Last night I posted the following in a forum I read, and write on, about the Yijing. Write is mostly an euphemism, of course, although I take the Yi very seriously, I mostly kid around in forums. Here is what I posted and why I tend to act like that:
Yesterday I was driving with my family in Delaware, close to Wilmington, when I noticed the tag of the car in front of me. It was a new series of Delaware tags, six digits long, no hyphens. The striking synchronicity, in my Yi oriented mind, is that the number was all 0’s and 1’s and yielded the following: 110101 (Hexagram 38)
Aha! -I said to myself- there you have it! For the past few… what?, months? years?, I’ve been struggling, in my forum participation, here and elsewhere, with what I perceive as absolutisms in others’ opinions. My own point of view is that you cannot find anything more open-ended than the Yi. On the other hand, this is a statement that perhaps can be twisted, only twisted, as an absolutism itself. Therefore, whenever I read: “the Yi is this”, “the Yi is that”, “you can’t use the Yi for this or that”, “you must formulate your questions like this”, “you cannot accomplish this or that with the Yi”, and so on, I start gritting my teeth and the only possible way for me to deal with it is to either smile and ignore or smile and make fun of it. The alternative would be to take positions and add my own absolutisms to the fray, which I decided early on is not worth the energy and effort.
I’ve been chewing on that paradox for quite a while and I was as I was driving. Those kind of thoughts have a tendency to chase me and are slow to die of exhaustion… Help was on the way, though. The hexagram that popped right in front of my car made me realize that Homo Sapiens are, and will for ever be, contentious creatures and there is nothing this specimen can do that is going to change that on a grand scale. On a personal level, though, I can find some peace.