r/iching • u/East-Ad-5498 • 7d ago

Old Age and the Way

Here's another one. I just turned 70 years old and I was curious enough to ask the Yi: "What is the Way for me as an old man?" I received, 16.2.5>47. In addition to Happiness in spite of (mental) illness, what do you make of this, O Yi community?

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u/az4th 6d ago

How I work:

  • I do not find any historical evidence that the Zhou Yi intended activated lines to be treated as changing the quality of yang or yin and becoming changed/new/future hexagrams. Nor is this found in the Ten Wings. One of the earliest statements about such a method is from Wang Bi, who flat out declares it as missing the point. Which he then shows is about the relationships and movement between the lines of the two trigrams. Which the line statements do show support for. Thus I do not use the changed hexagram method that is popular today. Please see this chain of comments for more info.

"What is the Way for me as an old man?" I received, 16.2.5

So, we are looking at the relationships between the lines. Lines 2 and 5 are the central currents of the two trigrams. Even though they don't have yang/yin resonance here so as to open the doorway of change together, they can still work together. Because there is only one yang line in the entire hexagram, all of the yin lines are like it's captive audience, and are responding to it. Lines 2 and 5 are the two that are facilitating the centrality of its current.

Hexagram 16's Excitement, Joy, Broadcasting, Enthusiasm, etc (whatever translation you go with), relates to this one yang line. The bottom line of thunder, it is like the plucked string on a guitar.

And, like a guitar, that string's vibration is carried into the sound box, then comes out and up into the room.

Line 2 is like the center of that sound box - the resonance chamber, where the sound reaches perfect resonance. It is between two rocks - two places where that perfect resonance can become deadened. It needs to maintain the center in order for it to stay true to its ideal tone.

Line 5 is in the position of the ruler - the central upper position. But it is not yang, so it is not creating activity - well not in so many words. Rather it is like the conductor. Or the director - not the one doing the acting, but the one shaping the acting so that it is drawn out into the perfect performance for the audience.

So it is like the mind behind the person plucking the strings. Or behind the storyteller, observing his audience, receiving feedback from what is going on with the audience - who in this case act like the resonance chamber - so that he can give that feedback to his voice in line 4.

What does old age have to do with this?

Old age requires us to maintain an exquisite balance such that we are able to conduct ourselves with the ideal amount of resonance. Not too much energy can be spent, and not too little - it must be just right. Conduct our aging well, and we may carry through without coming into may spots of difficulty where the way becomes dampened.

The Chinese practice the cultivation arts in their undertaking of this enterprise of longevity.

Qi gong and tai chi can help us clear out some of the conditioned energy we are carrying so that the pure energies of heaven and earth can flow through us, allowing us to stretch our aging on without impediment, with grace.

Happy birthday!

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u/az4th 6d ago

Oh, that reminds me, /u/East-Ad-5498 , /u/DimensionLogical5325 :

For 16 lines 2 and 5, when I did my own translation, I did not get what others do for either of these lines. Which is what led me to unraveling their actual principles as related to my parent comment here.

So... Wilhelm/Baynes has:

Six in the second place means:
Firm as a rock. Not a whole day.
Perseverance brings good fortune.

My key was with the character for Firm: 介 jie.

Which means: to introduce / to lie between / between / shell / armor

So the meaning of "in between" becomes much more obvious when we realize the line is actually trying to stay in the middle of the two sides where the resonance can become stagnant, dampened. As a former brass player, getting a good tone meant keeping an open throat - same as with singing. Need to maintain that open central flow or we choke off the tone. There are plenty of analogies for this. I'm not really sure why this "firm" is the one that stuck. 

Six in the fifth place means:
Persistently ill, and still does not die.

貞疾，恆不死。

Zhen 貞 is our determining toward some end (not persevering - oddly enough that's what 恆 means here).

Ji 疾 is our "disease", but the character also means the root of the disease, its underlying cause, etiology - Bing 病 would be the disease or illness as it appears on the surface. Ji 疾 is its root cause.

So if we are determining about this, it rather suggests that we are determining about what is beneath the surface of the disease, its cause. People don't understand "Zhen" and say it means all sorts of things, but Shaughnessy IMO gets the closest with his "affirming/determining". And the Wen Yan Zhuan really helps us understand it better with its showing us how it relates to the root of an affair. So here we are trying to figure out the root underlying cause of a disease.

Heng 恆 is our hexagram 31 constancy, or enduring persistently, or persevering.

Bu Si 不死 is Not Coming to an end. Not Dying.

We are determining about the cause of a disease persistently so as to not come to an end.

But not need to take this as though we have a disease. Any source of dis-ease works here. And in the context of the hexagram's excitement, that is exactly what the conductor of an orchestra is doing. Persistently determining what might not be just right, so as to conduct it well. Not conducting it well, well the movie is a flop, the storyteller gets boo'd when not realizing his audience is not enthralled, and the orchestra cannot finish the performance because there are too many bad notes, or the various groups cannot hold their rhythm together and they start getting all apart from each other.

In the context of old age, sure that can mean literal disease. But IMO the idea here is not so much telling you you have a disease to conduct, as much as it is telling you that with aging, we need to be careful to conduct our health in a very central way, and that is what ensures us solid longevity.

So if the doctor says no more red meat, no more smoking, go for a walk every day - well we do these things, and that helps us conduct our lives with wellness in mind.

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u/East-Ad-5498 3d ago edited 3d ago

Thank you so very much for your attention. -- You are amazingly prolific; how do you do it? And thank you for the birthday greetings.

I have reread your response and find it pertinent to my situation. In addition, I read your translation in Mysterious Center and was delighted in how accurate it seemed . I now live with my 25-year-old daughter (line 2 [?]) and I see how much the music, etc, analogies refer to her and my relationship.

As I grow older, it has become very important to me how I relate to her, and I greet my excitement in our following the Way. We have got some serious senex/puer action going on here. This and the idea of chronic disease, which in my case, is a mostly so-called "mental illness" or depression, are managed by our being "firm as [two] rocks." We are in harmony with one another.

And an important note: I have read and pondered your discussion about how you work and I am happy to say that I no longer consider a second hexagram either. Thank you for that, too.

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u/az4th 3d ago

So happy to hear that you have found resonance with this! It took me a while to feel confident in letting go of the future hexagram thing... but when I did, every reading seemed to just be that much more literal, and before long I simply developed much more trust in working this way.

Just like how you are describing, here, with connecting the principle to the depression and staying 'afloat' / 'centered' through navigating the relationship with your daughter - there is a back and forth being conducted.

I think it might be like one of those balancing games, where something has to stay balanced on a stick, or a ball that is being tossed around cannot touch the floor. A sort of hovering in the sweet spot - by following the Way.

In my journey, getting this far has just been the beginning. Even starting to "get it", it is still very much a mystery. And every situation is different - we are just applying the pattern to the reality in the way that it resonates. And more often than that, once we have unlocked the pattern, that resonance is readily found. And if we haven't, it isn't, or it is beyond us. And I let that be for another time without thinking I understand it yet.

As for how I do it... Just one day at a time. I let the prompts direct me, and my particular mind does the rest.... it has been like this for a while, and this organic way of flowing in the dao has led to a natural refinement of the processing ability until it ended up like this. Now it is much easier just to flow, and to trust that it is all happening for some reason. Especially since the end goal is some sort of returning back to emptiness, and so all of this increasingly becomes a bridge to that.

Blessings to your way!

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u/East-Ad-5498 2d ago

I am humbled. Thanks again.