Wilhelm translates Tong Ren as Fellowship with Men, and Blofeld translates it as Lovers, Beloved, Friends, Like-Minded Persons, Universal Brotherhood. In Chinese, tong means similar, alike, the same. Ren means person or people. When the two characters are put together as a unit, it means to treat people alike. In ancient China, tong ren also meant people with the same interests. Herein, Tong Ren is translated as Seeking Harmony. It has the connotation of forming alliances. To break through a tough situation, people need to work together in harmony, as in an alliance.
The ideograph of the first character, tong, consists of three parts. The first part looks like an upright rectangle without the bottom line, symbolizing a door frame or a house. Within the house, there is a single horizontal stroke representing the number one. Underneath this is a little square symbolizing a mouth. In ancient China, people were counted by mouths. For instance, if someone wanted to know how many people there were in your family, they would ask “How many mouths are there in your family?” The three parts of the ideograph come together to depict a group of people gathered together as a single unit. Here, the mouth indicates that they are thinking or speaking as one. The Chinese can feel the harmony in the group. The ideograph of the second character, ren, suggests a person standing.
The image of this gua is Heaven above, Fire below. Heaven suggests ascension. The flame of fire moves upward. Fire approaching Heaven gives an image of people with the same interests working together in harmony. There is only one yielding line, at the second place.The ancient sage saw this as a picture of harmony; the one at the second place treated the other five elements at different places equally, with the same attitude. An ancient Chinese maxim says, “People in the same boat help each other, sharing weal and woe.”According to the I Ching, however, there is no absolute sameness. The ancient sages passed on the secret of obtaining harmony, that is, seeking common ground on major issues while reserving differences on minor ones. Tong Ren teaches that the wise classify people according to their natures, not for the purpose of treating them differently, but to seek common ground. If there is common ground, each one is able to act in harmony with the others. The ancient Chinese dreamed day and night that the world would belong to the majority and the government would serve the common interest of its countrymen. This is Seeking Harmony.
Articles about this have been popping up with increasing frequency of late, so I decided to see what the Yi has to say about it. The Notes section of the Reading highlight quite a few unusual particulars about how closely all the hexagrams are to each other both visually and in terms of the binary values. Given how tightly linked they all are, I take that as a sign that, yes indeed, we will soon be in a Brave New (metamorphized #49) World. The Nuclear #44 sounds a cautionary note at the heart of the entire dynamic. It denotes leadership from below because the only yin line is the ruler of the Hexagram and because it is at the bottom. Rulership is better at the ideal #5 level.
In traditional societies, merchants and technicians didn’t rule society although they might enjoy great prestige and wealth. Values are more important than profits or material accomplishment. But we do not live in such times. In any case, my takeaway from the Reading is that a one-digital-world dynamic is basically a done deal.
Not in the Reading but an afterthought: based on the movement of the single yin line in Primary’s #13 to Future Influence’s #43, namely from Line 2 to line 6, possibly it will take place in about four years, possibly shortly after New Year’s since #43 represents the second month of the New Year. So perhaps February 2027. If this blog is still around then, we shall review this Reading then!
The ideograph of Yi is simple and clear. The lower part is the image of a household container. Above the container is an ancient ideograph for water, shui. It looks exactly like the symbol of the original gua Kan, Water ☵. Water above a container symbolizes that water is pouring into the container, an act of increasing. The structure of the gua is Wind ☴ above, Thunder ☳ below. When Wind and Thunder support each other, their energy is doubled. It is also an image of increase. The inner gua, Thunder, indicates that there is firm resolution within. The outer gua, Wind, indicates that there is penetrating outward action. Confucius’s Commentary on the Symbol says, “The superior person follows the good when he sees it, and corrects his fault when he finds it.” This tells us that a superior person follows the good as quickly as the wind and corrects his faults as firmly as thunder.
The theme of the previous gua is to decrease what is lower in order to increase what is higher. This gua discusses how to decrease what is above in order to increase what is below.
When Heaven ☰ loses a yang element, it becomes Wind. And when earth ☷ gains a yang element, it becomes Thunder. This is precisely an image of diminishing the lower to increase the upper. Increasing comes from Pi, Hindrance (12) ䷋. In Hindrance, there are three solid lines in the upper gua and three yielding lines in the lower gua. When the topmost solid line of Hindrance moves to the bottom, Hindrance alternates to Increasing. The Commentary on the Decision says, “To decrease what is above is to increase what is lower.” The upper gua is Wood as well as Wind. Here it symbolizes that a wooden boat is moving forward, driven by the wind. The lower gua is Thunder, symbolizing action. Thus King Wen’s Decision says, “Favorable to have somewhere to go. Favorable to cross great rivers.” [Huang Complete I Ching]
Continuing our geopolitical Yi series, as some are discussing what happens next given the much ballyhoo’d but almost immediately stalled spring-summer Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’ and President Vladimir openly taunting NATO a few days ago to ‘by all means send in more weapons for us to blow up,’ I thought to Query the Yi about Russian-Ukrainian relations once the military kinetics are over.
To me a Cast without changing lines indicate a fairly straightforward situation and the Reading above reflects that. As always, time will tell….
Thanks for your interest. I direct you to this review of the book I’m currently studying, “Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi”. It’s a very complex higher graduate level discussion requiring close reading, which makes it difficult to cite. I found a softcover of the book for under $30, so don’t be shocked by the sticker price for the hard back cited at the top of the review.
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Good catch! I tend to delve into the old esoteric underpinnings. For example, one of the ‘hot button topics’ in the book involves the notion of li-ritual. As in Part One Ch II as a lead-in where we can read:
Their common argument is that Confucian rituals or li,
commonly understood as a docility enhancing social mechanism, in effect exercised a critical “constitutional” function by constraining the arbitrary use of power by the ruler. [my emphasis] According to this new interpretation, the Confucian ruler is not above the li. On the contrary, the ruler is systematically controlled by the li … that confers moral and political authority on him and simultaneously enables him to exercise political power legitimately and with sufficient popular support.
This is all fine, but the wordy abstractions in the emboldened part reveal a major problem we have nowadays in assessing systems and thinking from days of yore. Essentially what is going on – to exaggerate and over-simplify – is akin to studying Roman Catholicism without ever experiencing a Sacred Mass, something whose experiential imprint effects every aspect of the tradition both in societal and doctrinal manifestation. Put another way: the tradition cannot truly be understood without experiencing the sacred perception engendered in (a well conducted) Mass.
The roots of the daoist tradition out of which flowered Confucius’s desire to fashion sane societies are esoteric and involve the experience of sacred perception, the origin of which was hinted at in my earlier snippet and is encapsulated by approachable notions of ‘The One and The Many.’ The relative world of form (The Many) – limitless, ever-changing, ever-creating, ever-dying – arises from out of the womb of the unchanging, the never born, never dying, always present, always formless One. When we experience the realm of form with a sense of the timeless present, sometimes called ‘ever-present awareness’ this experience, almost by definition, involves sacred perception. The timeless now is where the One and Many copulate in individual or group consciousness and it is engendering this perception, or state, which is the purpose of all profound ritual in traditional societies.
Unfortunately this sort of experiential aspect is often missed in such discussions and because it is missed the tendency is to ‘descend’ into relative discourse and policy development. Basically: how to handle deviations from the good, what to do with criminals, tyrants, foreign belligerents and so forth, all of course must be dealt with, but the role of uplifting ritual, or li, is often discounted as no longer relevant in that context, as being too airy-fairy, insipidly spiritual.
The fact is, that if/when a society has the ability to engender sacred perception, many ills automatically self-correct as most members aspire to virtuous learning, living, teaching and expression. And a monarch principle is necessary to bring that about in group ritual contexts, be it a local medicine man in a jungle tribe or an Emperor on the Imperial Chinese throne. One principle that probably won’t be discussed in the book – though hope am wrong – is the Court Principle. Forget about European examples, rather consider it as similar to a Church in which a Mass is performed. Yes, it can be done in an open field, beautifully so, but for magnetizing societal wisdom and power, institutional rituals, including architecture, tend to feature prominently.
For a King or Queen to hold the seat of Power in a way that engenders sacred perception, which is always fundamentally kind and virtuous, they need a Court for the benefit of those encountering such Sacred Presence, something into which first they prepare to enter, then they enter, then they experience the sacred majesty, then they absorb whatever message or transmission, then they leave and hopefully bring some of that experience back into their own lives and family. And of course apart from the Highest (Royal) Court in the land are many lesser ones, those of local authorities, feudal or otherwise, including churches, law courts and even, some might argue, sports arenas. But in a society in which all are interconnected – which we know now scientifically to be true – the highest court is where society taps into the profound, brilliant, just, powerful, all-victorious goodness that radiates forever from the Heaven principle out of which all are born and to which all return after the form manifestation ceases – which it always does.
Part of our problem today is that, having split Church and State (for both good and bad reasons) we lack a monarch or Court principle in which to engender shared perceptions of fundamental, bedrock goodness. Without that, it is impossible to create a sane, good, stable society. If studying Confucius will bring this more to the fore in our troubled modern world, so much the better. But again, without some sort of method of engendering sacred perception, much of it will remain rather hard to put into actual practice.
Anyway, that looks like an excellent book. Thank you for pointing it out. I hope to spend much more time with it at some point, though am way behind on my reading lists these days and the hottest heat wave since the 60’s in Central Mexico right now has made it impossible to read heavy matters; the words just shimmer off the page like desert mirages…
48 The Well > 62 Staying Low > 14 Great Possession > 31 Influence < 28 Excess
Gua Hexagram 62
In King Wen’s Decision, Xiao Guo denotes Little Exceeding. When one takes action it is difficult to avoid overdoing it. In the Duke of Z Yao Text, it denotes passing by. The first ideograph of this gua, xiao, symbolizes little. There are three strokes: one curved to the left, one curved to the right, and one vertically positioned between the other two. It symbolizes an act of dividing. To the ancients, after things are divided, they become little. The second ideograph, guo, consists of two parts. Three curved strokes at the top left represent three footprints going forward. Underneath is the ideograph zhi, which means stop. On the right is the ideograph for guo; its function is to provide the sound of the character. It resembles the side view of a cross-section of a house. Two pillars stand on each side and a beam sits on the pillars. Underneath the beam is a tiny square representing a mouth, symbolizing a person. A person pictured underneath the beam and between the pillars shows that the structure is a house. Above the beam is an extra structure that gives the beam an extra load, symbolizing exceeding.
Continuing our geopolitical Yi series, and following recent remarks made by various source in the media including senior officials and leaders, many are saying that the situation in Ukraine is clearly so dire that only escalation by the West can assure victory. A recent post in Moon of Alabama highlighted clear information warfare tactics on Twitter posting the same message ostensibly by different users in different countries. Here are the first two examples from that post:
As a British citizen I want to say that arming Ukraine is the single best use of tax payer money for decades. My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters. Do more now.
As a German citizen I want to say that arming #Ukraine is the single best use of tax payer money for decades. My only criticism is that the west aren’t sending enough, fast enough. Ukraine is paying for political posturing with the lives of their sons and daughters. Do more now!
Obviously, we don’t know who is coordinating this, but it seems reasonable to conclude that someone wants the ‘Do More Now!’ message to get out there to the masses. And some are wondering if ‘more now’ means NATO troop participation which might possibly lead to outright war which might possibly lead to the use of nuclear weapons. So I cast the Yi to see if we can read the tea leaves on that latter concern. As with all such Casts, I am not presenting myself as a great Expert of the Yi, but clearly am enjoying the juxtaposition of the world’s oldest organized Oracle and philosophical text with current events. Plus we will see later on how accurate or not such Readings are.
The result of this Reading is that perhaps tactical nukes may be used (Changing Line #5) to destroy things hidden in bunkers, like command and control complexes or weapons arsenals, and that such use might actually help bring about a satisfactory end (31).
But there are cautionary elements in the mix:
#28 indicates a situation where things have got to a breaking point or could get out of control with the four concentrated yang lines in the middle able to burst their relatively weaker container of one yin line above and below. It could also indicate a situation like a bomb: concentrated power within breaking out of its container in an explosive fashion. But if #28 is the Nuclear, i.e. inner dynamic, #62 shows a progression in that the outer two yang lines of #28 have morphed into yin lines, making the situation far less explosive. Moreover the changing line #5 results in Hexagram #31 which denotes stillness within and joy, with pleasurable communications, without. What about the Past Influence? That is #48 The Well which denotes bringing water up from below to benefit, even instigate, a community or settlement. But it also might mean there is a situation with danger below that has to be brought up to the surface or which threatens to harm those on the surface. In which context, #62 is recommending de-escalation, lowering rather than raising tensions. That said, the Changing Line involves hitting a target but one hidden within a cave. #14 could depict an explosion from within visible without (Fire the trigram of brilliance and protective armor above Heaven, the trigram of war). And finally: #62 is the last Hexagram before the final 63-64 pair which wrap up the entire 64 hexagram sequence. Maybe it’s end times??!! (I don’t think so, but…)
So my takeaway for this Reading is that there may very well be nuclear weapons used but only tactical ones in very contained situations, not inter-continental ballistic missiles taking out foreign capitals.
Generally, the Russian approach has been low-key and methodical though rising to a considerable challenge to confront NATO’s largest military force (though not technically within NATO nevertheless largely funded and trained by them) with minimal loss of Russian lives and disruption to their domestic economy and well being. Reports from within Russia are that things are pretty normal, the war is not discussed with high anxiety – though of course there are opinions galore – and their economy if anything is looking up as they change trade relations with the West, manufacture more things themselves or trade more for goods from the East. No worries, in other words. Meanwhile they have a big thorny issue to deal with on their Western border but they are handling it well. Ukraine’s counter-offensive thus far has yielded no obvious gains but they are paying a high price in men and equipment. Which is why the cry for ‘Do More Now!’ is being raised in the manipulated Western information-war space.
That latter dynamic is also hinted at by the Yi in the form of Hexagram #31 which is sometimes translated as ‘telepathy’ or I have used ‘meeting of minds.’ On the ground there is physical conflict, reportedly, but there is also a world-wide perceptual space in play and quite possibly the use of tactical nukes will wake people up to envisaging a new chapter in the whole thing, one in which it is time to take Russian concerns more seriously, end the conflict which is wasting Ukrainian lives, and stop listening to the endless propagandizing in the conceptual chatter realm where most people tend to project that our overall reality dwells.
It doesn’t. It’s just chatter. A couple of well-placed tactical nukes might be just what the doctor ordered to shut all that chatter up!
48 Community Well > 24 Turning Back > 17 Following > 26 Merit < 2 Interdependent Society
Gua Hexagram 24
Fu Turning Back
Responding represents the tenth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. During this period of time, the yang element seems to disappear. Actually it is brewing quietly beneath the surface. At the winter solstice, the twenty-second day of the eleventh month, the yang energy emerges. In northern China, people can actually feel the yang energy begin to surface at the turning point of that specific day. There is an ancient saying handed down over thousands of years: “At winter solstice, yang begins to surge.” This idea is vividly expressed in the structure of this gua. For this reason, during the Zhou dynasty the Chinese New Year began with the winter solstice. The yang energy starts a new cycle.
This gua is the inverse of the preceding gua, Bo (Falling Away). Falling Away and Turning Back complement each other, reflecting the idea of going around and beginning again.
Wilhelm translates Bo as Splitting Apart and Fu as Return (the Turning Point). John Blofeld translates Bo as Peeling off and Fu as Return.
The ideograph of Fu is formed of two parts. On the left side are three strokes representing three footprints going away. On the right side is the ideograph fu, which provides the sound as well as the significance of the character. At the lower right, three strokes represent three footprints returning. It was an ideograph of the remote past. At the upper right, there are two oval circles standing for two suns. In fact, the ancients employed the image of two suns to represent two yang elements. The upper sun shows that the yang is falling away, as it is at the top of Bo. The lower sun signifies that the yang is returning, as it is at the bottom of Fu. The horizontal stroke on the very top represents the number one. The whole picture of the upper right side of the ideograph explains that one yang is falling away and the other yang is turning back, going around and beginning again, in endless cyclic motion. This is the way of the Book of Changes.
Another political Yi Reading. Hexagrams #24 and #26 are generally positive, with #17, according to Taoist Master Alfred Huang, one of the most positive in the entire canon. So perhaps the answer is that, yes, Biden will remain in the saddle until 2029 as per the Query, being re-elected anew (#24) around January 2025 (in accordance with the election cycle) having attracted a great Following (#17) and resulting in ‘Heaven within the Mountain’ of #26 which indicates the storing up of great merit consisting of ancestral wisdom. Mountain denotes dignity, calm, finality, wisdom, meditation. Heaven denotes powerful leadership, connection with the creative forces, what is right and profound. So #26 is a very strong hexagram suggesting the tranquil containment of great power and wisdom.
So that is one possible interpretation of this Cast, albeit we might have to struggle with the sixth changing line. The first two seem fine:
1 Quiet Return, good fortune might mean an easy, no fuss re-election
2 Repeated return. Danger. No blame. (If one is involved with the Return dynamic again and again it is fine – this could refer to the re-election process.)
6 Wilhelm: Missing the return. Misfortune. Misfortune from within and without. If armies are set marching in this way, one will in the end suffer a great defeat, disastrous for the ruler of the country. For ten years it will not be possible to attack again.
Now many people ignore this many changing lines and will pick the middle one. In which case, Biden, seemingly, after running again, will get elected. No big deal.
But I have not chosen to select this interpretation. Partly out of bias, and partly for the following reasons, some of which are expressed in the attached pdf text. Simply put, most of the hexagrams involve the power dynamic coming from below in the lower trigrams with no leadership in the upper trigram where Biden, as President, now dwells. This Cast, therefore, doesn’t seem to be about Biden. If we assume – as my interpretation does – that he is part of the Old that goes away to make way for the New during the time around the Winter solstice which starts on December 21st – then most likely he will leave after the next election (his last day in office being January 21st 2025) though it is possible he could fall ill or be impeached and have to leave before then, such as possibly around the time of the December 21st 2023 winter solstice. Time, as always, will tell.
If we assume that #24 indicates that a New President will come in (and given the number is #24 perhaps we can assume 2024 ?!) and the rest of the hexagrams are mainly depicting the nature of the New Cycle about to unfold at that time.
#17 shows Thunder below indicating change and forward momentum shaking things up from below and creating Lake/Joy above. The combination is #17 Following which indicates a time of everyone really coming together joyfully enjoying all four major virtues described in Hessey’s Shambhala I Ching as ‘profound, brilliant, just and all-powerful.’ The fruition of all this (#26) is a society which is stable (Mountain Above) and aligned with Heaven’s primordial goodness and creative spirit (Heaven Below).
Also in #24 is impetus from below, from the very bottom. So there might be a revolt of some sorts from the working classes in the States. This Thunder, still present in #17 results in Joy above which contains yang lines in both 4th and 5th places. So this impetus from below creates leadership above which in turn becomes two yin lines flanked above and below by yang lines in #26, this Cast’s fruition. The people are protected, honoured and also filling the two main leadership positions (4 & 5).
In any case, it’s a long time between now and a US election. This Cast was made in response to an interview read today with one of the January 6th political prisoners in the US who just received an 18 year sentence even though he did not go near the Capitol and had no weapons on his person nor communicated to anyone to do either. And yet he is still regarded as so dangerous and beneath honorable consideration that he will be locked up until his mid 70’s. He has also mainly been in solitary confinement since early 2020 and is now in solitary again after sentencing though not for any bad behavior on his part whilst incarcerated. He predicts that Trump will be found guilty of leading an Insurrection preventing his re-election at which point I had the thought of asking the Yi if Biden was going to remain in office until January 2029.
The Yi indicates a change in the late December to late January time frame (usually his last full day as President would be January 21st 2025 or 2029), but it also suggests – at least to this particular, and by no means Master, Diviner – that change will be coming from below, in which case it seems unlikely that Biden, a sitting President, will remain. Change is coming which will involve strong, inspired following from those below and ultimately a very meritorious dynamic at the end. It seems hard to imagine that Biden’s remaining in office will involve any such dynamics.
Time will tell.
PS. Note a little echo: when we inquired about RFK Jr the Yi yielded #26 as the Derived as well. I would say this sort of resonance increases the chances that he will be the one to effect joyful followership from below and a new type of leadership resulting in #26 Great Merit for his nation and people in January 2025.
About two books which tell about the grand voyages of 1421 and 1434
First, a comment I left on the Moon of Alabama yesterday. (Forgive any sloppy writing.)
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Emperor Yung Lo
Update on Admiral He story.
First, I highly recommend Menzies’ books. Have read most of the first one and peeked into the second. The first is about the 1421 voyage (which involved several coordinated fleets worldwide in order to both map the world definitively once they got their longitude methods down which happened in the early 1400s, and also to extend their tribute territory if possible.)
Disregarding the inevitable controversy when new narratives are introduced, I’ll just summarize the overall narrative arc for those who might find it interesting:
1. The fleet did map most of the world including North and South Poles. Settlements up and down the Pacific Coast of Americas from Vancouver Island to Chile, which had many horses already when the Spanish arrived, just as California had rice etc etc. (lots of info in the book). (Also East Coast and inland. Many native tribes could understand Chinese in the 1600’s etc.) Also Mayans in the Yucatan.
2. A decimated fleet returned to China only to find that their entire enterprise was to be ‘cancelled’ by the Mandarin class.
3. Background: Yung Lo’s father the previous Emperor had been involved in expelling the Mongols from China (Yuan dynasty). He did so by restoring the Mandarins who had been suppressed. But the Mandarins had their own problems. They were narrow minded, insular, hereditary aristocracy class, hidebound etc. So the new Emperor – who was known as ‘the usurper’- used alliances with high-ranking Eunuchs to balance his power against the Mandarin block because he felt strongly that China should be expanding. Hence the fleets. There were many over a decade or more. Huge expenditures. He also built the Forbidden City palaces. And much more. A very dynamic ruler. But increasingly resented by the Deep State mandarins.
When the fleet left, soon after there was a historic Tsunami which got rid of a significant number. Around the same time lightning struck the new Palaces in Beijing and a fire burned most of his concubines to cinders. Then he became impotent. And then he had to fend off resurgent Mongols in the North and lost. And died.
So when Admiral He et alia returned, battered, bruised, decimated but victorious, Yung Lo’s vision was into the Cancel Bin.
4. The next Emperor reversed Yung Lo’s elevations of Eunuchs to run the navy and trade missions and marginalization of the Mandarins. But he only lasted 3 years.
5. The next Emperor was Yung Lo’s grandson. He triangulated. He went forward with the outreach and sent a large fleet, under Admiral He again, to Cairo – which had been trading with CHina for over 600 years regularly at that point – and Italy. That is the subject of the second book, 1434 about which there is quite a bit of documentation though you won’t find it in the history books. The Mandarins cancelled all that too.
6. Because at some point the Chinese closed up.
7. The Portuguese, many of whom had been on board with Admiral He during his round the world passage, got hold of the maps with accurate longitude and latitude. (Columbus had a smuggle copy when he went to the Americas which he did NOT discover, it’s a complete lie – there were many Portuguese settlements with forts and churches by the time he got there because they got the Chinese maps first and they had been going even before the 1421 Chinese (and so had the Chinese though they didn’t have the ability to make accurate maps until the 1420s).
8. Because of the Chinese Empire pulling back, and because of the Italians (the Pope) refusing to play ball with the Chinese Empire following the 1834 trade mission (during which they shared their star maps, navigation technology and many other things, some of which later surfaced as Leonardo da Vinci ‘inventions’), once the Chinese retired to their borders, it was the Christians who took advantage and gradually encroached on the trading routes established for centuries using force and guile but mainly taking advantage of the gap left by the stupid Mandarins and their over conservative approach.
In short, the rise of the West was [largely] due to the internecine conflict within Imperial China triggered by the Mongol takeover and after math. China’s civilizational arc was interrupted once the Mandarins took back power and turned the Empire inwards.
It is now on the rise again.
About the SMO: Quite possibly Putin et alia and Xi are aware of this history and have discussed it. Admiral Menzie’s books created a stir in China and many historical societies there endorsed his thesis. So quite possibly the aims of the SMO are to reverse the course took in the 1400s which allowed the Chritian-Western-One-God-materialists of the West to run roughshod over a great civilizational diaspora including Daoist, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish (called Kamirs in Egypt, fabulously wealthy with huge palaces in China from their trade income there for hundreds of years) and Christian peoples. It is time to reverse the plunder ethic and replace it with the old one large multi-civilization civilization ethic.
So the SMO might very well be designed to exhaust the West to the point it can no longer force project in the Eurasian space any more. At which point they can continue their Belt and Road civilizational initiative which would have transpired back in the 1400s had not those Mandarins hated the eunuchs and mongols so much and turned their backs on the rest of the world. A mistake they are not going to make this time around.
That said: the palace DID get hit by lightning; the biggest fleet ever WAS almost entirely sunk by a huge tsunami. The Emperor WAS defeated in battle. Hardly surprising they took this as an omen to withdraw.
In any case, that happened. And now the story continues.
I always have wondered what spurred the Western rise given Asian dominance for so long. Turns out it was a self-inflicted wound leaving a gap that the Westerners – thanks to Chinese technology freely given in the early 1400’s – exploited.
Truth really is stranger than fiction, eh?
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Admiral Zheng He holding a chart, gazing ahead
Footnote: in the second book, after many additional inputs from experts the world over following the first book, it is clearly explained how they could calculate longitude on board, accurate to within about 50 miles sometimes much less. This capability is why the fleet was sent forth to cover the globe because they had finally figured out how to do this without needing the eclipse method. So they indeed set out after years of building up a fleet of over 1,000 ships, then they mapped the entire world including Antarctica, these maps were later copied and used by the Portuguese, then the Spanish, to conquer the Americas and East Indies etc. and the rest, as they say, is history.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jun 8 2023 6:52 utc | 185 [linked]
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Additional remarks:
The Books:
Menzies: 1421: The Year China discovered America
Menzies: 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Rennaissance.
I have read most of the first one (need to go back to read the first half slowly which mainly skimmed) and only the introduction of the second book. No doubt he makes some mistakes – he is after all peering back six hundred years – but after the first edition came out and he received feedback and new information from all over the world in response, it turns out that he was erring on the side of caution. The fleet was more than double his initial conservative estimate, they went further than he initially reported, much of which is updated in a Postscript to the second edition. He visited various historical societies in China who not only endorsed his views but added to them.
More importantly, I believe it important to leave the controversial aspects – with all attendant arguments – aside and just examine what is proposed, which is interesting in itself. If we accept as fact that these large fleets did traverse the world in the 1420-22 period in order to map it thanks to their recently developed ability to calculate longitude whilst under sail (several hundred years before Westerners could do it), and we accept that they did indeed map most of the world (including North Pole region and Antarctica) and that many Portuguese navigators – some of whom were on board Admiral He’s ships during these historic voyages – later got hold of those maps (such as Piri Reis and others) and these maps were then used by Westerners to push their maritime envelopes, that is something worth pondering.
But then we have the other side of it which is that for internal domestic political reasons the Chinese Empire decided to turn inward for a few centuries, a period which has now recently ended with China now proactively pushing its Belt and Road Initiative which essentially continues what Admiral He and his Emperor, Yung Lo (whom the hostile Deep State mandarins labelled ‘the Usurper’) started (following the Great Khan’s lead a century or so earlier). In the second book about the trip to Italy, Menzies tells how trade with Cairo and the Middle East had been active, stable and with high volumes for over six hundred years before 1434, but that after China pulled in its horns, that trade ended. This created a geopolitical, cultural and maritime trade gap which the emerging Europeans, following the Chinese example in the 1420s and 1430s, could aspire to and then actually did exploit. It wasn’t so much their expansiveness as China’s reclusiveness which gave the West its momentum. Their were Jesuits and others in the Chinese Courts well aware of the new posture and no doubt they informed their masters in Christendom of these epoch-shaping opportunity. (The power of good Intelligence!)
And here we are after five hundred years of relative Western dominance with the worm finally turning back to where it was for most of post-flood history, namely with a large civilization in Asia playing a key role in world culture. Personally I hope that the West wakes up, cleans house and joins in the Belt and Road vision which is not new but only rarely comes on offer. The Russian Tzar Nicolas I was all over it. Charlemagne was into it too though with less idea of the rest of the world at that point. The Chinese were into it after Genghis Khan created a pacified Central Eurasia all the way from Hungary’s borders to Beijing.
Anyway, the arc of history curves slowly but steadily and we are now living in a time when Admiral He’s exploits six hundred years ago are, after a long hiatus and many twists and turns, finally bearing fruit. I have reservations about the level of wisdom and high culture in China these days so wonder if they are up to midwifing a new world wide civilization – especially given how unstable and aggressive many of the other Powers in the world are these days, especially of course the Western bloc – but I for one wish them the best as well as, again, hoping we in the West actually join in. In that way, a new Golden Age could indeed dawn.
Footnote: along with trying to establish Admiral He’s voyages Menzies uncovered something far greater in many ways, namely the long-term influence of Asia on the the Americas, now corroborated by genetic studies. Indeed, when the European colonialists starting coming in during the 1500s they encountered Chinese settlements and/or Chinese influence all over the place throughout North and South America many of whose tribes (including the Cherokee for example) were able to understand Chinese centuries later. This seems to have been scrubbed out of our collective knowledge base. Cancel culture is not a new thing, we just never saw it en masse on social media before, that’s all. Similarly in China, all records of the Treasure Ships fleets was erased from their history by the Mandarins.
When Columbus came to the Caribbean he had maps – via some Portuguese via the Chinese after these historical world-mapping passages. Original notes show that the early explorers encountered many Portuguese settlements long in place. Indeed, some of the Portuguese had been visiting North America since the 1300s, before Admiral He’s fleets. They were in a good place latitude-wise to do so after all; they couldn’t yet dare to sail the world oceans but they could sail back and forth in the Atlantic. They couldn’t chart accurately where they went (Columbus often got his locations wrong by more than 1500 miles because of the lack of accurate longitude calculations) but by holding latitude they could hit one continent or another and then make their way to a desired port away or at home.
So another aspect to this tale revealed by Menzies is the significant effect that cancel culture can have in world affairs. The presence of Chinese in Mexico, which apparently is significant in many zones, not just coastal, is unknown by today’s Mexicans probably because it has been deliberately suppressed by the Roman Catholic church who also presumably suppressed knowledge about the great Chinese fleets and their visit to Italy after they no longer sailed the Asian oceans from Taiwan to Cairo and all in between once China turned its back on the world. (Making the current mess partly their fault!)
How much is being hidden from us right now? Very much, I would say. On all sides….
1 Great Dragon Leader > 43 Breakthrough < 1 The Creative
Gua Hexagram 1
The Chinese character Qian is an image of a rising sun radiating its light and energy —chi and nourishing the whole world. The ancient Chinese ideograph of Qian, shown here, depicts a sun on the left side of the picture. Above the sun, there is a shoot of grass with two tiny leaves sprouting on the left and right. Underneath the sun, the root of the plant penetrates deeply into the ground. On the right side the chi disperses from the sun and spreads out under the sky. In Chinese, Qian The Initiating possesses the same sound as the word for health. It denotes health and vitality. In the process of the creation of the world, Qian ☰ took an active role as the initiator, providing the purest yang energy, the healthiest action, and the most powerful strength for Kun ☷, the Responding, to receive.
In the I Ching, King Wen placed Qian as the initial gua and Kun as the second. Qian represents Heaven, and Kun represents earth. It is worth mentioning that King Wen did not name the first gua Heaven; instead he named it Qian, Initiating. According to the ancient sage, Heaven refers to celestial bodies or, to the Chinese, the divine deity, the Heavenly elderly Father.
The purpose of the I Ching is not to expose the nature of the celestial bodies or the divine deities but to offer guidance for favorable action in one’s daily life and at the same time to avoid misconduct that invites misfortune. Thus, when Qian is named, its emphasis is upon function rather than an object.
Continuing our political-geopolitical series, this one is about Trump, specifically whether or not he will be a viable candidate in 2024. I am not sure from the result what the answer is except that whether he is or isn’t he will have cause for regret. Hexagram 1 is very powerful. And here we have Hexagram 1 as the Primary and Nuclear, with the Derived only having one changing line (worth the minimum 1 point in the Horden Math approach). 17 Yang lines, 1 Yin line. The situation is not balanced (or fair) but it IS powerful. It involves what until recently was the leading nation in the world order, now clearly foundering, with a potential Presidential candidate who, it has now been proven, has been unfairly and disgracefully treated with an unending stream of false accusations, twice leading to unjustified impeachment. Some of these false accusations are still outstanding: although increasingly obvious that the ‘insurrection’ on Jan 6th was mainly a staged LARP which sucked in enough genuine Trump supporters walking back after a disappointing speech, nevertheless the story remains that Trump is an irresponsible power-hungry dictator wanna-be who fomented a riot to overthrow the House of Congress, the most dangerous event in US history since its ghastly Civil War.
So his cause is just whether or not you like him. But the Yi here clearly states in the Changing Line commentary that ‘arrogant dragon will have cause to regret.’
If we depart from the text – which the attached Reading elected NOT to do – we could interpret it differently: if he goes to the Highest Court in the Land and speaks out (Lake above involves speech, and the changing line was in the top sphere) perhaps he will achieve a Breakthrough and a very powerful new dynamic (#1) will emerge.
Alternatively, we could interpret the ‘arrogant dragon’ as those – aka The Deep State – treating him unfairly. They may have cause to regret.
But if we stick with the classic text, it looks like that Trump, the individual in question, will be toppled.
I speculate in the Reading that, because of the powerful configuration indicated by all three hexagrams, even if he is toppled perhaps this will involve, or even trigger, a very creative process that could prove highly beneficial to the nation in the end.
The structure of the gua is Fire above, Earth below. Fire is a symbol of Li, which represents the sun. The structure of this gua shows that the sun is rising over the Earth, an image of progress or a process. The ideograph of Jing is a beautiful picture of the sun rising over the earth. The circle at the bottom is a symbol of the sun. The horizontal stroke in the middle of the sun is believed to represent a dark spot on its surface. Above the sun, there are two straight lines that symbolize the horizon of the earth. Upon the earth, two plants are flourishing and blooming upward with the yang energy from the sun, glowing like the flame of a fire. The ideograph shows not only an act of proceeding but also the radiance of the energy.
This Cast follows on from one done two months ago, well before he announced his candidacy. I made the Cast because earlier on another geopolitical cast had indicated that a leader would emerge from the field. Since Trump had already emerged, and de Santis as well, I looked for someone who had not yet thrown his hat in the ring and so queried about RFK Jr who had made noises but not yet a commitment.
Note that the Primary of that initial Cast is now the Future Influence hexagram (#9, Leadership with Humility, or Public Service). Note also how positive all the hexagrams are with the exception of the Nuclear which is the inner dynamic: RFK’s star may be rising, but the situation is fraught with danger and intractable obstacles.
Another twist discussed in the pdf: the Establishment has black balled him. He is not listed on Democrat Polling results. He is not given interviews in the MSM despite being a Kennedy. The Reading advises him to stay still and ‘not leave the courtyard.’ To the Kings this commentary was written for, the Courtyard is where they did most of their formal Court business and it is where petitioners would present themselves. This indicates that by Keeping Still the world will be coming to him. And those who have ostracized him will find it is they who are left outside. The action will increasingly happen around RFK Jr and the mainstream media and Establishment toadies will find themselves increasingly ignored and irrelevant. For they no longer speak for or with the people. Biden is a complete phony, clearly, one whom increasingly the American people will find themselves easily forgetting as well as those who ostensibly support him.
Of course there is a long time between now and November 2024 but I think it will be interesting to see how these Yi casts hold up over time, along with their Readings, some of which we may be able to revisit to refine further as events reveal more.
PS. If anyone read this as soon as I posted it (around 12:50 EST) there was a power failure as I saved the document and somehow that confused the computer which temporarily lost the file. When I recovered it I did not notice that the most recent few minutes work had not been saved so the initial post of this document did not have the Judgement. Of course, if you did read it then, chances are you will never now read this paragraph. Never mind!!
Consider this master diagram (from William Horden’s Mathematical I Ching) depicting all 64 Hexagrams. The numbers on the inside are the binary count, on the outside the traditional King Wen Sequence Hexagram numbers.
64 Hexagrams with Binary and King Wen Numbers
This particular rumination is just marvelling at the elegance of the yin-yang proposition which is perhaps the most succinct symbolic representation ever formulated of the relative world we inhabit and co-create. The world of duality, of both appearing forms and the emptiness from which they arise, that open space which allows form to be. And as with the above method of counting. As you can see, there are 64 different hexagrams each with its own unique numerical value. This is calculated by a neat trick which some genius twigged to I think well over a millennium ago, namely:
The solid lines are worth 0.
The broken lines are worth different points depending on where they are situated. From the bottom to top it goes:
Bottom line = 32 points
2nd line = 16 points
3rd line = 8 points
4th line = 4 points
3rd line = 2 points
Top line = 1 point.
This is very simple but it took someone to realize that the solid lines needed to count as zero for there to be 64 different numerical values, no more no less.
This parallels our reality in that we do indeed have form and emptiness coexisting. For everything visibly manifest there is an invisible mind-level emanation that is without form or even location. Yes, we have a mind and it identifies with our body, but you cannot say how big or small it is nor where exactly it is located any more than you can say where our experience of sight, sound, smell or taste is located. In other words, there is always a yin and yang simultaneous dynamic ongoing with any and all phenomena in this our experiential universe.
Put another way: without acknowledging the solid lines as emptiness, the counting method – using only broken lines with different values based on position – would not work. This is such a clear demonstration of the profound accuracy of yin and yang insight that I wonder how many have noticed it as such. Too obvious to be recognized perhaps.
Wilhelm translates Tong Ren as Fellowship with Men, and Blofeld translates it as Lovers, Beloved, Friends, Like-Minded Persons, Universal Brotherhood. In Chinese, tong means similar, alike, the same. Ren means person or people. When the two characters are put together as a unit, it means to treat people alike. In ancient China, tong ren also meant people with the same interests. Herein, Tong Ren is translated as Seeking Harmony. It has the connotation of forming alliances. To break through a tough situation, people need to work together in harmony, as in an alliance.
The ideograph of the first character, tong, consists of three parts. The first part looks like an upright rectangle without the bottom line, symbolizing a door frame or a house. Within the house, there is a single horizontal stroke representing the number one. Underneath this is a little square symbolizing a mouth. In ancient China, people were counted by mouths. For instance, if someone wanted to know how many people there were in your family, they would ask “How many mouths are there in your family?” The three parts of the ideograph come together to depict a group of people gathered together as a single unit. Here, the mouth indicates that they are thinking or speaking as one. The Chinese can feel the harmony in the group. The ideograph of the second character, ren, suggests a person standing.
The image of this gua is Heaven above, Fire below. Heaven suggests ascension. The flame of fire moves upward. Fire approaching Heaven gives an image of people with the same interests working together in harmony. There is only one yielding line, at the second place. The ancient sage saw this as a picture of harmony; the one at the second place treated the other five elements at different places equally, with the same attitude. An ancient Chinese maxim says, “People in the same boat help each other, sharing weal and woe.”
According to the I Ching, however, there is no absolute sameness. The ancient sages passed on the secret of obtaining harmony, that is, seeking common ground on major issues while reserving differences on minor ones. Tong Ren teaches that the wise classify people according to their natures, not for the purpose of treating them differently, but to seek common ground. If there is common ground, each one is able to act in harmony with the others. The ancient Chinese dreamed day and night that the world would belong to the majority and the government would serve the common interest of its countrymen. This is Seeking Harmony. [Huang Complete I Ching]
The above description from Huang’s Complete I Ching clearly dances around ‘Golden Age’ issues. The term has no precise meaning, of course, but generally indicates a period of peace and plenty for a society, or perhaps even the entire world given how knit together we all now are.
This Cast seems to answer the question in the affirmative but as always the Yi provides both warnings and counsel. Warnings in that the internal dynamic of #44 has to be dealt with, and counsel in that the very nature of #13’s Fellowship shows leadership of the entire society coming from the Second Line, which is the Line of the Householder or Family. This is from depicting lines according to rank or role in society.
Line 1: Individual.
Line 2: Family- Household (often several generations and several families together)
Line 3: Local Official, still local but what goes on outside one’s immediate household.
Line 4: National or regional official serving the highest authority.
Line 5: The Ruler principle, either an individual, committee or whatever.
Line 6: The Line of the Sage, one who has gone beyond worldly concerns.
The Chinese emphasize that their policies, and indeed entire vision of how to be and organize a civilization, are based on timeless principles which center around benefiting all. I pray they are being truthful and this is not the same sort of rhetoric we get in the West about ‘saving Democracy’ and being a ‘beacon of light and hope’ for the world. People hearing such things are cheered and inspired, but that doesn’t make them truthful.
That said, whether or not our leaders are sincere, the Will of Heaven which is the Creative Force and Intent behind everything we experience inner or outer is essentially aligned to goodness in that Creation is fundamentally marvelous. Individual beings may be temporarily or apparently separated from the One which contains All – such as all particularities, aka The Many – but deep inside we all know we are part of the same overall drama and as such can feel warmth and connection with each other, which is the Fire trigram principle ruling the entire #13 Fellowship / Harmony dynamic.
This is a good result for the question and although intellectually cynical these days, my heart keeps telling me that things will work out well. Whether this is boilerplate wishful thinking or insight remains to be seen. For now, though, I take comfort in this Cast and Reading for it appears reasonable to conclude, especially given its forthright, stable, no changing lines nature, that we are indeed at the Dawn of a Golden Age.
The Toltec I Ching version of this Hexagram is included in the pdf Reading document attached below. As you can see, it is quite a different perspective which essentially depicts that of a spirit warrior’s developmental journey to master living in this relative world whilst aligning his spirit with that of the One so that the world of spirit and matter, always inseparable, are unified in his or her person instead of being seemingly sundered, as is often the challenge for most human beings, but especially so in this hyper-materialist age which insists that anything to do with spirit or mind is ‘unscientific’ and therefore ‘not real’ and therefore not worth even considering let alone making it an important part of our individual and collective lives. The Toltec I Ching offers a reorientation for the individual to attune to the higher soul which in turn is an emanation of the One, from which, and as an ongoing part of which, each and every Particular, aka the Many, aka ‘us’ are primordially joyful, creative emanations. Or: Horden’s languge and approach helps the individual consulting the Oracle enter the realm of the sacred, a timeless reality always present but often unwitnessed. The most immediate way to access it is by spending time in Nature which always conveys natural sacredness which is its fundamental nature. Spreading that into our daily lives, given how tricky and complex humans are compared to plants and stones, is an art, but one which I believe all of Horden’s works have been crafted to help engender.
12 Corruption > 21 Biting Through > 9 Service > 27 Cultivation < 39 Intractable Obstacles
Gua Hexagram 21
The ideograph of the first character, shi, consists of two parts. On the left, a small square represents an open mouth. On the right, there is an ideograph of shi, which provides only the sound to the character, with no implication as to the significance. However, the ideograph of shiis a beautiful picture of an act of divination. At the top two little plants represent yarrow stalks.
In the lower portion, there are two people in a hall. The horizontal line above them represents the roof; the horizontal line below represents the floor. The vertical line between them symbolizes a post or a pillar. The two persons are kneeling on the floor face to face. One is the diviner, the other is the inquirer. When this character is combined with the mouth on the left, it means “biting.”
The ideograph of the second character, he, also consists of two parts. On the left there is another mouth. On the right is a container that looks exactly like a type of bronze utensil of the Zhou dynasty having four legs and a cover. The stroke in the middle represents an object within the container. There is a tiny space between the cover and the container that suggests that the cover is being put on; it is an act of closing. This action signifies the movement of bringing two parts together. When this picture unites with that of the mouth, it appears as an action of bringing the upper jaw and the lower jaw together, or closing the mouth to bite.
The structure of the hexagram looks like an open mouth with an obstruction. The yang lines on the top and the bottom are the lips. All the yin lines resemble teeth. The solid line at the fourth place represents an obstruction between the teeth—the mouth cannot close. The union of the lips and the teeth requires the eradication of the obstruction. This picture indicates an obstruction in one’s daily life that would affect union and harmony among people. Only through eradicating the obstruction can the high and the low—people from all walks of life—come together in harmony and understanding.
Eradicating reveals the principle of administering justice by removing obstructions in a peaceful community. To administer justice, sometimes punishment is necessary; but the punishment should be appropriate. The Confucian Analects say that when punishments are not properly administered, people do not know what to do. The upper gua is Li, or Brightness, and the lower gua is Zhen, or Thunder. Together they symbolize that carrying out an eradication of evils with punishment is like the action of a thunderbolt with the brightness of lightning. It is vigorous and resolute, but also fair and just.
King Wen’s Decision on the Gua says, “eradicating. Prosperous and smooth. Favorable to administer justice.” The main theme of the gua is to administer justice by eradicating an obstruction. After an obstruction is eradicated, justice can be established. After justice is established, progress and success prevail. (Huang, Complete I Ching)
I believe the document here says it all, so no need for much additional commentary. We shall see what transpires, but as usual the Yi is optimistically showing a decent path forward whilst admitting there are serious problems to be dealt with. Of note structurally is how Line 4 represents that which must be bitten through in Hexagram #21 leaving the same upper and law jaw again represented in #27 Mouth, or Cultivation. The fact that Line 4, which is the critical line giving #21 Biting Through its core symbolic meaning exits the stage leaving only #27 depicting a mouth, or upper and lower jaw, demonstrates resonance in the Cast’s narrative arc, so to speak. And that implied narrative suggests something along the lines of: If you chew through the obstacle in Line 4 by getting a good Leader who serves the interests of the people well (versus the current oligarchy in #12 dynamic which mainly only serves its own interests), then that will be a good outcome. So the progression – using William Horden’s I Ching Mathematics – is simple:
#12 Stagnation indicates a time when leadership is oppressive; the rich are rising (aka getting richer) so the poor, relatively, are getting poorer. Not good.
#21 Cutting Through: stern measures must be taken. Action, represented by the Thunder trigram, below and Clarity-Illumination above. Things must be revealed and brought into the light of day. And the obstruction in the 4th line must be bitten through. That which needs to be bitten or gnawed through is represented by Line 4.
The path or main theme involved is indicated by the Derived #27 Cultivation which involves knowing what to accept and what to reject. Discernment. Virtue. Sanity.
And the way to get there is hinted at by the Future Influence #9 which involves leadership in the 4th place, traditionally the Secretary to the Ruler, or a Prime Minister to a President, or in a Democracy the President to the People who theoretically (though rarely in fact) rule. In any case, the single yin line in the fourth place rules all the other 5 yang lines including those in the superior 5th and 6th places. So this is leadership power exercised with humility and restraint. And of course this same fourth line is the critical one in #21, the obstacles which must be bitten through.
At the core of all these inter-related dynamics is Nuclear #39 which involves intractable or very difficult obstacles. There are always ways through or around but with #39 they take considerable effort to realize. No easy answers.
But the progression from 12 > 21 > 9 > 27 is clear: at the heart of the dynamic are serious, heretofore intractable obstacles, in this case involving politics and #12’s stagnation-corruption. Biting through is called for via the agency of honest, sincere public servants who follow the path of knowing what to accept and what to reject, ie what is right and what is wrong. This has to be established clearly as per #21’s Biting Through, including meting out justice with punishment where warranted, which is clearly the case however unlikely it seems to be possible in Western polities at this point.
Of note – and this is not a prediction: when we asked about President Xi and Presidential Candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr (before he announced his run), they each got Hexagram #9. Time will tell how this all plays out….
PS. Along with the usual King Wen sequence Hexagrams underneath in small type and putting in the recently developed Toltec I Ching sequence hexagram numbers and titles. I am not using them but gradually familiarizing myself with its commentary. It is an inner-path oriented approach recalling traditional spiritual training from pre-modern times. I am finding it very deep and informative on the inner level but am not yet able to apply its commentary to outer level issues such as the subject of this cast. This note just to explain what the additional text underneath the hexagrams usual numbers and titles means.
Also, the initial numbers are the binary count value. For example with #12, if you add up the bottom three broken lines they are worth: #6 = 32, #5 = 16 and #4 = 8, total = 56 which is the number you see before Stagnation-Corruption #12.
51 > 48 The Well > 13 > 39 Impasse < 38 Differences
Gua 48 The Well
Sequence of the Gua: Those who are exhausted from above are sure to return back to the lower. Thus, after Exhausting, Replenishing follows.
The ideograph of Jing shows the image not of a well, but of the ancient Jing land system, adopted in the time of the early Zhou dynasty. Two horizontal lines and two vertical lines intersect each other with a dot in the middle of the square, representing a well or bucket. The ideograph jing is a picture of a piece of land divided into nine equal portions. Each portion occupied 100 mu, equaling 16.47 acres. All the lands belonged to the government or the lord. The central portion was planted exclusively to benefit the government or the lord and contained the well. It was cultivated by the joint labor of the eight families who used the other eight portions of land. When a male reached a certain age he received a portion of land from the government or the lord. When he grew old, he returned the land. Every day, the eight families worked on the central portion first. In their spare time, they worked on their own piece of land.
The well nourished all the people who lived on the lord’s land. Later on, four plots of Jing land made up a village. Because people in the village took water from the well, the well became a marketplace and gained importance in the daily life of the people. For this reason, the true spirit of Jing is to replenish people. The serfs worked on the lands all day long, becoming exhausted; they went to the well to get replenished. The Commentary on the Decision says, “The well supplies replenishment but is never exhausted.”
The structure of the gua is Water above, Wood below. This image gave the ancient sage the picture of a well. The water in a well was practically an inexhaustible resource. It was in constant use yet continually refilled. It was the source of life. The image also suggests that the roots of a plant draw water from the soil to nourish the stalk and leaves.
We continue with geopolitical Yi consultation, now adding in some of the additional techniques introduced in Horden’s I Ching Mathematics which provide two additional hexagrams, namely one before showing influence from the past and one providing a bridge between the Primary and Derived.
This Reading, IMO, doesn’t directly answer the question in terms of predicting the future, rather focuses on the immediate challenge – which the Yi excels at doing. The divination is more like seeing what is actually going on right now rather than peering into a future that does not yet exist. According to this Cast, the situation goes like this:
In the past there have been major shocks and changes (#51) which I am calling ‘geopolitical tectonic shifts.’ That phrase has been used by several pundits of late to describe what has happened geopolitically in the past few years. The main dynamic under examination is #48 The Well, one of only two man-made objects in the 64 Hexagram Universe. Whether or not we go into a Golden or Dark Age depends upon us, it is not written already in the stars, nor is there an overpowering cycle in play which, no matter what we do, will result in a particular outcome.
The Well Image depicts Wood from below drawing up Water to Above which takes deliberate effort since Water’s nature is to follow gravity’s pull downward. If we regard Water as the water of life, as that which is essential for a community and often why one is established in any given location, then drawing up water involves tapping into that which is essential for a society to thrive. These are core bedrock values which need to be brought up from below and within to above and without. Values are of no worth if not put into practice and manifest in society. So this is a very clear message.
The bridge suggested to the unfavorable – or at least seriously challenging – #39 Impasse is #13 Fellowship which involves Fire within and Heaven without. Fire has to do with being connected, just like actual fire needs fuel. It is warm, it is the Heart, it provides light and clarity. So if the various nations and civilizations can join together in true fellowship, together summoning up their best values and principles, they then can manage the serious, deep and heretofore intractable obstacles in #39 Impasse which depicts a Mountain leading into an impassable ravine, usually requiring a return to the starting point to wait for better conditions or to determine a better way through or around this obstacle. It is #13 Fellowship which will provide this better way.
Throughout the modern era – and by that I mean since the old days after the birth of the Egyptian, Central American, Chinese, Greek, Persian, Roman and other old civilizations, there have been significant ups and down with no little hardship from plagues and famines and no few disasters from man-made war – for war of course is another thing only made by Man, a choice followed by consequences which then must be endured. So whether or not we are about to enter a Golden Age – certainly possible given our abilities to create decent cities and manage agriculture properly should we so choose – or a Dark Age – no less possible given the excesses in poor leadership and methods due to an out of control materialist profit-seeking leadership class and overly complacent citizenry – is collectively up to us.
#13 provides a big hint: The clarity and warmth are within Heaven which involves Leadership. We won’t get through this without strong leadership based on bedrock values drawn up from #48’s Well, values which provide life to the communities in the world.
Another note: in the text, it mentions how communities or cities come and go but the Well remains. This is true of essential, bedrock values which are based on the nature of the world we share and co-create and which boil down to, simply put, basic goodness. If we can find a way to honor basic goodness and put it front and center in our dealing with ourselves and others, our own countries with others, our own sectors in society with others, our own beliefs with others, all can be well and a Golden Age can indeed ensure. If, on the other hand, we fail to do this, Changing Line Two clearly indicates that none will drink from the Well, meaning our values will not be fostered in a healthy, uplifted, decent, delightful way, and our societies will languish.
Do a Cast and get your Primary/Divinatory and Derived (from any Changing Lines).
Calculate the binary number value of the Primary and Derived. To calculate the value add up the broken lines as follows from top to bottom: Top/1 = 1 point; 2nd line down = 2 points, 3rd = 4 points, 4th = 8 points, 5th = 16 points, 6th/bottome = 32 points. It’s that simple. You can see, for example, that #48 The Well has broken lines in the first, fourth and top line (counting the usual way) making the points 32 + 4 + 1 = 37. Meanwhile the Derived #39 has broken lines in the 6th, 5th, 3rd and 1st place = 32 + 16 + 4 + 1 = 53 points.
Past Influence is the difference between 37 and 53 = 16. Future Influence is the combination of 37 + 53 = 90. This is 27 over the maximum 63 (because the first hexagram with all solid lines counts as 0) so 27.
To calculate the hexagram from the binary number: first divide by 8 for the lower trigram and the remainder is the upper trigram. Binary 27/8 = 3 + remainder 3. 3 = Trigram Thunder (1st and 2nd lines broken total 3 points). So that is Thunder below and Thunder above which makes #51 Shock. Meanwhile Binary 16/8 = 2 with no remainder, so that is Fire below (2nd line down in trigram = 2 points) and Heaven above (3 solid lines = 0 points) = #13 Fellowship.
So now we have Past influence providing additional background information to our Primary-Divinatory #48 Well, and Future Influence #13 providing additional guidance for what might best be involved between #48 and #39 Impasse.
This method does not feature the Nuclear but I like it very much so put it in the middle out of the way of the circular dynamic created by #15 > #48 > #13 > #39. Voila.
William Horden Vol II Toltec I Ching Series: Image and Number.
What follows is a direct copy-paste of a passage from William Douglas Horden‘s Second Volume “Image and Number Treatise” in his multi-volume series about the Toltec I Ching which is his meisterwerk, a newly configured I Ching times with new numbers and commentaries for every Hexagram. It is designed for these times and written by William as per his Daoist Sudden Enlightenment School Master’s request. William has written literally dozens of books including I Ching texts, autobiographical volumes, poems and a novel. He is both prolific, original and gifted. Not only did he train under a Chinese Daoist Master to learn esoteric understanding and uses of the Yi, he was also adopted by a Tarahumaran Shaman in Mexico with whom he further trained for many years. The fusion of these wisdom lineages in the one person, Don Guillermo, has given birth to the Toltec I Ching, a truly special and splendid work.
I personally am not ready to leave the King Wen version after spending so many decades slowly developing a relationship with the hexagrams, but in his many volumes about it, he provides glimpses into the inner depths of the Yi, its lines, trigrams, hexagrams and world view that offer far more than most everything else available in the English language and I dare say in Chinese as well. His Volume I Mathematics of the I Ching presents truly groundbreaking insights and methods using binary counting of the lines which he discovered gradually over decades of contemplation and work. It is head-spinning and will take me a good long while to fully absorb – if indeed I ever can. This excerpt is from Volume II where, if I understand correctly, William is providing a fresher and deeper take, though grounded in his esoteric school’s and shamanic view, of ‘The Material’ in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, in whose composition Wilhelm was assisted by a Chinese descendant of Confucius himself and of which William is a great admirer.
In the following excerpt William gives us an entirely fresh take on how the trigrams represent existing portals joining both outer and inner realms of phenomena and human experience, in some sense being what the senses both perceive and manufacture out of what otherwise would be formless, meaningless, soulless particles, similar to how materialists tend to view our universe. Simply put, the trigrams in the Yi are symbolic representations of living processes which make our world along with our ability to perceive and function therein.
One of the duties of a Yi Diviner is to learn to see trigram processes in nature and circumstance all the time. Then the entire world becomes equivalent to hexagrams and trigrams and one can throw the books away and enjoy life as a ‘spirit warrior’ whose enemy, always, is within: that tendency to fall into habitual patterns which imprison us in a container of our own making out of which we can see and hear nothing of the sacred beauty in this living Dream Universe we all share and co-create in the ever-present moment.
Enjoy:
2023-05-17 William Holden Vol II Toltec I Ching Series: Image and Number. Excerpt:
Chapter IV. The Esoteric Lessons of The Changes
1. THE CHANGES is a microcosm of the mystical PATTERN OF ORDER AND CHANCE underlying SPIRIT and NATURE: It leaps beyond itself into the Unknowable, carrying the spirit warrior into the realm of transcendent experience.
Commentary
On the cosmological scale, dynamic creative equilibrium arises from the interplay of the forces seeking stability through predictable order and metamorphosis through random chance. Neither of these two forces ever dominates to the complete exclusion of the other—it is their interaction, like the interference waves of pond ripples, that self-organizes local pockets of times of greater stability and times of greater metamorphosis. The union of this great duality of cosmos and chaos constitutes a pattern that is both alive and aware, much as the DNA of the genetic code is both alive and aware: pure awareness is pure information without any boundaries—self-aware information is the inevitable result, as is unbounded communion of awareness. The Pattern of Order and Chance is a mystical Being who gives birth to the great duality of cosmos and chaos and, simultaneously, is given birth by the union of cosmos and chaos.
That there is a pattern to order is clear. That there is a pattern to chance is obscure. We can see that there are mutations within the genetic code, despite the fixity of the code. We cannot necessarily predict those mutations or their consequences ahead of time but we can appreciate that they are part of the code itself. The Pattern, in other words, allows from the very beginning for its own unpredictable evolution—it seeks its own transcendence by incorporating the unpredictable into its intrinsic structure. And it is not, of course, given birth by the genetic code, since the genetic code is but one of its many manifestations.
THE CHANGES [I Ching, Yi Jing] is likewise a self-contained manifestation of the Pattern of Order and Chance. It essentializes the Pattern in the same way that the RNA messenger code does DNA . By means of its archetypal structure and dynamics, THE CHANGES is able to symbolize the infinitely complex and evolving universe. This it accomplishes by mirroring the subsensorial generative energy that circulates below the threshold of the five senses until it emerges in material form.
This process of emergence is similar to a thought, feeling, sensation, memory, etc., that has resided in the unconscious suddenly becoming conscious: the unconscious element that has existed in a nonperceptible state has nonetheless been exerting its influence on behavior or mood, its unexpressed energy building tension that is finally released as the element crosses the threshold of liminality and becomes conscious. Just as there are individuals who train themselves to be unusually sensitive to unconscious thoughts, feelings, memories, etc., there are individuals who train themselves to be more sensitive to the circulation of generative energy: those who read symbolic behavior of others and thus divine the unconscious dynamics beneath the conscious surface are performing the same type of activity as those who read the symbolic behavior of spirit as it manifests in all forms of nature. Such spirit warriors have since ancient times been called diviners because they are trained to divine the intent of spirit, thereby foreseeing the direction and momentum of change in the natural and human realms.
In the same way that a great ship pushes water ahead of itself as a prow wake in which dolphins sport, the PATTERN OF ORDER AND CHANCE pushes change ahead of itself as a purposeful future in which diviners explore. Similarly, just as there lies the vastness of the open sea encompassing ship and prow wake and dolphins, there lies the vast oceanic Great Mystery encompassing the PATTERN OF ORDER AND CHANCE and purposeful future and diviners. THE CHANGES symbolizes the living awareness that is the PATTERN OF ORDER AND CHANCE: in its actions, it mirrors the way that Order and Chance alternate to create ever-new potential, calling it forth it from THE UNMANIFEST.
[In terms of the Three Treasures, or Heaven Earth & Man, Horden calls HEAVEN ‘Spirit’ and EARTH ‘Nature.’]
Standing at the gate, observing the comings and goings of all things as they arrive from and return to THE UNMANIFEST in their own time, spirit warriors become attuned to the transcendent realm of timeless creation. Since ancient times, this gate has been called The Estuary, for it is the place where the river meets the ocean—where the freshwater of the Known terrain mingles with the saltwater tides of the Unknowable sea.
Here is the secret standpoint of the diviner, for just as freshwater and saltwater are both water yet impossible to mistake one for the other, mortal and immortal awareness are both awareness yet immediately discernable from one another. The Estuary is that sacred place wherein diviners dwell, neither in time nor in eternity but in that shared space where their ever-circulating currents create an ephemeral mirror-like awareness of what passes between them.
Figure 13, above, illustrates the principal symbols of the PATTERN OF ORDER AND CHANCE and their associations to the solid and broken lines of THE CHANGES.
2. THE CHANGES reveals the unchanging nature of SPIRIT and the unchanging spirit of NATURE: SPIRIT is none other than the invisible half of NATURE, just as NATURE is none other than the visible half of SPIRIT. In the changing lines lies the secret relationship between mortality and immortality. The union of the masculine and feminine halves produces the spiritual embryo: Once the spiritual twin can journey on its own, one becomes an intimate of birth and death. Roaming in the land of The Changeless even as we perform our everyday tasks, we commune equally with the souls of the living and the souls of the dead.
Commentary
Figure 13, above, makes clear that Nature is symbolized by broken lines and Spirit by solid lines. This reflects their essential unchanging identities: Everyone and everything has a visible half and an invisible half, a body of Nature and a soul of Spirit. But the lines grow and incorporate more of the qualities of their opposites over time, an interchange reflected in the changing lines: broken lines change into solid lines and solid lines change into broken lines. This interchange symbolizes the secret way that nature changes into spirit and spirit into nature—the profoundly mysterious and hidden path by which the mortal body becomes immortal spirit and immortal spirit becomes mortal body.
The spiritualization of matter and the materialization of spirit: such is the secret path by which the innate perfectibility of all things advances through ever-deeper and ever-higher realms, sweeping like a wind through every chasm and valley, every storm and open sky. In the changing lines are hidden the body of the soul and the soul of the body, the feminine half and the masculine half of every nonduality.
The interchangeability of the qualities of these two halves on the individual scale of the lived life results in a blending of characteristics, like the roots of two mighty trees interwoven deep underground, that forms an unbreakable bond between the soul of the body and the body of the soul: uniting the seeming opposites into the personal nonduality is a creative act, a birth, that mirrors the cosmological union of the Great Duality into the ongoing Act of Creation. What is born here on the personal level is the intentional body: It is for this reason that it has been said of old, Just as there is a mind within the mind, there is a body outside the body.
The intentional body is, at first, unstable, like a newborn deer trying to find its legs and keep its balance— unsure of the realm in which it lives, the intentional body struggles to find its footing and maintain continuity of awareness. With familiarity and concentration, though, it gains strength and agility, no less than the fawn bounding and leaping within the safety of the herd—as it emerges within the intentional landscape, the intentional body begins to move among the landmarks and other intentional bodies with cautious deliberation. Finally, with patience and practice, it moves with all the grace and inner power of a great stag perfectly at home in the wilderness—coming into contact with the intentional bodies of all those who have ever lived, the spiritual twin evolves into a fully-formed purpose that must align itself with the Universal Purpose of the One Intent if it is to create good fortune wherever it goes. It is in this realm that we build great alliances and set in motion formulations of generative energy to take form and enter the flow of history.
3. THE CHANGES reveals that the original nature of human being is identical to the sacred WAY of SPIRIT and NATURE. Wisdom is found beneath the artificial layers of culture, history, and personality:
Human perceptions are made of the same material as SPIRIT and NATURE. The enemy-within is made of all one’s self-defeating perceptions, amplified by all the self-defeating lessons drawn from the social environment: failing to commune with one’s true self, with HUMANITY , with NATURE, with SPIRIT, all out of fear and distrust of life—this is the road of misfortune that leads to a wasted lifetime. Spirit warriors seek the true self beneath the facade of the enemy-within, harmonizing with its purpose for taking up this lifetime. They bring their intent into accord with that purpose, they bring their actions into accord with that intent. They know the outflowing cycle of generative energy on the path of fate and choose instead the path of freedom.
No longer confined to the realm of birth and death, they are at peace, filled with the love of the world. They do not strive, but follow the path of least resistance marked out by meaningful coincidences. They radiate gratitude for being part of such a wondrous creation, returning the loving-kindness of SPIRIT and NATURE with benevolence toward all. Allowing themselves to be loved by that which is greater than themselves, they can love.
Commentary
The wisdom teachings of the perennial truth favor no one: like rain and sunlight and soil, they nurture every seed without bias. There is no special knowledge or esoteric skill that privileges one soul over another. It is simply the authenticity of conscious perfectibility that forever pulls the sincere individual from one station to the next. This natural tendency toward awakening sets the compass points of the intentional body’s sense of direction: the path is wide and straight and level for those who mirror within themselves the sacred marriage of Spirit and Nature. Shedding the conventional domestication of human nature, such spirit warriors focus their intention on extinguishing the self-defeating habits of thought, emotion and memory that would chain them to a lifetime of trivialization.
This mirroring within the microcosm of the macrocosm is inevitable because the very substance of human perceptions is made of the same substance making up all other phenomena in the universe. It is in this sense that it has been said of old, There is no inside and outside. What we are perceiving with is the same substance as what we are perceiving. They have the same intrinsic pattern, the same essential makeup. This is what makes it possible for us to see mountains and rivers where there are, in reality, only subatomic particles: our senses have the same-sized holes between things as the substance making up this mesocosm within which our bodies exist. The ocean of generative energy (qi), in other words, gives form to everything in the universe, including our senses. It is for this reason that the eight trigrams are said to be senses: they establish the bridge between our perceptions and the world of phenomena because they embody the archetypal pattern of order and chance making up both.
As manifestations of generative energy, each of the trigrams contains its own specific allotment of qi. When pictured in their archetypal relationships of opposite-complements, the trigrams are considered to be suspended in their timeless realm, prior to actually manifesting phenomena in the timebound realm
walking purposefully towards the corner another approaching too around the bend we are destined to meet and then at last suddenly…. a haiku! in all its morning glory…
2023-05-17 #1
Meanwhile, Back in the Real World…
Watching a squirrel squirreting away on a nut with his mini hands with their mini fingernails sometimes pausing to chew or preen his mini beard or mini moustache his round black eye beady and bright and then he looks up into my gaze my eyeballs and cocks his head as if to say: ‘whats up?’ ‘just lookin’’ ‘hmm…. who’s lookin’ at whom, I wonder?’ ‘The One looking at the Many through the eyes of squirrel and man.’ ‘fair enough’ And he turns back to his squirreting business.
Whether a haiku bumping into itself around the corner of the next moment which is always this moment or a squirrel and man sharing that same ever-present moment again eyeball to eyeball everything always is the One experiencing itself through the Many. We are the Many. We are the One. One of the primary characteristics of the One, along with its only having form via the forms of the Many which it is forever spontaneously spawning, is Presence… some combination of awareness with luminosity with intelligence with spaciousness with aliveness. We all feel it, but we don’t all pay attention or feel what we are feeling.
Though quite a different life form than our own, a plant lives in a universe saturated with all these same vibrant, living qualities. Often we become distracted by the running internal commentary of monkey mind But the Presence of the One is always there always always always is the true reality in which we live all the time every moment every place waking or sleeping not some dead ‘objective’ space filled with mechanical physical bio-machines imagined by the those in the worldwide cult of materialist scientism and bewitched by ‘modernization equals progress’ spells.
There is more in this world, Horatio, than dreamt of in your little philosophy, said The Bard. And so to dream….
Am greatly enjoying dipping into the works of William Douglas Horden, an I Ching master of the Sudden Enlightenment School and someone also adopted into a shamanic lineage in Northern Mexico. He has a page with most of his many books on Amazon.com and also a website. I shall say no more except to add that over a period of many decades, following the instructions of his master, he has composed an entirely new sequence of hexagrams along with original commentary, each Hexagram accompanied by a shamanic style painting. It is the first new sequence published in thousands of years. It is a masterpiece called The Toltec I Ching. So now I have my core reading for the next year laid in: Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, and many of William Horden’s books revealing many hidden aspects of the Yi. His book on I Ching Mathematics, for example, which clarifies much of the theory that Leibnitz also used to develop advanced mathematics (though he got a couple of key aspects wrong due to translation errors). Mind blowing stuff. Anyway…
As I was studying it, an Event happened described in the attached document. To which I added a technique in Horden’s Mathematics book which I shall very briefly describe. Each broken line in a Hexagram has a point value. Solid lines are 0. So the hexagram which has six solid lines is worth 0. The top broken line is worth 1, the second line down is worth double that = 2; the third line down = 4; the fourth line down = 8; the fifth line down = 16; the sixth line down and last = 32. Quite simple. You can go through each hexagram and give them a number and each hexagram has it own unique number because each is different. This means, for example, that when I do a normal cast getting a Primary with one or more changing lines which result in a Derived hexagram, each of those two hexagrams has a number value. And Horden’s method (this is one of many) is: by adding together the Primary and Derived you get an earlier hexagram which represents Influence from the Past which has led to the Present, here represented by the Primary Hexagram. And if you take the difference between the Primary and Derived, that is regarded as Future Influence indicating the process involved between the Primary and the Derived. In his method the Nuclear doesn’t figure but I have kept it because I like it very much (and also pay attention to the nuclear of the nuclear or more – all 64 hexagrams end up originating from one of four hexagrams (1,2,63,64) so I like to know which family the Primary and Derived are in. (Don’t ask me why!)
So the first ever time I used this method was for this Dragonfly Event. That requires using some of the Plum Blossom method from Jou Tsung Wa which is to choose the upper trigram based on some characteristic of the event – in this case I chose Heaven because dragons are the animal spirit of the Heaven trigram, easy. And then you use the direction of the event to determine the lower hexagram, in this case 10:30 = Wind. That makes Hexagram #44. There were two ways I used to determine the changing line. One is from the event itself, namely that he had four lovely wings which the dragonfly showed me many times after he had stationed himself about a yard away from me on a wire leading from the nearby printer table. And the other way is a mathematical formula in the official Plum Blossom method adding up the year, month, day and hour and dividing that total by six and then any remainder is the changing line number with no remainder equaling the sixth line. In this case both methods gave me the same Changing Line 4. So that made Hexagram #44 changing to Hexagram #57 Double Wind with Nuclear #1 (message from Heaven!). Hexagram 44 has the binary number of 32 whilst Hexagram #57 has the binary number of 36. Adding them together yields the number 68 which is 5 over the maximum 63 so that is binary 5 which makes Hexagram #5 (the only time this happens I think that those numbers are the same). The difference between 32 to 36 is Binary 4 making Hexagram #9. Simple. The reading is attached below.
He also has nifty ways of calculating the lower and upper trigrams from the binary number. Let us say we have Hexagram #57 The Gentle ䷸. This has a broken line in the 6th and 3rd place worth 32 and 4 respectively totaling 36. To determine the trigram we divide by 8 = 4 for the lower trigram + the remainder – in this case 4 again – for the upper trigram. Each trigram is worth a number using the same binary system: so the top line broken is 1 (solid = 0); the second line is 2 (or 0); the third line is 4 (or 0). This gives you eight numbers from 0 to 7: 0 = Heaven (3 yang lines each worth 0), then Lake ☱ is worth 1, Fire ☲ 2, Thunder ☳ 3, Wind ☴ 4, Water ☵ 5, Mountain ☶ 6, Earth ☷ 7. So the lower Trigram 4 = Wind (the third line down = 4 points); and the remainder 4 from the calculation above also = Wind giving us Wind above Wind below which is Hexagram #57 Double Wind, The Gentle. Horden has lots of neat things with doubling and multiplying that end up revealing fascinating sequences with the Hexagrams showing relationships I had never considered and probably would never have noticed. A veritable treasure. Can’t recommend this work highly enough; have no doubt will be spending years slowly absorbing it. In the next post I will show how to form an intention and then create a Hexagram-per-month calendar to guide you through to realizing that intention. Also easy and really cool.
Dragonfly enters like delicate, lovely butterfly swarm from direction 10:30
Gua 44
This gua is the inverse of the preceding gua, Eliminating. Eliminating means to separate; encountering is to meet. After separation people meet again; after meeting again, people separate. That is human life. Eliminating and Encountering mutually complement each other. Wilhelm translates Gou as Coming to Meet. Blofeld translates it as Contact (or Sexual Intercourse, Meeting). Here, following the suggestion of the commentary, the term Encountering is used. The ideograph of Gou is simple. It is composed of a woman and a queen. On the left is a buxom maiden. On the right side is the ideograph hou, a queen. Because a queen always follows the king, hou also means behind. The queen is standing upright and bowing. Underneath her bending body is an open mouth, kou, and above the mouth a horizontal stroke indicating the number one. This one person that the queen is encountering is the king. They meet and come together. The queen greets the king with respect and her best wishes. The structure of the gua is Heaven above, Wind below. The wind blows everywhere under Heaven, encountering every being. It should be an auspicious gua. However, there is only one yielding line beneath five solid lines, symbolizing that the yin element is advancing and approaching the yang elements. When King Wen saw this happening, he heightened his vigilance. He realized that an unworthy person was worming his way into favor at the court. The growing negative influences would displace good people one after another. Darkness and difficulties had been eliminated, but their negative influences had not totally faded. These influences were permeating different areas. One must beware of this tendency and take prompt precautions against possible misfortune. Thus King Wen’s Decision and the Duke of Zhou’s Yao Text are full of warnings. But Confucius’s commentaries still shed light on the positive side. This gua is one of the twelve tidal gua. It represents the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar.
My reading for the Dragonfly event resists the somewhat ominous warnings in #44 because the event itself was one of gentle, sacred wonder so I kept the Reading in line with that very strong feeling. One of the feelings running through the Reading is ‘One and Many’ which has to do with the fact – too often ignored but there nonetheless – that we are all part of the same One and all the many different particulars are what the One is made of, the One is not something else so We the Many are the One which means that every which we we meet on the path, including random rocks and ornery thistles, are part of the One as well. As was this Emissary of the One, a gorgeous black and white dragonfly – the picture above really doesn’t do justice at all to how exquisite he looked in real life. But the reason I thought he was four small butterflies is, as you can see in the photo above, most of the wings are transparent and only the tips are black, so I thought he was four butterflies flying in formation which seemed incredible until he alighted on a cable near me and I could recognize him as a Dragonfly Emissary from the One – which of course ended up being his Nuclear Hexagram as is only right and proper.
But as I was writing out the Reading for it a huge hailstorm happened which killed animals in the field a few miles away. The power for our house and two other neighbours went down. Only us. (A falling branch on our lines.) So I regard that event as both a personal as well as a general one. The message also included 44 but was much more negative and my wife and I have taken heed and changed some of our plans for the year accordingly. Nothing major, but a shift in emphasis and timing which we had been skirting around for a while but have now shifted more decisively into. (It was 33 > 12 < Nuclear 44. The past influence was Exhaustion 47 and the Future Influence was the somewhat encouraging #10 Treading the Tail of the Tiger. The message to us seems to be that things are going to get a little hairy in the larger world and it is time to emphasize local community. I have been invited to be the lead dancer with the bride in a wedding in the village next to where we are building a house which my wife informs me is a significant thing, so we are beginning a new chapter in any case. But the Yi Cast indicated – at least to me – that there is a little more urgency in the mix due to the wider world perhaps getting more unpleasant (involving Retreat when leadership becomes corrupt so good people retire from public view, and Standstill which is when leadership and common people drift further apart.) And the area where the animals died from the hail was further up in the hill country a bit higher up than where we are soon – hopefully – moving so that accentuated the feeling I got that this was a message partly for us (the power failure which only affected a tiny group) and our relations / future life further up in the hills to where we will soon be executing a #33 Retreat maneuver!
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