Back when Eliana and I first started juggling ideas for Opening Space for Change, of course one of the first things I did was to ask Yi for a comment on the idea. Not for the business partnership side of things, but first of all for the whole idea of using music and sound to help open the channel, create inner space for a reading, and make it easier to hear the answer.
And not only that – though I’ve just titled this entry ‘the role of music’ for the sake of a shorter link! – but the role of Eliana’s music, which has very specific, documented healing effects. I could see how any ambiently soothing music might be nice before a reading, in a general sort of way, but that’s really not the same thing.
So I asked –
“What role can Eliana’s music play for people entering into conversation with Yi?”
And Yi answered with Hexagram 8, Seeking Union, changing to Hexagram 42, Blessing or Increase.
You might remember that 42 was also the relating hexagram in my reading for the podcast about how best to open the channel. I think it’s pointing here to the same idea: the blessing of a reading, more flow, more active exchange and participation in the world, becoming more intensely alive. The feeling that the nature of things is shining out, and the world just became more colourful, or somehow grew a few extra dimensions.
8 moving to 42 – seeking union in and amongst increase; asking where I belong in the flow, how I fit in, where my place is. It’s the attitude of someone entering into a reading, I think: seeking union in the sense of seeking a personal relationship with the answer, and looking for the connections that will make it possible to start building.
The dominant imagery in all my readings about this is water. There are the floodwaters of 59, Dispersing obstacles to the flow; there’s the overflowing vessel in 42. And now hexagram 8, with trigrams showing the streams flowing over the earth, and its association with the story of Yu. This is the moment after the floods have been overcome and the rivers are flowing in their courses, and it’s safe for the people to come and build a new world on the flood-plains. And new worlds are – of course – built in the first place out of relationships. (See 8’s Image!)
(Meanwhile Eliana, quite independently, had started talking about clearing blocks to flow and accessing your deeper well – which she did literally when recording the music for the event.)
So this is where the music comes in:
‘Seeking union, good fortune.
Retracing the oracle consultation to its source: fundamental, ever-flowing constancy.
Not a mistake.
Not at rest, coming on all sides.
For the latecomer, pitfall.’
More water: the ‘ever flowing constancy’, literally like swimming with the current of a river. You go right back to the source of the reading – sometimes quite some way beyond and behind the first question that comes to mind – and you can flow from there, through from the origins into constancy. A prosaic way of putting it would be that when you know where you’re coming from, you have much greater power and momentum to follow through on the reading. (Zhen, constancy, means both the act of divining and also loyalty and persistence.)
It might be quicker and easier just to ask whatever’s convenient, whatever your mind finds acceptable. Retracing the consultation to its source calls for time and patience – but is ‘not a mistake’.
‘Not at rest, coming on all sides’ – that, for me, really evokes the moment of preparing for a reading. There are considerations and factors and demands ‘on all sides’, indeed, and they are most decidedly ‘not at rest’. Yet hesitating, holding back and being the ‘latecomer’ is a bad idea; you need to enter into the reading wholeheartedly. Seeking union, good fortune.
The two moving lines stand in contrast to one another. There is the positive role the music can play, and there’s the place where it doesn’t belong. Where it doesn’t belong is pretty clear in line 6:
‘Seeking union without a head.
Pitfall.’
This top line is the moment of emerging from Seeking Union, when you need clear resolve. You need a ‘head’, in fact – a guiding principle, personal leadership. It’s not enough just to follow your natural affinities; now you need personal vision and specific choices.
But 8.6 is connected with hexagram 20, Seeing: the moment when your hands are washed of everyday concerns but you have yet to make the offering. That is, it’s a moment between moments, very still and full of attention, not ‘doing’ anything, set apart – exactly that moment Eliana’s singing to, when she creates ‘opening music’.
This is a very beautiful moment, but it’s the opening of a reading – not its direction. There comes a point when you need to make it personal, and specific, and the very opposite of ‘set apart’ from the everyday.
But back at line 1, at the roots of the reading, is the perfect image of the role Eliana’s music can play:
‘With truth and confidence, seeking union with it.
No mistake.
With truth and confidence to overflow the vessel
The coming completion brings more good fortune.’
This is how you begin to seek union: with truth and confidence, fu. It’s the same word as in the name of Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, and it means sincerity, confidence (not least in your self), and complete presence.
You need fu, entering into a reading, looking to create a real conversation with an oracle. That is, you need to be fully present with your whole self in your reading. This is not easy. Stress, anxieties, all the stuff that’s ‘not at rest, coming on all sides,’ can get in the way.
And then there is the anxiety about what the answer might be, which can lead people to ask more superficial questions simply because they don’t feel ready for the bigger answers. We’re ‘in two minds’ – or half-a-dozen of them – about asking. It happens to all of us.
Fu is about being unmistakeably in one mind, soul and heart; the role of the music is to have fu that ‘overflows the vessel’ and lays foundations – flowing, liquid foundations, like the temples of Hexagram 59 – for ‘coming completion’.
Opening Space for Change starts 1st February, and there’s an ‘early bird’ discount on tickets until January 25th.
What you say about stress and life generally getting in the way is so true. Keeping a rein on our conscious thoughts is hard enough in these difficult times, so touching our “inner self” is even harder.
R
Rosie Casson’s last blog post..Other interesting slides and clips
I’m convinced that 8 is a key number for the winds and for music in ancient Chinese thinking.
There are many points I want to make on this topic, but it is not plausible that I would write them all or that anyone would read them. So, here are some outline ideas to show what I have in mind:
1. Some people to read on this topic–
Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural analysis of myth, with the idea that musical organization and myth organization are the same (especially see the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked). Levi-Strauss’s work is ideal for understanding archaic China, and the Zhou Yi is ideal for furthering L-S’s ideas.
Viktor Zuckerkandl’s Music and the External World and Man the Musician. This way of thinking is very close to the Eranos circle and Wilhelm. Zuckerkandl argues both against a physicalist AND against a psychologizing interpretation of music, preferring the view that what we hear in music is the intentions of the sounds themselves to return to tonic etc. There are many parallels with Levi-Strauss’s thesis, and more recent cognitive treatments of musical chunking etc. bear out the views Zuckerkandl expresses in a quainter but very clear philosophical style.
2. From this, there are issues of tensions and resolutions in music, and rhythms and structures, that parallel the ways hexagrams show change. Also, Levi-Strauss’s use of terms such as “diatonic” and “chromatic” as, for the Zhou Yi, clear separation of sky and earth (at opening) versus maximally close mixing of yin and yang in the burning water terminus. This is something like tonic, dominant and half-step from tonic at the seventh, isn’t it?
3. The questions of meaning and music. Does meaning have less, or more, meaning, for not using propositional sentences? Is the best understanding of the Zhou Yi dependent on getting an exact translation of each one of the individual words in the text, or is there a more suitable way of understanding the text? Remember the famous passage in the Da Zhuan where Confucius says that the images of the gua allow one to communicate beyond language, what words cannot communicate.
4. Musical meaning and synchronicity. Isn’t music a good model of how we want society to work? There are many indications in early Chinese thought that musical participation is the paradigm for life in society, along the lines of the previous response. Doesn’t music play through us and don’t we anticipate the contributions of others in a musical performance because we follow the intentions of the tones rather than of the people? Doesn’t culture create coincidence?
5. Music and shamanism. The earliest specialization. Musical consciousness. Writing and divination (certainly Chinese writing is essentially linked to the project of divination) Etc.
Well, there must be more, but the comment is plenty long enough already, isn’t it?
Have you written any more on this elsewhere, Scott? My most significant musical experiences were learning the interleaved responsiveness of group improvisation, so your points certainly “strike a chord” . The “tensions and resolutions in music, and rhythms and structures, that parallel the ways hexagrams show change” is so obvious, yet I’d never noticed. Food for thought indeed.
Yes, improvisation has to be synchronistic, and that’s what I’m trying to express. When music is played, at some point it plays thru the musician(s) w/out their controlling it, right? Where does it come from?
Correction: #3 above, I meant to write–“Does music have less, or more, meaning, for not using propositional sentence form?”–sorry to be so careless.
Shamanism, the earliest specialization, is musical mostly due to the connection to the drum. The shaman in Taiwan I did fieldwork with broke/enhanced language by going from chatting to spontaneous poetry to song to speaking in several different glossolalia registers to dance and falling off tables in trance etc.–there was no question you were in a different kind of space, a different world, when you entered her shrine. She was very talented.
Zuckerkandl’s point is that the tones are dynamic–want to go back to tonic, want to chunk and expand into larger phrases–and we experience the forces playing inside this system once we select a scale to make discrete tones (this is exactly Levi-Strauss’s thesis). We hear tones as forces, intentional forces, so they are something like virtual (simulacra of) intentionality. This is very similar to the idea that the gua are “shen” (“spiritual”) because they want to move–they have deep and unpredictable connectivity. The Zhou Yi is a masterpiece because it manages to be both thoroughly graphic (structural) AND dynamic (the elements are much closer to links online than to dead textual marks–they are ACTANTS). Therefore, the idea that a particular hexagram has some particular “meaning” is difficult to maintain, because the whole point of the holographic organization is that the text changes to some other meaning constantly (the question is less ‘what does it mean?’ and more ‘how do we work this?’)–which is due to the role of the text and of writing as a means of divination. China’s cultural heritage grew out of the long conversation its first kings held with their ancestors, with the purpose of divination, through writing on bones and shells; the implications of this fact for our understanding of textuality and literature are presently not well thought through. But these things are coming together, you see, as you work and play with them!
I really appreciate the way you put these things together.
This reminds me of the music teacher who taught her class the meaning of ‘leading note’ by repeatedly playing vigorous and enthusiastic scales and stopping on the leading note – leaving her class squirming in frustration.
And of the problems I have with anyone trying to pin down what role a primary or relating hexagram plays, because so much depends on the nature of the individual hexagrams and their ways of relating.
So now you have me thinking of moving lines as leading notes, or hexagram changes as cadences, and wondering why on earth I never thought about it this way before.
By the way… hexagrams do seem to me to be rhythmic, and I can’t think of a reason not to read them as simple rhythmic notation. I introduced Eliana to this idea and a chart of hexagrams, and she took her drum down a well and made music inspired by Hexagram 48.
The intriguing thing was that as she made music, down by the underground stream in this confined space, the rhythm somehow evolved into hexagram 47. She doesn’t know the Yi at all, but she does know how to let music sing itself through her.
These observations are precisely what I’m suggesting too. The sense of walking or stepping in the notion of “cadence” is important, so the one-legged man, say in #10 where the human position is “split” when the hexagram pairs rotate (or the highly eccentric rotation at #43/44 which is also like limping), is a kind of cadence like that. So that the burning water at the end is a point of maximal tension; kind of like how a cadence works with the dominant, and how in a I-IV-V blues progression the major element of the V chord is half a step away from the tonic and makes a dissonance with it at the end of a sequence. I wish I knew more about music theory to understand how the dissonances are built into scales, but fire and water make structures in myth like this too. It seems Levi-Strauss wanted to analyze myth transformations because they were like “slowed-down music” so that we could take our time in tracing them. The Zhou Yi presents an archaic model of how mythical, musical or other symbolic experience is organized.
I think I speak for everyone reading this when I ask,
When are you bringing out a book on all this?
You’re looking at many things I’ve been looking at for years, and seeing things I’ve never seen.
Scott Davis, what a refreshing note you are, thank you.