Sunday 30 September 2007

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





Tuesday 4 September 2007

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.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/
http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/