Consecutive Hexagrams: An Illustration

The table below is from my I Ching notebook for this month. The record shows that I have cast hexagrams on 14 days this month, and on three separate occasions among these 14 I have cast the same hexagram consecutively, as noted below. According to standard probability theory, the odds of doing this on any occasion is 64 X 64 or 1 in 4,096. So presumably the odds for repeating this three times over the course of a two week period would be something like 4,096³ / 14 or roughly 1 in 4.9 billion. Clearly, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your probability theory.

But I would like to leave that matter there and focus instead on the messages, the lessons contained in this phenomenon. The point about probability theory is indeed a part of it: the teaching energy that speaks through an oracle like the I Ching sometimes points to our prejudices about chance, causation, and coincidence by producing such repetitions, as if to reveal to us our folly and myopia. Often such coincidences are merely a call for us to look within ourselves and identify and discard our self-limiting beliefs about such things as probability. I will not make the claim that probability theory is false; only that it is a limiting aspect of a very limited world-view.

In addition, consecutive hexagrams like these can represent the development of a theme, a multi-layered and subtly-tuned lesson from the cosmic teacher. This is where I’d like to turn the primary focus of this study.

My recent life issues have involved nine consecutive months of unemployment with all its usual financial struggles and worries. Fortunately for me, these have been relatively modest and ephemeral compared to the far more urgent difficulties faced by others in my condition. But a problem is not to be ignored merely because it is not exigent: as Lao Tzu said, it is actually best to “manage trouble before it becomes troublesome.” Thus, the Sage addressed these issues as a problem of expectation — usually, in my case, negative expectation, with its counsel being to remove the following negative beliefs:

The greater lesson of this, which may apply to others beside myself, is that before we can recover from an outer loss, we must first recover ourselves. Light will come to our lives most readily when we begin by dispelling our darkness. In economic times like these, this approach to financial adversity is doubly important, not to mention effective.

A still more urgent issue for me has involved the matter of freeing my body from a lifetime’s worth of obstructive and malevolent projections cast upon it. These destructive beliefs, derived from cultural conditioning and the authority figures of my childhood, have dragged me through years of arrant behavior, destructive habits, and general bodily neglect.

When we ignore or demonize the body and its natural needs, we do more than make ourselves unhealthy and our relationships rather more limited than they might be. The body, like many of its parts — heart, lungs, kidneys, limbs, eyes, ears, genitals, etc. — is bifurcated. We arrive on Earth with the familiar physical body, which we subject to all manner of defamatory beliefs (“a vessel of sin,” “dust and ashes,” “the inferior/lower part of ourselves,” “a machine that must be ruled by the mind/soul/spirit,” etc.). What is also given to us is a body that we cannot see, but can sometimes feel within ourselves, whenever we are attentive and caring to our physical body: the light-body or energy-body.

You do not have to be a New Ager or spiritualist to perceive the truth of this. In fact, it is best if you have no particular belief about it. Quantum scientists tell us that matter and even light can be conceived and indeed experienced — measured — as both mass and energy, quantum and wave, particle and movement. We are both thing and being, noun and verb, stage and action. These are, in the way of Nature, but a single living, dancing reality: as Lao Tzu said, “like the breath of lovers, the formed and the formless are one.”

But if we reject the one, we lose touch with the other; and if we subjugate or demonize the one, our condemnation creates a wound within the other. Which ventricle of your heart beats the best, which is the one you could live without? Which lung is the “master breather;” which leg makes walking possible? Silly questions, right? But this is the kind of demand we make of our lives as animal beings when we say either that we cannot exist as energy-bodies or that our physical bodies are temporary vessels whose only worth is to hold our “superior aspect” or “higher being” — soul or spirit or mind.

I am fairly sure that body is not a matter of mere dust and ashes; rather, I suspect that body, like consciousness, endures beyond our physical lives. The body that we know and often despise must, it is true, die and decay, transforming itself into its physical and chemical components. But our light-bodies endure and become part of cosmic record, if you will, an energy database of sorts that exists in dimensions, perhaps in universes, unknown to our earthly senses. Thus, to ignore or mock the notion of there being a light-body within you is to cast a limiting pall upon the physical body; and to defame or subjugate your physical form is to cast a stain of inferiority onto the life-force or body-energy that the Chinese called “chi,” and the Japanese “ki.”

Thus, in Hex. 21, I was being asked to examine myself and free myself of beliefs that connected guilt with the existence of my animal, bodily nature. Other beliefs that resulted from this guilt-projection upon my physical form were that “my body has no control over itself and its internal operations,” even to the point where I had unconsciously concluded that “I am too weak to change.” As these phrases were revealed to me, I recalled the old maxim, which most of us have heard since childhood: “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

The consequences of the demonization or mechanization of the body were further revealed in the final hexagram of this triad: number 39, Meeting Obstructions. The discussion from the Sage here focused on self-limiting beliefs, derived from those above, which tended to obstruct growth, movement, and development within both my bodily and psychological nature. Once again, the results of the impact of guilt-acceptance within me were revealed:

The undermining of our physical and formless bodily nature has destructive consequences that reach far beyond bad habits and ill health, bad enough as these are for us. They lead us into a darkness of stagnation, a blank corner of inaction and sightlessness where we can see no possibility, feel no hope, and find no will for real change or growth.

If you find yourself burdened with beliefs such as these and feel the impulse to blame yourself or another for accepting or projecting them, remember this: the collective ego has had several millennia of practice in casting its pall of error upon our ancestors; and the influential figures of our past have left the marks of their mistaken beliefs within us — usually quite unconsciously — from the earliest years of our lives forward. Thus, if you’ve reached middle age, you have been carrying these kinds of psychological projections for decades. In short, there is no one to blame, least of all yourself.

In a meditation, then, simply ask for help from the cosmic energies of inner cleansing and freedom from destructive belief, and say a firm but clear (that is, not bitter or hateful) inner No to the beliefs that are limiting or obstructing your progress. If your experience resembles my own and those of my counseling clients, you will feel lighter, freer, and clearer within yourself very shortly. There is no need to seek better beliefs or to cultivate imagined virtues that exist outside of yourself: as you clear away the painful emotions and false beliefs and expectations of your past, your natural light is given room to spread, and growth becomes your path. The only effort is in clearing away the darkness.