 Clarity's I Ching Newsletter: Issue 66 "Retrace your path, return to the source, re-establish what is important, restore the Way" Stephen Karcher's Total I Ching on Hexagram 24 |
™Letter from the Editor— Please turn up your speakers and click the 'play' button to listen:
or click here to use your usual media player. "Dear Hilary,
Thanks for your letter and newsletter... I found the answer to Archana's question helpful in my own interpretation of the moment, different situation. I too take the "what would happen if" or "how would it be if they or I", approach. The truth often stays veiled but the oracle is an honest friend and will point the way and let you work it out for yourself.
Regards,
Margaret"
™DIY Corner: Good and bad fortune?— "Hi Hilary,
My background was first astrology, and then I learned the I Ching. It gives me a slightly different perspective because, in astrology, any aspect can be looked at as good or bad depending. For example, in a horoscope chart you can have trine aspects (flowing, positive) or square aspects (challenging, agitating). But if your chart is all trines and no squares, you become lazy and rarely actualize your potential.
When I ask the I Ching oracle a question and get an answer like Hexagram 12, I can interpret this as telling me, "stand still even if it feels like stagnation" and this is something different than hexagram 52; keeping still, transcending the need for horizontal development in favor of vertical development.
Or with hexagram 23, instead of interpeting that answer as "deterioration", I can see instances where separation is neccesary or inevitable, and doesn't neccessarily have to be a bad thing, like a snake shedding its skin--transformation and change.
I feel oppressed by the judgement that the I Ching hexagrams always give; "good fortune/bad fortune" or "some remorse" or "guilt vanishes". I can see how, despite the traditional value assignment given, every step of one's life is a development that is ony going to be temporarily positive or negative. Clinging to the middle way will create the least amount of energy lost needlessly, and will always yield the best material world results over the long haul.
I like how I Ching author, Carol Anthony, discusses how fate works as a mathematical certainty. What the I Ching teaches us is the laws of fate, to the extent that we can comprehend them. But I feel a deep need to see an I Ching book written with all of the judgment left out, so that each hexagram can be treated as a scientific principle of natural law, without regards to good/bad or right/wrong issues.
Susan"
Hi Susan,
My own use of the I Ching is not so very different from yours, I think. I know Hexagram 23 as a necessary part of life, a process with positive potential. I also know how excruciatingly painful it can be, especially when someone is passionately attached to whatever 'dead skin' needs to be cut away. And also how very raw and exposed people can feel when being 'stripped' in this way. (A better hexagram to express a decisive personal choice to 'change skins' and bring about transformation would be hexagram 49.) The I Ching contains the constructive, creative uses of painful experiences deep within its text and structure, but also represents pain, or dead ends, or futility, with vivid honesty. So you might choose to go through a hexagram 23 experience, or to avoid it, or if (as more often happens) you find yourself in the midst of one you can at least learn from the I Ching how to move with it and support its 'space clearing' process. By the way, the Judgement of Hexagram 23 doesn't say that stripping away is a bad thing. It says there is nothing to be gained by having a 'direction to go' - which is very different.
I can see why you would react against such blunt statements as 'good fortune', 'pitfall' (aka 'misfortune'), 'shame', etc. But I think perhaps you may be neglecting an important difference between a negative auspice in an I Ching reading and one in an astrological chart. The misfortune in the I Ching reading will, more often than not, be something you can avoid altogether by a change of course. It's hard to deny that some actions in life are a better idea than others. Enthusiastically plunging all one's money into some dubious 'business opportunity' would undoubtedly be a learning experience of the first order - ultimately a good swift kick back towards that 'middle way'. Someone who asked the I Ching about this project in advance might get an answer that 'setting out brings a pitfall' - perhaps with added comments about charging headfirst into strong hedges and getting horribly stuck. Then they would have the choice of learning from their reading, or learning from experience.
So I think an I Ching with the original, simple messages of good or bad fortune expunged would be an I Ching with its teeth and claws pulled. Is it judgemental to make it clear when someone is about to lose all their money? Or sabotage a precious relationship? Or on the other hand, to give warm encouragement to someone who is afraid to risk making a change for the better? One of the principles of natural law, at least as embodied in the I Ching, is that if I do something half-baked, I'll end up in a mess. I appreciate very much having an oracle that tells me what I'm walking into, without beating euphemistically about the bush.
You'll notice that this is not primarily about right and wrong; I don't actually think that moral judgement enters into the I Ching text nearly as much as some commentaries would suggest. It has a lot more to do with practical results and human experience: what works and what doesn't. Ideas of right and wrong emerge from the interaction of our own inner compass with the pictures the I Ching creates.
One other thought: there is a lot more to the auspices in the I Ching than initially meets the eye. Often there is no auspice, just a haiku-like image, though commentators have an unfortunate tendency to rush in and categorise the line as 'good' or 'bad' as if the absence of an auspice were just an oversight. But when the auspices are used, it is with great precision and subtlety. It's all too easy, because the same words appear again and again, to give them formulaic meanings, and/or fail to take in their import at all. Or to rank them in a hierarchy of auspiciousness from 'nothing that does not bring harvest' down to 'calamity and blunder', as if each reading could be translated into a mark out of ten. In fact 'danger' can be something to avoid, or something to go into with your eyes open; 'without fault' or 'no mistake' has meanings ranging from 'stop worrying that there is something wrong with this' through to something suspiciously like damning with faint praise. And these nuances are to be found through a combination of text, context and interpretation. (Bradford Hatcher is particularly good at bringing out these subtle distinctions - see his work at http://www.hermetica.info .)
So in de-clawing the oracle you would also be losing more of the message than you perhaps realise. Look at 28,6, for instance, which describes getting out of one's depth and drowning:
'Too far, wading. Submerging the head.
Pitfall.
No mistake.'
No mistake??? The interpreters come out with versions ranging from 'do not make this mistake' through to depicting this as self-sacrifice: ultimate misfortune for the one who drowns, but not wrong. Eliminating the auspices here would eliminate most of the complexity and a lot of the message. This is the kind of line that helps to convince me that the original authors of the oracle knew what they were at.
very best wishes,
Hilary
(And I can't resist adding Susan's reply!
 :"Hi Hilary,
Wow, what a brilliant reply. A million thanks. I have to admit, your analogy of taking the judgment good fortune/bad fortune out of the hexagrams would be like declawing and defanging the 'animal' is really exceptionally good insight. I guess I was in a rut of not liking what the I Ching was pointing to me to see
Susan"
Susan, you're not the only one to pass through that particular rut! I could sell deckchairs down here...)
™Hexagram of the Month: 24, Returning ˜ ‘Things cannot be altogether exhausted.
On the outside, stripping away brings things to an end;
On the inside comes turnaround,
And so Return follows.’
Hexagram 23. Stripping Away, eliminated everything that was not alive and growing. It tore away the old images, ideas, purposes, attachments... whatever was draining and wasting vital energies. And given the nature of human attachment, this probably hurt. But it also cleared the ground for new growth, leaving nothing in its way; Return is the time for coming back to life.
The nuclear hexagram of both Stripping Away and Return is Hexagram 2, Earth, the Receptive. So both hexagrams are part of the work of making things possible: clearing and renewing the space that sustains limitless growth. In Hexagram 24, a single yang line is welcomed by five open yin lines above it.
‘Returning, creating success.
Going out, coming in, without haste.
A partner comes, not a mistake.
Turning around and returning on your path.
The seventh day comes, you return.
Harvest in having a direction to go.’
Return, in the old Chinese character, shows a foot going out from a town, and a road to walk on. (Thanks as always to LiSe for this!) So the first movement of 'returning' seems to be to go away from the crowd, and getting 'back on track'. This is not so much about a return to any particular place, as a return to your own path. It means getting back to fundamentals, to what you know to be right.
In readings, Return can be a reminder to simplify the question and touch base. It comes up very often in relationship questions, and frequently it's tempting to interpret it as meaning that the other person will return. In my experience, this isn't usually what it's about. The first step in 'returning' goes away from other people, back to your own path.
On a larger scale, this is about the whole cycle of 'going out and coming in': in human relationships, out of the group and back into it. Returning means having the space to change direction and orientate yourself 'without haste' or anxiety. The nuclear hexagram, Earth, speaks of finding partners in the southwest, losing them in the northeast - a balance between integration and individuation. With Return, this becomes a cycle. There is 'the root of de (of personal power and character), small and also distinct among things' (from the Dazhuan) - and then this new spark of self is ready for involvement, and 'partners come'. You meet this partner, or partners, because you're on the same road: in practice, this can be the forging of new connections or the renewal of old ones. (But it definitely does not encourage making a diversion to run after anyone!)
Returning when the seventh day comes means starting again at the end of a cycle. Whether or not this was the original intention, it does correlate with the movement of yang energy through a hexagram, as Balkin describes it: 'If one begins with Qian (pure yang) and, starting from bottom to top, replaces each line with its opposite, in six transformations the yin lines will have fully displaced the yang lines, and Qian (pure yang) will become Kun (pure yin). The seventh transformation then begins a new sequence, with a yang line moving up from the bottom.' This is a reminder that there is a natural cadence to events, a time for each stage, and the return is not to be hurried - the same message as in the Daxiang (the Image).
But it is still purposeful: allying that nascent spark of energy with a 'direction to go' brings harvest. This is the integration and involvement part of the cycle. First came relaxation and release from guilt or compulusion ('without haste... not a mistake'); then comes re-engagement with purpose. The moving lines seem to tell a similar story of 'going out and coming in'.
The Daxiang emphasises that all this happens in its own time:
‘Thunder dwelling in the centre of the earth. Returning.
The ancient kings closed the borders at winter solstice.
Itinerant merchants did not travel,
The prince did not tour the regions.’
Of the twelve hexagrams that traditionally marked the months of the year, Hexagram 24 is the darkest. The moment of the year when light begins its Return is also the moment when the days are shortest and the light most remote. The trigrams represent this as thunder in the centre of the earth: in Spring, it will come roaring to the surface, awakening everything to vigorous growth. But for now, the fields and the borders are closed; it is time for introspection, not for business as usual. This hexagram doesn't herald a triumphal return, but a gradual recuperation and recharging. The spark of life needs nurturing in stillness.
At the I Ching Community:
Off-site:
Hello, and welcome to the - um - early October newsletter ? I don't have any website news as such, though there will be a hexagram index for you at the I Ching Community before too long. Ewald, of eclecticenergies.com, is programming it for us. This will mean you can get instant access to a whole range of experiences and interpretations of the hexagram you're interested in, or even the specific moving line. The forum does have its own search engine already, but it's not particularly good at bringing up results by hexagram. This index is going to work a lot better, and be a whole lot more helpful. I'll let you know as soon as that's ready. Away from the Yijing for a moment - I've been reading 'The Forest of Souls' by Rachel Pollack, who's a wonderful tarot diviner and writer. The book is full of these incredibly imaginative, far-reaching readings, from questions I might perhaps have thought of, like 'how does Tarot work?' - through to ones I never would, like 'What is the experience of resurrection?' or even 'How did God use tarot to create the world?' The whole book is freeing, playful and fearless - and it made me wonder, where is the Yijing book to match this? And I don't think there is one. We spend our time in serious discussions about the right way to interpret the second hexagram, or the right translation of some extra-obscure piece of text - while the tarotists spend theirs creating a new spread, or a whole new deck. I know, a lot of this difference is because the two oracles are different: tarot doesn't have an original text, or thousands of years of continuous tradition. But all the same - I wonder whether we couldn't find ways to open out the way we talk with Yi. If you have any ideas about this, please do share them! I provide personal I Ching readings from £25.
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