Everything happens. Nobody has something forever. This is how we have to live.
– Haruki Murakami
The form and shape in which the process of time presents the existence of its moments.
– G.W.F. Hegel
Opposition and attraction are fundamental principles of the I Ching. People meet together or pull apart, for which there are two interesting hexagrams. Hexagram 12 is called Standstill and Stagnation. Hexagram 11 is called Peace. The first is a condition where nothing happens because the upper trigram moves upward and the lower trigram downward. They don’t meet. The second is reversed, trigrams moving together, so there’s a possible exchange. There are other relationships like this, which is why power lies in the complete system more than isolated parts.
In the film Ghandi, the famous leader advises warring men. One of them has lost a child. Take the child of the enemy who died and care for him like your own. The man cries. A third principle enters the conflict, which also happened in Northern Ireland. When hostilities subsided, Protestant and Catholic women walked together up a hill. The hill was formerly the site of an Army observation tower. They looked down on shared streets remembering people killed on both sides. Perspective changes everything.
It seems likely world tensions will increase as cultures simultaneously mix and conflict. In Lectures on the I Ching, Wilhelm thinks there should be a balance between national identity and international relations. Conflicts occur when the first is unduly emphasised, but it can’t be dismissed. Everyone is embedded in a culture and derives some identity from it. But not all of it, in a world where ideas and communications are global.
The third factor, a child and an observation hill, has a philosophical reality. This depends however on the character of a society, whether it is open or closed as described by Henri Bergson and Karl Popper. Open means the possibility of exchange. Closed means a system where questions aren’t allowed. The tension is one of belief versus enquiry, certainty or a Socratic recognition of not knowing.
This third factor fits the Hegelian dialectic and both the I Ching and Jungian process. There are two forces which meet, generating another. For Hegel, this occurs with historical and intellectual necessity. He refers to “a self having knowledge purely of itself in the absolute antithesis of itself” which means accepting the unknown (Phenomenology of Spirit). Negation is part of wisdom, emphasised in Taoism, and the yin dimension of the I Ching.
Two forces interacting is the dynamic of change. Jung described it as alchemy in the psychotherapeutic process, where he and a client met and both were transformed. There’s no alchemy in hexagram 12. There is in hexagram 11. Rotate one, and you obtain the other. But this might not happen. The direction can deflect elsewhere, with more problems to resolve. Optimistically, it might progress to hexagram 13 called Fellowship with Men, the lower Earth trigram changing to the intelligence of Fire. Or if one yang line enters from below we see hexagram 25 called Innocence and the Unexpected which Wilhelm describes as “the light principle as well as the first movement of the sincere heart of man.”
Standstill and Peace have an internal energy. Like all hexagrams they are composed of multiple and layered trigrams. Upper and lower, which are Heaven and Earth, and then nuclear trigrams formed from the central four lines. The top and lowest lines are disregarded. The lowest enters a situation which hasn’t yet begun. You arrive at a party, have no idea who is there and if you will enjoy it. You leave the party at the top line, and whatever happened is no longer the present reality.
The central four lines are inside conditioning the outside, two blended trigrams which separate then form another hexagram. This is like three dimensional chess. Even the normal version, with two dimensions, needs intuitive awareness because it’s not possible to conceptualise, at every moment, all the configurations of an unfolding game. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes this as part of his philosophy: “The Absolute on this view is not to be grasped in conceptual form, but felt, intuited; it is not its conception, but the feeling of it and intuition of it that are to have the say and find expression.”
The Standstill hexagram is where “heaven and earth do not unite…the shadowy is within, the light without; weakness is within, firmness without.” With religious texts, it makes no difference to veracity if someone disagrees. They are true or not, irrespective of what anyone thinks. When people argue, it’s because they are uncertain inside. This means inside depends on external environments, which contradicts spiritual ideas.
If the second Standstill line changes with the fifth, the Fire trigram is above and Water is below. This is an unhealthy situation again where Fire rises and Water sinks which means no interaction. Watery confusion is untouched by clarifying fire. Prometheus gives fire to humanity and the gods hate him for it. Fire empowers people, and makes affected social roles redundant.
As sociological criticism, Nietzsche’s work is along this line. He objected to what he called the master and slave relationship. In his version of the I Ching, David Hinton alludes to the subject: “rather than simply obey political power and implore the spirits to shape your fate in positive ways, the question of wisdom arises, and the empowerment that wisdom offers: act wisely and good things happen, act unwisely and bad things happen.”
The Peace hexagram is where “upper and lower unite” and like a Tai Chi movement, you are soft outside while firm inside described as “strength is within and devotion without.” Identity is not ultimately found in society. It’s inside, so the outside is of less consequence, which Jung described as individuation. If the second line of Peace changes with the fifth, the trigram Fire is below and Water above. This is generative and creative, heat warming water causing steam. In Jung’s The Red Book, he describes the image work of psychotherapy and the attitude people need: “I feel as though I ought to say something to you about these fantasies…the fantasies now seem to be rather thin and full of repetitions of the same motives. There isn’t enough fire and heat in them. They ought to be more burning…You must be in them more, that is you must be your own conscious critical self in them.”
There are two great polarities in the I Ching system. The first and most important is that of Heaven and Earth, represented with the first two hexagrams. All following hexagrams are permutations of Heaven and Earth. The second polarity is Water and Fire, which appears in one of the two trigram diagrams called pre-heaven and after-heaven.
After-heaven is circular, connecting with the five elements because of trigram correspondence. The pre-heaven dynamic is metaphysical. Water and Fire, horizontally arranged, never meet. Clarity (Fire) conflicts with The Abysmal confusion (Water) in which humanity exists. We don’t create this structure, and can’t change it, any more than we can avoid breathing. It’s an image of existence like Indian maya, where illusion and reality conflict. The I Ching Heaven is above, Earth receptively below, and we experience Water and Fire in between.
In Creativity and Taoism, philosopher Chung-yuan Chang notes the connection to dialectic method: “Hegelian notion of dialectics is useful in suggesting that a thesis and antithesis (anti-thesis) may become synthesised into a position that itself becomes a new starting point or thesis for further critical reflections.” Hegel’s enquiry eventually leads to intuition as polarities are transcended. When opposites synthesise, a unifying simplicity is revealed.
This stunning line from Hegel applies psychologically: “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering” (The Elements of Philosophy of Right). Within the I Ching, the owl awakens when darkness prevails but light begins to return. When life is wintry bad, spring is possible from a potential which never disappears although might be hidden: “The light has sunk into the earth: Darkening of the Light. Beautiful and clear within, gentle and devoted without…it furthers one to be persevering.”
There are overlapping layers within hexagrams, which I compare to three dimensional chess. There are also philosophical layers in the system. Twelve hexagrams correspond to calendar months and the rising then fading of power. Yang rises up at the beginning of the year replacing winter darkness. Yin reappears as summer fades, like a reflecting moon.
Peace and Standstill are two of the monthly twelve, yin and yang temporally and conceptually opposite. They are neighbours in the total sequence, with another connection to 63 and 64. The final symbols show yin and yang blending both perfectly and uncomfortably.
The I Ching is a framework in which human experience occurs. You read the framework closely with coins, read it widely for understanding.
I write like this is a magazine column. With research, references, and a lot of time. If you like it, perhaps you would support me.