Over in the quaintly-named ‘Basics’ section of GreatVessel.com, there’s an enticing article on The Voices of the Lines. [Update: now moved here.] As with most of Stephen Karcher’s ideas nowadays, I find I need to take small portions and chew them over well, not try to swallow it all at once. (When you’ve digested that article, try part II.)
So recently I’ve been savouring the taste of line 1 as “the first entrance of things into the psyche or the first stirrings of a process of manifestation” and “barely conscious”. Line 1 can be the voice of just-barely-beginning-to-sense the presence of the hexagram’s energy: a gut feeling, or an intuition, or inkling. It can also be a first (sometimes unwelcome) experience with the hexagram’s reality, registered as a kind of inner news bulletin. (‘Good morning!’ says 64.1. ‘Wet here, isn’t it?’)
For instance, the other day I received Hexagram 6, line 1 as part of a reading on how to do a better job:
‘Not a lasting place for work.
There are small words.
In the end, good fortune.’
Arguing’s basic sense that something isn’t right can be the beginning of change. Looking at this line as an inkling, I recognised it at once: the inner itch and restlessness, accompanied by a steady inner monologue of ‘small words’, that pulls me away from a task. So maybe this isn’t such a bad idea after all… maybe the ‘small words’ are a first sign of a valid, instinctive challenge, and worth listening to after all?
(The other moving line was the fifth, by the way – without that I’d be considerably more suspicious of the ‘argumentative’ impulse.)
Browsing through lines and readings, several first lines do feel like a first inner shift into their hexagram. Away from roles, out of the gate, into the crowd, as a first step into the flow of Following. ‘The pit within the chasm,’ sucking you into the dark of 29. Finding things ‘without fault’, opening out the possibilities of Release.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the first line sets the tone for the whole hexagram, or somehow predetermines the experience. It’s only the first hints of an intuition of the beginning, and there’s much more to human experience than that. The first sense of Sojourning might be one of separation and disaster – like the moment when the small child in a crowd suddenly realises she’s holding a stranger’s hand – but line 5 is still possible for the clear-sighted adult.
If I try to use this idea of ‘line voices’ as a template, ready to slap down on any hexagram at random, my results tend to seem forced. But used as a way of listening better to a specific reading, it offers new ears.
It’s a very attractive idea, and I think it’s capable of depth and utility.
That thing that he does – the characterization of the line position according to the overall meanings of the two single-line hexagrams that relate to it, is a thing that Lofting used to do ALL the time. Where does that idea come from? Have you seen it in any of the pre-Karcher/pre-Lofting lore?
Interestingly, the line description that resonated least with me was the one for line 6. Possibly one reason for this is because of the way I’ve studied line 6 in particular.
No, I haven’t seen that elsewhere – though I expect some Chinese scholar must have tried the idea at some point in the past few millennia, don’t you?