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