I keep editing my post from yesterday on reading hexagrams.

Today I’m playing with a paradox: Understanding belongs not to earth which underlies, but to heaven which is over and which comprehensively covers. Comprehension belongs not to heaven which holds all truth together (com-prehends) within its overarching totality, but to earth which underlies.

Maybe understanding is what the mind stands under, not what stands under the mind as its foundation. Comprehension is the orientation toward what can be comprehended: what stands whole for us against a background.

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Hitting a worn-out theme of mine again: Youthful love is a grasping and possessing of another. Mature love is sharing understanding within which things are grasped.

Jealously is legitimate, but not as an expression of greed. Jealously is the threat of destruction of sharedness of vision, of being. Under the influence of an alien influence, the loved one changes perspectives and no longer sees-with. The shared being is destroyed, and the betrayed becomes, in respect to the shared being, a severed part. The betrayed participates in death.

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The people who have bothered me most are the ones who think that seeing with me is incidental to friendship. I’ve known people who thought they could know me intimately and matter in my life while actively fleeing or stonewalling my “influence”. They wanted to preserve their individuality! – but what could be less original than to adopt uncritically and unconsciously this all-too-common attitude toward influence and individuality?

What was desired was not actually to escape influence and to preserve individuality, but to escape the appearance of influence from any one other individual. The former is pride; the latter, vanity. (That autism vs. borderline theme again – excessive yang vs excessive yin… honor is androgynous.)

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I’ve been reading Octavio Paz’s The Bow and the Lyre. It’s not hard to see from the title how this harmonizes with Taoism.