MEDITATIONS: I CHING; THE BOOK OF CHANGES, CANTO THIRTY-EIGHT

Contend—Strange—Grapple
|or| Disharmony

Investing in loss will yield small gains and personal satisfaction. Seek peace amid confusion and relinquish control as a means of overcoming adversity. Yield to overcome; bend to be straight; have little and gain much; empty and be full. Seek a cooperative ally and value the help he provides. (Bright-Fey 105)

In disharmony small matters turn out well.

Yang 1: Regret disappears. Having lost the horse, do not chase it. It will come back by itself. See bad people, and there is no blame.

Yang 2: Meeting the master in an alley, there is no fault.

Yin 3: With the cart being held back and the ox stopped, the person is punished. There is no beginning, but there is an end.

Yang 4: Isolated by disharmony, when you meet a good man, if you communicate sincerely, there is no fault even in danger.

Yin 5: Regret disappears. The partner bites the skin. What is wrong with going?

Yang 6: Isolated by disharmony, you see pigs covered with mud, a wagon full of devils. Before, you drew the bow; afterward you relax the bow. You are not enemies, but partners. Going on, if you meet rain, that is auspicious. (Cleary 225-233)

 Fire burns ever heavenward, just as water always seeks equilibrium at its lowest depth. The trigrams of Lake and Fire, then, are opposites in that they trend in opposite directions. So, too, does this apply to that which each element represents. Lake is pleasure, emotion, and joy: Fire is attention, intellect, and enlightenment. They are femininity and masculinity arranged in orientation as to estrange from one another—Disharmony, the natural consequence of the end of People in the Home.

In isolation, each family member becomes atomized. His or her individual concerns become elevated in importance above those of others’. Hierarchies of value differentiate and speciate until moral intermingling becomes impossible. Understanding falls, and loyalties dissolve. Society fragments then follows the family into its early grave. This is the destruction of cultural homogeneity, which is the necessary precursor to a high-trust society. A low-trust society is constantly at war with itself and discordant with the Great Course. In such a state, universality is impossible, or even punished, while self-indulgent subjectivism is rewarded. That is why small and insignificant successes turn out well. In disharmony, single notes are celebrated while songs as a whole are hated.

But the wise need not despair. Though their means of forward movement might have been cut loose and let to roam they wilds alone, those horses will one day return. The first Yang will join with the fourth. This is because, during a time of disharmony, similar energies seek brotherhood. The fourth Yang is the first’s positional correspondent, and by way of this correspondence, the two Yangs cooperate. They are willing to see each other despite each thinking the other lower. And by abandoning the will to domination, the two can converse sincerely. This sincerity is the opposite of manipulation, and it is the reason for blamelessness and faultlessness despite dangers.

The second Yang meets the master in an alleyway—that is, a crooked, narrow, treacherous path. During a state of disharmony, an upright individual is likely to find himself compromised or in a compromising situation. He will have good reason to doubt himself; however, he should not seek repentance in isolation. Instead, he should bring his consciousness to bear on that aspect of himself that would make him master of the situation and not yet another slave of his passions.

The fifth Yin corresponds to the second Yang’s position, and she is compliment to his Yang energy. This means that she, though in the position of leadership, yields to his moral impetus. That impetus is faultless, because it is aimed upward; and the relationship is proper, because yield bends downwards to meet him—and not just superficially, but with integrity penetrating her moral spirit, hence “biting” through “the skin.”

The third Yin and sixth Yang also correspond and complement one another, but in each case excess is present. At the extreme of disharmony, the third Yin is trapped from advancement by the first and fourth Yangs. She cannot move forward or backward. So stuck, she despairs.

And yet, this is a prison of Yin’s own making. The Yangs are not physically stopping Yin. It is not that she can’t advance or maneuver, but that she believes to try is pointless. This is the excuse she uses to surrender before she ever even tries. Thus is there an end even before there is a beginning. Thus, too, is the blame of less-than-failure projected onto others. “You see pigs covered with mud, a wagon full of devils,” is a description of a misperception, a delusion fabricated by the mind to place the fault of one’s own cowardice onto those who are morally upright and living harmonious lives.

Fortunately, this sixth Yang excess of attention manifesting as hyper-skepticism cannot last forever. Eventually, people see that there friends are not their enemies. They relax the tense bow and drop their arrows, realizing that what they thought they ought to slay is actually what they needed to accept about themselves the entire time.

Satan is on the inside. In deepest darkness, his seems the only guiding light, but it throws shadows—portals from which demon kind pour through. Do not summon demons to devour you. Recognize that there are things more important than your desires.

I Ching; The Book of Changes, with commentaries by Cheng Yi, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Library, 2003.

I Ching: The Book of Changes; An authentic Taoist translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2006.