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Ok so what the fuck is an I Ching?
Replies: >>4
Was this supposed to be a joke?
No one is laughing.
Replies: >>4
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>>2 (OP) 
Its a Chinese philosophical divination system, the Book of Changes , that has been in use since the 8th century BC. The only one to survive their burnings of philosophical works in the 3rd century BC. Generally the practice will use dried yarrow stalks or coins with square holes punched in them. Though coins seem more appealing to me, since I can't be asked to keep 50 stalks on hand. Its assembled from a series of either broken or unbroken lines providing 64 possible hexagrams from the combination of two of the eight trigrams. Li Kun Xun Quian Kan Zhen Ghen and Dui staring from the top and going clockwise in pic related. Representing Fire Earth Wind Breath Water Thunderbolt Mountain and River read in that same order as before. Each broken and unbroken line itself represent the negative and positive respectively. Ofcourse these lines can have the property of changing or not as well.

flipping 6 sets of 3 coins will determine the hexagram, one line at a time from the bottom up. 

where x represents tails and o represents heads

xxx   - -   Changing Yin
xxo   —   Yang
xoo   - -   Yin
ooo   —   Changing Yang

hope this helps

>>3
I try to always be laughing.
Replies: >>5 >>6 >>7 >>38
The_I_Ching_or_Book_of_Changes_(Richard_(translator)_Baynes,_Cary_F._Wilhem)_(z-lib.org).pdf
(8.7MB)
>>4
Might also be worth mentioning that all three coins are flipped at once. This is accomplished by cupping all three in your hands then tossing them into the air.

Unicode Hexagram

01 ䷀	02 ䷁	03 ䷂	04 ䷃	05 ䷄	06 ䷅	07 ䷆	08 ䷇	
09 ䷈	10 ䷉	11 ䷊	12 ䷋	13 ䷌	14 ䷍	15 ䷎	16 ䷏
17 ䷐	18 ䷑	19 ䷒	20 ䷓	21 ䷔	22 ䷕	23 ䷖	24 ䷗	
25 ䷘	26 ䷙	27 ䷚	28 ䷛	29 ䷜	30 ䷝	31 ䷞	32 ䷟
33 ䷠	34 ䷡	35 ䷢	36 ䷣	37 ䷤	38 ䷥	39 ䷦	40 ䷧	
41 ䷨	42 ䷩	43 ䷪	44 ䷫	45 ䷬	46 ䷭	47 ䷮	48 ䷯
49 ䷰	50 ䷱	51 ䷲	52 ䷳	53 ䷴	54 ䷵	55 ䷶	56 ䷷	
57 ䷸	58 ䷹	59 ䷺	60 ䷻	61 ䷼	62 ䷽	63 ䷾	64 ䷿

Hexagram Names

01䷀Qián The Creative           17䷐Sui Following            33䷠Tun Retreat               49䷰Ko Molting/Revolution

02䷁K'un The Receptive          18䷑Ku Decay                 34䷡Da Zhuang Great Power     50䷱Ting Cauldron

03䷂Chun Difficult Beginnings   19䷒Lin Approach             35䷢Chin Progress             51䷲Zhen Shocking

04䷃Meng Youthful Folly         20䷓Kuan Contemplation       36䷣Ming Yi Brightness Hiding 52䷳Ken Keeping Still

05䷄Hsu Nourished While Waiting 21䷔Shi Ho Biting Through    37䷤Chia Jen Family           53䷴Ji’an Development

06䷅Sung Conflict               22䷕Bi Grace                 38䷥K’uei Opposition          54䷵Kui Mei Propriety

07䷆Shih Army                   23䷖Po Split Apart           39䷦Jian Obstruction          55䷶Feng Abundance

08䷇Pi Uniting                  24䷗Fu Return                40䷧Jie Liberation            56䷷Lu The Wanderer

09䷈Hsiao Ch'u Small Restraint  25䷘Wu Wang Innocence        41䷨Sun Decrease              57䷸Xun Penetration

10䷉Lǚ Treading                 26䷙Ta Ch’u Controlled Power 42䷩Yi Increase               58䷹Tui Joy

11䷊T'ai Peace                  27䷚Yi Nourishing Vision     43䷪Guai Determination        59䷺Huan Dispersion

12䷋P'i Standstill              28䷛Ta Kuo Critical Mass     44䷫Gou Coming to Meet        60䷻Jie Limitation

13䷌T'ung Jen Fellowship        29䷜Kǎn Abyss                45䷬Cui Gathering Together    61䷼Zhong Fu Inner Truth

14䷍Ta Yu Great Possessing      30䷝Li Clarity               46䷭Sheng Pushing Upward      62䷽Xiao Guo Small Exceeding

15䷎Qian Authenticity           31䷞Hsien Influence/Wooing   47䷮Kùn Oppression/Exhaustion 63䷾Chi Chi After Completion

16䷏Yu Enthusiasm               32䷟Heng Duration            48䷯Jing The Well             64䷿Wei Chi Before Completion
Replies: >>6 >>38
>>4
>>5
Oh wow thanks anon. I wasn't really expecting this to get a reply after this long, so I'm glad I checked back. Guess I'm just not used to boards that are this slow?

These are kinda helpful, there's a lot of general information you've posted here. I'm not sure I really understand how to use the system from what you posted though. What do the changing lines mean? Like why would that distinction be made if you're just going to end up with the same hexagram either way?
I'm also confused as to what would the point of doing the reading with sticks be?

Additionally I think the attachment is broken, it won't download for me.
Replies: >>7 >>8
>>6
well changing lines are where things start to get really complicated, so ill try to keep it as simple as possible

you don't always get changing lines in a hexagram, but when you do you end up with two hexagrams where yin/yang lines go from segmented to solid or vice versa. it might be easier to understand them as old vs new lines rather than changing and unchanging. you see how the ☯ is central in >>4 image? that's because the ideas behind the Tai Ji are key to understanding not only why these lines change, but the system as a whole. the black and white halves represent yin and yang respectively, and each carries the seeds of the other within it. the way the split is drawn evokes the idea of a rotation because the change between these two is cyclical. when each is at the height of maturity it is entering into the other. when yin is old it becomes yang. when yang is old it becomes yin. here again the seeds of the other are at the entrance into that other represent the non opposition of the duality. duality as definition. it therefore follows that the xxx old yin line would change to yang and the ooo old yang line would follow suit. additionally x would be traditionally represented as 2 and o as 3. this because Tao is one (unity) two is yin which leads to three yang (together duality), that together form all things (trigrams hexagrams etc). Tai Ji again coming into play, representing the original one, as its whole, giving rise to duality, yin and yang.

all this means a total value of coins tossed will be either: 
6 old yin 
7 young yang 
8 young yin 
9 old yang

FOR EXAMPLE

(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 8
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 9
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 7
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 7
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 6
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 8
Replies: >>8 >>9
>>7
looks like we got two changing lines, so we have two hexagrams. primary & potential 
old yin on line 2 and old yang on line 5 (a symmetrical change very fun) 
from ䷞ mountain below & river above to ䷟ wind below & thunderbolt above 
hexagram 31 Hsien Influence/Wooing to hexagram 32 Heng Duration

starting from the bottom: 867798 ䷞ 🠺 ䷟

6 young yin - - remains broken - -
5 old yang -o- becomes broken - -
4 young yang _ remains solid  _
3 young yang _ remains solid _
2 old yin -x- becomes solid _
1 young yin - - remains broken - -

31 ䷞ 🠺 ䷟ 32
we didn't ask a question so i'll just focus on bare bones method without bothering to interpret anything. 
above we have hexagram 31 which is our primary and 32 which is our potential
lines 2 and 5 change, so they are the lines we consult from the potential hexagram. 
we wont bother with the lines of the primary but concern ourselves with its over all archetype of both hexagrams.

䷞
archetype
influence / wooing / tension / conjunction
attraction and influence between two complementary parts of a whole

䷟
archetype
duration / continuity / persevering
long term commitment, steady determination and persistence

changing lines
2 keeps the golden mean/
5 clings to continuity/

>>6
as for why someone would want to use the yarrow stick method, and without getting into how its performed, i can think of 3 large differences

1. time
this method takes more time, but that's purely a benefit as long you have it. the hexagram comes gains definition one line at a time across two trigrams. this divination happens as a meditative exercise (this is a reason I didn't bother asking a question with our instant roll example), so with sticks you'll have more time to ponder your question as you see yins, yangs and changes pile up and give the answer shape. this ought to lead to greater insight, especially since i don't see anyone using this method on a question that isn't especially important to them. 

2. probability
with coins all outcomes have an equal chance, with yarrow sticks value 9 is thrice as likely as 6. if you see yang as more likely to transform than yin this would be your method.

3. tradition
this is the original method for the divination. maybe this makes it more meaningful to you.

hope the mods notice that pdf upload isn't working and fix it. would be really nice to be able to share those on here.
Replies: >>9
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>>8
>>7
I guess that answers what I asked, but I do think its a bit of a cop-out that you wouldn't even try to interpret your reading...
Replies: >>16 >>17
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>>9
alright bitch.
watch me interpret this

(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 7
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 9
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 7
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 9
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 6
(##3d2+3) Rolled 3 dice with 2 sides and modifier +3 = 7
Replies: >>17
>>9
>>16
 changes on 2 3 and 5
Society/Concording People ䷌ -> ䷥ Neutrality/Polarizing

䷌ Society/Concording People
A social structure does not oppress you, you are in the second stage of a time cycle. Respect your superiors as they seek balance. Consider reading the Bhagavad-Gita 

Traditional reading of changing lines
2 You're a bit of a prick. You've been rude to more people than you ought to of and only some people in your incautious group are going to accept you. regrettable

3 You're an untrusting doofus who hides blades in the tall grass. your hesitancy causes friction and means you will not be accepted for a long time. this is a you problem, they've clearly shown their colours and are both tight knit loyal among themselves and as well as joined around a common cause

5 For whatever reason you don't have much of a choice in joining them. and while you are a brat about submission to norms you will be happy about having done so when all is said and done.

䷥ Neutrality/Polarizing
We are all a mix of two forces. You exist as a polar opposite in the situation but not in an actively antagonistic way. You are at a stalemate with yourself and could be blown in either direction. Rational judgement for small matters, but poor investment in those that require ethical conviction. Not traitorous, but without motivation to take sides. A good position to manage disputes and contemplate duality such as good and evil.




∧_∧
( ・ω・)
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>>4
>>5

As traditionally told, the Yi Jing takes its development through a progression of three legendary sages. Fu Xi, King When, and Confucius. ...figures belonging to a liminal space between myth and history.⁰ Fu Xi is the first Emperor of China [2952-2838] whose existence is perhaps entirely fictional sometimes depicted with the image of a human head on the body of a serpent. Fyu Xi is credited with the creation of the eight trigrams and their original arrangement early heaven. Alternatively titled Bao Xi, taken to mean ...Hunter,tamer of animals, & cook.¹ Reminisced as ruler of the world, the first creator of culture; the trigrams appeared to him in his examination of the natural world, its patterns close and far, in an attempt to connect with the Dao and classify the “Myriad of beings”.

King When, who lived during the warring states period, is supposedly responsible for the development of those eight into the system of sixty four though some sources still credit this to Fu Xi during a meditation sustained the length of seven years; the focus of which was on the great “care & sorrow” of conditions at that time and how to re-align them under the divine Dao. In this dungeon, with this motivation, he became the pattern King. Pairing every hexagram, and amending them, and each line, with a text found in the Tuan Zhuan Which constitute the first two wings of the Yi Jing and established him as the book’s principle author. That When’s imprisonment came at the hands of the tyrant Di Xin who ..Tortured the beings.²  means it is not surprising that it is under his dynasty, the Zhang, that the Yi came into use. Ancestrally titled changes of the Zhou, bearing his name. A book whose use may have been many’s only recourse in this time of turmoil. Which saw feudal lords acting independently and warring with each other over local lands while the Emperor functioned only as a figure head. A time of great yi where out of a hundread soldiers who advanced, only one would return….³  The Huni nan Zi says…the tortoise had holes bored in its shell until it had no undershell left & the divining stalks were cast day after day’ 

After this upheaval and violence the use of the oracle began to be flavoured much more seriously with concerns of the ethical variety. This moral approach to encountering Yi is attributed to the Confucian school of thought. Tradition credits Confucius with all essential commentaries on the Yi likely falsely. That is aligning the first eight wings of the text and establishing all five classics as near religious doctrine. It is far less disputable that his influence deemphasised the orracular aspects of the text. Instead posing it as a model of the cosmos to be pondered and examined, the wisdom of the ancients. An attitude which would be fully adopted under the Han (206 BC - 220 AD). And while “this illustrious genealogy had considerable cultural and political relevance”⁵  unifying diverse people across the empire under confucius thought, being scarcely questioned for over two thousand years, the simple progression of lines to orracular hexagrams is unlikely. Rather than the progression outlined in I Ching: a new interpretation for modern times where hexagrams progress from a divinatory yes/no of the broken and unbroken yin and yang lines to a yes but/no but possibility with two lines, into the complexity of the trigrams; a more likely origin exists in an assemblage of practices drawn from beginnings in paleolithic pyromancy.

The oracular tradition then has a divergent origin from that which is traditionally proposed. And while even the philosophical tradition of Confucian thought maintains a view point different than the causal perspective of western thinking, and here it is described here by Josheph Needham

The key-word in Chinese thought is order and above all pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the first time organism). The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one Colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever -moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made it inevitable for them…. They were thus parts in the existential dependence upon the whole world0organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance.⁶ 

 Often coined correlative and brought to a cannon standardization under the Han in the meeting of white tiger hall (79 A.D.) it culled many of the aspects from which it had originated.

Pyromancy as mentioned previously, in this context designates divination by fire. Initially a mere ...accessory quest…⁷  by which the bones of the victims sacrificed by fire were examined in order to evaluate whether or not the gods had accepted the offering, it eventually shifted to a state where the bones to be examined were the main event, and the sacrifice was an insignificant means to that end. This human concern for the future left an almost daily archive of recorded history. A testament of effort to the fact that the influence of divination on Anchient Chinese thinking cannot be overstated.

The Yi jing is the premiere divination manual to emerge from countless others and centuries of devotion to the refinement of these techniques. An incremental progression with divergence from a concern with the will of a higher power to that of a belief in a kind of “cosmic dynamism” marked, in quite a literal way, by preparing bones for the fire to attain clearer patterns of cracking, the progress tracing an emergent immanent “divinitory rationalism” A process, crudely simplified, as a progression through 3 stages; 1. Bone divination 2. Tortoise divination 3. Yarrow stick divination, as presented by Leon Vandermeersch

As far as the Yi is concerned, the essential problem historians are confronted with is how this vast collection of disparate statements regarding specific times and circumstances evolved into a well organised book,...⁸ 

Scapulomancy is pulled from the flames only to be subjected to the precision of heated rods prodding pre planned etchings entrenched on the bones of bovine skeletal plates, scratching the further visions they scried from this processional trance; the image of transformation, ocular statements, elucidated in pyromantic pattern. From this fell a reservoir of information 160,000 pieces broad with 4,500 words deep with less than half deciphered⁹

And in  the appropriately appropriated cosmological progression the shell of the tortoise is stolen,...a powerful… symbol,... its round back representing the cosmological vault, … square ventral shell, the earth; and the soft flesh of the animal, the human world between…¹⁰

A mirrored intent, single events of divination reflected the larger frame, Transformation of ocular formulae acquire a life of their own ...increasingly independent from the circumstances of the original consultation.¹¹  distilled and birthed from the archives, divitory manuals of typology, yi spills from shells onto pages until to do so is jing.

...Chinese thought works according to a logic of correspondences. The history of divination is an admirable illustration of how logic works…¹²

The yarrow sticks follow an introduction of a standardized system of numeracy. Marks placed to induce localized cracking leads to numerical designations of type. Fire recedes as number advances and randomness is used to make selection. Numerically divided as even and odd, Yin and Yang take shape as the broken and unbroken lines, a reduction to six and the hexagram is decided.

The Quin dynasty ends and the Han begins, with it proceeds the advance of Confuscian thought as a key to unification. The meeting of white tiger hall set in place all 10 wings of the yi and canonized the books which comprised all learning under their public exam system.

As the first of the classics, it was no longer just a book of divination: it was a tool for structural thought in all fields, a standard reference for any theory claiming authority. Its influence extended into Philosophy, ethics, politics, medicine, aesthetics; and, since the openness of its texts allowed many different interpretations, the concise and cryptic ocular core of the book became enveloped in a body of scholarly commentaries.

This, however, still leaves the discussion of the Mawandui manuscript. Located in a Han tomb, dated around 168 B.C., were discovered both an alternate version of the Yi Jing and the Lao Zi (Tao Te Ching). This version of the Yi differs in a few important aspects, the first is a re-naming of 38 of the 64 trigrams (though the associated texts are quite similar) Next that it only contains the first two wings¹³ and an assemblage of lost texts. Though most importantly a difference in the ordering of the hexagrams is present. In this version the upper trigram is fixed and the lower follows a regular rotation in variance. This ordering seems “to be tailored to the needs of yarrow stalk consultation.” which Wang Donglang suggests is a clear indication that it had a primary use for divination and not philosophical pondery in this period. This of course gives credence to the idea of Lai Zhi De, that in the shift to the philosophical position they had lost sight of the true soul of the book. Obscuring the origins and process from which it had sprung, where, it can reproduce the natural order of things because it has been generated spontaneously like natural phenomena the sages did not apply their minds to set it forth.

universal compass
pictured

Based on the philosophical tradition the universal compass assigns everything under heaven a specific place in interrelated cycles of correlation.
Cycle of five transformative movements
Cycle of Yin & Yang
The four seasons
The four directions
The eight trigrams
The codification developed in the White tiger hall gatherings of 79A.D. combine these 5 cycles; one of base five with four of base two. This reconciliation of five with two is accomplished by giving a privileged place to the earthly movement, aligning it with the Yin & yang hemicycles, the Pivot of Equalization’

The center of the later heaven diagram corresponds to the axis of heaven and earth, the boundary of Yin and yang cycles *where the earth movement is counted an additional time as the pivot of equalization as a fifth point on the 4 axi of the compass to align the 5 movements with the other base 2 cycles. Although other priviligings are possible the earth is common as a beginning of a cycle between winter and spring.


the five transformative movements

The elements here should be read as natures of transformation rather than substances. Those natures are made more sensible when interlocked with the other four cycles.

Wood movement
Beginning of a cycle, East and its sunrise, spring, germination

Fiery movement
Use of what has grown, fuel, combustion of wood and transformation to ashes
Following commitment and change
Summer south and noon

Earthly movement (soil and Ash)
([privileged] Pivot of equalization) Transition of yin to yang and vice versa
Support for all other movements
Bringing forth it is both sowing and the harvest

Metallic movement
Extraction of minerals from the earth embodied in Yin as giving them form
Crystallization, cast metal, Autumn, west, sunset

Streaming Movement
The melt of solid into fluid, an emphasis on water 
Stimulation of the soil and renewal that is the “pivot of equalization”
Winter North Midnight

Cycle of Yin & Yang

The basis of the system of creation and correlation which ties all cycles together. Yin 2 & yang 3 mark the system of differentiation that exists in the initial one. All of which is laid out in the symbolism of the Tai Ji. Interlocked and ever present they represent process rather than quality, western conceptions of masculine and feminine are always inadequate and no thing is inherently yin or yang. If yang is conceived of as active, and yin felt to be passive the point is missed. Similarly so when yang is seen to create and yin thought to receive. Yang is action and yin is its form, as process, as interplay; complementary & dynamic. Here creation in resonance together, correlation as strings and bells of frequency activate each other

A passage twice for clarity ¹⁴


                           #1 Taoing¹⁵

The way you can go                       If the Tao can be described it is not the general Tao
Isn't the real way.
The name you can say,                      If a name can be defined it is not a general name
Isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth                               The invisible is the origin of the universe
Begin in the unnamed:
Name’s the mother                                  The visible the mother of all things
Of ten thousand things

So the unwanting soul               By constantly thinking the invisible we understand the universe
Sees whats hidden,
&the everwanting soul          By constantly observing the visible we can see how the natural laws work
Sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,                      Thinking and observing are two different things
But different in name
Whose identity is mystery                       Yet they serve the same goal: to theorize
Mystery of all mysteries!
And the door to the hidden                  Theorizing and evolving these theories is the gate to marvels



       Yin            Yang
      water           fire
      moon            sun
      dark            bright
     moist             dry
     soft             hard
     hidden          manifest
     static          dynamic
     lower            upper
     inner           outer
     incomming      outgoing
     contracting    expanding
     inertia        activity
     completion     beginning
     form            energy
    structure        movement
    being             doing
    waiting         initating
    response        stimulus


Perhaps the cycle of Night and Day elucidates the “pivot of equalization”. As night advances Day recedes and is as true on the other side. They reach their peaks at midnight/midday and plant the seed of that recession. Birth of day by night and night by day. Each hemicycle starts at the pivot, advances through wholeness, full expression, and reaches the extreme/disclosing phase breaking out and beginning its decline and rebirth.


Yearly cycle and 4 directions

The four seasons correspond to the four basic divinatory terms in the Yi Jing. Spring/spring growth/summer harvesting/autumn trial/winter

Spring Est sunrise: Beginning source originating power emergence

Growing/summer south noon: Living success maturity completion

Harvesting/Autumn west sunset: Benefit, nourishment, power from the harvest, reap & gather

Trial/winter North Midnight: Test and ordeal, Survival vs perish, persist or decay. It is the essence of divination

The eight Trigrams and their attributesThe supreme [manifests] in the shake by emerging, in the root by matching, in radiance by reciprocal viewing, in space by involving service, in the open by stimulating words, in energy by struggling, in the gorge by toiling, in the bound by accomplishing words.
-Shuo Gua¹⁶ 


                ☰         ☱             ☲            ☳          ☴           ☵           ☶        ☷
              energy     open        radiance       shake         root        gorge       bound     space

symbol       heaven    marsh/mist    fire/sun      thunder     wind/wood   water/deep    mountain   earth
 
action       persist   stimulate    congregate     stir-up       enter   fall/venture     stop      yeild

animal       horse      sheep         bird         dragon        cat         pig          dog        cow

anitomical   head       mouth          eye          foot        thighs       ear          hand    solar plexus

element      metal      flesh         fire          grass        air         wood        stone      soil

color        purple      blue         yellow        orange      white        red         green      black

direction    NW           W             S             E           SE           N          NE         SW

Attributes:inspiration happiness  enlightenment   impulsive     subtle      danger      inertia    faithful
             power      pleasure     clarity    provocative    fragment     labor      perfection submissive
         agressiveness   magic       warmpth    experimental    formal     flexibile   inevitable  charity
          completeness destruction  community    vehemance      purity     melancholy    modest   protective
            coldness   sensuality  communication influence     transitory  pervasive    careful     even

Two main compasses exist as an organization of the trigrams. Primordial heaven as an arrangement of axial opposites representing a before to the human world. Attributed to Fu Xi. The other Later Heaven discussed here attributed to King When which maps the world of cycles after humanity. We begin with shake and end with bound. Directions and seasons are at angles rather than vertices. The yin yang hemicycles and pivot of equalization are on the horizontal, notable inbetween.

☳ Shake: First emergence of yang from below, winter recedes, seeds entombed in the earth germinate and emerge
Spring east sunrise woody movement

☴ Root: Wholeness of yang in fully developed woody movement
Matching coupling multiplying

☲ Radiance: Extreme of yang in the Fiery movement, light which grants sight
Summer south noon

☷ Space: Southwest pivot of equalization
Earthly movement service in agricultural work

☱ Open: Yin hemicycle begins, harvest and stimulating words
Fist phase of the metallic movement
Autumn west and sunset

☰ Energy: wholeness of yin, most highly defined structure, dissolution begins
Struggle between tendencies

☵ Gorge: Extreme yin, dissolution prevails
Darkness and trial begin as cycle nears its end
Winter north midnight streaming movement

☶ Bound: Northeast pole of pivot and end of cycle
Winter suspension between rebirth and death.
Accomplishing words articulate what ends and the new beginning
Replies: >>39 >>40
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>>38

⁰p.33 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
¹P.34 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
²p.36 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
³p.42(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁴p.42(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁵P.33 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁶p.52(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁷P.37 e(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁸p37(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
⁹P.37 wang donglang (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
¹⁰P.38 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
¹¹p38(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
¹²p.41(Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
¹³ Credited to king Wen
¹⁴P.3 (Le Guin 2019) P.1 (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004)
¹⁵This section is chosen because, as the beginning, it contains the book and the philosophy in its entirety. Emphasizing the specificity paired, or multiplied, ambiguities have to gesture at something exact, movements brought home precisely in their resistance to that capture. An Aleph which when seen rightly contains everything.

Each version presented rests in a cause unlike the other, but both expounded on in their writers forewords, and so thematically resonant, appropriately evoked in their interpretations of the first passage further emphasize the comparison.

‘’Reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward.”(p.35 (Le Guin 2019))

The Zhang’s translation finds itself in a tradition of justifying the new translation and Leguin’s rendition does just this though she doesnt pay the element attention. Her reasoning restated along the following lines; a beauty exists in the Tao Te Ching that fails to be rendered in the versions she has read. Its poetics masked by an emphasis on meaning and knowing even in those versions most prized, loved, and inspirational to her. To this end it is written, an intentionally intense pattern forms its content, its beauty, which is the inseparable meaning of her poetics. Juxtaposed to this the Zhang’s find meaning lost in the poetry of previous attempts in translation. Their concern is ironically a clarity they feel poetry cannot provide. Their end is exacting and couched in the difficulty of the task they have set for themselves, to present the book in the plainest English possible. An attempted untenability, for the Dao escapes plainess even, if not especially, in Chinese. This because the nature Lau Tzu highlights lies in an interest beyond. Beyond, which will necessarily open onto the reader’s interpretation. Though even before this a loss exists in the transcription. A book nearly 2,500 years old, hand copied, accumulating corruption in mistype, exacerbated by the fact there was no standardization of chinese characters before the Qin dynasty 200 BC, and lacked a system of punctuation before the 19th century. Further, Chinese is a far more figurative ;) language than English, which would be flattened with literal translation. 

“... we have put an emphasis conveying meaning rather than seeking english equivalent or the artistically poetic translation.” (xii (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004))

A choice then has to be made in how these elements will be presented in an English interpretation. Sam Reiler chooses a modern iteration which takes license to remove aspects he believes too archaic. Aspects that lend themselves exclusively to concerns of mandarin leaders, concerns which would be lost on a general user. “‘He should be a guest at court’ ‘Assert the right by force of Arms’ what do these admonitions have to do with the peaceful pothead in the woods of vermont, the lovestruck Bennington Sophmore, ot the small business man caught in the grip of political vice? Nothing’” p.7 (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004; Reifler 1974) Rather it is his stance that “In interpreting the I Ching a new I have not changed the meanings of the hexagrams, but have changed the language of the interpretations so that they speak to you and me, in terms we understand, in consideration of the realities (so to speak) of our present situation in history.” p.7 (Reifler 1974) A hope to lay a path for readers to access the Tao, their way which is ever present. A repeated reemphasis of the goal that brought into existence both the I Ching and Tao Te Ching. A goal of clarity as interpretation, as Divination.

A graduate of Columbia university and student of eastern philosophy, Mr. Reifler says of the Tao “It is the gateway through which we are constantly passing. We are never before the gate nor beyond it. Nothing exists except there, at the moment, in the gateway”. p.3(Reifler 1974) “Hesitation, anxiety, dissatisfaction are to the Taoist what Sin is to the christian. To dispell them and clear the mind and heart the I Ching is devoutly and ceremoniously cast.” p.4 (Reifler 1974) It is here, in this hexagram, that the Taoist finds their direction. “Ideally, the meaning of the hexagram will have the feeling that it has been on the tip of your tongue the entire time.” p.5 (Reifler 1974) Each Hexagram offers a direction through reflection on the inquiry the caster posed. In Refliers interpretation the hexagrams are broken into 3 different sections, each offering a more specific meaning depending on the motive* of inquiry. Stealing terms from hindu mysticism: Artha, Kama, Moksha; pursuit of material, relationships, and the spiritual respectively. in this way produces a simplified means from which to interpret the hexagram(s) formed. A decision likely resting on his belief that “Strictly speaking - metaphysically- there are, ofcourse, an infinite number of Taos. (or if you wish only one Tao). But in order to reduce the concept to a realizable ritual experience it was necessary to divide the number of ways into a knowable finite number of prototypes. After a short history of trial and error sixty-four was found to be the most convenient number. … ways of being that covered the entire range of human experience” p.4-5(Reifler 1974) “This is the secret behind all magiucal systems. They attempt to encompass in themselves all possibilities; so that the vision of experience seen within the system will be as perfect a reflection as possible of all without” p.4 (Reifler 1974)

A notion construed with some confusion, as there are two distinct traditions with concern to the use of the Yi Jing I Ching. The philosophical and oracular. Where the first, and the reason why Bantam catalogues Reifliers rendition as a philosophical text, which reads the Yi Jing as a book of total and complete experience of everything under heaven, to be studied and examined containing all possible situations and their moral principles. The second, the orracular tradition, in which the Eranos translation is published as a book of “divination/Ancient Knowledge” by Watkins sees the oracle as something that “...acquire[s] a specific meaning only when they answer a specific question, in a concrete life situation.”(p.46 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)) Which runs counter to the strict reading based on “moral principle” in which the true soul of the book is lost.

At the height of the philosophical tradition, the social system was dominated by “... the scholar/sage, the learned man endowed with a refined moral sense whose natural field of action was in government service.”( p.45 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)) For example: when, in 530 BC, Nan-Kuai consults the oracle about a rebellion he is plotting he receives an auspicious indication towards his success, a shift in line five of hexagram 2 space “yellow apron, spring, significant” which his friend advises him not to believe on the grounds that if an act is not moral it can never receive an auspicious indication. This represents evolution in both application and interpretation of the text alongside the development of the idea of an “Ideal user” and “disciple of wisdom”. A pattern of thought against a revival of ocular tradition of thinking, and something Le Guin fands at fault in “Scholarly translations of the Tao Te Ching as a manual for rulers [which] use a vocabulary that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Taoist “sage”, his masculinity, his Authority… perpetuated and degraded, in most popular versions”⁰  (p.x (Le Guin 2019)) This is not the only affinity she shares with the orracular tradition in her rendition however.

In an attempt “... to preserve as much as possible the mirroring potency of the orracular language in english…”(p.19 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)) the Eranos translation deploys a strategy counter to that of the simplifying and modernizing efforts made by Reifler. Instead it takes a literal translation as the center* and deploys a field of meaning around each chosen literal. The words in this field represent the multitude of different associated interpretations available to a Chinese reader of the Yi Jing.

Similarly Leguins rendition is pulled from a field of meaning. “I do not know any chinese. I could approach this text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation.” it was her process to “... compare various interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could discover for myself that several english meanings might lead back to the same Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain an intuition of the gait and cadence, of the original necessary to my ear and conscience ifI was to reproduce it in English.” (p.99 (Le Guin 2019) 

As the original classic the Yi Jing was being adapted into the Confuscious attitude of philosophical study, the Tao Te Ching was supposedly being laboriously written on bamboo by Lau Tzu. (p.x (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004)) Le Guin's process of rendition then acquires a synchronistic level of appropriateness in its happenstanceially devised method which unknowingly preserved what Neo-Confuscional oppositionist Lai Zhi De sought to revive in his criticism of the philosophical approach so many hundreds of years after it took hold.

Further Le Guin makes an effort to add a decidedly non standard version of the text to her visionary field. The Ma Wung Tui texts, in this case translated by Robert G. Henricks, discovered along side a Yi jing with a decidedly pre palace divinatory slant, mans that while with regards to the Tao Te Ching “Nothing about it is certain except that it’s Chinese, and very old, and speaks to people today as if it was written yesterday” P.ix (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004; Le Guin 2019) we can know that it existed prior to the emphasis of the confucian mode of pondering a completed map of heaven and earth talking hold. Which means attempting to read the book through such a lens is vastly inappropriate.

“Each day, I open this book at random and receive a contemplative gift. These words are akin to water in the desert.”
-Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge


“I use ‘wise soul’ or “the wise” for several words and phrases usually rendered as sage, wise man. Saint, the great man, and so on, and I avoid the pronouns usually associated with these terms. I wanted to make a version that doesn’t limit wisdom to males, and doesn't give the impression that a follower of the Tao has to be a professional, full-time holier-than-thou who lives up above the snow line. Unimportant, uneducated, untrained men and women can be wise souls.” p.106 (Le Guin 2019)

“A ‘mystery’ cannot be posited in the empty region of spirit, where only words foreign to life subsist. It cannot result from a confusion between obscurity and the abstract void. The obscurity of a ‘mystery’ comes from images that a kind of lucid dream borrows from the realm of the crowd, sometimes brining to light what a guilty conscience has pushed back into the shadows, sometimes highlighting a figures that are routinely ignored.” p.213 (Bataille 1985)

It is however appropriate then that Le Guins Version take to task the underpinnings of the shift to the philosophical tradition, its emphasis on a completed knowledge, and an elite ideal user, instead embracing the tradition from which the yi jing emerged.

Front and center of her critique lies the distinction of the knowing maleness and its superiority over feminine ways of being. In the words of Shulamith Firestone “a book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For Love, perhaps even more than child bearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today.”p.113 (Firestone 2003) A dissection of what she terms “Male Culture” proves essential to what Le Guin sees hidden within the text. rather what it is and how it occludes it.

Its current condition emerges from the scar tissue of the oedipus complex, itself an adaptation of male dominance that spawned the nuclear family. A response to increasingly liberatory technological conditions which would allow women more freedom and independence. As technology increases so too do social and cultural restraints, damaging love and making everyone to a degree its victim. For Firestone a developed individual would have a “... healthy transexuality…”p.54 (Firestone 2003) but at present “...the sexual rejection of the male child by the mother causes, as we have seen, a schizophrenia in the boy between the emotional and the physical, in the girl,..., produces insecurity in her identity in general, creating a life long need for approval.”p.117 (Firestone 2003) In a boy Frued would see the libido correctly sublimated into a drive to accomplish great things to acquire recognition, while most women never stop seeking affection directly. “That women live for love and men for work is a truism.” p.113 (Firestone 2003) While men create culture they are soothed and fueled by the love of women, often their only self allowed emotional outlet. But while both parties need love they have highly divergent expectations of it.

Perhaps having drifted slightly from its earlier absolute, it is still thought that women are more directly possessive, read clingy, with a higher interest in highly emotionally involved relationships than sex necessarily, while men are interested in nothing but the screw. Sex replacing emotion and communication.“As a result of their battle to reject the female in themselves (the Oedipus complex as we have explained it) they are unable to take love seriously as a cultural matter;...”p.114 (Firestone 2003) And it shows, for Firestone, all of culture is littered with images of women meant to be seen rather than understood, objects to be coveted, aggrandized and possessed. Which ends ina reality of dismissal “What he wants instead is the Pepsi-Cola girl to smile pleasantly at his Johnny Walker Red in front of a ski -lodge fire”(p.137 (Firestone 2003) the lower caste position of women focus them into a stance where they simply “can’t afford the luxury of spontaneous love.”p.125 (Firestone 2003) and so any she must play a game, restrain her emotions and play to the image on top of the pedestal until she can force enough commitment to be sure he won't leave when she returns his affections, when they meet and the veil is dropped and her act is no longer in play. “She wanted to marry a man with whom she could be as bitchy as she really is.”p.126 (Firestone 2003) ”... for the freedom to love is what she is really aiming for.” p.125 (Firestone 2003) The double bind women are placed in by the idolization and anxiety of male culture in which “virility and sexual performance become confused with social worth.”p.132 (Firestone 2003)¹ to give in to emotion and become attached and risk rejection for not being a projected image, to hold out and be a prude all to successfully become “the ball and chain”. It is the oedipus complex that “to the degree a woman is like his mother, the incest taboo operates to restrain his total sexual/emotional commitment; for him to feel safely the kind of total response he felt for his mother, which was rejected, he must degrade this woman so as to distinguish her from his mother.” p.117 (Firestone 2003) Perhaps one of the better examples of the result of this process come to us a la 1961 from the accurately titled track ‘Wanderer’ by Dion. A classic for the ages recounting the attitude of a proud drifter, a man who will never settle down, found wooing pretty women in each town, where they don't even know his name

 “and when I find myself a-fallen for some girl 
Yeah, I hop right in that car of mine and drive around the world”

Here announcing, if only accidentally, the cultural value of maleness in lack of emotional involvement.²

The split in cultural reality is further displayed in something as trivial as comicbooks. Where girls are marketed love comics, Archie & Veronica, etc Shulie preferred “fairytales, much less realistic, were a better trip.” p.144 (Firestone 2003) and it is true that “I couldn’t stand my brothers library: to me they seemed only complex versions of (respectively) Superman, Ack-Aak-Aak, and the Adventures of Bugs Bunny. But though the male library continued to repel me, in the process of developing ‘good taste’ (male tase), I also lost my love for the “female” library, indeed I developed an abhorrence; an I would be - I’m ashamed to admit it- far sooner have been caught dead with hemingway than with Virgina Woolf in my hands.”p.144 (Firestone 2003)
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Good taste is male tase for a reason , How many rock songs echo the attitude of Dion, they have been the control behind almost all of cultural creation. They set the standards of experience by which art is measured, Justified, and creations that fall outside of this experiential window have their designers “put down and misunderstood named by the (male) cultural establishment ‘lady artist’, i.e. trivial, inferior. And even when it must be (grudgingly) admitted she is ‘good’ it is fashionable… to insinuate that she is good bu irrelevant.”P.143 (Firestone 2003) spoilers mine and for this reason should be unsurprising “... that they are seldom as skilled as men at the game of culture”p.143 (Firestone 2003) because they have to compete as men in a male game where “...it is not just a question of being as competent, but of being authentic.”p.143 (Firestone 2003) and when the outright denial of their experience doesn't push them onto the psychologists couch to receive treatment that has “...proven worse than useless…”p.64 (Firestone 2003) for it is “... the operation of institutions only within the given value system, thus promoting acceptance of the status quo.”p.63 (Firestone 2003) is is not just men that are placed into a state of emotional repression then, women are barred from expressing any array that could be seen as negative, ruining their sweet character, from Reiks couch “I am afraid to show these emotions because if I did; it would be like opening a Pandora's box … I am afraid my aggression would destroy all.”p.61 (Firestone 2003) this has lead more than a few to simply try to adapt to into a persona of male psychology, subjecting themselves in a loveless detachment, to a drying up of the emotions, a shallowing sickness which couldn’t even approach liberation from the trade; all to avoid the perception that their side of things happens to be “... one long protestant complaint rather than a portrayal of a full and substantive existence…”p.143 (Firestone 2003). We inhabit an unfortunate case where culture is so saturated with bias that neither can give a comprehensive view of experience, though certainly the supply of one is lacking in quantity compared to the other, And so in Firestone’s opinion “It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true ‘female’ art.”p.143 (Firestone 2003) an emergence which “... may signify the beginnings of a new consciousness,...”p.151 (Firestone 2003) for blossoms of the mind bear their fruits in reality, or what might be left of it.

What then is love? To Firestone it is the height of selfishness. A process by which “... the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. Anything short of a mutual exchange will hurt the other party.”p.115 (Firestone 2003)³  This exchange of selves is rarely what happens today. The successful process is blocked, “often resulting in … an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult if not impossible to ever love again.”p.115 (Firestone 2003) But the system which causes the blockage, a disparity of power dynamic most recently resultant from the Oedipus Complex, whose structures are proclaimed as healthy and re-enforced through the extrapolated authority of freudian psychoanalysis, needn't be the case. Where Firestone notes the roots of psychoanalysis and feminism being the same with the criteria for selection of one over the other being that “Fruedianism subsumed the place of feminism as the lesser of two’’ evilsp.56 (Firestone 2003)  Feminism riding on the difference that it “... does not accept the social context in which repression (and the resulting neurosis) must develop as immutable. If we dismantle the family, the subjection of “pleasure’ to ‘reality’, i.e. sexual repression, has lost its function; and is no longer necessary.”p.56 (Firestone 2003)

One of the weapons Shulie identifies as a means of re-enforcing male culture, here the idea of a woman to be agrandized rather than understood, is erotism. Choosing an example written by herbert Gold What’s Become of Your Creature, floundering in his attempt to “...describe the whole spectrum of male/female experience”p.145 (Firestone 2003) in that he can't even attempt to see beyond the “male” angle. The story follows the philandering protagonist, Frank, whose failing marriage, unsurprisingly, ... for he needs her anxiety as a steady reminder that he is still “free””p.122 (Firestone 2003) begins to improve as he enters an affair with a young pretty girl by the name of Lenka. It progresses through all the expected stages. Frank, a college professor, begins his relationship with a student, and when it is broken off she confronts his wife with a letter ruining his marriage. Unable to undergo the mental effort to understand her reasoning, he remains baffled as to the cause. Years later, with a new young foreigner on his arm, he encounters Lenka again. Drug addicted and prostituting herself to make ends meet, when she makes a pass at him he having called her on the phone to meet recently (which she declined), he is overcome by an aversion to her uncleanliness, her disease, and “Because he could not bear her sorrows,...”p.147 (Firestone 2003) flees into the street. His story’ closing; happily embracing a wife, newly with child, wondering what could have happened to Lenka.

Frank, and by extension Herbert, expose their emotional shallowness. Unable to understand Lenka’s motivations; her heartbreak, her motivations for seeing him in the first place, her abysmal disappointment that he would leave her for someone he was cheating on “You cared more about a cold bitch than you cared for me just because you had a child.”p.146 (Firestone 2003) Defanging her efforts by granting her “full points for cruelty and sweetness”, he is incapable of relating to her as a person with her own plans and goals. Finally he abandons her in disgust, finding her used by other men as a means to keep the lights on.

Another example of this ‘male angle’ stunting erotism, of which are the majority, is the character Catherine in Trufants film Jules and Jim where “She kills the man who dared escape her, along with herself” “such vamps and femmes fatales... [are] in reality nothing more than women who refuse to accept their powerlessness.” P.151 (Firestone 2003) And though the art is accurate the feminine mystique exhibited by Catherine goes purposefully unprobed by Trufant, the feminine perspective purposefully ignored as a means of achieving erotism. However, “Erotism is exciting. Noone wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least that spark.”p.139 (Firestone 2003) It is then worth looking at an example where erotism id done right. “Only a few artists have overcome this division in their work… if not through physical expression, then in some other way the greatest artists became mentally androgynous.”p.148 (Firestone 2003) Of which The story of the Eye by Georges Bataille proves a “...most accomplished…” study. Rather than relinquishing the female protagonist's perspective as the means of cultivating a mystery to induce erotism, Bataille makes the narrator's investigation of her perspective the main aspect of erotism for the first half of the book. An intimate search for a meeting and a realization in communication. Almost immediately after their first meeting she becomes split between two characters, Simone and Marcelle.  Marcelle being the face she must present to the world to meet its standards, restrictions, and expectations in addition to the protective layer of the dance women must partake in. Simone, what lies underneath, the true meeting and communication with whom the narrator is after, and whom the split protagonist feels she must keep hidden. Three aspects are of exceptional import when entering the middle of tale; first is Marcelle’s retention in and escape from the mental hospital, next marcelle’s mention of marriage after escape, -just before her death- and third is Marcelle’s death occurring during the first copulation of Simone and the narrator. The notable line being “We were so calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it.” This trifecta is the realization of the acquired commitment, dropping the act, relinquishing and the resultant lul in excitement when each party finally meets in the representative carnal act. But what distinguishes Bataille's story is the “X-ray vision… Increased sensitivity to the real, if hidden, values of the other…” the narrator displays in his pursuit of Simone, not Marcelle, who is only ever there under Simone’s insistence. For while Firestone criticizes “...’blindness or ‘idealization’...” she specifies “...if we could eliminate the political context of love between the sexes, would we not have  some degree of idealization remaining in the love process itself? I think so.”p.118 (Firestone 2003)  The spark that ignites the erotism in this story is the interest in meeting Simone, she who lies beyond the illusory Marcelle. Further, it should not be read that the political conditions are rendered moot in this story. Rather, following their meeting it is the narrator who becomes split, after a symbolic crossing of a river, between Sir Edmond, an economic provider who is emotionally distanced,  and himself prior. 

What Bataille displays is an attempt at an errotic and comprehensive picture of the split reality  “... art which is guilty of only reflecting the human price of a sex-divided really, great care would have to be taken that criticism be directed, not at the artists for their (accurate) portrayal of the imperfect reality, but at the grotesqueness of that reality itself as revealed by the art.”p.152 (Firestone 2003)

Ursula K. Le Guin, publishing her story Left Hand of Darkness one year before the release of Firestones book may be one of the first volleys released “...out of this ferment…”p.150 (Firestone 2003)

A bizarre alien life of dualisticly mutable sex make up the majority of the subjects in the novel. Singular beings capable alternatively of siring or conceiving, their social arrangements, exceptionally foreign to our own. Not quite a freeing from the biologic through technology as prescribed by Firestone, but certainly a thought experiment towards sex equality approaching the proper direction, an alien culture.  Genly, being a Terran of single sex, provides his observations about Gethen Winter its inhabitants and culture as the means of narrative. His lens the focus through which images are told. Our cultural bias exposed when projected upon the Androgynous alien culture and individuals he encounters. Excellently exemplified when he identifies an individual he is staying with as his “land lady” because “... he had a fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, a soft frame, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature.” p.50 (Le Guin 2000) Kind and gossipy with sexually charged characteristics make up femininity to Genly The things a male is not, for “Women are the only love objects in our society, so much so that women regards themselves as erotic”.p.133 (Firestone 2003) It would be a mistake to say this is the only way it could be. in ancient greece and other cultures where homosexuality was rampant, are the only places the male nude was in vogue. For this reason it is interesting to note today “Homosexuals are so ridiculed because in viewing the male as sex object they go doubly against the norm: Even women don't read pretty boy magazines.”⁴ p.133 (Firestone 2003) The preference for one over the other is in large part a trained condition, since males are hardly ever portrayed as sex objects. Although “... people might still prefer those of the opposite sex simply because it is more physically convenient. But even this is a large assumption.”p.54(Firestone 2003) “It would be quite wrong to say that women are more beautiful or even more desirable than men… but they lay themselves open to be desired.” p.130-31 (Bataille 1986) since women are in a condition there they must love not only for the basic need, mental health etc, but also to acquire social validation, it is no surprise that Genly would inquire of his ‘Land lady” how many children he had birthed. The answer being, none, but he had “...sired four.” His distaste for his own bisexual leanings becomes evident when his perceptions drift toward the opposite sex upon attraction. Recounting a weaver as female he treated as male previously and then after the fact , though not being able to resit attempting mind speech upon encounter. Coming to a maximum then crossing the ice with Estraven. When they enter Kemmer they are viewed by Genly as female for laying themselves open to desire. A fact he meets with an uncomfortable if mild disgust toward the strong male ally he had known him as previously.

 It is perhaps Interesting, if not ironic, that Leguin’s forward scratches upon the same grooves as Shulamith in her chapter Dialectics of Cultural History following those giving shape to the concept of male culture. Perhaps a prophetic happening to some, Le Guin would deny it. “Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying” p.xix (Le Guin 2000) Lies however are their way of expressing what they've seen, what they know, how the world thy,ve met is, what their dreams are, and what their intuition has shown. Dressed through metaphor as illustration, the novelist delivers truth as “... a matter of imagination.”p.xxiii/1 (Le Guin 2000)

This of course, is only part of her concern in the foreword. She shares far more with Firestone than is originally let on. The artist, she proposes, as one who renders falsities as a career, is wrongly looked to as indicator of the future. Instead, as said before, they render what they’ve witnessed without a concern toward the possible. A scientist, Le Guin reminds, “... is another who prepares, who makes ready, working day and night, sleeping and awake, for inspiration.” p.xx (Le Guin 2000) Though they certainly are conditioned towards a particular way of being “The public image of the white-coated Dr. Jekyll with no feelings for his subjects, mere guinea pigs, is not entirely false: there is no room for feelings in the scientists work; he is forced to eliminate or isolate them in what amounts to an occupational hazard. At best he can resolve his problem by separating his professional from his personal self, by compartmentalizing his emotion.” p164 (Firestone 2003) Individuals out of touch or at best divided from their emotions, or as Le Guin would say “-Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship.” p.xxi (Le Guin 2000) and in her prescription that they pay a visit to Dyonisus she has run through what Shulamith identifies as “The Two Modes of Cultural History” P.154 (Firestone 2003) p.109 (Mackay and Avanessian 2019) True to form, Firestone has found the gendered dichotomy sparkling through; the bright masculine scientific logic of Apollo has relegated the dark passion fueled aesthetic frenzy of Dionysus to the realm of the unimportant. Vetoed from consideration, the Bacchoi Silenced⁵ . Combined,  “...the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible.” p.154 (Firestone 2003) but this current dichotomy is sick, dragged down and imprisoned even more in modernity than was the case in ancient civilization when though the aesthetic mode was still captured and and used toward development of male culture “the female principle - dark, mysterious, uncontrollable - reigned, elevated by man himself, still in awe of unfathomable nature.” p.159 (Firestone 2003) Today the emotionless technological mode has made magic, prophecy and legend the stuff of mockery, but it is this aesthetic mode which births religious and mythic sensibilities through which we become “... creature[s] of time - a historian[s] and a prophet[s]’”. p.154 (Firestone 2003) While the aesthetic inspires and the technologic actualizes, but in “the mechanistic, deterministic, ‘soulless’ scientific world-view, which is the result of the means to rather than the (inherently noble and often forgotten) ultimate purpose of empiricism: the actualization of the ideal in reality.” p.164 (Firestone 2003) and where Le Guin finds that people are already androgynous in the “... peculiar, devious, and thought experimental manner propper to science fiction,...”p.xxi (Harrison 1922; Le Guin 2000) Firestone is not only unafraid to proclaim that we damned well ought to bee, but takes the pains to identify the means of enforcement through which we are not. “What we shall have in the next cultural revolution is the reintegration of the Male 9technologic mode0 with the Female 9aesthetic mode0 to create an androgynous culture surpassing the heights of either cultural stream.” p.174 (Firestone 2003) There is however one place where Le Guin goes beyond Firestone in her critique of the dominant scientific sensibility. She questions whether something only has value if it points at a single fact, one sound solid quantifiable comprehensible to the rational intellect. She proposes the question of the value of the art of interpretation.

“A sentence or a paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence than by the attentive intellect.” p.xxii (Le Guin 2000)

“I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.” p.xxi (Firestone 2003)
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The Handdara is a cult of ignorance, devotees of unknowing and practitioners of presence⁶. A religion without vows, creed, or priests; their belief in a god is equally as uncertain. An organization almost completely intangible if it were not for the Fastnesses, where practice the foretellers. Diviners whose calls once made there can be no doubt, certainty abounds, as solid as anything ever could be. A question asked and if possible⁷ an answer given in a way now unavoidable. Though this may ring akin to Taoism, when Genly asks if the business is “... on the plane of pure chance divination, along with yarrow stalks and flipped coins. No, Faxe says, not at all, chance was not involved. The whole process was in fact precisely the reverse of chance.” p.64 (Le Guin 2000)

Fortelling in process involves nine members of a circle. A weaver at the center who controls the power and the movement of the others. Five regular indwellers, adept practitioners of presence, one of whom must be in Kemmer alien heat whose tension and opposite sex expression is aroused by a pervert⁸. And two Zanies, time dividers, whose insanity is their skill⁹, enhancing and reflecting the tension. In the words of Faxe the weaver “The energy builds up and builds up, always sent back and back, redubling the impulse everytime, until it breaks through and the light is in me, around me, I am the light…”p.71 (Le Guin 2000) The Asker asks their question and pays the price they can afford. The pervert arouses the Kemmerer and the Zanies keep a rhythm. The weaver maintains a focus on themselves,maintains the connection sensing the pattern surfing control until the web collapses. As Genly observes “... Abrupt visions and sensations all sexually charged and grotesquely violent, a red black seething of erotic rage.” p.69 (Le Guin 2000) too intense for him to handle, a chaos of gaping pits with ragged lips, a time distortion that could do nothing less than drive him mad, one which he struggled to shut out but found be cowed and trapped in his own mind far worse than “... the connection, the communication that ran, wordless, inarticulate, through Faxe…” p.68 (Le Guin 2000) and “...the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armour, an armoured woman with a sword. The light burned, sudden and intolerable, the light along her limbs, the fire, and she screamed aloud in terror and pain, ‘Yes, yes, yes!,” p.69(Le Guin 2000) reaching across time until the circle of the web collapses, the asker answered; and Genly could not evade the certainty that the answer was right¹⁰. Why then would a cult of unknowledge devote themselves to a practice that gives shapes of certainty?

“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” p.74 (Le Guin 2000)

“We mostly come to the fastnesses to learn what questions not to ask” p.74 (Le Guin 2000)

“Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.” p.75 (Le Guin 2000)

“There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer…. The only thing that makes life possible is, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” p.75 (Le Guin 2000)

Chance divination finds information about a direction in time to make decisions on the non-immutable as we push into uncertainty.

Le Guin arranges her Tao Te Ching with a purpose, the release of the feminine from the monopoly on the knowing control of the masculine ideal of the wise man as the Taoist sage. And she is right to desire this, she has intuitively seen what is hidden and unleashes it in her method of creation. The Aleph that is chapter one read correctly holds the answer, the door to the hidden. It is philosophy and technique as verse. Dionysus the one that hides and reveals themselves. The door to the hidden, the infinite Tao which allows one to see the mysteries that are little talked about, to tap into nature, advance with the excess inherent in the cycle, producing truths that take shape in the concrete moment. Interpretation and mastery of the art is the key to utilizing the Yi Jing in the orracular tradition. The advancement of which was stymied by the coming of the philosophical tradition of dealing with the text as a completed map of heaven and earth, all that was or will be. The limiting emotionless masculine attitude which is the abandonment of the tradition it is pulled as passion, the continual advancement of divinitory technique through refinement and combination of systems and books for thousands of years. Pulled from our small field and read again, it is even resonant in the Zhangs’ translation “Theorizing and evolving these theories is the gate to marvels.”p.1 (Tao Te Jing in Plain English 2004)  It is through critique, destruction as creation, that Fire stone brings us the feminist theory, the movement, the moment, papered over by the Freudian acceptance of, its insurance on the health of, the oedipus complex, its enforcement and training into gender divided individuals, the subjugation of women to be lesser and its continued hold through the political power imbalances corrupting love. “As long as woman loves man, as long as she is mother, sister, wife of man, even the higher man, she is only the feminine image of man. As terrible mothers, terrible sisters and wives, femininity represents the spirit of revenge and the resentiment that animates man himself.”p.187 (Deleuze 2006) She desires a new art, a feminine art, in which experience that is not projected by male culture might be realized. One where the sex divided reality can be exposed and overcome, not accepted.

 “It is noteworthy that when Athene formally asks the Erinys who and what they are, the answer is not ‘Erinys’ but ‘curses our name haunts below the earth’... Here the idea is not that of cosmic fate, but of a definite and tangible curse, the curse of blood guilt.” p.222 (Harrison 1922)

“But language and associations sometimes break through the best regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind lay the notions that the Erinys, the offended Ghost, was a snake. The notion of the Earth demon, the Ghost as snake…” p.233 (Harrison 1922)

In Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching which the Erranos translation of the I ching uses to illustrate the conceptions of tin and yang. It is said that 

“People despise
Orphans, widowers, outcasts
Yet this is what kings and rulers call themselves
Whatever you lose, you've won
Whatever you’ve won you’ve lost

What others teach I say too:
Violence and aggression
Destroy themselves
My teachings rest on that”
p.52 (Le Guin 2019)

In properly paradoxical manner, just as the Tai Ji represents in each yin and yang the seeds of its own undoing, the course of any reaching its excess and transforming into the other. Where the masculine has controlled the feminine mode of culture, the Aesthetic, up until its height in the Renaissance¹¹ where it began to regulate it to a role of non consideration with the emphasis shifting to the newly strengthened, more fitting to the masculine trained sensibility, technological mode; the revenge of the feminine, its aggression, is as appropriate as it is inevitable. 

“There is creation, properly speaking, insofar as we make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life instead of separating it from what it can do.” p.187 (Deleuze 2006)

As Shulamith predicts, the future arrives as an androgynous rebalance beyond either mode. As the Aesthetic surges back into play; the technologic ceases to be a plaything of masculinity. “Enjoyment will spring directly from being and acting itself, the process of experience, rather than from the quality of achievement.” p.174 (Firestone 2003)

The yang at the end of its cycle brings its own end in excess a value of 333 (9)on its way to the beginnings of yin,. A journey to its own excess 222 (6). Where 3 is begotten by 2 and 2 is begotten by the Tao and the Tao exists from nothing.
¹⁶P.60 (Ritsema and Sabbadini 2018)
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>>39
>>40
>>41ex:One way to approach the basic power of the universe is through magic. From this approach to the power of tao comes Popular Toaism, the Taoism of the masses. Popular toaism is not a pretty sight. We have already said enough about the original doctrine of the Tao to indicate that it was a concept to subtle to be grasped by the average mind or spirit. It was perhaps inevitable that when the concept was translated to make contact with the average villager and institutionalized around this translation it would be rendered in cruder and eventually perverted terms. To pass from the lofty heights of the Tao Te Ching to the priestcraft of Populat Taoism is like passing from a crystal mountain spring to thick, fetid waters of a stagnant canal. Mysticism become mystification and religion is perverted into necromancy and socery. There have been long epochs in Chin’a history where Taoism in its popular form could be characterized as little more than a funeral racket.p.200 (Smith 1958)

¹... never questioning why the male model wears a jock strap when the female model wouldn’t dream of appearing in as much as a G-string.p.142 (Firestone 2003)

²A presumption so strong the alien human male hybrid, Akin, from tri-sexed alien breeding novel Adulthood Rites is assumed a wanderer by nature before even having finished adolecence.

³ An offer of a case of the phenomena, though perhaps beyond exaggeration, and deserving of greater exploration, occurring with success in conditions harsher than need description. Hansel and Gretel, the twins from Black Lagoon, breathe each other in and out to the point they’ve lost their own permanent distinction. Each lives inside the other as much as fully as they live inside themselves, across each other at either time, fully exchanged and hosted. A greater trust would hardly be possible without the loss of individuation, that would be the integration of their alternating male/female personalities, their traumatically compartmentalized selves.
The exchange between puppeteer and Katsuragi is additionally worth contemplation.

⁴The clear exception to this case is existent in fujoshi. The Author of my lesbian experiences with loneliness Nagata Kabi, at one time (p.117 (Nagata 2017)) only allowed herself to indulge in pornography of the boy love yaoi-hole variety.

⁵“The Bacchoi hold orgies in honour of a mad Dionyssus, they celebrate a divine madness by the eating of raw flesh, the final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world, and the symbol of their orgies is a consecrated serpent.”p.483 (Harrison 1922)

⁶ Presence is an untrance involving self-loss through extreme sensual awareness and receptiveness.

⁷2022 Years ago  winter is always in year one the Lord of Shorth approached a group of forteller’s with a question unanserable and forced them to proceed. what is the meaning of life? The circle of power lasted six days and nights, both zanies died, the pervert clubbed the lord of Shorth to death with a stone. The Weaver known as Meshe emerged and became the founder of Gethen’s other predominate cult. “The old man of Arbin Fastness once said that if the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the answer, he’s go on burning for years. Thats what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It’s hard to believe. I doub’t any man could endure it. But no matter….”p.71 A year cycle for a member of the cult of Yomeshta is 144 years from the birth of Meshe in Ekumenical year 1492 

⁸One who cleves to being a single sex all of the time. Tolerated but often referred to as half dead

⁹Would you cure a singer of his voice?p.66 (Le Guin 2000)

¹⁰ I shall try here to examine the question whether fear is not precisely what does underlie ‘sex’, and whether the connection between ‘mystic and ‘sexual’ has not something to do with gulfs of terrifying darkness that belong equally to both domains.p.222 (Bataille 1986)

¹¹ Specialization only increases

Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. U of Minnesota Press.
———. 1986. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. City Lights Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. A&C Black.
Firestone, Shulamith. 2003. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1922. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 2000. The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition. Penguin.
———. 2019. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way. Shambhala Publications.
Mackay, Robin, and Armen Avanessian. 2019. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. MIT Press.
Nagata, Kabi. 2017. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.
Reifler, Sam. 1974. I Ching: A New Interpretation for Modern Times. Bantam Books.
Ritsema, Rudolf, and Shantena Augusto Sabbadini. 2018. The Original I Ching Oracle or The Book of Changes: The Eranos I Ching Project. Watkins Media Limited.
Smith, Huston. 1958. The Religions of Man. New York : Harper & Row.
Tao Te Jing in Plain English. 2004. AuthorHouse.
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