Naming Children
Nowadays many people name their children after
some fashionable film star or pop ‘idol’. I've mentioned before some of the
significance that names have (‘On Names’). When a woman is pregnant the soul
of the baby moves into the foetus and the mother is given an insight into the
nature of the new baby. Of course, this assumes that the mother has relationship
with her own subconscious. Nowadays this is rare. Names provide an insight into
the soul of an individual.
In some Eastern cultures, the naming of the child is an honour given to the eldest member of the family. The children are seen as continuing a dynasty and the elder see their role in the evolution of the family. Nowadays, particularly in the West, this idea of the extended family having an ongoing evolution is lost.
Chinese and Japanese scripts are pictorial languages and a name has a character that has a representation. This picture gives a facet to the name that is lacking in Western cultures.
The concept of a picturegram is also in the I-Ching where each one of the 64 hexagrams is made up of an upper and lower trigram. There are eight trigrams so the combination of eight above and eight below gives 64 combinations. Each trigram is a picture and has a meaning. Combined into a hexagram it tells a story, for example the meaning of hexagram 15 (Modesty) is as follows:
- above K'un The Receptive, Earth
- below Ken Keeping Still, Mountain
This hexagram is made up of the trigrams Kęn, Keeping Still, mountain, and K'un. The mountain is the youngest son of the Creative, the representative of heaven and earth. It dispenses the blessings of heaven, the clouds and rain that gather round its summit, and thereafter shines forth radiant with heavenly light. This shows what modesty is and how it functions in great and strong men. K'un, the earth, stands above. Lowliness is a quality of the earth: this is the very reason why it appears in this hexagram as exalted, by being placed above the mountain. This shows how modesty functions in lowly, simple people: they are lifted up by it.
The picture is used as an insight into the situation being analysed.
The I-Ching is also called the ‘Book of Changes’. The common way of using the I-Ching is to throw two coins six times to get a sequence of 6 lines. There are four combinations. Each line may be broken or unbroken, moving or still. The randomness of the throwing represents a snapshot into what Jung calls “the coincidence of events in space and time”. The picture must be interpreted and standard works on the I-Ching provide standard (albeit somewhat cryptic) interpretations of the lines.
There are other methods of using the I-Ching. One involves using a standard formula to obtain the lower trigram from the date and time, whilst the upper trigram is derived from an aspect of the situation as depicted in a trigram. The trigrams are depicted
here. The secret is to extract the essence of the situation. An example is described
here:
We derive our two numbers to create the predictive hexagram from our keen observation of a situation. It can be something as simple as walking down the street, seeing an old man at the moment of a clash of thunder. I then look at my watch and I get a time. Thunder is the Chen(3) trigram and an old man could be the Chien(6) trigram. The lower number goes on the top and the higher number goes on the bottom. And, the moving line is found as I have described above. With this information I can predict either the fate of the old man, the weather or a situation in my own life. This is where my skill and intuition is important.
