The Awareness Century

Editor’s Note: This updated page represents an expansion of the earlier I Ching page. We will be using this space to present teachings from a variety of people, traditions, and practices promoting mindfulness, awareness, and open science. Our new century will be a time of progressive human evolution if and only if we are able to recognize the opportunities it offers for a broadening of awareness. In this context, there is no “right” or “true” practice or teaching to follow; there is only the need for awakening, for a rising, expanding awareness that will lead both individuals and societies into a world where trust is the medium that connects us and where love is the force that guides us. If you have suggestions, questions, or guidance to offer this page, use the comments link to the individual posts or the contact points at our About Us page.

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A Note on Emptiness

Last modified on 2010-02-08 09:50:01 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I usually begin each day with a short meditation that is essentially a request that the force of ego within me be scattered, dispersed. One image that tends to recur in this context is of an old-style mercury thermometer, whose silver bar rises until the glass shatters, and tiny pellets of ego-mercury go skittering omnidirectionally away. Then I can start getting the coffee going…

Experience has shown me that the first step in requesting help from the cosmos is to dissolve or chase expectation. You open your hand but do not stick it out. Obviously, experience helps here too: many of the things I most desperately wanted I turned out to be far better off for not having. Success is neither all effort (the cult of hard work) nor all benediction (the cult of prayer); though I suspect it is weighted somewhat more toward attraction than toward striving. Consciousness is quantum gravity, and gravity is a principle of attraction rather than of falling. We need never speak of falling in love; for love is a soaring, expansive attraction.

On the path of mindfulness, the true seeker pursues neither fullness nor emptiness. I would remind my Buddhist friends that sunyata (emptiness) is as much a delusion as maya (material striving). It is a fact verified both by science and by personal experience that there is no such thing as empty space. Thus, the search for emptiness makes as little sense as the lust for six-figure bonuses on Wall St. or the greed for fame everywhere in our culture.

So again, seek neither fullness nor emptiness; seek only clarity. Where there is clarity, the connection between the individual self and the cosmic whole is formed and held, and the balance between attraction and effort finds its natural and holographic point of moving, living equilibrium.

Anger vs. the Outpicturing of Your Perfection

Last modified on 2010-01-25 20:15:16 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The following material was channeled by Ellen while in a semi-trance. Her guides, discarnate beings she contacts through a meditative process, have no agenda other than teaching about unconditional love and fulfilling one’s creative potential. The guides do not make predictions about the future but rather “shine our own light back to us.” During the channeling process, the channel’s own point of view can sometimes surface, so the material may not be completely free of the human element. Ellen asks you to trust your own instincts in determining what feels true for you here.

Anger is a force that flows inward rather than outward. When it’s outward it very often comes about in terms of violence, disorganization, breaking things, etc. So many of us stick to anger rather than regrettable behaviors.

There is a weakness at the core of anger. While it might look like a strength, it might engender all sorts of forceful activities, the weakness at its core can be attributed to a weak sense of self, or an unhealthy relationship with the self. Let us say more. . . . A truly angry person is often ultimately angry at him- or herself, forgetting that he or she has the ultimate power to create, to bring about results, to create his or her own “luck” as it were. So often you as human beings forget about your ultimate power of creativity, of choice making, of bringing about solutions, results, and such. When this power is forgotten you have rage. This is the rage you see in yes, a two-year-old. A two-year-old often rages at his experience of powerlessness. Perhaps he can’t get his mother to accord to him what it is he desires. Perhaps he can’t fix his broken toy, perhaps his little brother or sister won’t share. Perhaps he’s having trouble eating his peas or porridge. There are many things a small, wee one can rage about. That rage is a natural, healthy expression of frustration and a feeling of powerlessness, for the little child has got to grow into his power. And indeed, there are many things the little one cannot accomplish. But in adults, what we have is a being who can bring about whatever it is he or she imagines or desires. We often think of this in a more metaphorical sense than in the literal sense, in which I mean, yes, it is true you create what it is you want with your imagination and desire. This is the condition of your being. This is the condition of your being because that’s the way you wanted it to be.

You have the ultimate power over yourself and your life. And then you let it go. You waved bye-bye to it, you let it float away in the breeze, you dismissed it, you disowned it. How did this happen? Throughout time you saw everyone else as being more powerful than you. You saw the external world as the holder of the power.

You see a bird fly, and you see the power in that bird. It’s doing something seemingly magical. Flapping its wings, staying aloft, overseeing the land below it. Making distances seem small. Journeying from point A to point B on a whim. On a mere whim and nothing else. And this is what birds wanted to do. And you see that nothing gets in the way of their power, nothing gets in the way of their desire, their imagination. There’s nothing or nobody stopping them. And so you have to wonder why–why you believe that something is stopping you but is clearly not stopping the bird. And we see this in all the good creatures of the land, the sea and sky. We see a oneness with their environment. We see an ability to propel themselves. We see a natural support between the environment and the being, one in which there is a circular interdependence, in balance, that supports life.

But you take yourselves out of the equation. Yes you do, you take yourselves out of the equation. All these things that are apparently true in the natural world somehow fail to exist, in your mind, in the human world. Now if you think about this, you are granting more power to the mere animals, the lowly creatures that you so often place below you on the evolutionary scale. In the grand scheme of things you very strangely put these lovely animals in a place that is more simple, less complex, less intelligent, and less evolved than you humans. But at the same time what you do is you remove your unique power from your concept of self. Very strange we say, very strange. And so nothing, nothing is quite so aggravating, quite so infuriating as this sense of powerlessness. Because it is your birthright, your hallmark, your beauty, your incandescence, your magic. And you’ve taken it away from yourselves. So easy, so easy it would be to get it back. How to do that, you might ask. How to do that?

You project your imaginings outward, onto a screen. You can pretend there is a screen in front of you. Project your imagination onto it, and then wait for it to come alive. Often it will. You can go about doing what it is you do. You can see the things around you as a result of your own creativity. Now you might say but that table in front of me, I did not make it. I did not make that car in my driveway either. And that Christmas tree in the corner, no I did not make that, that’s for sure. So we say, why are these things here? How did they get there if you indeed created them? And we would like to say that there’s mass consciousness in the effort. It is a chain of events. You can understand how you didn’t create the tree. Indeed, it created itself. Now it is in your home as a Christmas tree. You were one part of the chain of events that brought the Christmas tree to you. We don’t mean to suggest that you are a king on a throne waving a wand and that things will poof! land in front of you. We would like to suggest that you placed yourself within a very broad network of interacting beings. And brought many things to yourself quite effortlessly, whether it’s the clothes on your back, the food on your table, and so on. You will find that there is a flow to the things you believe in. Some things have entered your life with a strange level of effortlessness, an uncanny flow, as if the breeze brought them in. You very often take these things for granted.

And anger is so often anger at one’s self. Is so often one’s self not registering one’s own power and one’s own beauty. It is often a result of being disrespected by others, even treated cruelly by others. This is a typical reason to encounter anger within. How could that person treat me that way? What was she thinking? How could she be so cruel, so mean? A slap in the face. It may be more a situation of neglect. Why didn’t that check come in the mail, why isn’t the phone ringing?

Universally, anger is a reaction to not seeing yourself as the sacred and supreme being that you really are. And as you draw to yourself that which you are in terms of other people, you will find them mirroring back to you your own level of self-respect. And for some reason it is easier for you to see this happening when it is externalized than when it is internally present. So you can say that anger is a result of turning yourself inside out, and then taking it back again. It is difficult and it is painful to have this lack of love reflected back at you. It seems to double the pain and the passion. It seems to increase it, intensify it, heat it up. There seems to be an almost alchemical reaction, as if the friction or the discomfort causes a heat. It has to let off steam or smoke. It’s as if you let out the heat and the anger and it comes back at you in a circular fashion. And as it turns around it gains speed, and returns to where it originated. It increased its force and then buried itself inside you. Yes, there’s a lot of motion to anger. A force propelled outward at another who is looking at you in the same way you look at yourself. And there is a time to break this circular motion. To break this pattern, to cut it off, to see it as nonproductive. To see it as hurtful. It seems to be much more easy to stop this flow of events when it is coming at you rather than coming from within you. It seems much more easy for you to say “No, don’t treat me that way,” rather than saying to yourself, “Stop treating me this way.”

So what of it? Perhaps you’re angry that you got laid off a job. Maybe you’re angry that you were underappreciated in this capacity. Maybe your salary was decreased. Your position was eliminated. You can’t get hired. You are being treated in this scenario as if you are interchangeable, replaceable, indistinguishable from the next person. You are being treated like machinery. And indeed sometimes machinery is given more loyalty and respect in a company than the people who operate it. This is true, unfortunately. And it might seem inconceivable to you that this could be true, that you could be treated with such disrespect, disregard, and that you yourself are worth far, far more than you imagined, that you yourself are quite irreplaceable. Quite unique. But we would like to say that this distance between yourself–your true self, and what you believe to be true–is quite large. When you look at these people who lay you off, for example, you might say to yourself, “They don’t care. They don’t know me. How could they do this to me? How could they fail to see how much I need this job? How could they dismiss me so easily, without compunction? Without cause? Without providing even for my safety, my security, my future, my children?” It is reprehensible, we understand. But this is the level you have all stooped to in regards to yourself. This is the degree to which you have abdicated your own authority. Negated your own magic in this world. We assure you it is true. It is a very, very, very great distance between who you are and who you believe you are. And so when you feel this distance between yourself and perhaps your figure of authority, whether it is a landlord or a boss, whether it is a neighbor, perhaps even a friend or family member, one who doesn’t understand you, doesn’t value or respect you, doesn’t see you, well, now you know how you’re treating yourself—in a similar way.

We want you to think about the dogs you might own that are snoozing by the fire, getting fed, lapping up their water, getting petted, and so on. Many of them are enjoying a much better standard of life than you, are taking it for granted, living in the lap of luxury, and enjoying every minute of it. Do you think that you could manifest these things in your life as the dog has? Would you feel guilty if you had it that easy? Would you feel decadent? Would you feel lazy?

So anger…anger is a wake-up call. Try. Try to accept more of your needs as being healthy. Whether it’s a need for attention, comfort, love, sex, abundancy, or even power. We wish you would grant yourselves these things that you desire. We do not see the life of asceticism to be one that is ennobling. We see the balance coming more when you accept these things as your right. They will not magnify in importance if you give them to yourselves when you want them. It’s when you try to deny the want that they become so large and out of balance. Yes, you are hungry for things. Your are hungry for life. You are hungry for experiences. Your are hungry for light shining back at you. You are hungry for the mirroring of your inner power and so much more. These things are merely the circle of life telling you that you are alive. Just as the fish is constantly swimming, constantly encountering a new vision underwater. You want to be fed the results of your power. This is how you know you’re alive. This is how you know you are living. It’s merely moving forward through the outpicturing of your perfection. The motion, the motion continues. And so when you project your own beauty, grace, wonder outward, you will then receive it like the fish, the dog, or any other creature. When you project an image of your own powerlessness–something that the human race is clinging to, has been for eons–you will get it back to yourself. You will not like what you see. So we implore you to be a little more selfish, a little more self-centered, a little more self-respecting.

Happy New Year, From Hexagram 8

Last modified on 2010-01-03 03:39:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Numerologically, the year we have entered is a 3, in contrast to the 2 we have left (you simply add the numbers in the year until you have one digit: 2010 adds to 3; 2009 adds to 11 which in turn adds to 2). As unnecessary as it might be, there is too much potential for opposition and conflict in the binary; this is one reason why Pirsig, in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, proposed that Nature operates according to a trinary code (I have a full quote of the passage here).

I tend to agree with Pirsig, and I think that much of the more mature wisdom of the world, from both past and present, is in tune with the value of the trinary. The I Ching speaks frequently of a third presence, of a helping third, of the value of three. Three is the number of beginning, of opening, of two being joined and supported, nourished, by an invisible but genuine third presence. As they often do, Anthony and Moog vibrantly express this natural dynamic of completion, in their commentary to Hexagram 8, Holding Together:

All unity between two people is made possible by their recognizing and respecting each other’s boundaries; this being the prerequisite, the Sage then makes their harmonious connection possible. An image of a harmonious relationship between two people is the horizontal figure eight. The two circles of the eight represent the respective spaces of each person. It is their seeing the true self in each that enables them to connect. The point at which their two circles connect is love (mutual respect).

Perhaps another association has occurred to you as you read that selection: the figure eight laid horizontally is, of course, the mathematical symbol for infinity. A successful and natural relationship — a friendship, a love relationship, a marriage, even a professional relationship — partakes of and connects with the infinite, even as it operates amid the realities and vicissitudes of daily life. The two are not, however, the source of the infinite touch to the relationship: the noumenal energy that flows through them, connects them, and guides them is the invisible third that nourishes their union of form (the dark) with light.

As with most of what we teach here, this phenomenon has to be experienced, or else it is a mere stream of words across a page, easily brushed off as New Age fluff. For most of us, however, it is fairly easy to turn inward and look back on our relationships to discern those that were superficial and coldly pragmatic from those in which you could feel that third presence, the pulse of light, inspiration, or love that gave it an amazing vibrancy, a depth of meaning and a sense of endurance.

I’ll mention once more that I do not ask anyone to believe in this third presence, this Sage. It is better, in fact, that you do not believe. Personal experience is a far better teacher, a far truer guide, than belief or faith. So I’m merely suggesting that this year of 2010, this year of three, may be a good time to explore your relationships — those of the past and your current ones. Examine them, ask questions of them, and let your feeling response to them flow freely through and around you. Even the most skeptical of us can try this much: your beliefs (and certainly your anti-beliefs) will be easily recoverable after you’ve tried this experience. But if it goes well, perhaps you won’t need them all back, or have to grip them so tightly as you did before.

For many of us, myself included, 2009 was a year of reversals — outer misfortunes, losses, and stagnation. But it was also a year of contemplation, realization, and a sense of a burgeoning recovery. The coming year may be one of inviting that third presence into our lives, our relationships, our paths of healing and growth. It is not a god or some magic or other esoteric, religious miracle: it is simply a wave-form, an energy of the universe that is always there for those who will open themselves to its refreshing and restorative flow. The Chinese called it chi, the Japanese ki, and it is referred to as prana in the Sanskrit. In our human relationships, it may even be called quantum gravity, because it is, as Anthony and Moog indicate in the passage quoted above, a principle of attraction that honors each individual as it joins them with an energy that enhances them both. It is the completion that overcomes separation and dissolves division: this is the message of Hexagram 8, that “holding together brings good fortune.”

Consecutive Hexagrams: An Illustration

Last modified on 2009-12-12 15:34:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

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.

Date	Hexagrams	Changing Lines	Summary
11/2 – 11/3	Hex. 52, Hex. 52	Line 2; Line 3	Anxiety about the future (health, finances, job)
11/11	Hex. 21, Hex. 21	Line 1; Lines 1, 6	Projections, poison arrows against the body and Nature
11/23	Hex. 39, Hex. 39	None; Line 3	self-limiting, obstructive beliefs remaining

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:

“I’m on a downward slide and it can’t be stopped.”

“There is no turning back.”

The Sage also identified a changeling, a particularly malicious harbinger of negative belief that tends to reinsert dour expectations like those above. This changeling was exposed as the changeling of fatalism. It had to be killed in a meditation.

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:

“My will is limited.”

“It is my fate to get in my own way.” (i.e., for progress to become impossible)

“There is no good left in me.”

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.

Naked Beauty: An Exercise in Dream Interpretation

Last modified on 2009-11-29 02:41:17 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I was working in counseling with a new client, a young woman who seemed very focused, direct, and open in her speech. We were outside together, talking, when I noticed that she was naked. She had dark, shoulder-length hair and a lithe, beautiful figure, with small breasts that stood strong and free. I suggested we go inside someplace and she led me into a restaurant, where we sat at a table and continued talking. As I watched her, it was impossible not to become aroused; she was so lovely. But I also felt we were being watched; ogled by others; so I suggested to her that it might be sensible in this environment to put something on, and gave her a white dress. Smiling, she put it on and I told her that she still looked beautiful even with clothes on. She smiled again and led me outdoors. We walked down the street, still talking, and I felt as if I didn’t want to be with anyone else. But then I noticed that I’d suddenly run ahead of her and gotten onto a bus; when I realized I’d lost her, I jumped off the bus and walked back along its route until I found her again. I went to her side and touched her so we wouldn’t become separated again.

Dream interpretation can be a fascinating and sometimes absorbing activity. Yet many dreams are so beautiful in themselves that they require no particular interpretation and can even suffer from such analysis. I have found that the best interpretation on a dream always arrives after you have first allowed its experience the time and space to fill your being and your moment. So before you put your intellect to work on the message of a dream, allow your body to steep itself in the experience that the dream gave you. In other words, give yourself a brief meditation, focusing on the feeling of the dream and your body’s response to it.

The dream above is a recent one I had, and I awoke from it feeling refreshed, alert, and stimulated. In a meditation, I developed a better feel for who this delightful woman was, who, though my client in counseling, led, informed, and excited me so much. Jung would refer to her as an anima-presence, a symbol of the unconscious feminine principle within me; and that would not be wrong, but merely incomplete.

This young, athletic, and wise woman — so direct and yet receptive, firm yet responsive — is a helper of insight, an energy of the psyche that can lead me to identify and penetrate ego-obstructions rather than to oppose and fight them. The sexuality in her image and my response to her form represent the magnetism that exists naturally between one’s true self and the supportive and guiding energy of personal development and transformation.

Near the end of the dream, I found that I had separated from her and gone over a mechanical device that took me far ahead of her. This is intellect’s racing, breathless, and self-absorbed path, whenever it is forced to lead the psyche in isolation from the other natural energies of the living personality. The good news of the dream, then, is that I was able to retrace my way back to her, to that lovely female presence whose light leads but will not oppress; whose voice speaks clearly but not forcefully; who will allow you to stray and still be there when you are sane enough to return to her.

For I can clearly recall one feeling I had as I walked with her: though I desired her and wanted to sense her fully, to feel and taste and mingle with her; I knew that she was always there and ready — nothing needed to be forced with this beauty. In short, she was not to be claimed like a lover or a girlfriend or a wife typically is in our culture; but merely accepted, like a gift. I realized that if I were to try and put a ring on her, she would be gone in an instant; but if I only touched her and invited her inside me, she would do the same in return, and there would be in that as much delight as a man could bear.

Another important lesson of a dream like this involves the issue of the clothing. Though the detail of her conversation is lost to my memory (that is, it probably doesn’t matter); her forthrightness and insight came through clearly. In offering her the white dress, I was simply acknowledging the reality that truth is sometimes a private matter, and that sometimes you simply cannot communicate your truth to those who are not receptive. There are those who will leer at an insight or fine teaching just as they will leer at a naked beauty; your truth is meant to inspire those who can admire it and then transform it, personalize it, and make it their own. You do not wish to have people lusting after or seeking to buy or hoard your truth. There is an obvious strain of cultural voyeurism in our society, and it makes sense to protect your insight from that infection.

Note that the woman in this dream did not resist the white dress at all; she readily put it on and looked just as lovely with it as without. On the inner plane, this means that my personal truth is just as clear “clothed” as it is “naked.” In any event, truth delivered for its shock value is rarely truth; the light that endures tends to glow rather than glare.

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

Last modified on 2009-11-17 22:09:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

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.

Is Inner Truth a Lonely Path?

Last modified on 2009-10-24 17:13:11 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Our question this evening is this: “is the path of personal inner truth a lonely one?” The answer, in two words, is: “No, but…”

…It can often seem that way. I can actually sense the nodding heads of many a reader at this point.

You have made a choice to turn away from the way of the collective, from the lemming-stream of blind struggle, unthinking conformism, and unfeeling obedience; and have made a commitment to walking the path that has never been walked before and will never be walked again — yours. Will you be alone? Will this choice leave you isolated from society and misunderstood or even ridiculed, even by your family, your few remaining friends, and your peers or co-workers?

Once again, the ultimate answer is No. Nevertheless, it does take time for that to become evident, for your path to connect with those of others. Consider the image of the spider’s web here: the initial strands from the center go on a while before they begin connecting with other threads, other paths. Similarly, your path needs to mature, strengthen, and develop a little before it can find its natural points of connection, its place within the web.

This can be a difficult process, and I speak from personal experience here. The path can start to feel pale and painful, even constricting, when you are physically alone, when people who once thought you were cool now find you a little bit…strange. The strength to keep going comes from the same place as your original choice to take this path: from within yourself, where your connection with the Tao, with the cosmic whole, with the web of being, lives. In their commentary to line 2 of Hexagram 10, Treading/Conducting Oneself, Anthony and Moog provide the following insight:

2. Treading a smooth, level course. The quiet and solitary man fulfills his destiny.

A person may receive this line when he is afraid to stand or go on his way alone, out of fear of being lonely or excluded by others… [But] retreating from ego-behavior in others is to be embraced by the Cosmos itself.

In other words, your “company” for the time during which you are developing and maturing your personal path, your way of inner truth, is found in the very presences that you sensed in making your choice in the first place. Whether you call them “spirit guides,” “helpers,” as the I Ching refers to them, or “hidden hands,” to use Joseph Campbell’s expression — these are the psychological energies of the invisible world that prompted you to undertake your path; with which you seek a deeper relationship as a result of your choice. If you make the effort to get to know them, you will find that they make terrific company by themselves (because, after all, they are a part of you), and that they inevitably lead you directly to the right human connections that will nourish you and require no compromise of your inner truth.

As Anthony and Moog go on to point out in their commentary to Hexagram 10, there are two kinds of obstructions that the collective ego may use to make us give up, to force us off the path before our strand on the web can reach the many and abundantly rewarding points of intersection with other strands, other seekers, other people. The obstructing beliefs are (1) a mistrust in our own completeness, in our abilities as individuals to recognize and fulfill our unique destiny; and (2) a truly bizarre notion that the spiritual life is necessarily a solitary and isolated one. Both of these beliefs are ridiculously, almost comically false; and we must reject them from within.

Both of these beliefs are, like virtually all of the collective ego’s program, based on deep-seated fears — fears that may have been placed within us while we were children, before we had attained an age of independent discernment. They tell us that we must dread the prospect of having to go our way alone when we must; that any relationship or association, no matter how defective or dysfunctional, is better than being alone. They insist that solitude is terminal, irrevocable: it’s the same delusion as the collective ego maintains about death. These beliefs warn us that if we are to choose a path of mindfulness or spirituality, we must be hermetic and lonely. These fears — of exclusion, of loneliness, and of isolation — are powerful instruments of affiliation and bondage.

As long as we are subject to those fears, we remain in the prison of the collective ego. But once we say a firm inner No to those obstructive beliefs and free ourselves of the fears that fuel them, then light spreads over our path and our ability to begin to see those intersecting threads before us, even if we cannot yet touch them, arises.

The Atomic Trigrams

Last modified on 2009-10-23 04:29:54 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

This is an image of a single carbon atom’s electron cloud, which I’ve doctored a bit.

Shock and the End of Battle

Last modified on 2009-07-28 23:23:05 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

The departure from conflict is one of the more challenging lessons we encounter in the pursuit of Tao. The I Ching has plenty to say about it — in Hexagrams 6, 38, and the fifth line of Hexagram 51, Shock, which is where we turn our attention now.

Shock goes hither and thither.
Danger.
However, nothing at all is lost.
Yet there are things to be done.

In every conflict, a point arrives where someone must put down the weapons of dispute and leave the arena. Once this is done, the battle is over, because there are no longer opponents, merely an aggressor with no territory to conquer, no enemy to destroy; or a defender with no invader to repel. The situation then moves from the realm of agony to that of comedy. There are few things so funny as a warrior with no opponent.

It is easy to leave a fight we do not believe in; it is far more challenging to give up a conflict when our cause is just. This, of course, is precisely where the Tao calls to us most urgently: a just cause requires no defense; to fight for it merely gives power to those who would be our adversaries. A broader understanding of this simple principle in our culture would utterly transform politics and foreign policy, among other things.

The conflict can be a war between nations or the struggles of a divorced couple; the principle governing such battle is the same. In their I Ching commentary, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog express it this way:

The shocks that go hither and thither are the blows they impart to each other. Receiving this line is informing them that they have created a fate, which they are now experiencing. “Nothing at all is lost” means that the person reading this line can end the fate by saying the inner No to the ego’s desire to continue arguing, and also by saying the inner No to the other person’s holding onto his grudge.

The “inner No,” in this case, refers to a psychological transformation within the individual: before we can let go of our weapons, we must first release the attachment that dragged us out onto the battlefield in the first place. Of all the courageous acts I have witnessed in my life, by far the bravest have been those where a person has left a winnable conflict behind. In conflict, nearly every victory is pyrrhic, to the point where the phrase itself might be considered redundant.

From the cosmic standpoint, it is the purpose of shock to dislodge the ego’s attachment to its cause, its lust for victory at any price. The shock freezes the ego, locks it in place, shuts its mouth; and the individual is free to hear the long-suppressed voice of inner truth. This is when the Sage can speak clearly to us, reminding us that, as the poet said, there is no greater misfortune than to have an enemy. In Nature, life always find the path of least resistance; but in the realm of ego and its conflicts, death is our constant companion.

These principles are not unknown even to military strategists. They know that retreat and surrender are not the same thing. Retreat is the wisdom that cherishes peace and sanity above victory; surrender is the empty despair that often carries within it the seeds of future rage. In conflict and amid shock, the Sage calls us always to the way of retreat.

Recharging Your Inner Turbine

Last modified on 2009-07-24 17:19:10 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Sitting in meditation next to flowing water is very restorative. If you’re unfamiliar with meditation, try turning on this video and sitting quietly with your eyes closed until it stops (it’s less than two minutes). Then try it again with your eyes open, and focus on the image of the flowing water, as well as its sound. See how you feel afterward, and post a comment about your experience if you’d like.

It’s as if one’s chi-body is the turbine drawing energy from the stream. In the case of meditation, of course, we must also remember to give back to the source from which we receive. Your body knows very well how to do this already; no instruction is required.

This is one reason why I call my books (and others like them) merely “reference manuals for the true self.” In the way of Nature, no “instruction manual” is necessary for the proper functioning of the self; indeed, a “de-instruction manual” is, in our culture, more appropriate to the purpose. We learn not by doing, but by undoing. As Lao Tzu informs us: The Sage does nothing, yet nothing is left unaccomplished.

Yet Another Meditation Video

Last modified on 2009-07-20 22:35:30 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Meditation as the exploration of your body-self is the topic of this video (Quicktime, 8.8MB, click graphic to view). As I mention, a little physical exertion before you reach your meditation place is a good thing: to get to the place where you find me in this video, I have to walk about two and a half miles, much of it uphill. I have found that when I involve my whole body in the activity of meditation, it becomes easier to enjoy both the practice and its many benefits.

Just Another Meditation Video

Last modified on 2009-07-14 21:23:55 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I usually carry the laptop on my walks through Prospect Park here in Brooklyn, NY. So this came quite easily, though it will not be interesting or useful to many. My apologies to those without Quicktime (though if you’re on Linux, M-Player does a great job with such content, and the VLC player is excellent as well) — I’m sort of boycotting Youtube for now. Too much thoughtless commentary and it seems you can’t even post a home movie there without going under the copyright microscope. As I say at my main page of the blog, corporate America ruins everything, or so it seems.

The reason I do not put myself in the camera for these meditation videos is that I do not want you to do what I do; I want you to do what you do. Meditation is one of those universal experiences that are unique within each individual who practices. As such, it is unteachable. As the old Zen saying has it, an instructor cannot take you to the moon; he can only point the way toward it.

Questions About the I Ching and the Way

Last modified on 2009-07-21 20:40:45 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

No one has ever asked me these questions. They are simply questions I have asked myself. So I decided to write them down with the best answers I could discover. If you have additional questions about Tao or the I Ching that you would like discussed, write them into the Comments, and I will address them.

Can you tell me what is the rationale for using an old Chinese book of poems to help modern people with the most urgent personal and psychological problems?
A health writer at The New York Times today offered up a piece about the “imps” of the psyche, and — after interviewing several doctors, academics, and other experts — arrived at the conclusion that “A certain relief can come from just getting it over with.” In other words, maladaptive or positively destructive contents of the mind are simply impossible to manage or defeat. As I have mentioned before, I do not agree with this bleak view. What that old Chinese book of poems reveals to us is that we have resources at hand and within us that can help us to return enduringly to our natural state of sanity. This, if you ask me, is a pretty good payoff.
OK, I’m sniffing at the bait…how does it work?
As I mention here and at my counseling page, the process that makes it all work is what I call “inner elimination.” You draw upon the oracle to direct you to identify and verbalize (or image) the specific ego-contents of your mind that are impairing your health, your growth, your relationship(s), or your overall personal or professional development. Then, you expel them using a method developed by my teachers, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog of the I Ching Institute. What this process does is to engage and activate inner resources that the I Ching refers to as “helpers.”
What is a “helper”?
A helper is an energy that is activated within your body when you deeply understand the truth, “I cannot do it all myself.”
What’s the point of conceiving “helpers” in the I Ching as personal energies rather than as human assistants, which is how most traditional interpretations view helpers?
The I Ching is poetry, a song of insight and feeling whose music, I think, was intended to reach beyond appearances and past the prosaic conventions of the superficial that are mistakenly thought to comprise “reality.” If a poem cannot help us see into ourselves, then it has lost its music and become something hard and dead, like religious catechism or law. Most folks who are familiar with the I Ching know that when it is read literally, it makes little or no sense — you’d do just as well with refrigerator magnet poetry. To take the I Ching’s poetic advice literally is like following Jim Cramer’ stock tips. It is only when the poems are read metaphorically that they begin to live, to respond to the deepest human needs.
Where precisely does the I Ching speak of these ‘helpers’?
I see references to them in the following:

Hex. 2, Judgment: “friends in the west and south.”

Hex. 2, Line 3: “hidden lines”

Hex. 3, Judgment: “It furthers one to appoint helpers.” This phrase is repeated in line 1. The “wagon” in which “horse and wagon part” in lines 2, 4, and 6 refers metaphorically to a vehicle within the living self through which the helpers are contacted and activated; the horse being the life force or chi which “pulls” the wagon. The message of these lines is that these must not be separated, or there is misfortune.

Hex. 5, line 6: “Three uninvited guests” who deserve to be honored refer to helpers.

The “army” of Hex. 7 and Hex. 15, line 6, is a reference to protective helpers.

Hex. 16, Judgment: “It furthers one to install helpers and to set armies marching.”

Hex. 24, Judgment: “Friends come without blame.”

Hex. 29, line 4: “A jug of wine, a bowl of rice with it; earthen vessels simply handed in through the window.”

Hex. 35, Judgment: the “horses in large numbers” refer to helpers

Hex. 39, line 5: “In the midst of the greatest obstructions, friends come.”

Hex. 41, line 5 and Hex. 42, line 2: the “someone” referred to who brings increase is a helper, whose influence can exceed or overcome even magic or power (the “ten pairs of tortoises”)

Hex. 50, lines 5 and 6: the “handles” and “rings” of the Ting denote helpers

Hex. 56, line 4: the “property and axe” that arrive after the losses of line 3 are references to the return of helpers

Hex. 57, line 2: the “Priests and magicians” are references to helpers, though the actual terms used are probably Confucian-era distortions of the original.

Hex. 59, line 1: the “help with the strength of a horse” that comes is a reference to a helper, in this case the helper of dissolving or inner cleansing.

Hex. 62, Judgment and line 6: the “flying bird” is a reference to a helper, usually the Sage. Note that when it leaves (line 6), there is misfortune; the same result will come to one who pretends to take the functions of the helpers onto himself (line 1, “The bird meets with misfortune through flying”).

How are helpers made active within us, and how can I get their help now?
You ask. When you have sincerity and deep feeling within you, that’s all you need to do: ask. You are not, after all, calling upon something that is separate or distant from yourself. For many of us, however (myself especially included), it is also necessary to “undertake something” (see Hex. 2, 14, and there are others with this phrase) — this means to begin the work of undermining ego. What must be overthrown are the beliefs, self-images, forced conditioning, commandments, and false emotions (guilt, for example) of the collective ego and its dark reflection within the individual. As this “undertaking” continues, more and more helpers are liberated within the mind and body.
So does the I Ching tell the future?
No, I do not believe that it does. In fact, the I Ching does something far better than give us the lowdown on a deterministic future: it provides us with the opportunity to self-create a future that is consistent with our inner truth, our native abilities, and our natural destiny. Now it can appear to tell the future, because when you use the I Ching correctly, it reads the entire consciousness of a moment, thus embracing future possibilities and even likelihoods. But the future is not a script written into some stone called Time. As Einstein demonstrated to us, both time and space in isolation are illusions, fantasies — they are not real. There is only the time-space continuum in the relativistic universe. To claim that either time or space can exist independently would be like saying that application code could be written with only zero or one; or that you could live with only one side of your brain. These are all complements, not opposite things. Opposition is an invention of ego; in the way of Nature, yin and yang are complementary expressions of the same unity.
Can I learn to discipline my mind through the I Ching?
The short answer to this question is “yes.” But first, a word about discipline: any discipline — of the body, the mind, a student, a child, an animal — that strays from the purpose of liberating and fulfilling its potential is no longer discipline but despotism. This betrayal of discipline, this loss of purpose, is in many respects the defining error of our age and culture — in education, government, the workplace, our markets, and our media. Natural discipline is more about possibility than limitation; it affirms and supports freedom and rejects oppression and punishment. If a path of discipline that you are involved with contains a trace of punishment, guilt, or imperiousness, then I would encourage you to leave that path immediately; for it is not discipline. Discipline liberates the will of the student; thus, the I Ching furthers this way of inner freedom because it patiently and accurately reveals to us the attitudes, emotions, and beliefs that block the path of freedom. It teaches us how to properly expel these negative influences from within ourselves; it also points us to related practices, such as meditation (Hex. 52), that support the way of natural discipline.
Is the I Ching a religion, or the book of a religion?
No, I do not think it is; though some efforts have been made toward that end in the past. I feel these efforts are unfortunate errors. The I Ching contains no commandments; no catechisms; no laws of behavior or thought. It simply offers insight into the living personality and life of the inquirer who approaches in sincerity, humility, and respect. If there is one “rule” that I have personally found in my years of experience with the oracle, it is this one: Honor Life.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching Chapter 11

Last modified on 2009-07-02 01:59:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Walking Into the Light of Nature: Learning to Say No

Last modified on 2009-06-12 21:06:08 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The Christian gospel tells us that the good news (the meaning of the word “gospel”) is that every individual carries within the cosmic consciousness, which Christianity calls God or Jesus Christ. The rest is all the stone curtain of ideology, which obstructs light and impedes inner movement.

The good news of Tao has always been the same: the cosmic consciousness is alive within each of us, and it can be experienced in this moment, with no cultivation, improvement, attainment, or learning required.

As it turns out, all that is needed is unlearning the beliefs, commandments, inhibitions, and most of all, the fears that prevent us from recognizing the light within. As Lao Tzu told us two and a half centuries ago, development is diminishment. Each falsehood removed, each belief unburdened, each fear dissolved, is another step further into the light of Nature.

But if you’ve been reading the newspapers these days, you know that a virulent strain of extremism has infected our public discourse. The arrival of light often makes the vermin in a place become active. So this is a time for us to discover what the I Ching means when it tells us, repeatedly throughout its text, to be “firm and correct.”

My teachers, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, wrote a fairly large book based on the simple premise that we have to learn how to say “No,” from the heart and not merely from the brain. This, I feel, is the meaning of “firm and correct.”

In our culture, “No” is frequently a response of either aggression or defense. It seeks to punish rather than correct; to humiliate rather than dignify; to isolate rather than unite; to oppress rather than liberate.

Our “No” is rigid and unyielding. But look at the I Ching’s expression: “firm” is not the same as hard or rigid. “Firm” is the branch of the willow; the bed of a spring that defines the water’s course; the living greatness of a mountain. It constantly moves, bends, reshapes itself, even as it stands free and strong as both inner presence and outer manifestation.

Note also the use of the word “correct.” Why doesn’t the I Ching say “righteous” or “moral” or “ideal”? Perhaps because the sages who wrote the poems of the I Ching were guided to realize that, in the cosmic harmony, there is no such thing as “righteousness.” We can no more be righteous beings than we can be gods.

So when we say “No” from the heart, we are speaking as feeling beings rather than pretending to be gods. The source determines the nature of the act: we are firm but not inflexible; correct but not righteous. The willow branch becomes free of a weight of snow and ice by bending, moving away from the burden; thus, it releases it through a process of retreat, separation. Just so ourselves: in saying “No” to an affront, an injustice, or an invasion, we must communicate separation rather than denial; freedom rather than oppression; correction rather than punishment.

The gospels of both Christianity and the Tao inform us that we already contain the entire universe, fully formed, within ourselves. What need have we then, to pretend to be its ruler?

Dissolving Blood

Last modified on 2009-06-06 05:01:44 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Among certain Hindus, Jains, and Buddhist practitioners, it is customary to speak of taking a vow of ahimsa, or non-violence. Now while I have no problem with the practice of such a vow, I question the accuracy of its origin. There is no necessity for ahimsa to be a vow, a promise either to God or any other ideological fixture; ahimsa is simply a conscious act of return — an evolutionary step that goes not forward or backward, but inward.

For non-violence, properly considered, is a return to our true nature, to what we already are, beneath the stony crust and metallic shell of ego. The I Ching repeatedly describes the way of non-violence as a path of return; for example, in line 4 of Hexagram 9, “The Taming Power of the Small:”

If you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way.
No blame.*

That is, the way of “vanishing blood” and dispersing fear is sincerity, the actualization of our true humility. How we might see this accomplished is described in Hexagram 59, line 6:

He dissolves his blood.
Departing, keeping at a distance, going out,
Is without blame.

It is, perhaps paradoxically, a matter of killing ego, but through a process that is more like the action of water upon rock. Ego cannot be summarily slain, but relentlessly worn down, weakened, undermined. Simply starting such a process, however, can be extraordinarily liberating. This is the point of what I call conscious meditation: you work toward ahimsa not with a vow or through the prism of an ideology; but with a focus on unlearning and expelling the habits of violence and ill will that have been conditioned into us by our culture. As I mention in that chapter, CM is a practice that comfortably suits the western mind, because it is targeted, active, and progressive. There is no need to take a vow of ahimsa; we simply need to destroy the beliefs that obscure its living truth, which already exists within us.
_________________________________________________________

*I am quite certain that the ancient Chinese knew very well that blood in its natural state is a wonderful substance that furthers and protects life. They had a fairly advanced understanding of medicine for their time, without of course being able to understand that hemoglobin carries oxygen and leukocytes kill invaders and protect the body from infection. But ancient China was a world of violence (“warring states”), and the shedding of blood was too common and widespread for the “blood” of the I Ching to be a metaphor for anything but violence, aggression, and ill will.

Hexagram 6: Inner Conflict and Its Imps

Last modified on 2009-05-13 18:27:15 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Often, our most dangerous ideas are the most attractive. They can even seem compellingly true. I have found that the I Ching is very reliable in exposing such harmful and appealing notions; and recently I had a reminder.

Unemployment, like any personal loss or crisis, is a challenge to the integrity of the personality. Such events can become doorways for ego to slip through, or, as the old Chinese proverb has it, “the hole through which harm enters.” I have been out of work for only two months — not long enough for any real danger to arise, but long enough for dread to make its entrance.

I had mentioned earlier this month that times like these can make one feel the floorboards beneath the psyche creaking, shifting into imbalance. This should have been a sign to me of the approach of ego and its parasitic insinuation; but I missed it. This morning, however, the I Ching reminded me with line 6 of Hexagram 6, “Conflict:”

Even if by chance a leather belt is bestowed on one,
By the end of a morning
It will have been snatched away three times.

An incipient inner conflict that takes us out of our natural psychological balance, in which the true self leads, can appear as a seeming insight or deep recognition of some profound truth. This, of course, is always the action of ego talking in its artful tongue of helplessness and inevitable dissolution. I asked a few questions of the Sage and found that the line was pointing me toward an imp-phrase that was prompting me to allow for the inexorable approach of insanity. The phrase, which had occurred to me during a night of fitful, restless sleep, was “sanity’s grasp is always slippery, and inevitably loose.”

Well, it can seem like quite an insight in difficult times — particularly with its alliterative resonance and flowing metaphor. But it is an imp. What, then, you ask, do we mean by “imp”? Well, it’s actually ground we’ve covered here before: an imp is a back-of-the-mind suggestion, often unconscious or semi-conscious in origin, which employs fear in the service of falsehood. Ego’s goal, paradoxically, is always the disorder of self-doubt; the chaos that arises when the true self’s leadership is undermined or threatened. And there is scarcely a more potent seed of fear than to question one’s own sanity, the integrity of one’s own psychological being.

Thus the old Chinese oracle reminded me that the seed of inner conflict (remember the title of the hexagram I received) brings forth the weeds of fear and suspicion. These, of course, will be disguised as realization (the “leather belt” of line 6). But ego is inevitably self-immolating; its only action is destruction. That realization will rebound upon you (be “snatched away”), and the seeming gift of insight will become the Trojan Horse of the psyche. Particularly in difficult times, we have to be aware of this tendency of ego to raise its imps of belief and dread against the true self; and it’s always good to have help in maintaining your awareness. I have found that in a period of economic duress, three pennies can go a very long way.

The Solace of Quantum

Last modified on 2009-08-15 20:08:49 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Many folks who work in the profession of psychology study psychopathology — mental illness. I prefer to study sanity. I happen to think, bless me, that sanity is actually our natural state of mind; and that the return to sanity is not supposed to be an excruciating and expensive journey into the realms of drives, anal fixations, object-oriented obsessions, defense mechanisms, and various other lugubrious theoretical contents of the mind.

Nevertheless, I am aware that we have all been raised, to varying extents and with varying effect, amid a culture that projects such demonic prejudices and group-based self-images within us as might unhinge the gateway of natural sanity. I occasionally feel it myself, the floorboards of normal mind creaking, loosening, sliding beneath me. Most of us who work or study in psychology have been drawn to it by a heightened sensitivity to our own demons, our own abnormalities.

We discover a variety of inner balms and consolations. One of my peculiar sources of solace is in modern physics — quantum mechanics and relativity theory. The idea that Einstein demonstrated that there can be no such thing in human experience as Absolute Motion is somehow comforting to me. For when there is no Absolute Motion, there can be no Absolute Cessation. Think of it: in all the numberless measurements, trackings, countings, analyses, and statistical minutiae ever taken or performed by scientists in our modern era, there is no record of a thing having terminated its movement. All we can say of a thing, or of ourselves, is that it is at rest; not that it has stopped or ceased to be.

Death as we ordinarily think of and fear it is an illusion. We can look at a corpse and say truthfully, “it is changing,” or “its former organization is gone and transmuted into another order” or “something happened here that I cannot see or understand;” but we cannot validly claim, “this person/animal/thing is dead, terminated.” Indeed, the only death is in the claim itself, the false belief.

For certain scientists (string theorists in particular) also believe in the existence of additional dimensions beyond our known four. That is, there may be realms of experience that we cannot access within the limitations of form as we know it. And if you’ve read up on your Stephen Hawking, you know that black holes are probably way-stations, for both light and matter, to other universes. No wonder the dead can’t talk back to us.

If light and matter can be “killed,” only to be “resurrected” within a different universe at the other end of the wormhole, then how great a leap is it to consider that our own consciousness can do the same? Granted, when you’re not a physicist or astronomer (and even if you are), you can make of this whatever you choose. That, to me, is where the marvelous and transformative potential of this stuff lies: it takes us completely outside the realm of evangelism. You can’t make group doctrine out of this kind of insight; the “theory of everything” is as much an illusion as the divinity of Jesus.

The quantum universe is a beautiful paradox; God laughing at himself. You can only work with it as an individual. Consider the following passage from Gary Zukav’s epochal book on the new science, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and tell me how you could build a church upon it. As Emerson reminded us, the only true church has a congregation of one.

According to Einstein’s ultimate vision, which he never ‘proved’ (demonstrated mathematically), a piece of matter is a curvature of the space-time continuum! In other words, according to Einstein’s ultimate vision, there are no such things as ‘gravitational fields’ and ‘masses.’ They are only mental creations. No such things exist in the real world. There is no such thing as ‘gravity’ — gravity is the equivalent of acceleration, which is motion. There is no such thing as ‘matter’ — matter is a curvature of the space-time continuum. There is not even such a thing as ‘energy’ — energy equals mass and mass is space-time curvature.

This is a similar kind of vision that Lao Tzu presented in the 16th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, some two and a half millennia before Einstein came along:

While sitting in stillness,
Connect with the Cosmic Harmony.
By clearing the space within,
In steadfast quietude,
Let your true self observe
The numberless compressions of consciousness:
How they arise and recede,
Coming into being and blooming;
Retreating at last toward the Cosmic Origin.

Return to the root, to the primal nature,
Is the way of all beings.
Let your awareness contemplate
The eternal cycle of return,
And your insight will deepen in this.

The understanding that is nurtured
On the dispersion of ignorance
Perpetually broadens its perspective.

To embrace the way of return,
To feel the immutable equality of being,
Nurtures equanimity and justice.

To live in the Tao means abiding in the eternal—
Perceiving completely, with all one’s being:
Life is never exhausted;
It is only delusion that dies.

Hexagram 27: God as an Equal

Last modified on 2009-04-26 08:25:28 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Let us suppose, for the duration of this brief essay, that we all agree that God exists. Consider it the activity of Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” which is actually one of the principles that guides my own work with the I Ching. Disbelief, as well as other forms of belief, can be always retrieved when our work together is done.

So we agree that some sort of God exists. How would it further change our dialog about God if we also agreed that He, She, or It is not a “higher power,” “superior being,” or “supreme Lord?” That instead, God is our equal, the equal of every living thing?

First off, we could dispense with the capitalization, unless we simply meant it to indicate an ordinary proper name, like Brian or Barack. More importantly, we could also dispense with the “fear of God” that is the cornerstone of belief in virtually every religion. Why fear one who is your equal, especially when your religion tells you that this one is also the apotheosis of Love? Silly. Out the window, then, with fear in our relationship with God.

The I Ching, of course, has nothing to say about God — it does not mention such a being even once. In later and heavily-edited versions done by the Confucian school, there is mention of “the superior man” and “the power of heaven,” where the latter is deemed the authorizing force of the former. Yet even to the casual reader, the strain of this spin on the oracle’s poetry is easily seen and sensed.

The poets who were inspired to write the I Ching had a vision of the universe as a friendly, non-threatening, and nourishing presence that had nothing to do with power, fear, or the various hierarchies of might. This was a vision echoed in the poems and stories of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and others who agreed that the threats to both humanity and Nature arose not from a vengeful or destructive Other, but from the ego-distortions and bizarre psychological projections that we cast onto Reality. This was a problem two and a half millennia ago; it is our problem today in a world in which suicide bombers blow up a market filled with people, with the name God on their murderous lips as they detonate the charge.

So the authors of the I Ching preferred to focus on the nourishing aspects of the cosmic consciousness, which they describe in various portions of the text. One of these is Hexagram 27, Nourishing, whose lines are said to represent the mouth, with its solid lines at the top and bottom representing the lips, and the broken lines in between, the teeth.

THE CORNERS OF THE MOUTH.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
Pay heed to the providing of nourishment
And to what a man seeks
To fill his own mouth with.

In the lower part of this mouth — the first three lines — the oracle describes the false ideas which distort the reality of the universe. These are the agents of misfortune.

1. You let your magic tortoise go,
And look at me with the corners of your mouth drooping.
Misfortune.

Here, the writers are speaking to their culture. The “magic tortoise” was what we might refer to today as a “talisman,” an object that provided both instruction and nourishment, as well as connection with the Whole. Some folks have a similar attitude toward their iPhones, Blackberries, and iPods. Others feel this way about their cars, and still others, sadly, have the same feeling for their guns. As metaphor, the image of the tortoise is intended to direct the person inward, to the treasure that lies under the trash-heap of fear and false belief — the true self. You let that treasure go (or obscure it with belief), and trouble leaps into your lap.

2. In turning to the summit for nourishment
One deviates from the true path.
Continuing to do so brings misfortune.
One needs instead to seek nourishment from the hill.

This line (in a fresh and more accurate translation by Anthony and Moog, which corrects the error in the Wilhem work) is fairly direct about both natural and distorted views of the source of nourishment. You can’t “turn to the summit” for nourishment, because there isn’t any such thing. That is, there is no Cosmic Boss to whom you can turn for your answers in living. Real nourishment can be found in something lower, more familiar and easily accessible. The summit is cold and distant; nothing grows there. The hill is near, warm, and part of our natural habitable environment: that’s the place to look for growth and the food of mindfulness.

3. Turning away from nourishment.
Perseverance brings misfortune.
Do not act thus for ten years.
Nothing serves to further.

The perseverance known variously as arrogance or denial is the cause of what we know as fate. To persist in the fantasies of power and fear will just drag us down into a trench of recurring misfortune and myopia. My sense is that the real meaning of this line is more like “do not act thus, [or] for ten years nothing [will] serve to further.” That meaning reinforces the line’s focus: it’s a warning from an equal, not a sentence from Above.*

Most of the work I’ve done in counseling others has been with writers, artists, and musicians. This, I assure you, arose from no plan or marketing scheme of my own; it simply happened that these were the sorts of people attracted to my service and the I approach I took in the work. Creative people have little difficulty with the notion of cosmic benignity in general, and of natural helping energies in particular. As a painter I worked with once remarked during a discussion about “helpers:” waving a hand around his studio where we were meeting, he said, “if I imagined that this stuff came from me, with no help from invisible presences, none of this would have gotten done and I’d be digging ditches or out begging for alms.” This perspective is summarized by Anthony and Moog in their commentary to line 6 of Hexagram 27:

Whether a person desires to live in the Cosmic Reality (sphere of consciousness) can be determined by asking himself these simple questions: am I including in my daily awareness the Sage and the Helpers of the invisible world? Am I remembering to ask for help from these sources for all my needs? Am I unwilling to go along with things that go against my deepest feelings of what is true and correct? Am I willing to say the inner No to what is incorrect? Do I say a Yes to the gift of my life? These questions help a person to recognize whether his will is attuned to the Cosmos, or whether it is under the command of the ego.

You don’t need to be an artist to truthfully face and answer these questions. You only need to be the artist of your life. It has been my experience, personally and with the people with whom I’ve worked in counseling, that this is far easier and more practical an undertaking when you perceive the invisible world not as something or someone distant, higher, mighty, and powerful; but rather as a supportive, trustworthy, and nourishing equal.
__________________________________________

*Those familiar with the I Ching may well object here that line 4 reads “turning to the summit for provision of nourishment brings good fortune.” Here again, I would suggest that Confucian-era editors probably took liberties with the original text, replacing “hill” with “summit.” Confucianism was a “summit-oriented” doctrine, after all — everywhere it looked, it sought to direct people toward something higher and more powerful than themselves. This was a reflection neither of the real meaning of the I Ching, nor, in fact, of the perspective of Confucius himself.

Book Review: Stephen Mitchell’s “The Second Book of the Tao”

Last modified on 2009-05-02 05:04:27 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

By the time characters such as Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Lieh Tzu appeared on the earth, the set of poems known as the I Ching or Yijing (“The Classic of Change”) was already, well, a classic. It was not only known and admired throughout the culture and the nation that had spawned it, it was also frequently worshiped. This problem would only get worse with time.

Yet the wise fellows named above rarely (if ever) mentioned the I Ching in their own work. They just used it. If the prophets, saints, and religious leaders of our Western culture had taken the same approach to our Bible, much error, not to mention vast slaughter, would have been avoided.

I was visited by this thought while reading through Stephen Mitchell’s newest book, The Second Book of the Tao, his rendition of selections from the collections known as the Chuang Tzu and the Chung Yung. As Mitchell explains in his Preface, he settled on a division of 64 chapters, because “it is the number of hexagrams in the I Ching, the number of squares on a chessboard, the number of sexual positions in the Kama Sutra, and the only two-digit number ever to star in a Beatles song.”

What Mitchell has created is truly a wonder — a sequel that is fresher and more vibrant than the original. For as limpid as his 1988 translation of the Tao Te Ching was, it seems strained at times, as if it’s attempting to be a translation, even when he knew that such a thing was impossible. I have, incidentally, had the same impression of my own rendering of Lao Tzu’s poems, so perhaps that is merely a projection on my part.

But this Second Book of the Tao is an untrammeled dance into the joys of Tao. As Mitchell points out, “if Lao Tzu is a smile, Chuang Tzu is a belly-laugh.” Mitchell appears to revel in the bawdy dignity of Chuang Tzu; he delights in the wacky irony and self-satirizing spirit of the Old Master. The renderings of both the prose and verse are spontaneous, exuberant, bursting with unadorned beauty. As Mitchell says of the original texts, they “cut close to the bone.”

This quality is evoked in Mitchell’s Chapter 19, the story of Hui-Tzu’s attack on Chuang-tzu, in which this proto-pundit compares Chuang-tzu’s teachings to an old tree whose “trunk is so gnarled and knotted that no one could cut a straight board from it.” Hui-tzu concludes: “Your teaching is like that: big and useless. That’s why everyone ignores it.”

Well, Chuang-tzu responds with a delightful rant on wildcats and yaks and Nothingness. Mitchell comments:

[Hui-tzu is] like a mosquito biting an iron bull. His criticism is entirely correct, but it’s beside the point…We love to see the sage get the best of it, coming to his conclusion like a tonic chord. How can it matter if he’s useful or not? He is planted in his own integrity, and there he stands, gnarled and knotted, perfectly at ease with himself, his roots deep in earth, his branches held up to let the light in.

This humor, precision, and gentle rejection of ideology permeate this Second Book of the Tao, just as they do the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. Another example can be found in Chapter 61, which is the account of Chuang-tzu’s behavior after the death of his wife (“he found Chuang-tzu sprawled out on the ground, pounding on a tub and singing”). The story actually echoes the third line of Hexagram 61 from the I Ching (“now he sobs, now he sings. If he stops beating the drum, he finds a comrade”); except that Chuang-tzu has turned the metaphor topsy-turvy. Mitchell’s commentary reveals his understanding of this very point:

In his reply [to Hui-tzu's shock at his behavior], Chuang-tzu is the soul of patience. It’s amazing what lies come out of his mouth. He speaks as though he had waited for his wife to die in order to understand about death. That would have been to close the barn door after the horse was stolen.

Throughout this book, Mitchell’s commentary is shimmeringly clear, honest, and fun. I can’t think of a more delightful and unobtrusively insightful book on the Tao than this Second Book of the Tao.

Why the I Ching Still Lives

Last modified on 2009-04-06 18:22:20 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Long before there was such a thing as Christianity or Catholicism, a young man wandered the hills of Judea, teaching a message about the ordinary wisdom of love. Long before Taoism existed, an old government official rode an ox into retirement, leaving behind a collection of 81 crystalline teaching poems known today as the Tao Te Ching. Long before anyone spoke or wrote of capitalism, people traded and bartered goods and services, even using bits of precious metals in their daily commerce.

Belief systems, ideologies, religions, and institutions are the Johnny-come-latelies of the mind. They are the concrete poured into a fresh footprint. Inevitably, a system adds death to what was alive; it narrows, foreshortens, and distorts the original upon which it is based. What had once been a living inspiration to the discovery of personal meaning, or simply a practical approach to daily living, now becomes a moribund stone tablet of groupthink.

The only way to keep ancient wisdom alive is to stop worshipping it and begin adapting it to your time and your culture, continually breaking the bond between it and the system that claims it. The I Ching still lives for those of us who use it, precisely because students and translators have repeatedly snapped the fetters placed on it by the Confucian and Taoist systems of thought and belief. Irreverence is a virtue; blasphemy is truth.

If we are to grow as individuals and evolve as a species, we will have to learn to discard the habit of turning insights into relics; to expel the compulsion of turning the living face of wisdom into stone. Indeed, we will have to do away with the very notion of “ancient wisdom.” The only truth that endures is the one flexible enough to be reshaped in and by each living moment of history. This is the way of transformation.

“It Furthers One to See the Great Man”

Last modified on 2009-03-21 01:49:07 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

What is the foundation of discipline? If your answer is “control,” “authority,” “toughness,” “punishment,” or the like, then stay with me; you may have something to learn today.

If your answer is “respect,” as in respect for the individual being disciplined (including one’s self), then you are making progress in the Tao and probably don’t need my help.

The I Ching speaks repeatedly of “seeing the great man” (e.g., Hexagrams 1, 6, 39, 45, 46, 57). One meaning of this metaphor points within: look for the “great man” in yourself; recover your self-respect by peeling away the crust of inadequacy and the self-limiting beliefs that were conditioned into you from the time you were a child. One benefit of this practice is that it awakens humility — real humility, not the dress of self-abnegation that our culture promotes as humility. The point is, when you respect yourself as a whole being — mind and body, human and animal — you don’t need to parade yourself or take on airs and self-images. You can finally just be who you are.

Another meaning of “seeing the great man” refers to how we treat others. If we can “see the great man,” the true self, the living heart of ordinary wisdom, within others, we unconsciously nurture and support the growth and expression of that inner truth. This is the missing element in the collective ego’s program of education, growth, and discipline.

Discipline is the natural order of the organism, expressed as behavior. When we wish to impose a self-discipline of some sort upon ourselves, we have to begin by abandoning the imposition. If the body thinks it is being imposed upon, it will resist the very change that our mind sees as necessary or developmental, whether it is quitting smoking, eating less, exercising more, or what have you. The imposition of order belies suspicion and mistrust, not respect. So if you want to make some changes in your life, try nurturing self-respect for the very things that would benefit by the change, or for those that are being harmed by the current behavior. My experience has been that the I Ching is very helpful in guiding us in this respect, and meditation always furthers the recovery of self-respect.

When it comes to others, and especially where children are involved, the principle takes on added meaning. We have enshrined the love of children into our culture, but tainted that love with ownership, control, and the same force of imposition mentioned above. This is not real love, for it leaves out the most critical ingredient from love’s natural potion — respect for the individual and his uniqueness. “Tough love” in particular is a mindless excuse for ignorance and brutishness. If you have a child and think she will respond to threats, fear, and force, then you are living under a stark and sad delusion. Try instead to recover a natural respect for your child, and you will find that discipline happens with far less effort and struggle than otherwise. As the old Chinese oracle says, “It furthers one to see the great man.”

God is a Gerund

Last modified on 2009-03-02 16:12:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“God,” the New Age bromide tells us, “is a verb.” Hackneyed as it is, it’s a pretty fair insight, though I would replace the word “God” with “Success” or “Good Fortune.” That’s what the I Ching does — it ignores God and focuses instead on what living people really care about — the way toward success, meaning, and prosperity in this life, without obsessing over what may lie beyond it.

To guide us toward that end, the I Ching refines the god-is-a-verb principle and suggests that it’s really a participle. Apply the other correction noted above, and you will see some real wisdom there: success is a participle.

Now for those of you who may have forgotten their English grammar (I understand, it can be pretty dreary stuff), a participle is a verb dressed up to indicate ongoing or present action; or to work like an adjective; or, in the case of the gerund, a noun. Typically, it involves adding the familiar -ing ending to the root of the verb, as in these hexagram titles from the I Ching:

Associating with People (Hex. 13)
Meeting Obstructions (Hex. 39)
Pushing Upward (Hex. 46)
Being Halted (Hex. 12)
The Taming Power of the Great (Hex. 26)

Whether you’re talking about the search for God or the path of success, this is a small but crucial update to GIAV. Success is not a mountaintop you reach or a bottom line you achieve; it is not an ending or an apotheosis but rather a process, an unfolding.

The effect this has on feeling, thought, and action is significant. The success-as-a-participle principle leads us to live more in the moment and be less obsessed over distant goals or monumental objectives. It can also lead to some radical re-thinking of received truths about our most basic values. We can find an example of all this demonstrated in one of the more fascinating lines of the I Ching, line 5 of Hexagram 36, “Darkening of the Light:”

Darkening of the light as with Prince Chi. Being firm and correct furthers.

Now the legend of Prince Chi is fairly well known to students of the I Ching, so I’ll present it briefly to those who are unfamiliar with him. Prince Chi was a family member within the court of a tyrannical emperor whose depredations would make Dick Cheney look like a choir boy by comparison. This tyrant slid from one depth of murder and oppression to another until he started lopping off the heads of his innermost circle, members of his royal family. Prince Chi watched the slaughter go on as it came ever closer to him. He was trapped and was being continually watched; escape was no longer an option. His solution was to feign madness. According to certain detailed (though probably mythical) accounts, Prince Chi put on quite a show of it: everything from cross-dressing to having an NSA wiretap in his small intestine to eating his own shit.

Anyway, Prince Chi kept his head on by appearing to lose it. Legend further has it that he eventually did escape the tyrant and fled south, where he founded the nation known today as Korea (which was never divided into North and South until our time).

What, then, does this tell us about success and living in the moment? Let’s hear what Anthony and Moog have to add in their commentary to this line:

Prince Chi is a metaphor for several kinds of situations. The first shows a person who is in a difficult circumstance that he cannot leave outwardly. He needs to hide his light or even tell an untruth to conceal his real feelings, because the others would not understand his viewpoints, and further, would use it against him. It can also refer to consciously misinforming a person because that person is encroaching into one’s private space in an attempt to know things he has no right to know. This is firm and correct conduct in the face of an encroaching ego.

Other examples they offer include turning away from an ego-claim disguised as an expression of love; and various slanders made against one’s dignity, integrity, or ability, which cannot be openly rejected in the moment and its circumstances.

What the success-as-a-participle principle brings to the Prince Chi situations of our lives is a panoply of benefit.

It reassures us that ego’s maniacal sensitivity and its house-of-cards self-consciousness is not present or adaptable enough to truly further successful living. If we are so rigidly fragile about ourselves as not to occasionally feign agreement or even submission, we are going to find ourselves in one drama after another. But if we see success as continually developing and reforming, reinventing itself, then we can safely let go of the hubris of success as a frail finality that requires a constant and rather militant defense.

The lesson of Prince Chi shows us that truth, too, is not the brittle glass monument that is the stuff of conventional wisdom. Truth is sometimes the incorrect outer response to a situation; it is occasionally best kept hidden. Deceit, it turns out, is not always evil; nor is honesty always “the best policy.” We all know this is so; yet we kowtow to the notion that we must always be truthful because we have had it drilled into us from the cradle onwards. Living in the present and feeling one’s life as a developing story supports a more realistic and flexible view of both truth and deception.

This line also exposes the fundamental impracticality of the standard American instant-gratification fixation. Ego wants success now — whether it’s material wealth, fame, or spiritual realization — ego’s demand is “I want it now, I want it all, and I want it easy.” Prince Chi’s story shows a different reality, and it is informed by a clearer vision. Success is never “over and done with;” it is never behind you. It is being continually born, shaped, and remade. In short, success is always developing, moving. It is always alive: this, in fact, is how you recognize success.

____________________________________________

So we see that the old GIAV bromide has some life to it after all, once it is stripped of a certain Hallmark-card spirituality and given a linguistic update. As we often do, we will give Lao Tzu the final word here:

When we are born,
We are soft and tender.
After we die,
We become rigid and brittle.

A living tree can sway,
A living blade of grass can bend,
For suppleness is the strength of life.
Only in death is flexibility stilled.

Tough and taut is the body of death;
Gently moving is the way of life.

Powerful forces crush themselves
Because they cannot move or yield.
A stiff and heavy tree will soon be broken
By wind or by axe.

Thus does rigid power always crumble,
While the supple and the humble
Gently endure.

Traveling on Mount Chi: Hexagram 46

Last modified on 2009-02-01 18:29:46 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Our daily lives are constantly feeding us information, messages about ourselves that are meant to teach and inspire us to do better, to live more practically, to become true citizens of Nature once more. So the primary purpose of working with an oracle like the I Ching is to become attuned to the chords of Nature that are played in the outer and inner events of our lives. The energy and the message of each “oracle” is the same: you can enable right action through revealing the truth of your genuine being that has always been at your core. The psychological process that promotes this result is the regular elimination of ego.

In fact, the one oracle speaks directly to the other one: the I Ching is useful to us not because it is something distant from and above lived experience, but because it speaks straight to the environments and relationships of ordinary life. This is precisely why I recommend the I Ching over other popular oracles: we all know what family is (Hex.. 37); what it means to be part of a community (Hex. 48) or Nature (Hex. 2); or the importance of food and nourishment (Hex. 27 and 50); but few of us would know a “Hierophant” if we tripped over one.

In addition, the I Ching’s core message of psychological growth through the elimination of the beliefs and distortions of ego speak directly to our culture and our moment. Most of us have felt what it’s like to be relatively free of ego, at least temporarily. It has probably happened for you: the simultaneous sense of substance and lightness; freedom of movement combined with an awareness of limitation; an almost primordial and whole-body sense of being unburdened.

Egolessness has a way of attracting or accomplishing what is just right for the moment, without the presence of ambition or any sense of strident effort. This is the message of Hexagram 46, “Pushing Upward.” As Anthony and Moog point out, a more accurate interpretation of this hexagram’s title would be something like “being lifted upward.” The idea is that the successful life has no more sense of ambition or goal-obsessed urgency than the subject of the Confucian distortion of “Pushing Upward” — the plant with the supposed “ambition” to press upward beyond the surface of the soil. In that sense, even the misinterpretation teaches us something — the fundamental silliness of ego-projection.

Well then, what is it that “lifts us upward”? It is the action of what the I Ching refers to as “helpers.” These are not strange, heavenly, external entities like fairies or angels or spirit-guides; they are simply life-energies natural to our minds and bodies. They are as both simple and inscrutable as the transformation of a seed into a plant.

The psychological focus of Hexagram 46 is revealed in its individual lines, which steer us in an entirely different direction from that of the Confucian botanical ambition:

1. Confidence is generated and renewed through the reliance of the organism on the currents of its natural life-force. The “helpers” are all around and within us; they are the poetry of Nature. To the extent that we attune ourselves to their teaching music, we are inspired with confidence.
2. Every day, we can make the “small offering” of belief and ego-projection through the action of psychological elimination. To do so is to affirm our sincerity and to clear the path of growth. Again, there is no ambition or supreme effort required for making the “small offering.” Indeed, ambition itself is, at its core, a natural energy — the simple will toward growth — that has been distorted or burdened with belief.
3. “Pushing upward into an empty city” is a poignant metaphor on the fruitless action of faith, hope, and belief. Experience is the city that is populous, vibrant, and plentiful; belief is a wasteland of projection and expectation.
4. “Mount Chi” is the gift that arrives as we make the “small offerings” of line 2. The metaphor here points more toward a sense of expansion rather than ascent. The mountain has breadth as well as height. We grow outwardly as we learn inwardly; growth is no more a matter of mere ascent than love is a matter of “falling.”
5. The message of line 4 is reinforced by this line’s, which speaks of progress as a series of “steps.” Once again, try not to think merely in terms of ascent — walking up a flight of stairs or climbing a mountain. Forward progress is not about a vertical scaling of either a corporate or a spiritual ladder — it is as Lao Tzu described it in Chapter 47 of the Tao Te Ching:

Without leaving home,
You can learn the Way of Nature.
Surpassing the superficial,
You can walk the path of truth.

6. “Pushing upward in darkness” is like forcing your entry into the “empty city” of line 3. This is the way of ambition and belief, which projects a goal and then pursues it with aggression and impulse. This is a foreshortening of life, of destiny, indeed of Nature; for it shuts off transformation by obsessing over change; it narrows the field of experience by compulsively striving after only what can be achieved through belief or faith. This kind of pursuit is appropriately named “darkness” by the oracle because it is obsessed purely with form, the visible, the superficial. To continue on this path is to enter the realm of the next hexagram in the series, number 47 (“Oppressing / Exhausting”).

Thus, from the standpoint of the teaching energy that speaks through the I Ching, and that delivers messages to us through the events and relationships of our daily lives, the expression “blind ambition” is really redundant. Every ambition is blind; to take the path of ambition is to go without vision. But to make the “small offering” of ambition and its supporting belief-system is to be given a panorama whose scope is as wide and high as Mount Chi.

Hexagram 58: Eliminating the Language of Fear

Last modified on 2009-01-26 20:02:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The heart leads from below; the brain serves from above. When these two work together, the natural personality arises and the truth-potential of human language is realized. This is the lesson of Hexagram 58 of the I Ching, whose second line I received this morning as my “lunar new year hexagram.”

THE JOYOUS. Success.
Perseverance is favorable.

2. Sincere joyousness. Good fortune.
Remorse disappears.

Finding the right names for things, people, or ideas — and ridding ourselves of the wrong ones (for, as the flying poet told us, “Language is the source of misunderstandings”) — promotes both personal and societal evolution.

In the first chapter of his Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu reminds us:

Words can touch the Essence,
But thought can never grasp it.

Our words can indeed, and occasionally do, touch truth; but every effort to contain, stop, monumentalize, or otherwise imprison truth will fail. This is what religion does: it turns the face of truth to stone by poisoning it with fear — it quite literally “petrifies” truth. Here is how Anthony and Moog express this, in their commentary to line 2 of Hexagram 58:

Receiving this line makes a person aware that he has drawn false conclusions due to misnaming something, or to having accepted wrong names given by others…When we misname the Cosmic Consciousness God, certain fears are aroused that come from seeing it as an authority figure that has power over us. When we realize that the Cosmic Consciousness is neither higher, nor uses power, but helps us reunite with its harmony, there is no place for fear.

So what does all this have to do with the lunar new year? Everything, I would suggest. The wars on innocent civilians that characterize the first decade of the 21st century — over 4,000 murdered in Afghanistan; tens of thousands in Iraq; and recently over a thousand in Gaza — have all been fueled by the fear-of-God rhetoric of their enablers. It is inevitable that when fear becomes our primary connection with the Source of our life, embodied in the language of our most holy books, then death becomes our daily reality.

This, to me, is a very developmental new year’s message, because it tells us what we can do to reverse the rule of death and take back life; it tells us how we can connect with a living truth by releasing the grip of prejudice; and it shows us the way back to “the joyous” through a rigorous elimination of the language of fear.

Hexagram 49: Up the Renewal

Last modified on 2009-01-19 15:03:42 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

One of the more famous hexagrams of the old Chinese oracle is No. 49. In it, the I Ching describes the three essential energies necessary for renewal — either personal or societal renewal. But before we come to those, we must first explore what renewal is, what it means (I am writing amid a week that will likely be remembered as a time of renewal in America, when we inaugurated an African-American president).

The title of Hexagram 49 is traditionally and popularly known as “Revolution.” That’s all right by me — revolutions are not evil or bad; but they do tend to be messy. Revolution, as we normally conceive it, rather narrows or constricts the message of Hexagram 49 — here is how the authors of I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way make the same point:

The difference between the two is that revolution replaces one form of ego-domination with another, while renewal re-harmonizes and reunites aspects of ourselves that have been forced apart.

Revolution tends to lack the regenerative component that renewal includes. Both, indeed, may involve bringing down or discarding what is corrupt — specifically, ego and its separation from and opposition to reality. But renewal does a better job of departing from the opposition; thus, its changes — in either the living self or the nation — tend to endure. From a psychological perspective, this is a far more practical interpretation of the message of Hexagram 49.

Now we come to the three ways that renewal works its ordinary magic. These are the energy-streams or “helpers,” to use a recurring I Ching theme, involved in renewal:

Teaching energy: This is the Sage, the teaching consciousness that speaks through this oracle and through the events of our daily lives. When this energy leads us, we share in its vision, its clarity, its whole-being knowledge that unites heart and brain as a symbiotic entity.

Dissolving energy: This is the helper of dissolution (Hexagram 59), whose metaphor is water. It dissolves the stony darkness of belief, false thought, and negative emotion. It cleanses the mind and rinses the psyche of ego-detritus.

Transforming energy: The helper of transformation completes the arc of renewal. It is an energy that works from the center, the core, outward; rather than skimming the surface of change. When we have had enough of the recurring failure that results from reordering the furniture of either a mind or a society, then we are ready to be guided by the helper of transformation.

The lines of Hexagram 49 describe the action and synergy of these three helping energies in the work of renewal. We will quote the traditional Wilhelm translation of these lines and I’ll ask that you replace the word “revolution” with “renewal” as you read:

1. Wrapped in the hide of a yellow cow.
2. When one’s own day comes, one may create revolution. Starting brings good fortune. No blame.
3. Starting brings misfortune. Perseverance brings danger. When talk of revolution has gone the rounds three times, one may commit himself, and men will believe him.
4. Remorse disappears. Men believe him. Changing the form of government brings good fortune.
5. The great man changes like a tiger. Even before he questions the oracle he is believed.
6. The superior man changes like a panther. The inferior man molts in the face. Starting brings misfortune. To remain persevering brings good fortune.

The dissolving energy that clears the way for renewal is itself enabled by balance, restraint, and trust in the Sage’s ability to light the way through ego’s darkness. When we are guided to drop the self-images with which we wrap and limit our potential, “one’s own day comes” and the dawn of renewal arrives.

But again, transformation requires outer restraint and inner perseverance. It begins with the simple recognition that we can’t do it all alone; that there are invisible presences around and within us that can lead us outward, past the spinning, superficial dial on the wheel of fortune. As Anthony and Moog observe in their commentary to line 3:

The fact that people are ready within themselves to make a fundamental change in their way of life is simply not enough, so long as change has only to do with external conditions. Real changes in the outer circumstances can only come from transformations made within each individual…

Indeed, the helper of transformation is activated by the work we do, the effort we make, within ourselves as individuals. When we commit ourselves to “changing the form of government” from the petty tyranny of ego to the holistic teamwork of heart, brain, and body, then “remorse disappears” and we can even inspire others around us (“men believe him”). That is the time when people and nations can change like big cats.*

So it would appear that the message of Hexagram 49 applies to the new president and his policy team, to you, and to me, equally:

Trust the living energy of the universe, and your living connection with it.

Ask for help in dissolving and dispersing ego — first within yourself and then throughout your world.

Challenge and inspire one another, as the Sage inspires and challenges each of us individually on our path of growth. This is the way of transformation, the catalyst of renewal, the path of return back to the natural self and the natural society.

_______________________________________________

*Another excellent modern translation of the I Ching, published in 1986 by Greg Whincup, sees the big cats (rendered as the tiger and leopard) as symbols for “strength, self-confidence, and ferocity.” When we are unstinting and tenacious in dispelling the last remnants of ego, either from within ourselves or our nation (the I Ching persistently uses the phrase “firm and correct”); renewal happens without outer violence. The resulting order of the individual personality or the society tends to be progressive, stable, fair, and enduring.

J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, and the Hoarfrost Underfoot

Last modified on 2009-01-06 03:37:32 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

When there is hoarfrost underfoot, solid ice is not far off (I Ching, Hexagram 2, Line 1)

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull…I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. (J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 2)

My daughter has been struggling with something that, especially for a teenager, should be the easiest and most delightful of tasks: interpreting the classic post-war novel of loss, displacement, and dissociation that is J.D. Salinger’s great and continuing gift to American literature.

The problem, it appears, is that the teacher is asking her students to analyze, parse, and interpret according to some fixed symbology that she has delivered to the class. In short, she is portraying the role of Spencer, the history teacher who is hilariously lampooned in Chapter 2. She is also unwittingly embodying one of the living metaphors of this luminous book — the icy wall of denial and exclusion that our culture frequently places between its youth and the currents of Nature.

It reminds me of the famous “hoarfrost” line from Hexagram 2, “Nature,” of the old Chinese oracle. As Anthony and Moog comment in their text:

Hoarfrost can refer to a certain kind of projection that becomes a spell (ice): it is a suspicion that it is in the nature of a person, animal, plant, or other thing to behave in a certain way. This suspicion then projects itself into the psyche of the thing observed, causing it to behave as suspected.

This is precisely what happens in that early interview between Holden and the history teacher, Spencer. The old man scolds the boy for his failure to “play the game according to the rules,” and the youth responds with an ambivalent stream of platitudes while he also wonders about the ducks and the frozen lagoon at Central Park.

The problem, and the psychological depth of this great story, arrives as we perceive how Holden has introjected the very “ice” that was cast upon him by old, dead toads such as Spencer. He succumbs to the projections even as he struggles against their poison — seeing himself as a failure, a moron, a lunatic, and finally, a non-entity. The following is from Chapter 25 and the sweat-drenched walk on 5th Avenue:

Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again.

It’s one of those moments in literature that, now matter how often you’ve read it, gives you chills. Anyway, Salinger has turned 90, and remains in seclusion in his New Hampshire home. His fans and literary critics don’t understand this need for privacy, any more than they did a similar wish on Solzhenitsyn’s part.

But I might understand it, or at least the part that relates to Salinger’s enduring gift to our nation’s literature. He doesn’t want to have to talk with critics, interviewers, and fans about what his books mean; for that would be taking on the role of Spencer and destroying the living encounter that every young person should have with Catcher in the Rye. It would be creating ice out of hoarfrost; and teens all over the world would miss something that could guide them through those vibrant but challenging years, and help lead them back to their true nature.

Or as Holden himself puts it in his final sentences, “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

The Imp Is The Perverse

Last modified on 2009-06-28 03:51:36 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Apologies for that title to all the Poe fans out there, but there’s a point to be made on this score: our words tell us more about ourselves than we might imagine.

Some 7 years ago, while I was editing I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way, I talked and wrote at length with the authors and publishers of the book, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, about the various neologisms they had brought to their interpretation of the old Chinese oracle. One set of such terms included the words “imp,” “demon,” and “dragon.” Here is how they define the first of these terms in the book:

Imps are behind all impulsive behaviors; they generally speak in the psyche in terms of musts and shoulds, and move a person to act against his inner truth and against his true nature. An imp can also consist of a single false word, such as the word “special.” This word does not describe a Cosmic reality, because every aspect of the Cosmos is equal to every other aspect. Calling humans “special” or attributing to them a “special place” in the Cosmic order, creates the parallel reality that separates humans from the Cosmic Whole.

As Carol once mentioned to me, imps are “back of the mind” thoughts that go unquestioned until they “colonize” the psyche, giving rise to the irrational fears that become demons. A demon is, in essence, an imp that has grown to adolescence; and the dragon is the complete system of belief and dread that forms from a networked collection of demons — thus the phrase “demonic sphere of consciousness” for the collective ego’s dragon-like program of thought-slavery.

Carol added that our language contains clues to this dynamic: she asked me to look through a dictionary sometime at a group of “imp” words and see how many of them carry connotations of power, insult, slander, and the kind of “special” arrogance that characterizes the “imp.” So I did, and here is what I found — first, I looked up the standard dictionary definition of “imp” and then collected some “imp” words:

imp |imp|
noun
a mischievous child : a cheeky young imp.
• a small, mischievous devil or sprite.

important, impel, impede, impair, impact, imperious, imperative, impasse, impassible, impend, impenetrable, imperfect, imperial, imperil, impertinent, impetuous, impinge, impish, implacable, implicate, imply, implode, impose, importune, impossible, imposter, impotent, impound, impoverished, impractical, impress, imprison, improper, improve, improvident, imprudent, impugn, impure, impute

I asked the Sage to provide, through the oracle, a demonstration of imps at work in the psyche, and it provided lines 1 and 3 of Hexagram 52, “Meditating,” or in the traditional Wilhelm translation, “Keeping Still:”

KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still
So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into his courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame.

1. Keeping his toes still.
No blame.
Continued perseverance furthers.

3. Keeping his hips still.
Making his sacrum stiff.
Dangerous. The heart suffocates.

Anthony and Moog offer this comment to line 1:

Movement in the toes can refer to impulses coming from the ego; they are based on particular seed phrases that consist of stated policies and procedures for doing things. Many of these phrases contain “shoulds;” they drive a person’s actions and reactions into pre-structured channels that conform to a particular image the person has of himself…Seed phrases that drive impulses are: “you need to defend yourself,” “you need to be somebody,” “you must assert yourself in this life,” “if you don’t fight back, you’ll be ruined.”

So much for the imp-side of things. The Sage goes on, in line 3, to describe how imps become a demonic network of thought, belief, and fear in the psyche — how they “suffocate the heart.” The imps have now grown and multiplied into a rigid, lockstep march of belief that manifests in a person’s actions. Freud called this the “repetition compulsion” — a program of reaction that becomes more demonically obsessive even as it is increasingly revealed as fundamentally maladaptive to its time and circumstances.

We do not have to look far to see the effects of the demonic in our culture today. The imps that guided our financial system have become the demons of its collapse. Every day at the corporation where I work, I hear the same language of the repetition compulsion: “we must fight to survive now; it is imperative that we strike back against our competitors; this is no time for humility — we must attack or we’ll be ruined.”

The force of this militarism is sometimes astonishing to me: how can these weaklings in their pinstriped suits imagine themselves as fighters, as some sort of guerrilla resistance movement? Can’t they see what is directly before them — their own self-destructive habits of reaction exploding in their very faces, the more they cling to them?

This is the repetition compulsion, the demonic sphere of consciousness, at work. If you sense any of this within yourself (and, as Hexagram 52 points out, there is no better way of doing so than through meditation); and if you are open enough within to acknowledge the presence of the demonic, the solution is easier and more straightforward than you might think. You have to go to the seeds of the demonic network, the imps from which it derives its compulsive power. Identify the seeds of thought from which this tree of belief grew, and cast them out of your psyche through recognition, elimination, and a call to the invisible energies of cleansing and renewal. It is exactly as Lao Tzu sang in the famous (and often mistranslated) 64th poem of the Tao Te Ching:

Manage trouble before others see it⎯
That is, before it becomes troublesome.
The problem that you can barely get your arms around
Grew like a tree from the tenderest sprout.
A tower of trouble rises from a mere hole in the ground.
That march of agony, a thousand miles long,
Began where your feet touch the Earth.

Live by force and you will be destroyed by it.
Take things in your grasp, and they will slip away.

Finally, since we paraphrased the title of his famous essay/story, we will allow Mr. Poe the last word on this topic, from The Imp of the Perverse. As he says, it all starts with the thought, which transmutes into desire and fear:

That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged.

Vanishing the Blood, Banishing the Small: Hexagram 9

Last modified on 2008-12-07 22:51:55 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Throughout the I Ching, “the small” is matter for both celebration and caution. Small actions and small efforts are honored — the “two small bowls” of Hexagram 41 are as much sacrifice as we need to make; the “small things” of Hexagram 62 reveal that a successful life is not one of hard labor or endless striving. Particularly in a holiday season amid a crashing economy and rampant unemployment, this is a crucial message for our time.

Complementary to this message of small action is the I Ching’s other “small” insight, which we find repeated throughout the text — in Hexagrams 33, 11, 12, and 9. Here, we are encouraged to turn within and expose the “small” — the seeds of great error — and flush them out of the psyche. This evokes Lao Tzu’s advice to “manage trouble before it becomes troublesome.” The I Ching reminds us that “Peace” (Hex. 11) is nurtured by the “departure” of the small, and that we become “halted” whenever the small is allowed space to grow within us (Hex. 12).

This discussion of the small begins in Hexagram 9, whose traditional title is “The Taming Power of the Small.” It is a marvelous example of the I Ching’s poetic precision: this single phrase captures the power-based conditioning process at work in the collective ego (“taming power”), in the context of its petty and shallow ideological means (“the small”). As we have pointed out before, the result of this Pavlovian program is the constant and unceasing tension and darkness of life amid the collective ego (“dense clouds, no rain”).

Recently, the Sage offered me a living, current example of this wisdom. I cast Hexagram 9 with lines 3 and 4 changing. Here is the text, beginning with the Judgment:

Dense clouds, no rain from our western region.

Line 3: The spokes burst out of the wagon wheels. Man and wife roll their eyes.

Line 4: If you are sincere, blood vanishes and fear gives way. No blame.

It is poignantly appropriate that after 8 years of “bursting spokes,” we should be arriving at the turning point in 2009, and that the Sage chooses Hexagram 9 to deliver this message on the theme of making “blood vanish” and “fear give way.”

The bursting spokes, of course, represent the destruction of all progress and forward energy through the “taming power of the small” — the narrow, acrid, and barren (“no rain”) ideological waste that has infested our nation over the first decade of the 21st century. This is not so much about Bush, Cheney, or anyone else in particular as it is about the institutions they defend and the dark, obstructive prejudices they embody. To understand this is to understand that these cynical projections can also be found within us, in some shape, form, or degree.

The spokes hold the wheel together and keep it in the best shape to further true progress. The spokes live in the formless interior of the wheel; they draw strength from the formless and deliver it to the wheel, which helps the wagon roll. Thus Lao Tzu, in his famous 11th poem of the Tao Te Ching, could say:

Thirty spokes unite around a single hub:
Thus a wheel is made.
Yet it is the formless core
That makes the wagon roll.

Clay is formed and baked:
Thus a cup is made.
Yet it is the invisible interior
From which we drink.

Framed walls and brick are joined
To make a house.
Yet it is the open space within
That makes it livable,
That gives doors and windows
Their unique functions.

Therefore, make being your element,
But non-being, your life.

Formed and formless are not separate: the one inheres in the other. When we abandon or ignore one and elevate the other, both suffer. This, in brief, is the history of America these past 8 years. When the spokes shatter, the wheel’s purpose is lost, along with that inviolable connection with the formless; and everyone who perceives the inescapable consequences will indeed “roll their eyes.”

We don’t have to accept this, neither as individuals nor as a nation. America went a long way toward “repairing our wheel” just over a month ago; there is much more we will need to do together. Still, as helpful as it is to have more competent leaders in charge, the transformative moment in which “blood vanishes” and “fear gives way” boils down to each individual’s personal choice, each private decision to disperse falsehood from within and recover the natural unity and outward movement of the living personality. When and to the extent that this occurs, progress happens “as if no one had tried” (again, Lao Tzu). Anthony and Moog explain further in their commentary to line 4:

“Blood vanishes and fear gives way” is an explanation that the Cosmos has intervened to correct the difficult situation because the person involved has kept himself open to Cosmic help, and refrained from any attempt to correct matters according to his own ideas.

As I have mentioned before, inviting cosmic help is little more than the mere admission that “I can’t do it all by myself.” To start here is to undertake the work of repairing the wheel.

In the days after September 11, 2001, amid the cries of shock, agony, and confusion, were the calls for retribution, revenge. A few voices spoke publicly of the need for examination, healing, and restraint — again, recommending the “small” effort of psychological reparation over the wild outburst of violence. Among these latter was the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: he asked Americans to look within and “kill their inner Osama.” I thought it was extraordinarily wise advice. But it was not merely ignored, it was demonized — how dare this Buddhist monk who knew nothing of the world accuse Americans of having an “inner Osama” that needed to be killed?

In fact, Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese who has no doubt seen more horrors than the vast majority of Americans could imagine; and in any event, subsequent events have proven him right. There was an “inner Osama” to America, and it came right out into the open at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the killing fields of Fallujah, and the many (and continuing) “erroneous” air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which innocents — many of them children — were brutally murdered.

Thus, in order for “blood to vanish” and “fear to give way,” there must be enough of us brave and strong enough to do the work that Thich Nhat Hanh recommended some 7 years ago. It is a matter of facing down the demons of conditioned belief and ideological arrogance that were programmed into us before we had the ability of discernment. I have personally found, along with my clients in counseling, that the I Ching is a valuable partner in this process of inner cleansing. It is not hard work, but essential. And it begins with the choice that you make as a free person.

“The Rain Comes, There is Rest”

Last modified on 2008-11-16 15:47:19 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I took a long walk tonight. It was a warm late autumn evening, seemingly perfect for walking; yet I saw scarcely a dozen other people out with me. It occurred to me that an observer unfamiliar with our species would never have imagined that I was walking through the middle of a borough of some 4 million souls, amid a city of twice that many.

The problem was that it was raining, or had been very recently, at the time I made my largely solitary circumambulation of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (that’s my route on the map). Why is it that people abhor rain so? I suspect it’s mainly the result of societal conditioning, all of it ranging from the bizarre to the absurd (for example, viruses and bacteria can make you ill, but moisture cannot — in fact, your body is 75% water). I’ve complained lightly on this point in another post, my “Rain Haiku” piece.

The ancient Chinese authors of the I Ching saw rain a little differently than we do. In the 9th Hexagram, “The Taming Power of the Small/Success Through the Small,” the tension and conflict of inner struggle is reflected in the phrase, “Dense clouds.” The Judgment text adds: “No rain from our western region.” In other words, no relief, no cleansing, disburdening downpour. I always thought that the Eeyore character from Winnie the Pooh should have been depicted with his dark cloud following him around but bringing no rain with it.

If there were any confusion about the meaning of rain and clouds in the Judgment text of this hexagram, the 6th line disperses it:

The rain come, there is rest. This is due to the lasting effect of character.

To these people, rain meant nourishment for crops and the replenishment of streams and wells. In short, life. Metaphorically, rainfall symbolized the clearing of inner tension, the resolution of conflict, the surpassing of ego. In another hexagram of the I Ching, number 59, this achievement of clarity and success through the dissolving action of water is celebrated. It also contains one of my favorite lines from the book, line 4:*

He dissolves his bond with his group. Supreme good fortune. Dispersion leads to accumulation. This is something ordinary men do not think of.

That is one pretty cool metaphor; and for me, it embraces the overall lesson of the entire oracle, especially for our own time. To dissolve your inner bond with group conditioning is “supreme good fortune.” Why? Because it reveals the light of inner truth, the treasure bound for so long by the corrupt knots of belief and prejudice. That prejudice can range from “rain is bad weather” to “Nature is a malignant force that must be fought and tamed.” It is all the result of what you are trained to think; what you are drilled to assume is unquestionably true. To enter upon the path of “dispersion” — that is, the cleansing from within of all that implicit arrogance and presumption — is to recover the treasure and “accumulate” the bounty of your true self. And maybe “ordinary men do not think of” it because this dissolving way of being does not come from thought; it begins in the heart.**

Another fairly perceptive fellow from ancient China, Lao Tzu, also saw this truth, and expressed it repeatedly throughout his Tao Te Ching. Here is a little piece from Chapter 23:

Be sparing in your speech,
And then return to silence.
Be truly a part of Nature:
Its storm-brought winds do not outlast the dawn;
Its rain drums and sings upon the thirsty earth,
And then the clouds recede before the sun.

What made this dance of sound and silence?
If the Cosmic Consciousness thus ebbs and flows,
Why not we, the word-drunk wanderers of this world?

_______________________________________________

*As coincidence would have it, I received line 3 of Hexagram 50 later that evening, which contains the text, “Once rain falls, remorse is spent. Good fortune comes in the end.”

**Regular readers of this site know that we’re always pounding the drum for equality between the genders. Thus, the term “ordinary men” is to be understood as “ordinary humans.” In fact, ancient Chinese languages had no gender-specific pronouns; “he” and “she” were indicated by context, and to this day in spoken Chinese, gender-reference is similarly loose. In any event, as Anthony and Moog mention in their preface to the I Ching, “The reader’s prejudices will be challenged enough by this book. Certainly, the real issues described herein lie beyond the gender issue.”

Book Report: Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”

Last modified on 2008-11-08 21:57:03 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

As a couple of you may know, I write a fair bit of what would be classified as “New Age” literature (all right, New Age writing — I’ve yet to produce anything that would qualify as literature). In fact, I spend enough time writing the stuff that I read very little of it.

But recently I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose and spent a week with it during my daily commute. This is my very first exposure to Tolle, who is perhaps the most celebrated and widely read of the modern New Age writers. Indeed, he is the J.K. Rowling of New Age literature.

Now I have a certain suspicion of anything that has been “Oprah-fied.” Not that I have anything against Oprah, the Queen of Television — after all, she does a lot of good in her work. She helped revive interest in Steinbeck during the celebration of his centennial; has brought reading into the lives of countless folks who might otherwise not bother; and been a staunch Obama supporter throughout the campaign. But the glare and fame that she deals in can be poison to a teacher of awareness, so I assumed that Tolle, having been exposed to that glare, might not be the real deal in this field — the “real deal” for me being represented by the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Carol Anthony, Hanna Moog, and Robert Bly.

Well, now that I’ve read this book, I can report that Eckhart Tolle is genuine, and that his teachings matter. I may not be much of an influence in this field myself, but I know the good ones when I see them, and Mr. Tolle is a good one.

His language is, like that of most teachers of awareness, simple without being mawkish or sentimental. He is also often funny, as in the story he tells of the ducks flapping their wings after a brief conflict (he imagines what might have gone through the ducks’ minds had they been infected with the ego-obsessions common to humans amid conflict).

Again, like all other effective teachers of mindfulness, Tolle’s orientation is to lived experience rather than airy abstractions. He tells us that “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” He then points out how far we have deviated in our culture from simple awareness, in both our material obsessions and our action compulsions. He observes that we have, by and large, become a race of “human doings” rather than “human beings.” Our inner dialogue is constantly related to action, both real and imagined, and usually in the context of conflict and the obsession with superiority — both on the planes of the individual and collective egos:

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane than the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego.

Tolle is also aware of the shapes that ego takes in its good intentions and spiritual pretensions. He tells the story of having been asked to review a catalogue for a spiritual organization’s course offerings. When he was asked to recommend a few of the best of these courses, he replied:

“I don’t know,” I said. They all look so interesting. But I do know this…Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it’s free.”

Now that is the advice of a genuine teacher of mindfulness in living. Tolle’s work is replete with this kind of straightforward, common-sense guidance — the kind of teaching that challenges the student to put the book down and make the effort of self-examination, to look within and bring the teachings to life. Tolle knows that anything else is mere display, more stuff of ego.

So, having finished Tolle’s book, I asked the I Ching for its comment. I cast Hexagram 60, Limitation, with lines 2 and 4 changing. Here is the pertinent text, beginning with the Judgment:

Limitation. Success. Galling limits must not be persevered in.

2. Not going out of the gate and the courtyard brings misfortune.
4. Contented limitation. Success.

Tolle is a teacher who leads us “out of the gate and courtyard” — away from the restrictive boundaries of ideology and oppressive thought. He reveals that success is not to be found in what you do, but in who you are in each moment, every situation. Right action arises from inner clarity, from what Tolle refers to as “Presence,” or awareness that is not laden with thought, judgment, or expectation. He knows as well that the only way clear of ego’s limitations is to experience the freedom of being, which lies within and beyond the narrow boundaries of intellect and action. Lao Tzu has a poem — Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching — which expresses this very well:

Look for it—it is invisible;
Listen for it—it is silent;
Try to grasp it—it is not solid.

Its nature is bodiless,
Yet it is the essence of body.
Its darkness is the source of light,
Its infinitude, the ground of time.
It is the Formless One
From which all forms arise.

Pursue, and it eludes you;
Follow, and it vanishes.
Thought cannot hold it,
But you can’t think without it.

It is the thread of all being,
The origin, the pulse of time.
It is the wave upon the strand of life:
Pervading, defining, nourishing.

Your true nature, says Tolle, is just this: the flowering of being which thought cannot hold or limit, even as “you can’t think without it.” As Lao Tzu says, this real presence is “the pulse of time” — that is, the consciousness that lives within and detached from time. Thus the two great obsessions of ego — thought and time — can be consummated even as they are transcended. Tolle shows us that there is no time other than Now, and that when awareness steps past the linear boundaries of what he calls “psychological time” and its rigid program of demand and expectation, we find that our “clock time” is put to its most optimal use. This is the lesson of the I Ching: when we harmonize ourselves with the limitations of Nature, the false limitations of ego are dispersed like smoke before the wind of awareness.

Now many readers (this one included) will feel uncomfortable with the fact that Tolle styles himself a “spiritual” teacher who occasionally goes to some length in parsing the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and other icons in terms of Tolle’s own insight into awareness. Perhaps he felt this was necessary to draw the faith-based portion of his readership into the open ground of his clear seeing. I have taken a similar approach in my own work, where I call upon those who follow a particular religion, faith, or belief to keep it as long as it serves them, but never to grip it like a sword or a gun, but rather to hold it lightly, like a kitten or a bird, always in readiness to let it go entirely.

Rigidity and grasping are the obsessions of ego; they are the “galling limitation” mentioned in the Judgment of Hexagram 60. As Tolle observes, the purpose of life is in presence — your purpose lives in each moment, not in where you will be in five years or after some goal is reached or an action consummated. “Leaving the gate and courtyard” of ego is all about returning to presence, to the true self of every lived moment. Success, as Tolle points out, is not something you strive to attain. You do not become successful; you are successful in every moment that you live in which “thought is the servant of awareness.”

Sing of the Inner Bling Ting (Hexagram 50)

Last modified on 2008-11-04 21:30:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

If every one of the world’s 1,100 billionaires gave up nine-tenths of what they own, they would be — guess what — still fabulously, uncomfortably, foolishly wealthy. Warren Buffett would be worth $6.2B instead of $62B, and the lowly J.K. Rowling would be the owner of $100M rather than $1B.

If every one of the world’s 9.5 million millionaires gave up nine-tenths of what they own, they would remain wealthy by most global standards; and the least of them would be solidly upper-middle class here in the U.S.

But I am not recommending any such thing, as developmental an idea as that might be (the baires and maires could thus easily save many lives or simply resolve the global economic crisis — even among the billionaires alone, there is over $3 trillion at hand according to my formula above). Fact is, both the devout and the profane have united in ignoring the Nazarene hippy’s well-known practical advice on this score (Matthew 19).

“Why?” you may wonder. Or, to be more exact, what would be the problem with investing the bulk of one’s excess wealth into the Earth and its people, while also stopping short of Jesus’ somewhat extreme recommendation to poverty? I think Anthony and Moog may have hit on a fair piece of the answer in their commentary to Hexagram 50, The Ting (which, incidentally, is pronounced “Ding”):

The ting, as a Chinese cultural object, was a sacrificial vessel in which food was offered as sacrifice to the deified ancestors. Any idea of sacrifice is contrary to the Cosmic Harmony because of the connotations that go with that word: it was a primitive form of bribing the gods, with the sacrificed animal being a substitute for a person’s own body parts. Sacrifice differed from an offering, which was more to honor ancestors or a higher power, but offerings also have the mistaken implication of there being something higher than oneself, and are connected with the idea of there not being enough (harvest) if one does not make offerings. This view of Nature as stingy, and as withholding it fruits, is incorrect, and inhibits the nourishment from flowing freely.

I sometimes watch people at work and wonder: what would happen if they checked in with themselves as often as they check their cell phones and Blackberries? We obsess over our objects as if they were our selves; as if they would vanish or melt away without our constant vigilance over their reality, their supreme importance. The rush of accumulation exhausts us; the impetuous compulsion of managing, protecting, organizing our objects consumes us until we are no longer their consumers, but merely their slaves. Our lives become a gleaming litter of bling — shiny, expensive stuff that suffocates the only real treasure we have, our living and unique personality and its connection to others and to the whole.

It can always be turned around, though — and this is the lesson of Hexagram 50. On the material plane, it’s easy, in fact: give some of your stuff back. I’ve bought two laptop computers in the past two years and wound up giving both of them away to people who needed them more than I did. It’s a good lesson in the true bounty of Nature — what you give finds its way back to you, effortlessly, abundantly. Don’t wait for some holiday to arrive — just give.

On the inner plane, it may take a little more effort if you’re a longtime and stereotypical consumer. So start small, with the little impulses that stab your mind like needles. When you get on the elevator after a meeting, don’t grab for the Blackberry. Leave it in your pocket and check your own messages instead. When I get out of a meeting, thought and sometimes emotion are running fairly high; a quiet half-minute on the elevator is an excellent time to check in with myself, examine my impressions, assumptions, and reactions; find out what needs correcting and what is defective or useless.

When you’re on the train or bus, keep the white earbuds in your bag and listen to the music within yourself for a little while. When you get home from work, see what 10 minutes of silence will do for you before you turn on the TV, order dinner, or listen to phone messages. Meditation is not some bizarre practice that you pay a yogi to teach you or that you need to pursue while on a retreat to some New Age destination; it is a practice meant to fit into the temporal gaps in our daily lives, and enrich the moments of action, communication, and relationship. You simply have to be alert to the availability of these intermediate points of living, so as to clear out and replenish your inner space through them. You can’t connect to the world if you’re a stranger to your self.

MDTN 101: STFU

Last modified on 2008-10-12 22:02:23 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

My number one goal of meditation, which I apply to beginners and consequently to myself, is this: shut up.

There are times I wish it could be more complex or subject to New Age eloquence, so I could sell it all as a deep secret to Oprah’s readers. But the truth is this:

Everyone — and I mean everyone — already knows how to meditate. It’s part of your animal nature. Watch a cat on a windowsill or a dog resting open-eyed in a shaft of sunlight: animals meditate. So can you.

Meditation is a simple process of exchange: you return both your energy and your decay to the cosmos in exchange for fresh and cleaner energy — what the Chinese called chi and the Indians prana, or life-force.

In order for the exchange to work, you have to stop your noise. Every meditation worth the name begins with shutting up. This, as you may be able to guess, requires a little more practice than some would imagine; because closing your mouth is only the beginning of it. You have to shut down the machine of inner noise as well — gossip, fear, rancor, suspicion, rage, cockiness, and all the other buzzing bullshit that feeds on your mind.

Attending to that crap with progressively greater detachment and non-judgment is, of course, part of the process of meditation. It’s also where many folks across a number of traditions get stuck in either pain or entrapment. If you’re among them, perhaps I can offer something useful beyond the rather obvious points noted above.

Engaging the Helpers: Psychological Counterpoint

The I Ching teaches us how cosmic helpers function whenever we call upon them clearly and sincerely. They work through a process of what I call “psychological counterpoint.” If you’re at all musical, this will be a familiar theme: multiple independent voices that share the same harmony working together in a musical whole. As soon as we are able to drop the arrogant assumption that we must do it all ourselves, and ask the helpers to join, support, and guide us, psychological counterpoint develops effortlessly, and the strain and frustration of meditation dissolves.

If you prefer corporate or technological metaphors, try “multi-tasking.” As I often tell folks at work, we are not meant to multi-task — the computers we work with are made to perform that function. Same thing with meditation and self-development: you can’t do everything, let alone everything at once, so don’t try. Helpers can multi-task, because there are lots of them, and they can work together toward the same end. Let’s see how the I Ching can comment on this dynamic.

Hexagram 57: The Penetrating

The Penetrating. Success through what is small. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. It furthers one to see the great man.

For the purpose of this brief guide to meditation, I received the following two lines, numbers 2 and 4:

2. Penetration under the bed. Helpers are used in great numbers. Good fortune. No blame.

4. Remorse vanishes. During the hunt three kinds of game are caught.

Before we go further into this, one note for the I Ching veterans watching: wherever the oracle refers to “priests and magicians” (line 2 above in the traditional translation); “a great wagon for loading;” “magic tortoises;” or “the great man;” the practical psychological interpretation of all these metaphors is to helpers — that is, functional cosmic presences that join with and support our efforts in achieving clarity, prosperity, modesty, and a better feeling of the quantum love that pervades the universe. Now let’s see some of Anthony and Moog’s commentary on these lines:

“Under the bed” is a metaphor for a projection or spell that is influencing a person or situation without his being aware of it…This line counsels the person to “penetrate” to the phrases and/or images of the spell…The Helpers are the ones that are needed to break it.

Without help, I can’t control my ego-noise. All I can do in isolation is hear it and try to wear it out before it does the same to me. But when I ask for help in my meditation — either from the teaching Sage that speaks through an oracle like the I Ching, or from another presence such as the helper of dissolution, which applies the light-water of cosmic cleansing to clear out false ideas and destructive emotions — then I can find myself getting somewhere, with no force, power, or strain applied.

I often use the term “elimination” to describe the basic process of self-development. Well, meditation done mechanically or with ideological blinders on is like constipation — the elimination is hard, painful, and frequently incomplete. This is not the way of Nature. Bringing helpers to your aid will make your practice of mental and emotional unburdening smooth, sweet, and refreshing.

Finally, line 4 accurately captures the “counterpoint” or “multi-tasking” aspect of meditation guided by the helpers. The “hunt” for falsehood, emotional poisons, and ideological limitations becomes a song of many voices that delivers both completion and abundance, through the very process of inter-penetrating that is the main theme of Hexagram 57.

Beyond this advice, all I can suggest is that you try. Before your next meditation, simply call in the silence of your private heart on the helping energies of the universe to guide you, lead you, support you, toward a greater clarity — I think you’ll appreciate what happens.

For more on meditation, see the PDF at the About Us page, which includes selections on the practice of meditation from my books.

Hexagram 63: Crossing the Great Water of Sacrifice

Last modified on 2008-09-13 19:09:59 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Yesterday, I cast Hexagram 63 in the morning, and late last night, cast it again. This used to blow me away, especially when it happened repeatedly, for I have been steeped in the ruling prejudices of Western science — probability, randomness, the holy Fisher test, and the god Chance. There is a surreal humor in it all, by the way, which was captured by Einstein in his famous outcry (“god does not play dice”) — the idea that life is a handful of mud tossed into a wall, and can only be given order and meaning through the intellectual regulations of priests, pundits, and PhD’s.*

Nowadays, however, a coincidence like yesterday’s is merely information that I’ve done a lazy job of understanding a particular message, which must be iterated for me. To use an oracle like the I Ching is to enter a nonlinear realm of thought, feeling, and experience, where every inbred assumption is challenged, every programmatic artifice of projection upended. The universe is not, after all, an insane death-rattle of randomness, but a dance of expansion and contraction; attraction and retreat; form and transformation.

In any event, back to Hexagram 63, which is one part of the conclusion to the I Ching and reflects that cosmic dance metaphor. 63 is “After Completion,” and 64 is “Before Completion.” In other words, there is and can be no such thing as the fixed point of ultimate completion — be it the “theory of everything,” or the paradise on earth, or the truth for all time, or the rock of ages. Isn’t it curious, by the way, how the marketers of the weirdest fantasies imaginable are the very folks who label someone like me a “New Age freak”?

For the text, we’re going to switch gears a little and draw upon Greg Whincup’s outstanding translation. His rendering of the title of 63 is “Already Across”:

Already across the ford.
Blessed.
Small should remain as he is.
Beginning: auspicious.
Ending: disarray.

Now in my morning session, I had received line 5 changing:

The Eastern Neighbor slaughters an ox.
But this does not bring as full a blessing
As the Western Neighbor’s modest offering.

Sound like a familiar theme? Throughout its text, the I Ching exposes arrogant falsehoods and oppressive belief systems related to the cult of sacrifice. It can be something along the lines of the Bush Doctrine (“the more killing you do, the greater your progress”) or the McCain variation on the same theme (“country first — god bless America and fuck everybody else, the planet included”).

Most of our religious belief systems are founded on sacrifice. The entire Judeo-Christian tradition (and I include Islam, which is based on many of the same texts and stories) swells over a fundament of sacrifice: death, the oppression of self, and redemption in some ethereal realm of eternal reward. The greater one’s martyrdom, the greater one’s reward. These ideologies actually compete for the title of Greatest Sacrificer, Biggest Martyr, and Most Massive Multiplayer Murderer. Thus, again, the Bush Doctrine: mo killin’ mo bettuh. The more death you deal out, the greater your danger of being the next to die. Sacrifice is the original vicious circle — rigid, inflexible, self-immolating, and forever closed.

The circle of Nature is never closed. The same goes for the mind and understanding (thus the graphic above): no point of final completion, just continual movement across, beyond the previous understanding and toward the destination of no-arrival. Already across: no time to stop and celebrate, for there is another crossing to begin. As soon as you stop crossing and erect the stone tablets of perfection around you, death takes over. But in every journey there is always time to pause, give thanks, and then keep going.

So the thing we have to sacrifice is the very idea of sacrifice. The cosmos has no notion of sacrifice; it just keeps giving, with no loss to itself. We can be the same way, if we discard our training in sacrifice and let the natural way of gifting flow through us, to those we love and care for, and into the cosmic whole.

Now that evening, Hexagram 63 appeared again, with line 5 changing again, and line 4 provided as an extension to the morning’s message. For line 4, we return to the Wilhelm translation:

The finest clothes turn to rags. Be careful all day long.

Anthony and Moog point out that this line can indicate someone who bought into the “rags to riches” fantasy of the collective ego, and found that success eludes him. They add:

The cause is that his sincerity was halfhearted, so that he has glossed over the remaining issues standing in the way of success. Such a person may have a variety of false phrases in his program, such as, “whatever you do it is not enough”…”no one is ever going to appreciate what you do”…and “nobody is perfect.” These kinds of phrases cause a person to approach his life halfheartedly.

I have found, in my own experience and that of many of my counseling clients, that beliefs like these tend to monumentalize misfortune, thus enabling and perpetuating the cult of sacrifice itself. Once we buy into misfortune as an eternal reality, the cult of sacrifice, with its vicious cycle of resignation and conquest, becomes our only response. The Rock of Ages becomes a boulder that we ceaselessly push up the side of our life’s Calvary, where our cross stands waiting.

To slaughter such beliefs is to move life truly forward, outward, and further the next crossing, and the one after.
________________________________________

*A professor of mine in graduate school once summarized higher education for us: “you start out by getting a B.S., and we all know what BS is; then you go on to get an M.S., or More of the Same; and finally a PhD, Piled Higher and Deeper.”

Handling a Cosmic Compliment

Last modified on 2008-09-03 16:47:40 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Someone does indeed increase him. Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it. Supreme good fortune.
(Hexagram 41, “Decreasing”, line 5)

If you use the I Ching frequently, you may find certain lines confusing or disorienting. For me, this has long been the case with messages such as the one above. I tend to be the sort of fellow who can more comfortably handle criticism than compliments.

For most of us, “supreme good fortune” is winning the Powerball; marrying Natalie Portman; landing the six-figure deal from Random House for one’s novel; attaining supreme enlightenment and walking around in a cloud of Amitabha bliss.

Then, of course, we wake up in the morning and Natalie’s not lying beside us; the Powerball card is another loser; our writing continues to go unrecognized; and we feel as enlightened as the face of Dick Cheney’s hunting partner. WTF happened? Why didn’t something cool and wonderful come to me after I got this line?

Well, the first answer is that there’s no cool-and-wonderful “out there” to be obtained or consumed — all the cool-and-wonderful is already in-here. The message of the line, in this case, is: turn inward and see it. And then, blessed with the gratitude occasioned by that recognition, get back to ordinary living.

This line can also offer information on another person. This was the case for me recently. I have a brother who’s got colon cancer and is undergoing chemo and radiation right now. This line was assuring me that he will be well again, and healed. Supreme good fortune, indeed.

And every so often, the “ten tortoises”* can be telling us about something clear and beautiful that is arriving in our own lives. In that case, it is a moment to remember the source. For no matter where good fortune appears, or what its proximate source may seem to be, the origin of all truth and beauty and abundance in our lives is the cosmic origin whose defining energy is the quantum gravity that we call Love. Our gratitude for the supreme good fortune of life and its gifts is simply our feeding back into that gravitational stream. When we remember to do that, to feel that, we contribute to the overall harmony of the cosmic whole. Blessing is not, as many of the world’s religions will try to convince you, a one-way street; nor is it a game of inner commerce — a brokering of deals with an external Power.

In the particular context of this hexagram (“Decreasing”), success is the natural consequence of eliminating falsehood. As ego’s distortions are released, truth is free to emerge; as discord is discarded, the great harmony arises.
_______________________________________________________

*For those who are curious and not familiar with the history of this oracle, the “ten pairs of tortoises” reference is to the animal prized for its shell, which was used in the earliest known use of the I Ching. The shell was touched with a hot poker and the resulting cracks read for their meaning. It is a measure of the universal popularity of this oracle that the Chinese nearly killed off all the tortoises before they finally got the idea that there might be a better and more humane way of consulting this thing. Thus, by the time the I Ching was put into written form, tortoises must have been so rare as to be sublimely precious; and therefore it is said in this line that even someone possessing ten pair of these prized creatures couldn’t stop the flow of abundance to the fortunate recipient of line five’s message. Kerson and Rosemary Huang published an I Ching that features descriptions and photos of tortoise-shell divination as it was practiced some 7,000 years ago.

Hexagram 18: Correcting Decadence

Last modified on 2008-08-30 20:15:27 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

One of the more fascinating, insightful (in my view, at least), and probably controversial points in Anthony and Moog’s treatment of the I Ching comes in Hexagram 18, which they title “Recognizing and Correcting the Causes of Decay.”

Recognizing and correcting the causes of decay has supreme success. It furthers one to cross the great water. Before the starting point three days; after the starting point three days.

What Anthony and Moog set out to do from this text is to define both the character, history, and development of what they call the “collective ego.”

The collective ego originated in the myths and stories early humans told around their campfires about the heroic deeds of their ancestors.
…
At first the simple stories…were passed on to each new generation. Gradually, they came to include the storytellers’ imaginations about the creation of all things, including the creation of his clan and its mission in the world. In this way the simple stories became myths. The terms used in this book for these myths, which over time have attained the status of “ancient truths,” is the “collective ego.”

Dissolving the Hierarchy: The Societal Perspective

The appropriate context for this interpretation can be found in the individual lines of the hexagram, which describe “what has been spoiled by the father” (lines 1, 3, 4, and 5); “what has been spoiled by the mother” (line 2); and the entire system of hierarchical division from whose seeds the decadence has formed (line 6).

From a societal perspective, there is a crucial and very topical point to this, particularly in light of the prominent roles of notable men and particularly women in this election season (Clinton and Palin). The I Ching teaches that the matriarchy is just as mistaken an approach to leadership as the patriarchy. Both forms of decadence must be “set right,” as described in lines 1, 2, 3, and 5. The cost of “tolerating” hierarchical systems is “humiliation” (line 4).*

As Anthony and Moog point out repeatedly throughout their book, the cosmos or universe operates neither according to hierarchy nor power — there is no such thing as a “higher power” in Nature. Is a star greater than a tree? Am I more powerful than a rose? Is a human a higher form of life than a worm because it can talk, fight, and fish? Nonsense.

In fact, the teaching of the I Ching’s authors harmonizes with that of other poets throughout history (Lao Tzu, the writer of the Old Testament vision of Ecclesiastes, Basho of the Zen tradition; and, in modern times, Whitman, Rilke, early Wordsworth, and Bly) — humankind can only hope to evolve beyond its current position of decadence, destruction, and self-extermination by embracing its natural place in the cosmic order, as an equal with all the other creations and forms of the universe. When world leaders begin to speak and act on behalf of the planet and the cosmos at large, rather than from the narrow trench of a feudal and bellicose nationalism, this will be one sign of humanity’s evolutionary progress.

Dissolving the Hierarchy: The Personal Perspective

There is also, of course, a personal significance to this teaching. Both I and many of my counseling clients have received this hexagram in the context of revealing false ideas, prejudices, and belief systems that were programmed, preached, or pounded into us as children, before we had developed the discernment and independence to say either an inner or outer No to them. Often, these manifestations of decadence are simply personally introjected forms of the same delusions promoted by the collective ego: the belief in one’s personal inadequacy or weakness before the monumental power of the group (the nation, company, religious sect, or family).

Power, subjection, and injustice begin at home. To identify, undermine, and expel the belief in the unquestioned power of the father (or the mother); the acculturated self-images of the good and obedient or self-sacrificing spouse/child/parent/worker/citizen; and the often harrowing enforcements of these corrupt beliefs from one’s personal history (beating, the inducement of guilt, neglect, isolation, and group affiliation) is the true work of healing and self-development in the cosmic way.

Now I am aware that there have been many problems with the “recovered memories” experience of many conventional and alternative therapies — supposed “abuses” by parents that have been either disputed or proven false, and the prosecution of foolish lawsuits based on these recovered memories.

My experience has been that the I Ching adds a beautiful light to this morass of confusion and hatred by showing the way out of it. The Sage teaches us that we can’t develop as individuals on the basis of either false memories or motives of revenge against the agents of real but past abuses. We make progress by separating from decadence, not by remaining in a toxic relationship of opposition to it. Success in life comes not from trapping ourselves in a battlefield of perpetual confrontation with the forces of decay, but in the inner recognition, expulsion, and surpassing of them. When this becomes our strategy, either as individuals or societies, decadence is left to rot on its own, with no energy of either affiliation or opposition to feed it.
______________________________________________

*Incidentally, there is a very cool numerological balance to this:

“setting right what has been spoiled by the mother”	“setting right what has been spoiled by the father”	“does not serve kings and princes, sets himself higher goals”
2	4 (1+3+4+5=13=4 [1+3])	6

In other words, the point is about dualism and the natural dichotomies that are distorted into the half-truths of the collective ego. Every item in the series increases by two from the previous; each item’s number is divisible by two.

Now numerical dichotomies are entirely natural and correct; ideological dualism, however, is a distortion. Thinking in terms of two may seem natural and complete — two arms, two legs, heaven and earth, sperm and egg, father and mother, good and evil, truth and falsehood. But this kind of thinking has, time and again in human civilization, restricted both our vision of alternatives and our field of understanding and action. Division and dualism are just the beginning of human understanding; the incipient point of intelligence, from which a fuller, rounder development and a truer, more genuine evolution proceed. The I Ching itself begins with a binary code, and then, in its very teaching, transcends it.

Hexagram 34 and the Demonic Sphere of Consciousness

Last modified on 2008-08-14 11:49:13 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way is a fairly large and challenging book. Challenging not for its size (about 750 pages in the hardcover edition), but for its ideas and the fresh perspective it brings to the old classic. It introduces a new language to the oracle, with terms such as “collective ego,” “parallel reality,” “guilt-spells,” and “Cosmic Consciousness.” It also re-conceives more familiar terms such as “poison arrows” and “helpers” under the light of its revolutionary insight.

A favorite of mine among these neologisms from the book is the phrase “demonic sphere of consciousness.” Let’s hear from the authors on what this might signify, and then I’ll offer you a real-life illustration.

The use of false words in describing the Cosmic reality leads to mistaken ideas, and ultimately to mistaken beliefs about the nature of the Cosmos and the way it works. Among these are mistaken ideas about life, about Nature, about human nature, and about the place of humans in the Cosmos. Because of the ability of human thinking and imaging to create consciousness, false words, ideas, and beliefs project themselves into reality, thus creating a parallel reality. Its invisible side is the demonic sphere of consciousness. It is a sphere of consciousness created by the collective ego, and as such exists as a field of negative consciousness outside the individual. The collective ego is the source of the individual ego, which starts out as an imp, and, through the process of societal conditioning, grows into a dragon that controls the individual psyche.

The demonic sphere of consciousness is totally dependent on the life energy it gets (through the individual egos) from people’s true natures. To steal a person’s life energy, the collective ego makes the individual believe that he lacks the ability to cope with life, and that the institutions of the collective ego are the source of all his material needs…Based on the lie of personal lack, the collective ego thus succeeds in stealing the person’s life energy to keep its false system alive.

This demonic sphere is described throughout the I Ching, but perhaps nowhere so comprehensively as in Hexagram 34, “Using Power.”

Using power. Holding back furthers

The individual lines largely describe a goat that butts its head against a thick hedge, and typically gets its horns entangled. This is the path of the rebel, the outcast, the social misfit who lives his entire life by bludgeoning his head into the institutions around him, thus bloodying himself and passing his life energy to the very thing he hates and opposes. I have spent a great deal of my life in such wasted action, and let me tell you, it does you and society no good at all.

Line 5 advises us to “lose the goat with ease” and there will be “no remorse.” To give up the self-image of the rebel, the iconoclast, the misfit, is to recover the easy way of growth that Nature programmed into you in the first place. The “hedge” cannot be toppled or destroyed; it can only be successfully engaged through separation (nonviolent outer protest and the inner No practice, applied to the demonic elements that fuel the collective ego and its institutions) and through penetration (engaging the representatives of the collective at the level of their humanity rather than their connection to the institution).

In their commentary to Hexagram 34, Anthony and Moog observe, “The belief in power creates both power and powerlessness.” If you read the main page of our blog here regularly, then you know that there are goats butting into hedges all over the place in our society. There are the haves and have-nots; the insiders and the outcasts; the complacent and the bitter; the powerful and the impoverished. But it is not power that creates the conflict, the misery, and the injustice; for power is not real, it has no cosmic or logical validity — even as an idea. Power is a distortion of something that is real (strength); it is, in sum and substance, an illusion.

So what is it, then, that causes suffering, injustice, and the disfigurement of Nature? It is the belief, specifically, the belief in power (and powerlessness). When we live beyond belief, we “lose the goat” and penetrate the hedge.

Therefore, much of the work of self-development is in the mere act of recognition. As I say to my counseling clients, recognizing and identifying the demonic sphere of consciousness in whatever guise it may take in our inner or outer lives is 80% of the work of self-growth and success — what the I Ching refers to as “good fortune.” When we learn the way of recognition — or more accurately, unlearn the way of subjection, mute acceptance, and apathy — the path of success opens wide and clear before us.

It can sometimes take a rather severe test of sorts to lead us into this regular practice of recognizing and separating from the demonic sphere of consciousness and the parallel reality in which it operates. I spent the better part of two years of my life amid such a test: the various stages of my separation and divorce from my wife, some eight years ago. The entire experience taught me a lot, because it presented a vivid, if sometimes frightening, portrait of the demonic sphere of consciousness.

The first encounter I had with this portrait was in a marital therapist’s office in Manhattan, a few months after my wife had announced her intention to leave me. When I walked into this office, the first thing I saw was a dead pigeon, outside the window, hanging, entangled in some wire wrapped around the rail of a fire escape landing. I stared mutely at the dead, stiff creature all through the first session. At the next session, it was gone, but by then it was as if the dead thing had entered the room. The sessions ended in enmity and bitterness; the therapist a blank, vapid spectator to the conflict, incapable of adding anything further than some inane, moralistic bromides to the discussion.

So the scene of this conflict was transferred to a more ostensibly power-based institution, the courthouse. At Family Court, a judge sat behind her bench with a large calculator in front of her, tapping away at it as paper rolled out of the machine and down the front of her bench. When she looked up from this functionary’s apparatus to announce the judgment, it was something on the order of double my wages — I would be quickly ruined, homeless, and unable to do anything for anyone. I had a lawyer with me, who stood up and made this simple point (I was unable to speak at all). The judge pointed at the calculator tape as if it were the Shroud of Turin and pronounced that it was the Law, and thus she was bound to judge as the Law decreed. My lawyer approached the bench and asked if the parties could be given a recess to negotiate, and the judge reluctantly agreed, after getting my wife’s consent. In five minutes of nervous discussion in the hallway outside chambers, we agreed to a number that was a third of the awarded amount, and this was eventually made the prevailing judgment.

Later, at the actual scene of the final divorce decree (which followed upon months of paperwork, statements, and depositions), my attorney mentioned to me that some strange and uncomfortable questions might be asked of me at the hearing. He advised me to say “yes” or “no” and nothing more to each question, depending on the tenor of the question. Sure enough, “strange and uncomfortable” paled before the reality of it. I was asked about whether I had had sex with my wife recently; when the last time had been; whether I was still capable of sexual activity and whether I still experienced sexual desire; and finally if I had sexual feelings for my wife (the to last, I honestly said, “I don’t know,” and my attorney elbowed me in the ribs and muttered, “just say No”).

At the end of this humiliating performance, there was a break, after which the judge returned to pronounce summary judgment of divorce (which contained a public summation of my humiliation), and it was over. Or so I thought. A few weeks after, I picked up the New York Daily News one morning, opened the front page, and saw a picture of the judge who had presided at that last, disgraceful ceremony. He had been arrested and indicted for taking bribes from attorneys in exchange for favorable rulings! I instantly called my lawyer and asked if this meant we had to do it all over again, that the entire affair had been made null by the corruption of this judge. He laughed and assured me that the judgment was binding and could not be nullified by any finding of criminality against this judge. This, after all, (he explained) is how the Law works.

At each stage of this process (and believe me, I have skipped over a lot), I saw, mainly in retrospect, the mark of power and the demonic sphere — the impulse to control, humiliate, subject, and debase others. I saw it in the therapeutic and litigious institutions and their representatives; I saw it in the buildings and the environments in which these ghastly and phantasmagoric events played out; I heard it in the language and the rigid behaviors of the officials involved in these performances; I saw it in my wife’s distorted and transmogrified personality; and most of all, I saw and felt it in myself, to the point where there seemed to be nothing but “imps” and “demons” driving me, defining me, possessing me.

But throughout it all, there was also the calm, clear, teaching voice of the Sage, speaking through an old Chinese book of wisdom. As I learned to recognize and dispel the demonic sphere’s poison within myself, identifying its presence in the people and institutions around me became simpler, and their power-based illusions easier to endure and to penetrate. The Sage never panics; it is never shrill or accusatory; it never operates through power or subjection. No matter how bitter or befouled I felt, no matter how consumed with self-hatred and darkness, the Sage stepped up, every night, offering truth without attachment or demand, like the “earthen vessels handed simply in through the window” of the 4th line of Hexagram 29. It was the beginning of a relationship that I have come to rely on to this day, and will no doubt continue to draw strength from in the long path of learning ahead, and the continuing work of penetrating and surpassing the dark and narrow hedge of Power.

The Yellow Lower Garment: Hexagram 2, “Nature”

Last modified on 2008-08-11 10:21:28 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Nature is great through its interpenetration with the Cosmic Consciousness; it discerns what feels harmonious and allows that to lead, with the firmness of a mare. If a person tries to lead, he goes astray, but if he follows, he finds guidance. It is favorable to find friends in the west and south and to forego friends in the east and north. Perseverance brings good fortune.

It is occasionally claimed of the I Ching that it is a book of 60 chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion; the Conclusion being the “Completion” hexagrams 63 and 64; and the Introduction being the ancient precursor to Spinoza’s cosmology, Hexagrams 1 and 2.

I have no particular side to take on this — it is more a merely academic than a practical discussion; but clearly, virtually every translator, writer, and commentator on the I Ching has found a fertile depth of meaning in the opening two hexagrams in particular. Anthony and Moog, too, join in this tradition of offering detailed attention to these opening hexagrams, which they call, respectively, “The Cosmic Consciousness” and “Nature.”

The authors adopted these descriptions not to be different, but to be clear. They were uncomfortable with the confusion that had developed around the traditionally dichotomous and often opposing principles, “The Creative” (Hex. 1) and “The Receptive” (Hex. 2); and so they sought a presentation that better reflected the equality and harmony inherent in the universe. They write, “…both hexagrams show the two sides of the Cosmic Whole. Hexagram 2 shows the energy of the dark that attracts the light, and thus finds guidance.”

I recently received Hexagram 2 with lines 4 and 5 changing. Following are these two lines:

4. A tied up sack. No praise, no blame.
5. A yellow lower garment brings supreme good fortune.

Line 4, as the authors point out, is very often about self-images that inhibit personal growth and natural influence. I describe such self-images in a discussion of the “Mirror of Erised” meditation from my Tao of Potter book:

The ego, with its capacity to steal our inborn creative energy, has devised a number of masks for all occasions—there is the corporate mask, the parental mask, the mask of piety, the mask of patriotism, a mask of asceticism and sacrifice—the list has been steadily growing for a few thousand years.

If I could point to a single “80-20″ rule of counseling with the I Ching, my experience has shown me that 80% of the work of healing and self-development with the oracle is about identifying and destroying, from within, the self-images of the individual ego that are introjected during the process of cultural conditioning. The benefits of attending to the work of liberating the true self from such self-images can hardly be overstated.

But my challenge at the moment of this particular inquiry was not a self-image per se, but a related bit of detritus from my personal past, having to do with the forced and false division of being. Anthony and Moog put it this way:

The same principle applies to the person who regards parts of his body, or some of its functions, such as his sexuality, as lowly…Looking at one’s animal nature as lowly…blocks its self-healing capacity. Healing occurs when we rid ourselves of those mistaken ideas that divide us into higher and lower parts.

On asking the Sage, I found that the phrase, “My body is incapable of self-healing” was presenting a global impediment to the natural movement of chi within me and inhibiting the free action of one of Nature’s greatest gifts to us as animals — the regenerative and self-healing abilities of living form.

Inquiring further, I found that a supporting belief behind this disbelief in the body’s self-healing capacity was an intellectual notion that “the body is a mechanical system.” This cynical and self-limiting falsehood had convinced me that the only way to health was through a reliance on doctors, medicines, and the institutions within which they operate. This, by the way, is not a recommendation against using doctors or medicine; it is merely a point about the necessity of releasing the spells that prevent us from realizing our natural autonomy.

I was assured that a firm inner No to these false beliefs would liberate the “yellow lower garment” of line 5, which Anthony and Moog refer to as “the body’s knowledge of inner truth.”

Where inner truth is alive, free, and unobstructed in its capacity to naturally lead the self through the joys, relationships, work, and challenges of a human life, the unity of the formed and the formless; Nature and the Cosmic Consciousness, is realized without effort or struggle; and the “supreme good fortune” of life in harmony with Tao can be experienced, in this world and within your body.

Hexagram 7 and “The Cosmic Army”

Last modified on 2008-08-08 12:05:49 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

I have been occasionally asked how I can “believe in” the unseen cosmic presences that the I Ching calls (in Hexagram 3 and elsewhere) “helpers.” So here’s a quick answer: I do not “believe in” them. The universe does not ask for your belief, only your trust and cooperation with its harmony.

But, yes, it is true: I have had experience of helpers, and I hope that experience continues. To trust in such an experience is not to take a leap or faith or some spiritual position; it is merely to arrive on the firm and deeply-felt ground of understanding that I cannot do it all by myself.

That’s basically it. If that is too simplistic or non-analytical a place for you, I am not here to evangelize. There are plenty of satisfyingly complex and intellectual dissections of the meaning of life, the cosmos, and even the I Ching oracle, spread throughout the world of print and online literature, which are more compelling and entertaining than anything you will find here.

For those of you who are still reading now, this discussion arises in the context of Hexagram 7, The Army. Its Judgment is fairly simple:

The army needs firm correctness and a strong man. Good fortune without blame.

A while back, I received this hexagram without changing lines, at a time when I had some health problems and was under a fair degree of personal pressure from the demands and expectations of others. I was drawn to Anthony and Moog’s discussion of a “cosmic army,” a natural alliance of universal energy-streams or “helpers” that work to protect the health, psyche, and true nature of a person, a family, a community, or even a planet, from harmful influences and ego-encroachments.

The Cosmic Army’s function is to fight, when called upon, transgressions against ourselves, other people, and against Nature in general (animals, plants, and the earth as a whole). When humans try to do this themselves, they only create opposition that strengthens the aggressor, for when the ego is engaged in defending, the other’s ego is energized and empowered.

This was a fairly challenging perspective to me, that “fighting” should be consistent with the natural activity of the cosmos. The authors are suggesting something similar when they point out that anger is often a perfectly natural reaction to people and events, and that it only falls into error where ego distorts and inflates anger into rage.

The other challenge presented by this view is that fighting can be done, and is, in fact, most effectively done, without inner or outer violence. It is an insight that Lao Tzu arrived at and expressed in the poems of the Tao Te Ching:

The generals have a saying
Which they apply to war,
And I teach it too:

Better to be aggression’s guest,
Than its partisan host.
Better to draw back a mile
Than press forward an inch.

This is called marching
Without moving your feet;
Capturing without an assault;
Defeating without an enemy.

For there is no greater error
Than looking outward for enemies.
To look outward for enemies
Is to estrange your only true self.

This is why two sides opposed
Will fight to a bloody draw,
Where sorrow is the only victor.

There is no greater misery than opposition, and no more forceful a fighter than one who can surpass it. But we humans aren’t very good at that on our own, are we? Therefore, what better time than in conflict to recall our tentative definition of a “helper” — an acknowledgment of the simple fact that “I can’t do it all on my own”?

It makes a great deal of sense to me; but we have to depart from certain habits of belief and its weird rigidity. For me, this meant, first and foremost, overcoming skepticism. I found that the phrase, “the cosmic army is a load of bullshit” needed to be removed from my inner program.

Personal trust in helpers of the universe is, at worst, a harmless practice. At best, it is a reflection of how the cosmos truly operates, in contradistinction to the strange deus ex machina contrivances of intellect and faith that have beset humanity through the past few millennia.

More importantly, such a practice transforms your psyche and reveals your natural center (the meaning of “marching without moving your feet”). I and several of my counseling clients have found conflict dissolve around us, as if without effort, simply through calling on this “cosmic army” of protective helpers.

It is all a matter of trusting your own lived and unique experience. The cosmos will never ask you to abrogate your trust in science or technology; it will simply ask that you abandon idle skepticism, suspend both belief and disbelief in the most private and personal part of your being, and follow the natural guide that arises there.

Meeting Obstructions, Not Halfway: Hexagram 39

Last modified on 2008-08-05 12:27:10 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

39 Meeting Obstructions

On meeting obstructions the southwest furthers. The northwest does not. See the great man; perseverance brings success.

One of the reasons why the I Ching is so successful, as an aid to self-development in general and as a medium of psychological healing in particular, is that it challenges each person who engages the oracle. The cosmic voice that speaks through it is here to teach, not to stroke us. It speaks to life and not to fantasy.

And life, as I am sure you have discovered, is challenging enough without the superaddition of some inane aspiration to become a “superior man.” The superior man is a vapid self-image based on the lies of ego and its institutions — the pabulum that many of us were raised on as children. The I Ching asks us to flush this garbage out of ourselves, and shows us how.

Specifically, it helps us to understand exactly what the garbage is; and this tends to be unique to each individual’s experience. I recently received line 2 changing from Hexagram 39, which is a lesson on overcoming psychological obstructions to the natural program of growth originally coded into our genetic makeup. Here is line 2:

The king’s servant is beset by obstruction upon obstruction, but it is not his own fault.

The line points toward self-images of servitude, personal inadequacy, and guilt (for imagined “faults” in nature) — the very things that belief systems, especially (though not exclusively) religious belief systems, tend to dump onto us virtually from the cradle onward.

One of these is the self-image of the victim, a typical consequence of becoming “the king’s servant.” Ask any writer or artist in particular about the self-image “I am a victim of neglect,” and I’m betting you’ll hear some resonant laughter in response.

Another aspect to this line is discussed by Anthony and Moog in their commentary, and it has to do with a distorted notion of duty:

The line can refer to a person who, through a misunderstanding of the term “duty,” has put a spell on himself through thinking that he has a duty to an idea, an institution, or to another person. The spell forces him into one difficult situation after another, all of which compromise his dignity and his integrity.

One of the problems I have found with these collective distortions of true nature is that they become even further distorted within the individual ego, where they can become twisted into self-images of the rebel or the outcast. Helped by the Sage, I found a particularly malignant self-image, a poison arrow contained in the phrase, “It is my duty to live and die in the margins.” This is the self-image of the iconoclast, the outcast, the rebel, the neglected artist forced into the dustbin of his culture. Much of the division, isolation, and territorialism in our society can be traced to these self-images.

In fact, we find that many of our beliefs about good and evil derive from these and similar self-images. Anthony and Moog deliver some much-needed perspective on this topic, in their commentary to line 2:

Evil is neither part of the natural order nor part of the makeup of the Cosmos. Rather, evil is a false consciousness built on the human delusions that have created the parallel reality. Evil owes its existence and power to each individual who maintains those delusions in his consciousness. It can only be fought within the psyche of the individual who harbors the mistaken ideas. This fight is a systematic and consistent effort to deprogram the mistaken ideas and beliefs behind those illusions. It always requires the help of the Sage and the Helpers. Any outer fighting only energizes and promotes the parallel reality.

In my next post, we’ll learn what the I Ching has to say about where and how this “fighting” is properly done, when we visit Hexagram 7 and the “Cosmic Army.”

Hexagram 6: Overcoming Conflict

Last modified on 2008-07-26 17:08:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Conflict. You are sincere and are being obstructed. A cautious halt halfway brings good fortune. Going through to the end brings misfortune. It furthers one to see the great man. It does not further one to cross the great water.

“All conflict,” write Anthony and Moog of this hexagram, “has its origin in an inner conflict in an individual’s psyche.” As I recently discovered, inner conflict can be found in groups and institutions as well.

Perceiving conflict in this context is particularly instructive, because it shows us the delusory and projective character of conflict — we very often fail to recognize it for what it is, because we mistake it for “sincerity.” This happens all the time in corporate America.

I cast line 5 changing in this hexagram in response to an inquiry about my situation at work. Line 5 reads: “To contend before him brings supreme good fortune.”

This line assures us that conflict brought before the teaching heart of the cosmos can be easily resolved, which is the “supreme good fortune” indicated. If you have ever found yourself suddenly (or finally) free of a particular and longstanding source of conflict, then you know the feeling — “supreme good fortune” pretty much covers it.

But first you have to clearly recognize conflict in its real form, stripped of its deceptive and arrogant disguise. The true sincerity implied in the main text can only be revealed when the false or artificial sincerity of ego-conflict is exposed and expelled from within the living self. Where genuine sincerity remains absent or obstructed by inner conflict, then good fortune will also remain elusive. So we need to search for the seeds of conflict, its poisonous veins, and cut them out of ourselves.

On questioning the oracle through the “retrospective three coin method” described in the download materials above, I found that the seeds being referenced in this case were those false ideas and images of institutional arrogance that were infecting my company and stalling its progress. Here are the obstructive prejudices I thus discovered:

“Profit is our God; loss is our devil”

“Leadership is accomplished solely through power”

“Growth is our only goal”

“To lead in business you must control the market”

I then wanted to know whether it is necessary that a certain number of people connected with the company — be they employees, shareholders, customers, or whatever — need to share in discarding these psychological aberrations on behalf of the organization, in order for there to be a “tipping point” of transformation achieved. The answer was very practical: such a course is neither possible, desirable, nor pragmatic.

As it turns out, the cosmos does not operate according to any democratic or other human government model. Its paradigm is more along the lines of natural exchange and transformation, such as is seen in photosynthesis. Think of it for a moment: the conversion of light into chemical energy, the molecular stuff of true growth — perhaps the most crucial organic process supporting life on our planet. If we could form a government based on that, why, I think we’d finally be getting somewhere on the evolutionary path.

Back to the company’s problems (talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous): the corporation had, as often happens in our individual lives, trapped itself in a net of opposition, control, and obsessive dichotomies that had led it into a narrow, virtually purblind view of leadership and growth. In the case of an individual’s conflict, the way is easy: discard the false ideas with the help of the inner No technique discussed in the downloads above, and turn the rest of it over to the invisible world for correction and transformation.

But when you’re dealing with a corporation or other institution, all the individual can do to maintain his integrity and preserve his inner truth is to ask for help in clearing any connection with the false beliefs out of himself, and then simply leave the matter there. This is how progress is made on the cosmic plane and growth supported within the individual self. We will perhaps never see the time when, as Diderot hoped, “the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest;” but we may activate and celebrate that final and triumphant killing of ego within ourselves.

Using the I Ching: Exposing the “Image”

Last modified on 2008-07-24 12:49:13 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

One of the best examples of the clarity that the Anthony and Moog text has added to our understanding of the I Ching can be found in how the authors treat the traditional “Image” portion of the text: they ignore it.

But they also explain why, and this is where the clarity comes in: the Image is a Confucian overlay on the original text that is riddled with prejudice, ideology, and (as the title suggests) the obsession with appearances — image.

China is known for being a particularly image-fixed culture (though I personally think the Chinese are hardly unique in this respect — image is a problem for all of us). Witness the current preparations for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, which range from garish to positively brutal. They seem to imagine that it is possible to “go green” for just six weeks while the entire world (they again imagine) is focused solely on their nation. Healing, either of the self or the environment, is not a mechanical or automatic process: you can’t throw a switch and clear the air, only to continue befouling it again once attention passes. This is both aberrant policy and lazy psychology.

So in the readings that you’ll find here, there will be no discussion of the Confucian “Image” section of the hexagrams. Indeed, our business here is to draw on the insight of the cosmic teaching voice that speaks through the I Ching to learn how to expel self-images, be they of the personal or the cultural variety. As Lao Tzu says in Chapter 12 of the Tao Te Ching:

Rampant color impairs vision;
A profusion of sound obstructs the ear;
Gluttonous tastes poison the mouth;
Attachment to belief warps the self;
Predatory impulse reviles the treasure.

The Sage uses the outer to point to the inner;
By exposing the image, it shows us ourselves.

Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart

Last modified on 2008-07-21 10:53:54 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

23: Splitting Apart

Splitting apart: it does not further to go anywhere.

Hexagram 23 is generally considered one of the “bad,” or particularly ominous messages to be found in the I Ching. And indeed, it often contains a warning for us, usually having to do with the splitting or divisive effects of ego — how it forces division between body and mind, beauty and ugliness, work and personal life, spirit or soul and body or the “lower nature.” All such divisions are unnatural and obstructive to ordinary growth.

But “Splitting Apart” can also point us toward a progressive form of splitting, which consists in the separation of the true self from the distortions and false beliefs of ego and its institutions.

Usually, of course, both factors are involved, as in this recent experience from my consultation of Hexagram 23:

I received it without changing lines, and so my focus was directed to the hexagram’s primary message: “it does not further to go anywhere.” This generally means that there is inner work to be done before any outer action can be taken. Almost always, this involves a projection in the unconscious which must be deleted from one’s inner program. Clarity within leads to successful action without.

At this point, I asked whether a guilt spell was involved, and this was affirmed. On seeking out the phrases for this, I found one in particular: “My sufferings are a punishment for my guilt.”

Guilt is an especially nasty projection of the collective; first because it places all the burden for evil on the human personality, or some presumably “dark” aspect of it; second, because it is the only known introjected punishment. That is, it is punishment that the “criminal” inflicts upon himself, with no outside agency or weapon necessary to do the trick, except as a merely ideological threat.

How we have come to imagine that guilt or sin is a necessary aspect of our nature is vaguely mysterious, since no other citizen of Nature appears to recognize it — neither plants nor stars nor animals nor rocks nor the very elements of the same matter with which we are made seem to manifest a trace of guilt over their existence.

Guilt, of course, is an instrument of power — just as the nuclear bomb; the armies and navies and air forces of governments; and the police state laws and technologies of tyranny. The difference is that guilt is a part of our training: from early childhood, we are taught to feel guilty, to see ourselves as cosmic criminals. The more we accept this aberrant falsehood, the more are we accepted in turn into the collective, and the more are we oppressed within the gears of its tyrannical machinery.

Therefore, it is necessary, from a cognitive, deeply psychological, and bodily level, to expel guilt firmly from within; destroy it with the weaponry of inner truth and resolution, assisted by those quantum energies that the I Ching refers to as “Helpers.” This is the “splitting apart” that furthers growth and breaks down the division and splitting done by the power of the collective. Eliminate guilt from your life; free yourself from its toxic stain of oppression; and your thought, speech, and action will bloom with light and success.