Hexagram 29: A Jug of Wine, A Bowl of Rice

I keep the Tao of Grasshopper page here for a reason: it’s topical. It may seem like a silly claim to make of a TV show from nearly 3 decades ago, but the core message of this remarkably original program remains valid today:

“Fear is the only darkness.” Master Po’s simple statement is a clarion call to every individual living in these troubled, fear-ridden times. Fear is a darkness of ignorance, of no-awareness; it is a demonic celebration of myopia, of narrowness, of delusion. Fear tells us that life is inherently threatening, that the body is a prison, and that we are somehow guilty before an external God.

But when the worst that can happen has already started — the quick destruction of this planet as a humanly-habitable sphere; the collapse of world economies; the continuing spread of war and the looming pall of nuclear weaponry — what room is there left for fear? What use is it? As I mention in one of the posts at the Grasshopper page, if you were to quote FDR’s famous maxim to Master Po (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”), the old sage would smile and reply, “Not even that.”
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Hexagram 29 of the I Ching is about fear and its culturally-conditioned seeds, which are cast within us, like a magical spell or curse, and restrict growth, inhibit our free movement through life; and obstruct the flow of life force, both within the individual self and our communities and organizations, all the way to the human species itself. As Anthony and Moog point out in their rendering of the I Ching, “The Abyss” is the primary metaphor for fear and its source in an essentially limited and limiting ideology:

While fears are of many sorts and have many causes, this hexagram addresses the primal fears of the psyche: fear of the unknown, death, punishment, abandonment, and of not having enough essential nourishment for one’s whole being, whether that is actually food, or chi energy. Primal fears comprise the source of all other fears.

These authors go on to point out the source of such fears: thought. The trigram K’an, which is doubled in this hexagram, represents intellect, the forebrain. Now thought is not evil; it is only troublesome, in fact, when it is pushed onto the stage of life naked and alone, with no active support from the other components of the psyche.

In our culture, we tend to aggrandize thought, monarchize it, place it onto an empty throne in a high place that is distant and separate from our animal nature. So the first steps beyond fear consist in expelling the belief in thought or mind as the ruler of the psyche; then we can find and discard the individual thoughts that impede our growth by trapping us in a labyrinthe of fear and darkness. This process is guided by Nature and its helping energies: it is metaphorically described in the fourth line of Hexagram 29 as “a jug of wine, a bowl of rice…earthen vessels simply handed in through the window.”

This is the process that many of my clients in counseling have discovered in their own journeys through and out of the realm of their own fears. If fear is a persistent and obstructive pattern in your life, this process may be worth considering. If you are in the New York City area (or else would like to talk about telephone or online counseling), you may contact me at any of the points listed on this page.