There are two lines in Hexagram 20 that differ by just one word:
Line 5 –
‘Seeing my own life.
The noble one is without mistake.’
Line 6 –
‘Seeing their lives.
The noble one is without mistake.’
Seeing ‘my own’ life, or seeing ‘his, her or their’ life. How to understand the difference between these two perspectives? One possibility is to look at them through the lens of different spiritual teachings.
Wilhelm says of line 5 that one should ‘examine the effects one produces.’ Take this advice a step or two further, and you have the whole idea of creating your own reality. Since the ‘law of attraction’ was popularised as The Secret, it’s not an unfamiliar concept: everything you see in your life at this moment is your own creation. You attracted it all, including other people’s behaviour.
Changing this line alone points you towards Hexagram 23, and this can certainly be ‘Seeing’s Stripping Away’. If you see your life as the real image of who you are, any better-looking self image you might have been hanging onto will be torn away. This can be very disillusioning – and it can also have 23’s effect of clearing the space for a fresh, more authentic start.
Is this an anachronistically modern, new-age-y idea? In a way, yes… but there is a Chinese parallel. Line 5 is the ruler’s place in the hexagram, and the ruler had responsibility for everything in his realm.
When there was a seven-year drought, the first Shang king, Cheng Tang, offered himself as a human sacrifice to appease heaven. He said,
“The fault is mine and mine alone. Please do not punish my subjects. If my subjects had done anything wrong that might contribute to the drought, I must be the root cause for their wrongdoings. Heaven and ghost spirits, please do not hurt my subjects because I failed to guide them properly due to my insufficient capability.”
(from Reflections on History)
So if you receive 20.5 you can see your life from the king’s perspective, and own it all as your own work. (But it’s in the nature of the Yijing, as an oracle, that there’s no ‘Law’ to say you must always see things this way…)
Then at line 6, the personal element is removed altogether. Once again, Wilhelm points the way: ‘here in the highest place, everything that is personal, related to the ego, is excluded.’ The ‘ego’ is a modern notion, of course, but the sage who retreats from the world to the highest place really isn’t.
From here, the view is towards Hexagram 8 – you’re Seeing the quest for union, the human patterns of relationship and affinity. How does the world look from up here? Eckhart Tolle describes this shift from ‘my life’ to ‘his/her/their life’ in A New Earth:
“To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions – as they happen. This is not really a “doing,” but an alert “seeing.” …When that shift happens, which is the shift from thinking to awareness, an intelligence far greater than the ego’s cleverness begins to operate in your life. Emotions and even thoughts become depersonalized through awareness. Their impersonal nature is recognized, there is no longer a self in them. They are just human emotions, human thoughts. Your entire personal history, which is ultimately no more than a story, a bundle of thoughts and emotions, becomes of secondary importance and no longer occupies the forefront of your consciousness. It no longer forms the basis for your sense of identity. You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions.”
These two lines seem natural alternatives – you can recognise your whole life as ‘your own’, or you can have no ‘self’ with which to own anything. Which is better? Yi offers no hint at all: each line is a way for the noble one to be without fault. (And maybe anyone not a noble one would be quite likely to make mistakes in trying either of these.) Unlike the first line, for instance, both are acceptable perspectives for him to adopt; both are an imaginative expansion of vision. And it would be possible, of course, to have both lines change together, and See absolutely receptively, as open as the earth.
We have to have both views – of ourselves as self-ish individuals and as also as ego-less transpersonal beings who form part of the totality. They balance each other. Sometimes we operate more from one side, sometimes more from the other.
Yes – though I don’t think of line 5 as ‘selfish’, more as ‘self-full’, if you see what I mean. It takes a lot of capacity to have both views.
Dear Hillary.
I think hex 20 is about seeing and be seen and the art of observation.
The observer observed. In line 3 a choice is met: looking from the inside out or also taking an outside perspective, do you dare to leave the ingroup en take the outgroup perspective and go beyond gossip?
Our behaviour -and speech is verbal behaviour- is a process of constant tuning, in body language, in tone, in words. It’s good to see us as a buch of primates in front of your mental eye, then you see us. But the tuning is also part in the wider ecological perspective.
Line six should be a correlate with line 3, representing the outside persective, but also realizing that everything is a process, in flux.
It is a bit as in quantumtheory: at the moment you realize an observation, you also realize that the observation came into being because you oberved, so what you observer is a mirror of yourself, you are part of the process. Then the next step is moral: when your surrounding behaves “in tune”, “healing”, your obsevation is without mistake. When things start to riot when you’re around, your surrounding appears to tune to you in the wrong way. Then you have work to do.
The question should always be, like from the zen master to his pupil who was desparately trying to analyze his visions, “but who’s the observer?”
It is not a question of with or without ego, but how you are influenced by your surroundings and how you influence your surrounding. The talk about ego is very distracting: ego should be bad, egoless is good. The question should be :what is your point of reference, how do you want to be influenced, how do you want to influence (no this is not about 31, it is about observing 31). Well, take 10 deep breaths, ask what you think is important, then see if it tunes well or gives dissonants.
Yes, yes, and yes, as all perspectives have equal value. The I Ching is indeed multidimensional and applies on all levels.
On another level…
The fifth line is us in our addressing ourselves as unique individuals. The sixth line is us as seeing ourselves from the perspective of the universal whole. Do the two images equal each other? Or do we see ourselves in a different way. Line five has an undefined quality of showing us the need to see ourself clearly and accurately, but only the highest line has the highest view.
Gene
I have an addition to make about “the observer observed”. Who’s the observer?
At the moment you start to observe yourself and start to realize that everything is a projection, you can ask who is making that observation, who is realizing that everything is projection. It is not ego, but some other force that is looking at all the hopes and fears. That can only done with compassion, without that force observations byond ego are pointless.
Yes. I wonder why it takes a noble one to get lines 5 and 6 right, and I imagine that has a lot to do with it.
I love the way Yi can give us half a dozen words and we respond with all this.
When we are observing ourselves from outside ourselves we are practicing becoming one with all. We take on the perspective of the universe and become one with it. This is, as said above, an act of compassion, both on ourselves and on all things.
Gene