. The question Lanie posed, and the interpretation Harmen gives are marvelous. Let me just add a thought.
I have, over the years, found great solace in Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zi). He suggests that each and everything is different, unique unto itself (like the “Te” principle in Taoism), but that all of those unique things are essentially the same in the vastness of Way. Here is one of my favorite passages:
“So the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There is nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.
Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – in Tao they all move as one and the same. In difference is the whole, in the whole is the broken. Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again.”
You can see how a disabled (“broken”?) boy has just as much of a place i the world as anyone or anything else.
“Graceâ€: the question was inappropriate and the changing line means no-one is sincere about the talks. “Wind comes forth from fire:†think about it.
Everyone,
Thank you so much for helping me towards a better understanding of this profoundly difficult situation. Harmen – naturally it will take time and thought for me to completely grasp, but your interpretations, as Hilary said, are ‘wonderful’ for an I Ching beginner like myself. The word ‘soul’ is fine with me. It gets across what you’re trying to communicate. I do happen to believe in God (it’s what I was taught and I’ve had no reason to reject it in favor of anything else) but I’m not all that ‘religious’ and I have no problem with the idea of soul in a broader non-Christian context.
At the very least – not that it’s important in general, but it IS important to me – I feel some sense of…’relief’ maybe? about the internal experience of people with mental deficiencies. (And here seems to be a good moment to reflect on what Hilary pointed out: Yi’s barbed comments to the rest of us about what we term ‘deficiencies.’)
Mr. Crane: Thank you for stopping by and offering what is, obviously, the most important perspective of all. While I realistically can do nothing other than think about these issues in an impersonal way, I cannot tell you how moved I was by your account at salon.com. Personally, I find few things as valuable to learning as someone with an important story to tell and the skill to tell it well. I very much hope you aren’t offended by this ‘discussion’ of your son. If you are, in any way, you have my sincere apologies, as I’m the one who started it.
Again, thanks to all. I know I disappeared from my own discussion for a few days – bad Netiquette – the explanation, for what it’s worth, is I got caught up rather suddenly and unexpectedly in a household move which pushed almost everything else in the world off my radar.
Lanie