Hexagram 25 and 26
The eternal structure of life and time.
25 is not about daily-life real people, it is about the natural state of man. The base of what he is, his face before he was born.
26 is mythology. It is not real,
not the size and truth of daily life, it is image, metaphor, analogy, symbol.
Every day life relies on it, life is carried by the big symbols. Its time is
eternal time, not human time but time of the gods.
The following is, in my opinion, about both hexagrams. The last paragraph makes hex.25 especially clear.
Joseph Cambell ('The masks of God, primitive mythology, foreword) says:
"..the
mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable
apparition of the mythical being that it represents – even though everyone
knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it,
furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which
the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god.
..there
has been a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where
things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play
sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being
and the logic is that of “make believe” – “as if.”
..as J. Huizinga has pointed out in his brilliant study of the play
element in culture, the whole point, at the beginning, is the fun of
play, not the rapture of seizure. “In all the wild imaginings of mythology a
fanciful spirit is playing,” he writes, “on the border-line between jest and
earnest.”
..The gentile, the “spoil sport,” the positivist, who cannot or
will not play, must be kept aloof. Hence the guardian figures that stand at
either side of the entrances to holy places: lions, bulls, or fearsome warriors
with uplifted weapons. They are there to keep out the “spoil sports,” the
advocates of Aristotelean logic, for whom A can never be B; for whom the actor
is never to be lost in the part; for whom the mask, the image, the consecrated
host, tree, or animal cannot become God, but only a reference. Such heavy
thinkers are to remain without. For the whole purpose of entering a sanctuary or
participating in a festival is that one should be overtaken by the state known
in India as “the other mind” (Sanskrit, anya-manas: absent-mindedness,
possession by a spirit), where one is “beside oneself,” spellbound, set
apart from one’s logic of self-possession and overpowered by the force of a
logic of “indissociation” – wherein A is B, and C also is B.
..But there is another attitude, more comprehensive, which has
given beauty and love to the two worlds: that, namely, of the līlā,
“the play,” as it has been termed in the Orient. The world is not
condemned and shunned as a fall, but voluntarily entered as a game or dance,
wherein the spirit plays.
Prof. Huizinga: ..From this supremely aristocratic point of view,
any state of seizure, whether by life or by the gods, must represent a fall or
drop of spiritual niveau, a vulgarization of the play. Nobility of spirit
is the grace – or ability – to play, whether in heaven or on earth. And
this, I take it, this noblesse oblige, which has always been the quality
of aristocracy, was precisely the virtue (αρετη) of the
Greek poets, artists, and philosophers, for whom the gods were true as poetry is
true. We may take it also to be the primitive (and proper) mythological point of
view, as contrasted with the heavier positivistic; which latter is represented,
on the one hand, by religious experiences of the literal sort, where the impact
of a daemon, rising to the plane of consciousness from its place of birth on the
level of the sentiments, is taken to be objectively real, and, on the other, by
science and political economy, for which only measurable facts are objectively
real. For if it is true, as the Greek philosopher Antisthenes (born c. 444 B.C.)
has said, that “God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by
means of an image,” “ or, as we read in the Indian Upanishad,
It
is other, indeed, than the known,
And, moreover, above the unknown!
then
it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and
heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been
perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere
priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other
door.
And so what, then, is the sense that we are to seek, if it be neither here nor
there?
Kant, in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of
Meta-physics, states very carefully that all our thinking about final things
can be only by way of analogy.“The proper expression for our
fallible mode of conception,” he declares, “would be: that we imagine the
world as if its being and inner character werederived from a supreme
mind” (italics mine).
Such a highly played game of “as
if” frees our mind and spirit, on the one hand, from the presumption of
theology, which pre-tends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the
bond-age of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of human
experience.
I
am willing to accept the word of Kant, as representing the view of a
considerable metaphysician. And applying it to the range of festival games and
attitudes just reviewed – from the mask to the consecrated host and temple
image, transubstantiated worshiper and transubstantiated world – I can see, or
believe I can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the series by
way of the alchemy of an “as if”; and that, through this, the impact of all
so-called “reality” upon the psyche is transubstantiated. The play state and
the rapturous seizures sometimes deriving from it represent, therefore, a step
rather toward than away from the ineluctable truth; and belief –
acquiescence in a belief that is not quite belief – is the first step toward
the deepened participation that the festival affords in that general will to
life which, in its metaphysical aspect, is antecedent to, and the creator of,
all life’s laws.
...The laws of life in time and space – economics, politics, and
even morality – will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return
to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and
wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view
and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of
children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life’s meager
possibilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself with
something other than itself for the sheer delight of play, transubstantiates the
world – in which, actually, after all, things are not quite as real or
permanent, terrible, important, or logical as they seem.