Mountain over Earth

I wrote this on the 17th of December, and the next day changed my travel plans and flew to L.A. on the 19th. The blog got lost in the shuffle of a full work day, and canceling appointments for the next week, and never got posted. Read on, and perhaps you can understand why...

My father is gravely ill. He’ll be 87 on January 2nd, if he makes it. I’m speaking to him on the phone two or three times a day. My sister is spending most of her days with him, in hospital, and has asked me not to bring my planned visit – just after Christmas – forward.

I love my father. We’ve had our good times and our bad times, but all that has faded into irrelevance long ago. What’s happening right now puts everything we are, and have been, and done, to and for each other, into a different perspective. I feel his love strongly now, and I know he feels mine.

I want him to survive this crisis, and regain a life he can enjoy. I think there’s a good chance of that, though every time I speak to him, both of us know it may be for the last time.

I’m praying a lot, and meditating, practising holding the poignant tension of the moment in my awareness, not shying away from it, trying (and sometimes succeeding) in holding that fine line between numbness, and fear, and the pain of loss, and a sense of desperation because I don’t know what to do, and at the same time know there is nothing else helpful I can do.

A couple of days ago, after a night with the phone on my pillow, waiting for a call telling me the worst, my daily I Ching reading gave me Hexagram 23, Bo; it is formed of Mountain over Earth: one yang line on top, with five yin lines under it. The yin is pushing out the last bit of yang; it corresponds to the time of year just before the Winter solstice – which happens to be right now.

Bo means to carve, or to peel. You’re peeling off a bark or skin, stripping off the exterior, the last bit of Yang, which leaves you naked and vulnerable, exposed to a difficult naked truth. Bo also means to dismember, to slice up; to flay; to be stripped of rank or honour, to be deprived of your rights. Any way you look at it, it’s hard to take, even if it’s inevitable.

But there’s also a sense of carving away that which is superfluous; if you do this, what you don’t need falls away; that is the essence of carving. You can see this in embryonic development: the limbs begin as a generalized stump, which is then ‘carved’ back to form fingers and toes.

Wilhelm translates it as Splitting Apart, Huang as Falling Away, Lynn as Peeling, Brad as Decomposing.

The Decision is short and not at all sweet: Not worthwhile to have somewhere to go. In other words, stay at home, if you have one – and, may I suggest, under the table with a crash helmet on.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Decision says, in part:
To move in enduring ways, then, means allowing the heavy to fall, the old to die, the weak to be eaten and the low to fill up.

And the Great Image speaks of those above being benevolent and generous to subordinates, thus confirming their positions as if building houses on solid foundations.

The whole thing is about how to meet this time of the last dregs, the final ending, and clearing the past to make way for the future. There’s an implication of suffering, and the end of the world as you know it. The Mountain erodes, crumbles, and becomes the Earth – and that is the strength of this situation: Earth accepts everything, and (eventually) gives it back as life.

Anyway, Bo is for sure one of the Death Hexagrams, and I was sure my sister was just waiting until it was morning in California to call me.

That evening, I read a piece by Michael Ventura called ‘Temporary Goodbyes’, which begins with this paragraph:

"Goodbye" is such a temporary word. The soul doesn't adhere to it. Memory subverts the resolve of "goodbye," evoking images of the past beyond our power to deny them. When you're young you think you can leave places and people, but later, much later, you know you never can, you never did, you played with time and space but you never left. And as your friends and family die you discover that nobody ever really leaves. They reach for you and touch you with a kind of stillness, a strange stoppage of time; and from that stillness a gentleness spreads that you never thought was grief, the genuine grief, but it is: a hopeless and gentle and all-enveloping benediction. You feel the dead receive your blessing, and feel that their reception is a blessing upon you; logically you may think there's no afterlife, but something in you insists the dead can hear and even speak. (http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A75884)

The next morning, following my habit of reading a chapter of the Dao De Jing before my morning meditation, I opened to Chapter 38, which includes (in the Feng-English translation) the lines:

Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
And not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.

That afternoon, full of dread, I dialled my Dad’s hospital room phone, expecting him not to answer. But he did. We talked. I told him that my son – his only grandson – was confident he would recover. He replied, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask, a series of staccato gasps:

“He’s
optimistic.
I
used to be
pessimistic.
Now
I’m not
optimistic,
and not
pessimistic.
I’m just
facing
reality.”

I am in awe of his strength, and wish he did not have to suffer so much.

I feel held in the web of life, which is turning its dark face toward my family now, as it is turned toward many families now, and know that all of us – all of life, human and non-human – all of us are held.

As of this writing, my father is still alive. And I’m still praying.

And as of THIS writing, on the 30th, my father is STILL alive, and I'm spending every day with him. Of which, more soon....

Meanwhile, I wish everyone an abundance of blessings in 2008.


www.ichingconsultation.com

Meeting the Mensch

God bless the Bodhi Tree Bookstore (second-hand section), and God bless the person who handed in their old copy of “Shadow Dancing in the USA” to be sold on.

Because it was sold on to me. The first couple of chapters got me so excited that I bought several copies to give to friends; it’s out of print but you can find second-hand copies online.

“Shadow Dancing” is a collection of essays by Michael Ventura. Ventura has a particular talent for describing the many intertwining strands of meaning – historical, political, psychological, mythical, physical and spiritual – surrounding a cultural phenomenon, and weaving them into a whole that is rich with fascinating questions, and powerful in its call for a more conscious engagement with the human condition.

I just finished reading the centrepiece of the book, a scholarly and passionate 60-page essay entitled Hear That Long Snake Moan, on the cultural origins and impact of American music, and I wanted to stand up and shout. I had “encountered the Da Ren”.

The phrase li jian da ren occurs 5 times in the I Ching.

“Li” signifies auspiciousness.

Some of the various meaning of jian are: to observe, be exposed to, consult, encounter, consciously, advice respectfully sought.

Da ren literally means 'big' or 'great' 'person'. It signifies someone not occupied with petty concerns, who can see the bigger picture and understand the situation more profoundly. A wise man, in other words. A mensch.

Wilhelm translated li jian da ren as “It furthers one to see the great man”. Brad Hatcher renders it “Rewarding to encounter a mature human being”, which I prefer – because ‘greatness’ is such a sullied word, so often either inflated with connotations of celebrity or trivialized: ‘You look great'.

But a mature human being…that’s as rare and as much of a treasure now as it was at the time the I Ching was written.

And the implication of li jian da ren is that you not only see the Da Ren – you not only encounter him, but you seek his counsel. There is an interaction, and consciousness is involved.

When I do a reading, I’m in that role. When you consult the I Ching, it speaks to the Da Ren in you, asking you to stretch yourself a little or a lot, to look from a broader, or at least a different, perspective. It’s no good to just look out from the eyes that asked the question; you need to step back, or up to the plate, and take a look from there. It’s an invitation to dream into the question, and wake up into a more inclusive reality, one in which you are more of a participant.

Reading anything by Michael Ventura does that for me. He is not only a virtuoso writer; he is a deep thinker, and a mature human being.

‘Maturity’ is a word that also has problems nowadays; it often comes with a package of odd pop-psychology connotations. It actually means ‘ripe, fully developed’, i.e. an adult rather than a child. But that means different things to different people. To my parents, acting ‘maturely’ meant being rational rather than angry, even when anger was an appropriate emotional response. For a lot of people, it means not taking risks. Ventura's take on the subject is more what I'm after:

"I'm looking for a maturity more alive, a maturity that's not afraid to be desperate, a maturity that isn't terrified of looking ridiculous. A maturity that's still willing to get dangerous if that's what it takes."

I think it’s a lot harder these days – roughly 3000 years after the I Ching was written – to be a Da Ren. Our world is one hell of a lot more complex than it was in the Zhou Dynasty. Politics, commerce, and technology in the Global Village – an oxymoron if there ever was one – throw up new and more demanding questions about what it is to live a good life, balancing private concerns with human responsibilities. We have lost the templates for family and personal relationships, and we are all finding our way in new territory, while the ground beneath our feet continues to shift. Most alarmingly, the very earth beneath our feet is changing in ways that are genuinely threatening.

We live in a world in which it’s as tempting as it is easy to be distracted from the central essentials of life.

Like frogs in the cookpot, we need wise men to help us notice that the temperature is rising. For example, that our

“sense of being overpowered by media has become such a fundamental part of our experience that we take such impotence for granted…We know the screen is not real, yet we feel unreal beside it. Our moments of love, trembling between fear and grace, are not “true love” – we’ve seen what that looks like on the screen. Our hesitant speech, with its painful silences, isn’t good dialogue. Our desperately awkward acts of survival are not real physical bravery. We are like people who’ve combed their hair in a magic mirror. The mirror shows only a state of idealized perfection, while we grow older and our hair is thinner and longer. No wonder, after dressing before such a mirror for eighty years, we look a little strange.”

He says, too, that we’re living in an Age of Endarkenment, and that

“What each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in the human heritage - and pass it on.”

and

“The future of the world is the future of the heart. Our capacity for love will ultimately have more effect than our capacity to store information.”

Over and over, he points out that history is not a spectator sport.

“Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You’re the solution. If you’re not, there is no solution.”

That’s a Da Ren speaking, and inviting us all to be mature human beings.


“Shadow Dancing” may be out of print, but Ventura is alive and (I sincerely hope) well, and you can access a collection of his articles on his website: http://www.michaelventura.org/, and his up-to-date “Letters at 3am” on the Austin Chronicle’s website: http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Archive/column?oid=oid%3A73654

www.ichingconsultation.com

Nourishment

Tree-ripened figs, Arta, Mallorca

Usually, when we think of nourishment, we think of food for the body. This is perfectly valid, but there are other kinds of nourishment that are just as important.

Friendship, kindness, love, acceptance; satisfying work; beauty and pleasure; a sense of purpose and belonging in the world – all these are nourishment for the soul. Without them, something in us starves and fails to thrive; we become less than fully human.

What does the I Ching tell us about nourishment?

Hexagram 27 is formed of Mountain over Thunder. Mountain is stillness, while Thunder is movement and activity: a blending of two opposite forces in a powerful way.

The name of the hexagram is YI, a term for the lower part of the face: the chin and mouth, the jaws. It is usually translated as Nourishment; LiSe calls it Jaws, and Brad calls it Hungry Mouth. The shape of the hexagram shows a solid line on the top, another solid line on the bottom, and an empty space in between: the image of a mouth, open to receive.

The text reads:
Nourishment
Persistence is promising
Study the hungry mouth
From the searching mouth to the feeding

Why should we study the hungry mouth?


People come to me for guidance and healing – that happens to be the kind of work I do. The first thing I do is to listen to them. Often, the second thing is to encourage them to slow down and make a space inside, so they can listen to themselves, and hear – from the inside – what they really need.

I haven’t yet met anyone who hungered, in his heart of hearts, for a Big Mac or the next episode of Big Brother.

We live in a world so crowded, so hectic, so full of sales pitches, that few of us give ourselves the chance to study what it is that we really need. For many people, personal time has been eroded and pinched, and much of what is left is poisoned. There are studies indicating that the average American family spends only 20 minutes a day hanging out together. Other studies show that the average American spends roughly 40 percent of his or her ‘leisure time’ in front of the television.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Nutritional Science – or Psychology – to recognize that this is not wholesome, that it will not build the flesh and bone of a human life.

“Meanwhile the world goes on”, as Mary Oliver wrote. It is all still here for each of us, “the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain”, and the possibility of real love and fellowship, and satisfying work, and beauty.

The banquet is laid out before us. Why are so many people starving?

This is a real question, something to think about.


The word ‘suffer’ has basically two meanings: to feel pain or distress, and to tolerate or allow.

When an individual comes to me for help, I can help that person discover his or her real needs, and some of the factors that have prevented those needs being met. Choices open up for the person.

But I am still curious about why so many people suffer – in both senses of the word – the theft of their time, which is essentially the theft of their lives.

While writing this, I looked up the word ‘suffer’ in an online dictionary, and the first thing that came up was:

Buy Suffer

Make the most of the January Sales

Let us help you find the best deals

uk.shopping.com

Why do we put up with this sort of insult – in both senses of the word: “an insolent or contemptuously rude remark”, and “an attack or assault”?


The answer – or at least a clue – might be right there in Hexagram 27: movement and stillness, stillness and movement, and empty space – and time – in which we can be open to receive.

Time was – and not so very long ago – when most people lived closer to the land, travelled less, and had more time. Much more time. Before the 1880’s, there were no standardized time zones – indeed, there was no standardized time; clocks were not synchronized; ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ were as precise a measurement of time as most people needed. People lived together and worked together: as families, as extended families, as villages. There was time to make music, to tell stories, to daydream.

In fact, the further back we go in human history, the more time there was. It is generally agreed that hunter-gatherers – those ‘primitive’ societies that occupied the overwhelming bulk of human history – needed to work only 15 to 20 hours a week to sustain themselves.

That left an awful lot of time for taking the world in: for telling stories, making beautiful things, singing, dancing, making love, dreaming, and just hanging out together – all those activities that nourish the human soul.


Modern life has plenty of Thunder and not enough Mountain. In China, Mountain implies a mindful, receptive, inner stability. The character for Mountain, gen, shows a high place, where you can get a detached perspective. The character is formed of two parts: on the top, an eye; at the bottom, someone turning and looking you straight in the face. The first meaning of the word is to resist, to turn and say NO, to refuse to be moved, or to be coerced into an action you don’t want. It’s about being centred in your true nature despite all influences that would deflect and distract you away from it.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Decision for Hexagram 52 (Mountain doubled) opens with the line “When the time has come to recapture the centre of being, the peripheral life must wait”.

Without those moments of stillness, of mindful inner receptivity, we can’t even know what we need, much less take it in and be nourished by it.

Study the hungry mouth.

And please, don’t buy Suffer – not even in the January sales.


www.ichingconsultation.com

Family

My mother died, many years ago, after a long, long illness that had involved much suffering for the whole family. I was not quite 24.

Suffering can bring a family together, or it can tear it apart.

In our case, it tore it apart, or at least it tore me away. I moved halfway round the world, naively thinking I’d put all that suffering behind me, and started a new life in England.

Meanwhile, my father remarried; Barbara was a wonderful woman, with two daughters of her own, and my then-teenaged sister was absorbed into that new family.

I had little to do with this new family, never felt part of it, and it was never particularly important to me, until my son was born. Little by little, on our infrequent visits back to California, we were gathered in to the family. My son has an uncanny resonance with my father. Barbara became my dear friend, and her daughters became my sisters.

In the past ten years, I have re-established a warm relationship with my own sister, and eventually – only in the past few years – have come to understand and love my father for the brilliant, generous, curmudgeonly eccentric that he is.

For the first time in my adult life, I have felt held in a familial network of belonging.

Last week, Barbara died. I will miss her painfully, but what I am experiencing now is a sort of psychic vertigo, as if the furniture in my world is being moved. Subtly, but palpably, I am being pushed to the front of my ancestral line.

My son and I went to California in September to visit the family. I had seen them in March, shortly after Barbara was diagnosed with cancer. She was still robust then, and in high spirits. Six months later, it was a shock to see that she had grown old and frail, after a course of chemotherapy. The evening we arrived, my son whispered to me that he had grown up ten years in a few hours.

We spent two weeks with my family. I cut Barbara’s wispy, post-chemo hair; she looked very small, but radiantly beautiful: translucent, as if a light was shining through her.

What upset me just as much, if not more, than Barbie’s impending death, was that the family seemed to be fragmenting under the strain of her illness.

Suffering can bring a family together, or it can tear it apart.

We talked a lot on that visit, my son and I, about families – and specifically about how my Dad, who is in his late 80’s, and not in the best of health, would get on after Barbara’s death. I talked with my sister – who is also not in the best of health – about how we could support him emotionally and practically. We talked with my Dad about his financial resources, if he needs at some point to move into sheltered housing. We all talked and talked and talked, and that was a good thing in itself.

Now I am home again in the UK, Barbie has died, and I feel very far away from my father, who is essentially home alone.

I have friends, and many clients, who look after elderly parents. Some visit them daily, some a couple of times a week; some have them living with them. I would be more than happy for my father to come and live with me, but it makes no sense to anyone – least of all to him – for him to move halfway round the world to a house with a lot of stairs, in a strange country with a dodgy climate. I can’t move back to California – as if I would want to: my work is here, and my son, and my Sweetheart, and I love this green and pleasant land, even when it’s cold and damp.

I’ve been fretting about this. My Sweetheart pointed out that I made the decision, when I was 24, to move away from my family: that it was my choice.

But the context in which that decision was made has changed radically.

Hexagram 37 is all about Family. The name of the hexagram is JIA REN. REN means person or people. The character JIA is formed of a pig under a roof, which is an image of a home. JIA REN are the people at home: the family.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Decision says, in part:

Home is the place where we first expect fairness and where we will first learn to trust. This can be a poor preparation for life in the world outside, but at least we might have a few years to pre-cover, in advance of those beatings that life in this world has to offer.

When I was a young child, home was that for me; and I feel responsible for this man who was responsible for me, when I was too young to be responsible for myself. If and when he becomes too old to be responsible for himself, I want to return the favour.

Hexagram 37 also speaks about roles; about all the necessary roles being held within a family, and how these roles interact. That feeling of being pushed toward the front of the line: it’s as if I’m standing behind my Dad, and looking over his shoulder, estimating the heft of the role of Head of the Family; it’s weighing me up as well. I can’t help feeling that I am not only geographically unsuited for the position, but unqualified, unready.

At the moment, my father is home alone, by choice. He seems to be getting on just fine, so I’m fretting less.

But I still wish I lived nearer.

Because it’s not just that I feel responsible for him. I want to make the most of the time left to us, to hang out together, to gather in and harvest the ancestral wisdom that is concentrated in him.

My father used to say that the only thing worse than getting old was the alternative. Black humour -- but it’s no joke. All of us who don’t die young will get old, and most of us will become infirm, in one way or another – and probably in more ways than one. Some of us will lose our minds; most of us will lose mobility; all of us will lose friends to the reaper.

The compensation for all these losses may or may not be wisdom, but we gain character. Like an old tree becoming gnarled and twisted, we become more ourselves.

I want to spend time with my father. He is very much himself, and is precious to me.

And I’m way too far away from my JIA REN.

www.ichingconsultation.com

The Ritual Cauldron

Buddhist temple, Saigon

Last weekend I participated, along with fourteen other women, in a ceremony to celebrate the passage of a dear friend into mid-life. In a four-hour ritual of our own design, we made a container in which our friend could undergo an initiation into the next phase of her life, leaving behind old wounds, and embracing a life more faithful to her true nature.

I had a similar ceremony on my 50th birthday; my closest friends gathered, invoked the spirits of fire, water, earth and air; they washed and anointed me, accompanied me through a life review, mirrored back what they saw in me. They witnessed the burning of fears that had far exceeded their ‘best before’ date, wrote wishes for my future, and wove them into a six-foot dreamcatcher.

Ceremonies like these tend and feed the fire of transformation in our lives.

Hexagram 50 describes something like this. It is formed of Li (Fire) over Sun (which in this case represents Wood). This is a fire under a ritual cauldron. Fire has two purposes: to burn and to cook; here it is clearly to cook, implying an alchemical transformation into a new state.

The name of the hexagram is Ding. A ding was a specific kind of bronze cauldron used in connection with the founding of a new dynasty. It was a ritual vessel for offerings to the spirits: a means of connection with the ancestors, and specifically the ancestral line of the Emperor. The emperor would have nine dings cast at the founding of a dynasty, to maintain a supportive and beneficial connection with the ancestors, and celebrate the initiation of the new dynasty with their blessing.

By extension, ding means to found a new dynasty, but with the implication that it is properly aligned with one's spiritual lineage. Huang calls this hexagram ‘Establishing the New’.

Ding is the only manmade artifact in the I Ching. It’s about personal, human power: your true path, and how you express it. On a personal level, it is a crucible in which

"the alchemy serves higher purpose and powers, the leadenness of our being turns into gold, into a life to which we give value…To sacrifice does not mean to lose things: it means to make them sacred. Thus the past is made sacred here, redeemed for a higher value”. (Brad Hatcher)

The Great Image says “The jun zi rectifies his position to manifest higher purpose”.

It's good to do that every once in a while: to reconsecrate your life. And it's a great privilege to participate in such a ritual for someone dear to you.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

Imagination

Morro Bay, California

Following on from last week’s blog on Hexagram 15….

I had a conversation with my Sweetheart recently about different kinds of photography. There’s prosaic documentary photography, like holiday snapshots; and there’s ‘art photography’, such as the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Robert Mapplethorpe, in which the artist creates a tableau and photographs it, much as a painter composes and executes a painting.

And then there are the photographers who manage to do both in the same stroke, like Ansel Adams, or Dorothea Lange, or Long Thanh, or any of the fabulous photographers whose work is collected in Edward Steichen’s timeless and exquisite classic ‘The Family of Man’. They take the world as they find it, and deliver an image rich with meaning.

Several years ago, I spent four weeks in Viet Nam. I completely fell in love with the country – its lush jungle (humming like high power wires), its richly cultured cities, gorgeous food, and above all, its people, who are for the most part living examples of Buddhism in action.

I took hundreds of photographs, which I showed to my father on my next visit to him, the following year. “This is a hill tribe village…this is a water buffalo…this is a fruit seller…”

My father, who in a previous life was an accomplished photographer himself, launched into me. “A good photograph shouldn’t have to be explained.”

It was true. I had been trying to capture not only an image, but the beauty, or poignancy, or sheer strangeness that had touched me deeply and changed the way I saw the world. And in almost all of those photographs, I had fallen short.

And maybe that’s the clue to the difference between an ordinary ‘documentary’ photograph and the work of an Edward Steichen or Dorothea Lange. An image by a great photographer tells you more than the facts; it hints (or hollers) about what it might mean. It never tells you “in so many words”, but involves your soul in a conversation about the complex possibilities of what it could mean.

A merely documentary image tells us too little; an explicit explanation tells us too much. As James Hillman says, the image is always more inclusive, more complex than the concept.

The same is true of writing. There is writing that documents facts (even if those facts are fictional), and there is writing that evokes meaning. At the moment, I’m reading a sensational book by Michael Ventura called ‘Shadow Dancing in the USA’. It’s one of those books that ignites a bubbling cauldron of ideas: the kind of ideas that make me look at the world with new eyes and fresh vision.

Bradford Hatcher has produced a rendering of the I Ching that does both. His Yi Jing (http://www.hermetica.info/) is both rigorous in its translation – perhaps the most rigorous translation that exists in the English language – and includes his own commentary, which is original, but grounded in a deep and wide knowledge of not only the I Ching and Chinese history, but several other wisdom traditions.

Brad’s Rogue River Commentaries are true commentaries, not an interpretation of other commentaries or traditions. They are based on an intimate knowledge of the I Ching, but consist of his own personal elaboration on the images. In the Introduction, he makes it clear that is what he is doing:

“Before anything else I should be clear that this effort does not in any way attempt to explain the texts of the Book of Changes. It is not an attempt to do any of your thinking for you or to make your task of understanding any easier…I tried to put on the original text and walk around in it some more, stretching it further, exploring some of its tangents and implications and, in the process, try to drop as many clues and hints as possible to some of the layers of meaning in the original.”

And that’s what raises his work to the level of soul as well as scholarship: he serves up images, in poetic language that presents possibilities: a cauldron of ideas that makes you look with new eyes and fresh vision.

In his Yi Jing, he has managed to do what I couldn’t do in most of my photographs of Viet Nam: faithfully documented what he found, and conveyed how it touched him and informed the way he saw the world.

I’m in awe of his work. And grateful.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/

Tell it like it is

Hills near Pismo Beach, California

I’ve just come back from three weeks in California, during which time I saw a lot of people, in different contexts and circumstances, facing up to difficult realities.

The straightforward facing up to 'how things really are' is the subject of Hexagram 15. Here, Earth is raised up on top of the Mountain, to show its quality, which is to be open to everything. Earth is the Great Mother, appreciating the uniqueness of each of her myriad children; she accepts them all, without deluding herself that they are more or less or different than they are. And Mountain, below, corresponds to the season just before the Winter Solstice, when foliage (and verbiage) have fallen away to reveal the bare bones of the world.

The name of the hexagram is QIAN. The character is formed on the left, with the image of words coming out of a mouth: ‘speech, to say’. On the right, a hand, drawing together stalks of wheat, treating them all as equal.

Wilhelm and Blofeld call it Modesty; Huang calls it Humbleness. Bradford calls it Authenticity.

It’s a very favourable hexagram, perhaps the only one in which all the lines are auspicious – but its meaning is subtle, and tends to be oversimplified in many translations of the I Ching.

On the surface, it’s about modesty and humility: egolessness, following, and leading through service – and particularly service that is inherently productive and creative.

But ‘egolessness’ is often misunderstood. There are those who have an inflated view of themselves, taking themselves too seriously -- and there are also those who don’t take themselves seriously enough. There are those who declaim that the world is endlessly beautiful, and those who declare it nothing but a sewer; those who see good in everything, and others who can see no good anywhere. All these extremes are belief systems, and if we view the world through them, it results in a distortion of our perception.

Things are what they are, and when we really see them as they are, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. As Bradford Hatcher puts it,

“We hear how the world is perfect just as it is. Why must we be so extreme? Why do we even presume to speak of perfection? The world is what it is. Cash those dreams in for cash value and what you have left is much more stupendous than perfect. It moves along fine as it is with accidents, defects and all.”

The Great Image tells us:
Within the earth is a mountain.
Authenticity.
The noble one, accordingly,
Diminishes the excessive and adds to the deficient,
Appraising things with fair allocation.

That is, the jun zi doesn’t see the world through the lens of his own prejudices, desires and aversions, but as it is. It’s an impartial discrimination: seeing – and naming – exactly what is there, without exaggerating or embellishing (the ‘excessive’), or trivializing, demonizing or denying (the deficient).

This hexagram is not about making yourself small. If it means modesty, it is modesty in the tradition of the great Chinese artists who never signed their paintings – but not because they were pretending they were not great painters.

I recently saw a biographical film about Stephane Grappelli. Everyone who knew him remarked on how sweet he was, what a lovely human being. He was a great example of Qian: immersed in the music itself, and unconcerned about whether people thought he was the greatest jazz violinist in the world, he never hit an inauthentic note in his life. He lived and played for the love of the music, for the joy it brought to him and to his audiences.

And it seems to me that the world is so full of ordinary extraordinary things, and that the meaningful connection between these things is another aspect of them, and that our personal experience of them is yet another facet of the reality of them .... that only art can even begin to reveal what is there. Perhaps Jean Cocteau had something like the same idea when he said, “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth” ... as in this sonnet by Ursula LeGuin:

Cold north blows through hot sun.
I seek to be by doing things.
The wind does the wind; the sun is one;
I am the center of many rings,

a sphere enclosed in other spheres,
an absence in a solitude.
The sun is round, as round as years.
Is my hunger all my food?

A blue moon will rise tonight
as the sun sets across the wind.
I have done. I have done right.
Now let my being begin and sing.

The sun turns south; the wind is cold.
North and silence eat the old.

Or this haiku by Issa:

A world of dew,

and within every dewdrop

a world of struggle





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Childhood

A few months ago, I went to a party some friends organize every year, a mini-music festival over a weekend, attended by several hundred friends and neighbours. On the Saturday afternoon, it started to rain. As people took cover under a marquee, the children discovered with delight that the rain was pouring through the roof at one point. Sensible adults moved a wheelbarrow under the leak. To the children, this became a magical fountain of fun.

Hexagram 4, MENG, is one of the hexagrams that describes childhood. It is formed of Mountain over Water; at its most positive, this is an image of a spring at the foot of the mountain, and the clarity and purity of that spring: the innocence of childhood.

The character meng originally referred to dodder, a plant that is very prolific and fast-growing, and quickly covered the roofs of houses. The meaning then became extended to mean ‘covering’: veiling or hiding. A covering can provide protection; it can also conceal things, and even prevent them from manifesting. The nature of a child is not yet manifest; it is in potentio, an unknown. The process of life uncovers the brightness of the child.

The hexagram name is variously translated as Youthful Folly, Immaturity, Childhood, Covering/A Callow Youth, Not Knowing, and Inexperience.

The Chinese term qi meng refers to education; it literally means to lift the cover and reveal what was concealed. The word education itself has a similar meaning, derived from the Latin educare "bring up, rear, educate," which is related to educere "bring out," from ex- "out" + ducere "to lead". In both cases, there is an assumption that one is revealing something already inherent in a person.

Childhood is a necessary stage; not-knowing comes before knowing. It is only when you know that you don’t know, that you can be receptive to new knowledge. This stage is sometimes compared to the Fool in the Tarot; it’s inexperience rather than stupidity. The knowledge we receive depends upon the direction of our curiosity, which shapes the questions we ask and the experiences we seek.

It’s a basic principle of scientific research that we only get answers to the questions we ask, and that the way we formulate our questions is of primary importance in determining the kinds of answers we get. Learning to formulate a question that can yield a useful answer is one of the fundamental skills of the formalized learning we call research. As Francis Bacon said, “A prudent question is one half of wisdom”.

But while Meng is at least partially about education, it clearly isn’t talking about linear ‘fact-accumulation’. In fact, it may be pointing strongly toward NOT being linear, toward accessing a state of attentive receptivity that allows you to learn in a different way.

The human brain has two very different memory systems. ‘Explicit memory’ encodes event memories, including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts.

By contrast, ‘implicit memory’ records complex knowledge that we cannot describe or explain. Learning the motor coordination required for walking and performing manual operations is one example; language is another.

“Spoken language…is based on a labyrinthine array of phonological and grammatical rules that native speakers know but could not explicate; most could not even recognize the rules when spelled out in plain English…Implicit knowledge makes language structure available for automatic use but not reflection. Children learn to speak without instruction; they absorb linguistic rules as a sponge absorbs water.” (Lewis, Amini and Lannon, A General Theory of Love)

Very complex situations – like Real Life – do not yield to explicit questions. Say you are meeting someone for the first time, and you want to get to know them. You could ask them a thousand questions, and they could answer them honestly; you would know all about them, but you still wouldn’t know them. But in the asking and the answering, your implicit mind would be observing and getting to know them.

There’s more than one way to learn. In traditional societies, most skills were learned by apprenticeship. You can go to school to learn ABOUT things, but learning HOW TO do anything only comes with experience.

While it’s indisputably necessary to learn about things, maybe Hexagram4 is encouraging us to uncover our implicit memory, our intuition, our ‘knowing without knowing about’, or knowing why. The Decision says:

It is not I who seeks the young and inexperienced.
The young and inexperienced seek me
The first consultation informs
The second and third show disrespect
Disrespect deserves no information
It is worthwhile to be dedicated.

It’s the ‘explicit mind’ that asks a lot of questions. The Decision tells us not to do that. Perhaps it is saying we need to adopt an attitude of mindful receptivity that will allow our 'implicit memory' to work – that we should cultivate our ability to stay patiently with a question until it reveals its truth, and we absorb it as a sponge absorbs water. “A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access”, said Nietzsche.

Most of the really important things in life can’t be taught, but they can be learned.

Hexagram 4 is essentially about how to retain a healthy innocence into adulthood, but without immaturity. Not-knowing and naiveté are two very different states; an open curiosity about the natural world (including that part of it that lies ‘inside’ us) actively invites knowledge rather than denying uncomfortable realities. A great part of wisdom lies in knowing how to wonder, how to be receptive, how to notice things that don’t fit with what is already known, how to imagine new possibilities and test them against experience.

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Inner Truth

It was an evolutionary leap when mammals first evolved, not least because one of the features that distinguishes mammals from reptiles is a capacity known as limbic resonance. Unlike reptiles, a mammal can detect the internal state of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match it. It is our capacity for limbic resonance that makes us emotionally responsive, which is to say, capable of relationships, and capable of love.

The capacity for love is a marker of spiritual health – perhaps its most important marker. What the saints and realized beings of every spiritual tradition share in common is an extraordinary capacity for love.

It is love, reflected in the eyes of our parents, that tells us in infancy, who and what we are. In our earliest days, the physical presence of loving adults may mean the difference between life and death, quite independent of the provision of food and warmth: recent research suggests that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome may be the result of the physical separation of mother and child. The countries with the lowest rate of SIDS are those in which infants sleep in physical contact with their mothers.

As a baby’s growing awareness takes in more of the world, including himself, he continues to learn from his parents what it is to be loved, and to love. This is not an intellectual learning; it is not something that can be defined and taught with words. A child learns from the experience of love; his internal world, as it grows and takes form, is shaped by that experience. Relationship, for mammals – and we are mammals – is in large part a physical experience, and it changes how we experience the world.

For millennia, right back to the dawn of our species, human children – like all mammalian young – spent virtually all their time with their parents and extended family until they themselves were ready to venture out into the world, their independence emerging naturally and effortlessly from the satiation of their dependence. By observing everyday life within their families, they learned both values and survival skills, including crucially important social skills: how to live in relationship with others.

But human children learn something in addition to survival: in the loving gaze of parents who truly see them, they find a sense of themselves as unique individuals. Adults who were fortunate enough to have enjoyed the consistent presence of a supportive family tend to be confident, emotionally stable, and able to withstand the knocks that life deals out. They know who they are; they have a sense of their own value, perhaps even a sense of destiny. And they are able to form close relationships with others; they are able to love.

There are intimations of many of these themes in Hexagram 61, ZHONG FU. Zhong means centre. The character Fu is formed with the legs of a bird on top, and a child underneath: thus, it means to hatch. It implies the quality of a mother hen: steady, faithful, loyal, trustworthy. In the context of Hexagram 61, it is most often interpreted as truthfulness and sincerity, and particularly being faithful to yourself. Zhong Fu is the equivalent of the Daoist concept of ‘zhen’: authenticity: being faithful to what is at the centre of your life, to your own nature, your own Dao.

Huang sums up the essence of the lines, from 1 to 5, thus:

The Duke of Zhou says that, being sincere and trustworthy, one should be at ease and confident. It should be as natural as a mother crane calling affectionately to her young. One should persist in being sincere and trustworthy. First beating the drum and then stopping is not the proper attitude. Being sincere and trustworthy, one is able to link with others in union…

This might well be paraphrased as a description of good parenthood: being at ease and trusting our own instincts, we respond to our children as naturally as we breathe. We are there for them, not when we can fit it in to a busy life, but steadily, all the time; we don’t make a fuss over them and then ignore them. If we give them this foundation of relatedness, they will then be able to form loving relationships with others.

Modern Western society does not support us in spending the time our children need to establish their strong centre, their personhood, their inner truth. In Southeast Asia, I observed a different norm: families spend most of their time together. Extended families live together; small children are looked after by their grandparents, and wander in and out of their parents’ place of work; the whole family takes meals together, often in the workplace.

But even in Asia, this is changing, as ‘developing cultures’ begin to ape the patterns of social isolation that have poisoned the West. Most of us have lost the immediate proximity of extended families; most of us in nuclear families work outside our homes.

It is into the cracks opened up, as families fracture, that we slip deeper into Kali Yuga. I applaud those families who are raising their children to be strong enough in their personhood to eventually pull us out of it.

Huang says of Hexagram 61: “In hatching chicks, the hen must be faithful to her obligation.”

The Tuan commentary for the hexagram says that sincerity can transform a country.

In the 21st century, we need it to transform the world.

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Abiding Passion

I’m having a love affair with my garden. Every day we bring each other gifts. I bring water, or new seedlings; or I prune or weed, or build supports for the beans and climbing tromboncino courgettes and wineberries and tomatoes. It produces something new and surprising, magical and beautiful every day.

I came to gardening in my 40’s, with a half acre allotment which I tended for ten years. It was way too big for me to keep up with, and parts of it always looked like it had reverted to jungle, but it churned out a vast array of fabulous fruit and veg.

I’m still passionate about gardening, though more relaxed about it. I know that not everything always works as I expected or hoped, and that’s OK. The garden goes on and on and will always continue to be magical and surprising and beautiful.

This constancy through change is Hexagram 32, HENG. Heng is variously translated as Duration, The Long Enduring, Long Lasting, Constancy. But it lasts precisely because it is always changing. The hexagram is formed of Thunder over Wind: two different types of movement, the Gentle and the Shocking. Both trigrams have the quality of movement, but the relationship endures. This is the hexagram of lasting marriage: stability in the midst of changing circumstances, a living marriage, a steady state of constant renewal.

The character heng has the ‘heart’ radical – representing feelings, the realm of the mental and emotional – plus an ideograph of a boat between the banks of a river. This is a ferry one relies on to cross the river, always making the same journey, continuous and dependable. It’s a cyclic journey, not a linear adventure. Thus the meaning is: to rely on, constancy; something that will go from here to there and back again, without ceasing: a steadfast heart.

This hexagram is exactly in the middle of the I Ching, and is the heart of the I Ching: in the middle of change, something is permanent. The theme is beautifully stated in the Confucian commentary on the Decision: ‘The four seasons change and transform; thus can their production of beings long endure.’

Reminding me of this truth is the very best gift my garden gives me, and it gives it every day.

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Limbic Resonance

Standing in the mud at WOMAD with my Sweetheart last week, my heart was captured by a couple who started dancing at the side of the stage. While almost everyone was moving in time to the music in some way, these two were twirling and swaying as one. I don’t know if they had just met and fallen madly in love, or had been together for twenty years and were still madly in love.

That sweet madness is the subject of Hexagram 31. This hexagram opens the second half of the I Ching, the half dealing with humanity, and specifically with personal and social relationships.

It is formed of Mountain over Lake: a pairing of opposites in harmonious conjunction. Mountain is stable and rises upward; Lake is on top and sinks downward, so they are coming together. Mountain is the youngest son, Lake is the youngest daughter; it is a picture of courtship. It’s also a great Taoist image: Stillness (Mountain) inside, and Joy (Lake) outside – a perfect marriage of Yin and Yang.

Although the name of the hexagram is XIAN, Huang says that according to Confucius’ Commentary on the Decision, it should be GAN. Gan means influence; it has the connotation of moving the heart, being emotionally excited or stimulated. But there are also resonances with xian, which has two meanings: (a) to bite or be bitten – what we might call ‘smitten’, and (b) entirely or completely. All of these meanings are aspects of being in love.

It’s a hexagram of feeling, of being moved or touched by someone. Wilhelm translates it as Influence (Wooing); Blofeld as Attraction, Sensation. Huang calls it Mutual Influence. Wu calls it To Influence, To Move. LiSe calls it Affect and Affection.

Brad Hatcher calls it Reciprocity, and relates it to Eros. He says:

“Beyond simple union, beyond putting our fractured, fragmented selves back together as viable, functioning wholes, there might be no other purpose or plan. Every human being alive has myriad generations of human and near-human ancestors to thank for bringing them here, not to mention the primates and far longer lines of descent. Each of these beings in turn had something to give in exchange for something they wanted. Each self struck a bargain with other, to negotiate a new pairing while acting in what they hoped was their own best interest. Each had to take a lover. Life learned long ago that the self by itself is extinguished. It learned to want and desire, and that it would need to merit its rewards and fulfilments. This is what brings out our best.”

We can also consider this quality in terms of ‘limbic resonance’. In A General Theory of Love, authors Lewis, Amini, and Lannon explain the concept of "limbic resonance" as the special ability of mammals (including humans) to become attuned to the inner states of others, influencing them and in turn being influenced by them. Mammals, unlike reptiles, regulate each other's internal states – not only their emotional states, but physiological function. An example of this is the way a group of women who spend time together will often find their menstrual periods coming into spontaneous alignment; close friends will achieve synchrony more readily than women who merely share a living space, even though the latter may spend more time together.

When two people are in deep limbic resonance, they are in love. They are in touch, they are ‘touched by’ each other; and being the responsive, malleable beings that we are, they are influenced by each other.

The authors conclude that humans, like all mammals, have "open-loop" physiologies, and require the sympathetic presence of others to maintain systemic balance.

“That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.”

Since the heart has its reasons (that the Reason knows not), this would imply getting our own Minds and Hearts (our cognitive and limbic selves) on the same team, or to reprise Brad Hatcher’s commentary, “putting our fractured, fragmented selves back together as viable, functioning wholes”. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, in his book True Love, in order to truly love, we must practice oneness of body and mind, to be 'entire', to be 'complete', to be xian.

I don’t know the real story behind that beautiful dancing couple, but they sure looked like – at least at that moment – they had it sussed.

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Crossing the great (muddy) waters

Womad 2007, Charlton Park

I’ve just returned from four days at WOMAD, a festival of world music and dance. Thousands of people braved knee-deep mud to celebrate music and dance from countries and cultures all over the world.

Unpredicted torrential rain made the physical conditions of the festival extremely difficult. Nevertheless, it was a joyous gathering, and a beautiful example of Hexagram 13, TONG REN, which is formed of Heaven over Fire.

Tong means together: to come together, gather together, meet; agreement, harmony, concord; or comrade, colleague.

Ren is people, or person.

Tong Ren is people uniting to become a cohesive, coherent group. This is the hexagram of society and the community, in which people are equal. It’s about understanding the intrinsic qualities of things and organizing them for the benefit of all, rather than for personal gain.

It’s variously translated as Similar People, Fellowship with Men, Like-Minded Persons, Union of Men, Community, Seeking Harmony.

What was noteworthy about this gathering was that the similarities were not the superficial ones we normally notice. People came from across the spectrum of ages and classes. The performers came from all over the world, and from a wide range of musical genres.

What we all had in common was a love of music, an enthusiasm for experiencing a wider context of our humanity, and the intention to have a great time.

Music, and the arts in general, bring people together. So do the pure sciences, and cooking, and gardening, and the spiritual quest. I once spent an afternoon as the guest of a family of pineapple farmers in the hills of Viet Nam; they served me tea in the tiny one-room shack that was home to a couple and their three adult children, and although we had no common language, the mother of the family and I felt the bond of the shared experience of motherhood.

The Decision of Hexagram 13 refers to a union of men ‘beyond the suburbs’, i.e. the common people, as contrasted with the government. Huang observes that “Tong Ren reveals the truth that if people deal with each other in a spirit of equality, then peace and advancement are possible.”

The Decision also says we can “cross the great waters”, meaning that we can bridge a gap, accomplish something important, cross over into new territory.

It’s a hexagram of recognizing how we are similar, and how we are different, and celebrating both.

Bradford Hatcher – always an inspiring interpreter of the I Ching – hits the nail on the head:

The fire does not enlighten the night, but the flame will make a focus in common, a unifying vision, a bonding experience and quite a little spectacle. Gathered here we agree to disagree, exchange the best of our stories and songs, make our peace...

And so the search for the greater world means going across the great waters, across our cultural boundaries, across the ages of time, outside of our niches and sometimes out of our minds. After ages of trials and wars, the clans start to take steps towards consensus, overcoming our disparities by returning to our old common grounds...

Our hope is as much in seeing things not the same way. Our frontier isn't the known. Is that not the whole point of frontiers?

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Decrease

Kenh Ga, Viet Nam

(Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky)

A friend of mine recently had a dream about having to hurriedly get out of the house in which he and some friends were living, because there was going to be a missile strike on it. He was frantically looking around, trying to decide in two minutes what he should take with him as he rushed out. The punch line, though, is that they had organized the missile strike themselves.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to leave stuff behind; sometimes you just get bored with it and relax your grip. I’ve let go of some emotional patterns that way: it got so tedious, I couldn’t bear to go over the same territory one more time.

You can get to a point where not having stuff feels better than having it. On a material level, I downsized twice in the last three years and can recommend it.

Travelling helps you let go. First of all, you’re in a different environment, your habit patterns aren’t being reinforced by your surroundings, and you’re getting fresh input and having to be creative about how you meet new experiences. Secondly, you discover that travelling light is easier than hauling a lot of baggage around.

This is all described in Hexagram 41, which is, appropriately enough, called Decrease.

The character SUN shows a hand pouring something out of a ritual vessel; the meaning is to pour out, to decrease or diminish. It can refer to any lessening, subtraction, decline, loss, or ruin – but also suggests a libation to the earth: sacrifice in its original sense, as an offering to invoke the sacred.

The Decision is unequivocally positive. It reads:

Have confidence. Most auspicious. No inauspicious omens.
Do the divination. Favourable to have a place to go to.
How to proceed with an offering?
Two baskets of rice can be offered and presented for the sacrifice.

Two baskets of rice is not a big sacrifice, but it’s OK to give what you have; it’s not the quantity that counts, but the truthfulness and sincerity with which they are offered.

Loss generally carries a connotation of injury, but it’s not necessarily negative to decrease. The key is what you are losing. This hexagram can indicate catastrophe, but it’s potentially a new beginning. Even if something is damaged, you yourself can grow and develop, like a tree that has been pruned so it can bear more fruit. The implication here is that you are not losing what you need, but shedding what is superfluous, and creating a space to move forward. It may be a painful process, but it’s about reducing the load you are carrying, and travelling light.

Both Taoist and Confucian commentaries speak of diminishing anger and desire – what we refer to colloquially as ‘baggage’. (Which reminds me of a dear friend, who says she’s looking for a man with ‘carry-on baggage’.)

As Lao Tse says:

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
(Tao Te Ching, transl. Feng and English)

Hexagram41 is actually very zen – not only in the sense of creating empty space – but more so because it is formed of Stillness (the attribute of Mountain) and Joy (the attribute of the Marsh).

I wonder what kind of missile my Higher Self might be organizing to motivate my next downsize?

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Boston is a random red herring

Dreaming

Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

I dreamed last night that I was moving out of a house; a family who had several dogs of various shapes and sizes, and seemed to be good friends of mine, were moving in. I was moving to Boston (a city I’ve never been to), and thought it would be great to live there because it was close to my friend Helen (who actually lives in Bristol).

I also dreamed that a real-life group of people I worked with thirty years ago were dismantling our old office because we were leaving – perhaps the business had folded, or maybe we had all quit. We had moved all the desks into the middle of the room, which was how it was when we’d started (not in real life, but in the dream).

Apart from some dodgy geography (Boston isn’t quite drop-in-for-a-cuppa distance from Bristol), there seems to be a theme of endings and beginnings, and friends.

Now then (as my father used to say, and probably still does), I believe that dreams, like the I Ching, can pick up on the subtle beginnings of things before they are solidly manifest. Both are a sort of early warning system, not necessarily of concrete events that will happen in the future, but of processes that are unfolding.

That’s why the I Ching often has a dreamlike quality, where things that make no sense at all in real life somehow seem perfectly natural. In other words, many of the images in the I Ching don’t stand up to the cold hard light of linear rational thought – but they are all the more powerful and information-laden for being surreal and ambiguous.

That’s also why scholars of the I Ching argue endlessly over what a particular line means. Not only does each individual word have many possible meanings, but having decided on a ‘translation’, there may still be a number of different interpretations of each line. And I believe it’s the diviner’s role to hold the full spectrum of potential meanings like an artist’s palette, and to craft an interpretation that is both accurate and useful for the inquirer at that juncture.

At any rate, having had not one but TWO vivid dreams on the same themes, I thought it would be good to get a second opinion, and threw the coins this morning. I got Hexagram 2, Line 1.

It’s always exciting to get one of the Primary Hexagrams, 1 or 2. Hexagram 2, KUN, signifies total yin, complete receptivity. It has resonances with the new moon and the Winter Solstice; it is the tomb and the womb, doorway to the other world. KUN is where the downswing of the pendulum turns to the upswing, the pause between outbreath and inbreath. It’s like that Mary Poppins story (for those who were fortunate enough to have actually read the original Mary Poppins stories) where the magic happens between the first stroke of midnight and the last.

The GREAT IMAGE says:
The basic disposition of earth is female

The noble man carries everything with great generosity

So here we find encouragement to welcome, with good grace, everything that is coming. That’s the essence of yin.

My changing line was Line 1, which reads: “Treading carefully on hoarfrost; solid ice will come soon.”

Frost is a good image of yin: something delicate, that melts into nothing when you step on it. But when there is frost, you know that Winter – and real ice – is on the way.

This line is about being aware of the beginnings of things, so you can feel how they will develop. Wilhelm interprets this to mean we are being guided to note the first signs of decay. He says to "check them", but how can you "check" the coming of Winter? Perhaps a better translation would say to "prepare" for them.

What does it all mean? I’m no wiser. Something new is beginning, but I haven’t got the shape of it yet.

A friend said to me today that if she’d known what she was getting into, she probably wouldn’t have done most of the things she’s done in her life. That’s true of me as well; I can’t count the number of times I’ve said that if I’d known how an undertaking was going to develop, I’d never have begun it – and how happy I was that I didn’t know!

But carrying everything with generosity…that’s something to aspire to.

Still, I reckon Boston is probably a random red herring.






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Call Me Unpredictable

Path through wildflowers, Can Marroig

My Sweetheart and I saw Thea Gilmore performing in Crawley last weekend. I blush to say I had never heard of her before a week ago. She is a major talent, both as writer and performer.

Thea told a story: just after she had her baby, someone in the music industry asked her if she was now going to be ‘all luvved up’. She said that she sat her son on her lap, switched on the TV, and found Big Brother …and her response to that was to write her song “Teacher, Teacher”, in which she says:

Teacher, teacher, there is danger on the screen
Some little coven of the bigotry machine

Teacher, teacher, how’d they get to hold that sway?

Don’t want to see them come to represent this age
The dumb, the dumber and the princes of the page
They’ve got the money, now let’s give ‘em hell to pay

I’m gonna be raising the roof
I’m gonna be painting the town
I’m gonna be tearing those white flags down

I’m gonna be crossin’ that line
I’m gonna be biding my time
I’m gonna be kissing those walls goodbye

Thea Gilmore’s a gal with vision and attitude, and her songs express who she is. That’s a good example of Hexagram 25, WU WANG, which is formed of Heaven over Thunder: Action following the way of Heaven.

The character wang indicates falseness, untruth, deceit, vanity – but also reckless, foolhardy, rash, disordered, out of place. Wu means ‘no’ or ‘not’. Thus, the meaning of wu wang is ‘no error, not reckless’. It describes an authenticity without falsehood, a natural spontaneous process, like the weather, or plants growing – except that it’s conscious, in the sense of human consciousness.

Wilhelm translates wu wang as Innocence, which doesn’t really capture the meaning. Wu wang is complete truth, without any distortion of the will of Heaven, or of your own personal dao. This takes strength and skill; there is nothing childish or naïve about it.

The Mawangdui I Ching has this as wu meng: “without strain', 'without effort', i.e. acting spontaneously, in tune with the dao. If you are following your nature, you may be exerting yourself, but it won’t have the quality of effort -- of struggle -- that we experience when we are going against the grain.

Another meaning of wu wang is ‘not anticipated', or 'unexpected'. I had a conversation recently with someone who was caught in a dichotomy; he thought he had to make a choice between being ‘middle class’ or ‘bohemian’. Both of those ideas are scripts handed down by history; your own dao is entirely original and unpredictable. It’s not mainstream, and it’s not opposed to the mainstream either – it isn’t determined by any external source. When we are spontaneous, in the flow of who we really are, we surprise even ourselves!

Following your dao has great power. This is one of the few hexagrams that contains the entire invocation yuan heng li zhen, invoking all the directions, all the seasons, and all the virtues of Heaven.

It’s interesting that the ideograph for wang shows us the image of a woman walking away. In ancient China, a woman walking away was a symbol of falseness. But it’s just as important to ask what we should walk away from, in order to be true to what we are and what we value.

Wu wang – being without error – is essentially about following your dao, and creating your life.

If we don’t, we leave a hole in the world where our own authentic and original lives ought to be – and there are forces ready to slosh in and fill that hole.

If we don’t, the ‘bigotry machine’ and a stupified mediocrity may come to represent not only our age, but ourselves.

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Travelling

My Sweetheart and I recently spent a fortnight on an idyllic Mediterranean island. I did some work while there, but mostly it was a nourishing break.

I don’t really do holidays. I’ve travelled quite a bit, but that’s different. Now I know that many ‘holidays’ (or ‘vacations’ to those who speak American English) also involve travelling. All of mine certainly do. But there’s something about travelling -- in the sense of visiting places you've never been before, broadening your horizons, that sort of thing -- that doesn’t let you completely relax. It's like that song 'Hit the Ground Running' by Bill Callahan:

I had to leave the country

Though there was some nice folks there

Now I don't know where I'm going

All I know to do is hit the ground running

I love to travel. One of the things I love best about it is described in another Bill Callahan song, 'I Could Drive Forever':

With every mile

A piece of me peels off

and whips down the road

All down the road
I should have left a long time ago

The best idea I've ever had
I feel light and strong

I could drive forever

Two years ago I backpacked through Viet Nam, on my own, for four weeks. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, thanks in no small part to the kindness and generosity of spirit of the Vietnamese people. But anyone travelling in a foreign country – especially alone – must always, to some extent, remain vigilant. Pickpockets and hustlers aside, everything is strange and unfamiliar. We don’t know how things work, we don’t understand the language, sometimes we don’t even understand the body language.

The I Ching tells us something about travelling, in Hexagram 56, which is formed of Fire over Mountain. Mountain, on the inside, is stable, strong, and steady; Fire, on the outside, moves. It’s about how to negotiate the role of a traveller; how to keep safe, and maintain your own integrity and roots, while moving through different cultures and situations.

When one is travelling, life is not stable, and everyone is a stranger. Moving from place to place is tiring, both physically and emotionally, and there are dangers. You are a wanderer, searching for something new: crossing borders, just passing through and not staying. You are on the move; the journey is in process, and you haven’t yet reached a destination.

This hexagram is about the need, when in new territory, to be clear and perceptive (Fire), and self-contained and cautious (Mountain).

The Decision is positive, promising good fortune, but most of the lines are negative. Many of them are about the dependence of the traveller on others: because he is at the mercy of others, he must be cautious and careful in his actions. Only two of the lines are really positive, and those are the ones with inherent inner stability and self-containment – and the best one speaks of finding a safe haven and trusted companions.

So travelling is not really about letting your hair down – despite the justified popularity of Full Moon parties (which are, I suppose, a safe haven with trusted companions).

But my holiday wasn’t Travelling. It had some of the advantages of travelling: I was nourished physically by exotic and exquisite food, and spiritually by the breathtaking beauty of the place…clear azure sea, fields of grain, goats grazing under ancient fig trees…

And although in an unfamiliar country, I was in a safe and comfortable place, with trusted friends, and my Sweetheart.

It was bliss.
I could quite easily get used to it.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

Watch it!

Lighthouse on Espalmador, Formentera

I recently read Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson. It’s a brilliant book – and it has made me look at lighthouses with new eyes, and hear stories with new ears.

There’s a sort of lighthouse in the I Ching: Hexagram 20, GUAN. The form of the hexagram as a whole has the form of the trigram Mountain, and there are a lot of similarities between Guan and Mountain: they are the two hexagrams of meditation, reflection, and contemplation. Guan is composed of Wind over Earth; it has the deep stability of Earth, and the lightness of Wind, which can go everywhere.

The character is composed of two parts.

• On the left, a heron or owl with wide open eyes. A heron can stay still for hours – then suddenly they’ve got the fish! An owl can see in the dark, through confusion and chaos.
  
• On the right, an eye with a person below it; thus 'to see'.

Guan means to observe or examine; pronounced with a different tonal quality, it can be an observatory (where you watch the stars to see the movements of the Dao), or a temple, where you can observe the Dao through meditation (a temple is sometimes called dao guan). In meditation, we observe: perhaps the breath, perhaps a sound, perhaps our physical sensations…what is important is that our attention penetrates but does not get caught in these things, like the wind moving over the earth.

Guan is a place from which you can see into the subtleties of things, as well as getting a bird's eye view: the big picture, a global perspective without your own small stuff clouding it.

And while you are watching others, others are inevitably watching you: that’s part of the package of being in a position of altitude.

Wilhelm calls it Contemplation; Blofeld calls it Looking Down; Huang calls it Watching; Wu calls it To Observe; LiSe calls it The Heron.

One aspect of this hexagram that I find particularly interesting is the Decision:

Huang’s translation: Hands are washed, offerings are not yet presented. Being sincere and truthful, reverence appears.
LiSe’s translation: Hand washing and not yet sacrificing. Possessing true devotion.

What are they on about? Why do you need to cleanse yourself? Why do you need reverence, sincerity, truth and devotion in order to observe?

We are all of us full of inner voices chattering away: beliefs, desires and aversions – all more or less unconscious and unexamined habits that organize us into who we are. In order to listen – even to ourselves (and three of the lines tell us to observe our own lives) – we must first make a quiet space inside. Daoism speaks of the ‘Void of the Heart’ – a quiet inner sanctum from which we can listen and look, see and hear without being clouded by preoccupation. If you are going to get a call from your higher Self, you have to keep the line clear – otherwise, You’ll just get a busy signal!

So how do we get the beans out of our ears? How do we hang up the phone so the still small voice can get through?

The Decision here describes a ritual. The first part of any ritual has to do with focus and preparation, of simply being present and making a space in which the unknown can become known. It can be as simple as sitting down on your meditation mat, or as complex as you like. It can be the Grace before dinner; the writing of Morning Pages; opening the curtains; clearing your desk before you begin working -- somehow we climb the lighthouse stairs. The magic lies in the reverence, sincerity, truth and devotion we bring to the moment: our open curiosity and willingness to welcome whatever is there to be seen and heard and experienced….what will you see today?