Love, an Inner Connection: Based on Principles Drawn from the I Ching - Softcover

Anthony, Carol K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0960383263 ISBN 13: 9780960383269

Publisher: Anthony Pub Co, 1993

Synopsis

This book defines the love relationship as the principle and most important of all relationships. It describes what no other book on love describes: the key role of the innermost thoughts and feelings in determining whether our relationships succeed or fail. Based on the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching, which the author says contains the word love only three times, this book reveals that love is the all-important underlying principle of the I Ching. This love, however, is defined very precisely by its hexagrams and lines not as mere softness and sweetness, but as a developed awareness, sense of personal limits, openness, and capacity for feeling. Indeed, this book presents us with an entirely new description of love and the parameters within which it can safely unfold and become expressed. It shows that when we observe these limits and keep consistently aware of the effects of our innermost thoughts and feelings, we can continuously give and receive love without harm to ourselves or others. Indeed, Mrs. Anthony shows us how we can "make love stay."

About this title

About the Author

Born Carol Kessler in West Virginia in 1930, Carol K. Anthony was educated at Ward-Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee and the University of Iowa, Iowa City, specializing in Creative Writing. Her writing interest began at age fourteen, when she wrote a full length novel. Commenting on this, she says that while it was no novel, it did teach her how to write. "What took 40 pages to say at the beginning took one page to say at the end." After finishing college, and while raising her four children, she became fascinated with the literature of world drama. Feeling always a sense of destiny, and wondering how her talent for expression might be used, she attempted playwriting. However, after writing four plays, she decided that they read disappointingly like histories. The subject matter of these plays, though, confirmed that her primary interest was in "finding the real underlying the apparent." Her favorite playwrights were Aesculus among the ancients, Shakespeare, Pirandello, and Ibsen among the Europeans, and Eugene O'Niell (especially his Great God Brown and The Iceman Cometh) among the Americans. In later years she found the plays and calendar stories of Berthold Brecht particularly interesting. Of the modern filmmakers she was particularly influenced by Ingmar Bergman's use of symbols to convey meaning, and she credits a systematic study she made of the symbols in Wild Strawberries for helping her to later understand the metaphors of the I Ching.

It was during a "mid-life-crisis" in 1971 that, as she puts it, "the I Ching came to her." Immediately she realized that she had found her true teacher. Since then she has been its dedicated student, constantly learning new material that has found expression in her four books. In 1999 she reflects: "It turned my life around 180 degrees, taking me in a direction I never suspected I would ever follow, with endless rewards. With each book, and this love book is no exception, it seemed to me that I was made to go through every sort experience related to the subject, in order to write the books from the heart. At the time I often said to myself, 'is such a difficult process necessary?' But when the process resulted in the finished book, and all I had gained from the experiences, the effort and the difficulties were far more than worth it. Throughout, I felt the loving support of my teacher, the Sage who speaks through the I Ching."

Mrs. Anthony, now a grandmother of seven, has lived the last 45 years of her life in a suburban village near Boston, where she also runs Anthony Publishing Company, Inc., a publishing house she founded in 1979. After publishing her first book she began giving seminars and lectures on the I Ching, an activity that now takes her to various places worldwide.

From the Back Cover

This book is about love as an inner connection between two people's essential selves, which carries the promise of bliss, the fulfillment of our life's purpose, and the completion of our spiritual development. It defines this love as the most important of all relationships. It discusses love as a free spirit which cannot coerced, and how it is endangered by our 3000 year old patriarchal tradition.

It discusses love as the all-important source of chi energy, which nourishes both body and soul. It establishes the sexual expression of love as the sacred unification of what is heavenly and earthly in us. It explains how shutting ourselves off from love causes ill health, through loss of the will to live.

It is also about the cosmic laws governing relationships, as defined in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom. It is about the essentials which must be in place if love is to endure. It is about the difficulties at the beginning, and the pattern in which we can expect the love relationship to unfold.

This book is based on the premise that at this stage in our historical process, it is essential to thoroughly scrutinize the love relationship. It is much more than a "how to" book. It achieves a deep understanding, and so creates a revolution in our thinking on the subject.

Edition details

• Publisher: Anthony Pub Co
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0960383263
• ISBN 13: 9780960383269
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 147