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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