Too Much Stuff

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 28, DA GUO, is composed of Lake over Wind. Wind can also represent Wood, and in this case it does: the image is of a Lake rising over the trees.

Da, of course, means “big” or “great”. Guo means extreme, excessive, something that surpasses what is normal.  It indicates a transgression; something that goes beyond the limits of what is acceptable or sustainable.

So Da Guo is a serious transgression; it can also indicate a natural disaster.

The Gua Ci is pretty clear:

The ridgepole (i.e. the pole holding up the roof) bends

Worthwhile to have somewhere to go

In other words, the roof is about to fall on you. As Bradford says in the Rogue Commentary, there's just time to collect a few wits and get nimbly moving... and it's good to have somewhere to go.

But the prognostication is not negative. Fulfillment can come of this, if we meet the situation with an appropriate response.

The form of the hexagram itself describes the situation: one yin line at the top, another at the bottom, enclosing a solid mass of yang, and unable to contain it. It's a situation of great power, but it's unstable. You are not impotent, but things have reached breaking point. The implication is that if it goes on like this, nothing can save it, and you may just need to get out from under it.

Discussing this hexagram in the East Grinstead study group last week, the parallels with the planetary situation are striking. As Paul Gilding put it in a recent TED talk,

The Earth is full. It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands. Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we've created a little too much stuff. So much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet.... We're living beyond our means... We need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50% more Earth than we've got. In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50% more than you earn, going further into debt every year....What this means is our economy is unsustainable. I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant, or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is; what I'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable. In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop.

In other words... the ridgepole is bending, and creaking dangerously. The trouble is, we have nowhere else to go, no other planet but this beautiful blue jewel. We simply can't jump ship. We can only go forward into our future right here, and we're all in it together.

How did it come to this? When we discussed it last week, one of the topics we returned to again and again was our addictions to that “stuff”, to the nice and pleasant lives we lead, or hope to lead. How much were we – each of us right there in that room – willing to leave behind as we make that jump into the future? What of our possessions, our comforts, our habits of passivity, distraction and denial, our souvenirs of an imaginary golden age, can we surrender before they are taken from us by force of history?

The words of the Da Xiang may take on new meaning here:

The noble young one, accordingly, 

                     stands alone and undaunted

And steps back from the world without sorrow

While Da Guo usually has the connotation of a transgression, it can also indicate someone who excels: a kind of superhero. And Hexagram 28 can actually be very positive, indicating great power – times of disaster often bring out the best in people, who find that they are able to go beyond their ordinary conception of themselves and find reserves of strength they didn’t know they had. Maybe one aspect of what is called for here is a stepping back from the demands we have put on the natural world: demands arising from an image of the good life created by those who have something to sell. We might, for example, create and participate in real and sustainable communities that can build "somewhere to go".

In his TED talk, Gilding goes on:

Of course we can't know what's going to happen. We have to live with uncertainty. But when we think about the kinds of possibilities I paint, we should feel a bit of fear. We are in danger, all of us. And we've evolved to respond to danger with fear, to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat. But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth, you can't see the danger at your door, but if you look, you can see it at the door of your civilisation. That's why we need to feel our response now, while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide. If we feel it now and think it through, we will realise we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon, certainly within our lifetime, but we are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming. You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right. The only thing they're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. When we feel fear, and we fear loss, we are capable of quite extraordinary things. … We are smart, in fact we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news: this one's a monster.

Paul Gilding's TED talk “The Earth is Full” can be viewed at http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html

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Tong Ren, Da You, and the Occupy Movement

"Role Play"

Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

Last week in the Brighton study group we looked at Hexagrams 13 and 14, as a pair.

Hexagram 13, Tong Ren, is about fellowship, community, our connections with each other. Tong means “together”: to come together; gathering together, uniting. Ren means “human”. This is about the way that people connect to form a community or a society. The emphasis is not, as in Hexagrams 7 or 8, on leadership; it is rather on the recognition of what each person is, and how they participate in the fabric of society. The Da Xiang reads “The junzi, according to kind and family, distinguishes the beings”. In other words, we differentiate or identify people; we find out who they are and how they are. But the context is inclusive, for the Gua Ci tells us:

Fellowship of men at the frontier:

Fulfillment

Worthwhile to cross the great stream

Worthy of the junzi's persistence.

In other words, reach out to people beyond your usual borders, find out what they are like, get to know them, recognise how they are the same as you, appreciate how they are different, make meaningful connections. Realise that you are kindred spirits who can differentiate your differences and find a common thread.

Hexagram 14, Da You, by contrast, is about wealth. Da means big, or great. You means “to have”, to possess, acquire, gain; to be rich, and also to offer. In ancient times, it meant a good harvest, perhaps the most universally useful type of acquisition, and da you referred to a “best harvest”.

There is no inherent conflict between these hexagrams. In the China of the zhouyi, the pursuit and acquisition of wealth made sense only when it benefitted society. We might think of Tong Ren as the system of relationships that make up society, and Da You as the energy flowing through that system.

These two hexagrams, taken together, raise a lot of interesting questions that are profoundly relevant to our times. What do we do when we have more than we need? How to we avoid arrogance, greed, or complacency? How do we avoid inciting envy in others, or getting hooked into envy ourselves? How can we honour the complex web of life that produced the abundance? How can we use this wealth for the common good?

Although these are worthwhile questions in any age, it would appear that in our time, the system of relationships that makes up society is organised in such a way as to channel most of the energy through a very limited segment of society. Rather than being permeated with a sense of abundance, most of our society is racked with a sense of lack, of disenfranchisement, of being marginalised and alienated.

Furthermore, our social system in the “developed” world is structured so that it alienates us – from each other, from nature, and ultimately from ourselves.  This was not the dream of the Global Village.  Widespread (in some countries, almost universal) economic migration has torn apart extended families; communities barely have time to form before they are reconstituted, so that many of us have never had the experience of a “village” of people around us whom we know well enough, over enough time, that a self-organising community can emerge. Real communities, which evolve in an organic way, embedded in their natural environment, have a better chance of being organised so that each person's talents are best used, and each person's interests are best served. This takes time. Community is connection sustained over time.

The vast chasm between such an ideal and the current reality is precisely what is being highlighted by the Occupy Movement, which is expressing in the most inspiring terms the fundamental values of human connection (with both each other and the natural environment that sustains us) and the realities of scale (“think global, act local”). 

Michael Stone has described the Occupy Movement as a collective awakening to the fact that our corporations and governments are the products of human action, that they aren't serving us, and that it is in our power and in our interest to replace them. He observes that it is "not just about economics, it's about ecology and our love for what we know is valuable: community, healthcare, simple food, and time.... We are not fighting the people on Wall Street, we are fighting this whole system."

The Occupy Movement invites us to bring a fresh view to the relationship between human connection (Tong Ren) and wealth (Da You),  and to redefine wealth itself, away from the endless accumulation of goods and back to a focus on the things that genuinely make life worthwhile: community, family, satisfying work.

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