Beauty

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

In the East Grinstead study group last week, we looked at Hexagram 22, BI, formed of Mountain over Fire.  BI is variously translated as Grace, Elegance, Adornment.  Hilary calls it “Beauty”, which I believe captures the essence of it.

Bradford's translation of the Gua Ci reads:

Adornment. Satisfaction. 

A little worthwhile to have somewhere to go.

I have always understood this hexagram as distinguishing between whether something is merely superficial show or represents an expression of inner quality. This is a danger of Fire, which can get lost in seeking ephemeral beauty, gaudy but insubstantial. Is it just decoration? Or is it an outward expression of a profound inner quality?

But last week, in our discussion, I got a new angle on it, which feels like an important insight.

Beauty happens when we are mindful of the small details. It's the minute particulars that make the difference between the simple good meal that I serve up, and the meal served by my epicurean friend who takes more trouble, prepares it with more care, and presents it in a way that delights the eye as well as the palate. BI is the care it takes to wear a freshly ironed shirt … or the perfectly laddered, layered stockings of a goth fashionista.   It's Lauren Bacall's elegantly lifted eyebrow; it's those painstaking Maori moko tattoos, of which Captain Cook wrote in 1769:

The marks in general are spirals drawn with great nicety and even elegance. One side corresponds with the other. The marks on the body resemble foliage in old chased ornaments, convolutions of filigree work, but in these they have such a luxury of forms that of a hundred which at first appeared exactly the same no two were formed alike on close examination.

It is also the small niceties we show each other, which constitute good manners.

This reading of the meaning is more in line with Wu's translation of the Gua Ci:  

Small. Advantage having a place to go to.

Think attention to detail, like a Japanese tea ceremony. No grand heroic achievements, but the creation of beauty, simply by performing each small action with exquisite attention, care, and appreciation.

Hexagram 22's paired hexagram is 21, SHI HE (Biting Through), which is about biting the bullet, cutting the Gordian knot. It's not concerned with the fine print; it's motto is “Just do it”. In music, SHI HE is the bare bones of a simple melody. BI, in contrast, is a fugue, or a jazz improvisation, embroidering and elaborating and fleshing out those bones. In architecture, SHI HE is the boxlike monstrosities that are many British council estates; BI is Hundertwasser's fantastical (and highly functional) built communities. BI is a hand-made and burnished terra sigilata cup. It's scarlet ribbons for her hair.

While SHI HE focusses hard on a single goal, BI requires both a shorter and a longer view: both the fine focus on detail, and a sensitivity to how what you are making, or your conduct, fits in a wider context, so that it's not a carbuncle on the landscape.

There's also something in it about recognising and accepting the transience of things. Think Japan again, where it's customary to take time off work to admire the cherry blossoms, because they are beautiful, and short-lived. Like us.

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

   and softly,

     and exclaiming of their dearness,

       fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

   their eagerness

     to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

       nothing, forever?

                                 ~ from Peonies, by Mary Oliver

No ivory tower

Ankhor, Apsara

Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

  

In the East Grinstead study group last month we looked at Hexagram 20, GUAN.  Guan means to see, to hear, to perceive and understand. The hexagram is formed of Xun (Wind) over Kun (Earth), and has the overall form of the trigram Gen (Mountain).

There are a lot of similarities between Guan and Hexagram 52, Gen, Stillness: they are the two hexagrams of meditation, reflection, contemplation.

But Guan is not exactly the same as Gen. Gen is all about Stillness; it is the essence of stability. Guan has the deep solidity of Earth, but it also has the gentle, penetrating quality of Wind, which can go everywhere; it moves, but nothing is moving it, and it adapts to fit every situation.

Guan means to observe. It can also mean an observatory – for the stars, i.e. the movements of the Dao, or for one's own Dao: a temple or meditation hall is sometimes called dao guan. The form describes a tower, like one of the guard towers along the Great Wall, a place where one can look down “from a height”.

But this hexagram is not about looking down from a height; it's not an ivory tower.

Guan is the same word as the name of the bodhisattva Guanyin, or Guanshiyin, corresponding to the Sanskrit Avalokitasvara, or the Tibetan Tara. Guan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, hears the cries of everyone. She is depicted as a thousand-eyed, thousand-armed goddess, the great master of love and sympathy. But Guan Yin not only hears the cries of the world,

“... she incorporates them. She quite literally feels them as her own and responds with the all-embracingness of a healing love, a love that mends what has been sundered...What Kuan Yin accomplishes with her wish-fulfilling gem is not necessarily the closing of some objective difference or distance, but the erasure of whatever has been imposed on our relations with others (our narration) to give us the illusion of discontinuity, of painful cleavage, of intractability.” (Peter Hershock, Liberating Intimacy, p104)

In other words, Guan Yin not only sees our suffering, she sees the truth behind our suffering. She dispels the illusion of our separateness, and so dispels our anguish.

When we engage in the kind of spiritual practice that turns, with open eyes, toward life as it is – when we sit down in the middle of our own lives and say “This is me. I am willing to look at what is true, what is real, and what is present”, we are Guan.

The Gua Ci tells us “Being true is as good as majestic” (Brad's translation), or “There is truth and confidence like a presence” (Hilary's translation). The word translated as “true/truth” is Fu, the same word as in the ming gua of Hexagram 61 Zhong Fu; it's a very important word in the Yijing, carrying meanings of not only veracity, but also sincerity and trustworthiness. It is a word that has very little to do with “objective” factuality, and a great deal to do with caring, watchful concern.

When we look with anything but compassionate eyes, we do a kind of violence, perpetuating "the illusion of painful cleavage".  And that is just as much true of our self-regard as in our perception of others.

Taking Charge

hKippers

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

 

In the East Grinstead study group last week, we looked at Hexagram 19, Lin. The word Lin can mean to approach or come close to; it is sometimes translated as “becoming great”, or “rise in power”, and is the word used for a job promotion.  Here, both meanings are evoked: it implies the responsibility to oversee and manage a group of people.

The hexagram is composed of Dui (the Marsh) below – carrying meanings of desire, pleasure, and satisfaction – and Kun (Earth) above, which refers both to the manifest world and to the capacity for acceptance and responsiveness. The question posed by this juxtaposition is: “How can you make your desires manifest?”

The answer, if it's a Lin moment, is “Step up to the plate, put your shoulder to the wheel, make hay while the sun shines”.

This is a moment of urgency, a window of opportunity. As Bradford says in the Rogue Commentary on the gua ci, or hexagram text:

Creative problem solving is not theoretical now, but intelligence on the run. Even to take a moment now means to look sideways for unseen solutions and trends, to find a way to put the world’s inertia to work and even make what is missing do tasks. Old successes only mean things learned and useful now: one is that you don’t know when the rains will come. Seed must be broadcast by then. The season’s promise taken for granted is empty. The success of the spring will be known in the fall, that of the leap in the landing.

The da xiang, or Great Image, tells us that the jun zi “instructs and plans without exhaustion, accepts and secures the people without drawing boundaries”. When there is something that needs doing, and needs doing now, it requires that planning be carried out, and that a team be enlisted and led from what is available now, even if that team is only the unanimous participation of all of yourself.  Lin is only one line away from Hexagram 7, The Militia, which is precisely about how to mobilise an ad hoc group to accomplish a task.

The type of task this could refer to runs the gamut from planting a field in the spring, to getting the harvest in in the autumn, and from organising a music festival to running a national election campaign. What they all have in common is exigency: a time factor demanding that we rise to the occasion with prompt and concerted action.

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Poison

"Alligators at Tonle Sap"
Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

In the East Grinstead study group last week, we looked at Hexagram 18, GU.

Gu refers to a kind of black magic; it literally means poisonous worms which have been long bred in an enclosed bowl, and refers to evil emanating from decay.

It's a dark word, about hatred and enmity. The original meaning always involved deceit and malice, something insidious. In the Shang Dynasty ideas about curses and poisoning were commonplace, and the preparation of such poisons was forbidden – so you know it was being done!

The hexagram itself is concerned with how to remove the evil and correct the situation, whether it involves family secrets, political corruption, bewitchment, or a longstanding feud. It’s a chance to face up to unpleasant secrets, lance the boil and purge the poison.

It's formed of Xun (Wind) below, constrained by Gen (Mountain) above. Mountain is the essence of Stillness – but here, it constrains and hinders the free movement of Wind, which is the essence of Adaptability. The core meaning here is that one's ability to respond appropriately to changing circumstances is hampered by something fixed in place.

On an individual level, these are behaviours we may not even be aware of; they rigidify until they simply feel like aspects of our character. LiSe specifically names it as “alien influences embedded in the soul”, i.e. those “parts” of ourselves that are habitual and unconscious. We all have these little ways of turning away from ourselves and others, from intimacy with life as it is.

On a group or company level, these are the rules and regulations, the group culture, “the way it's always been done”. Several of us in the study group have witnessed the renewal, over the past several years, of the college where I do most of my teaching. Despite a brilliant new manager, and a willing and gifted faculty, we are still pulling the splinters of “customary procedure” out of the system. These things don't magically change overnight.

At the level of government, Wikileaks is a terrific example of the sort of process needed to clear the air of fiercely guarded secrets – and governments' response is typical of the dirty fighting that defends those secrets.

The Rogue commentary on the Gua Ci reads, in part:

The sage … keeps his moments inside of their contexts and thus keeps his world on the run and alive. Breezes don’t come in a box. Things die and grow rotten when pulled out of context. Then how do we fix this? How might we arrest this decay? Fix and arrest are the wrong things to do here. We have too much of containment, enough of things safe from the changes. The liberal idea will become an institution and soon it no longer responds to the needs it was made to serve. Its big job now is defending itself against any change but its growth. The good idea becomes a belief, soon threatened by other perspectives. The decaying civilization cannot permit the experiments with styles of life which are poised to replace it. Habits and dogmas, pathologies and neuroses, circle back on themselves like incestuous clans. The rot spreads. But this has its good points as well: there is much which ought to decay.

The Tuan commentary doesn't indicate whether the reform will be successful; it merely says there is work to do, and that there will be a new beginning. This is the way Nature works: that which is no longer alive rots away and gives rise to new life.

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Following

 "Imposing Order"

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 17, SUI, is about Following. “Follow” is one of those words that carries a load of diversely nuanced meanings. 

For example, as a transitive verb, it can mean “go in the same direction as or parallel to (another)”, but also “go after (someone) in order to observe or monitor”. 

As an intransitive verb, it can refer to “a logical consequence” of something, or to “act according to (an instruction or precept)”; “conform to” or “treat as a teacher or guide” – but also “trace the movement or direction of”, or “understand the meaning or tendency of”.

One set of meanings implies falling in behind someone else; the other suggests a conscious and sustained awareness of a process. In the first form of following one can hitch oneself to an external engine, and fall asleep at the wheel; the second form is the essence of attentiveness.

The lines expand on this theme. Line 1 tells us that “Standards will change”, and that even “timeless” dharma evolves. No fundamentalism here!  Line 2: “Bound to the little child; giving up one of maturity” contrasts with Line 3: “Bound to one of maturity; giving up the little child” -- sometimes one approach is appropriate, sometimes the other. Line 4 tells us that persisting obstinately in a direction brings misfortune, but there is no error in following the clarity of the Dao.  Line 5 simply says that trusting in excellence is promising. Line 6, at least in Hilary's interpretation, speaks of the sovereign identifying his will with the source of the energy that flows into life, implying that he flows with it.

This kind of following is less like blind obedience or imitation than it is like tracking, following a string of clues. It is not passive, but is rather an active participation in a living process. Living processes are, by their nature, somewhat messy and unpredictable; life is less an efficient linear process than a creative melee of disorderly movements toward whatever the next moment brings.

If we pay too much attention to a map (which is our own or someone else's prediction of what we will find), we risk falling into a pothole, or worse.  (I am told that in parts of Iceland, the landscape changes so radically from year to year that maps have to be redrawn annually).  If we follow a leader (or a system of rules, or a belief system – even our own) unquestioningly, we may not notice that it is taking us somewhere that is no longer fitting, perhaps somewhere we would not have agreed to go.

This hexagram is a relationship between opposites.  Thunder is pushy.  Lake is joyful and lighthearted; its whims may even appear frivolous, but the oldest yang defers and adapts to the youngest yin.  It’s like following a road, or a river that follows the contours of the bank: responding to the changing terrain and following the Dao, rather than trying to plough a straight line.   You might have to abandon your own plans, or even the idea of making plans; you cannot impose anything, but you can go a long way riding skillfully on the currents.

The text is simple, even minimalist. It consists only of the invocation yuan heng li zhen – in other words, all the world is here – and wu jiu: no bad. If we can approach life without preconceptions, hold our agenda lightly (if at all), and adapt to changing circumstances, then we will not make a mistake.

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Movin' and groovin'

 Photograph by Pryderi Diebschlag

In Hexagram 16, Thunder is moving Earth, who responds by shaking her bootie.  The Gua Ci tells us it's worthwhile to "move the multitude".

Yű means 

cheerfulness, willingness, enthusiasm, to be ready or prepared; easy movement, responsive action   (from Bradford's keywords; see www.hermetica.info)

The whole hexagram is about responsive movement -- those moments when we are carried along by something that moves us.  The universal thing that moves us in this way, of course, is music, and the Da Xiang implies that it is the duty of a Sovereign to compose the music that will move his subjects.

Yű is the feeling we go to concerts or festivals to experience, when 10,000 people are weeping or waving their arms in unison.   It's the feeling that made people start dancing in the parking lot to the blues band playing at Eddie McStiff's in Moab this summer; it's why we flock to the desert for Burning Man, or take to the streets for a demonstration against any number of social injustices.  It's that choked up feeling you get when you hear your national anthem (even if nationalism features high on your personal list of Bad Ideas), or a favourite hymn or sacred song, and you're part of a multitude, transported on a wave of sentiment.  It's the spirit that moves us so that we're swept along, even when it means risking our lives.

It's the motor behind the Nuremberg rallies, the Crusades, Manifest Destiny, and Jonestown.  But without it, Chartres Cathedral would never have been built, nor the pyramids, nor Ankhor Wat, and we wouldn't have put a man on the moon.

On a more personal level, it captures something of the experience of falling in love, that imperative rush that's “bigger than both of us”. And if that's the only driver of a relationship, one or both of you are sure to wake up one morning with a painful dose of sobriety, wondering what possessed you.

And it's not only an interpersonal phenomenon.  Most of us have been swept up in private enthusiasms from time to time: hobbies or projects that seemed to have a life of their own, channeled, more of less temporarily, through ours.

For as long as a passion lasts, it feels good to be in the grip of it, even if it's blood lust. By contrast, mindfulness (the quality of Hexagram 15, with which 16 is paired), doesn't necessarily feel good.

Yű is not a state of mind in which we consult our experience, or think of the broader picture. It's a state in which we lose ourselves. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it can be sublime. We just need to be selective about what we lose ourselves to, and keep a canny eye out for the consequences.

Authenticity

"Another Big Sky" by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 15, QIAN, is about perceiving and relating to things as they are, rather than embellishing, exaggerating, or minimising them. Bradford's keywords include:

Ordinary reality; genuine, unpretentious, accurate; consistent, basis in fact; stability, sobriety; curtailing the superfluous, accurate assessment, groundedness; simplicity, nothing extra or extraneous.  

It's about seeing what's there and telling it like it is, leaving behind the shuck 'n' jive, not needing to make things more interesting, or entertaining, or alter them to our own ends.

In the Dao De Jing, “uncut wood” is used as a metaphor for the “original nature” of things, before they are made over into something “useful” for our purposes. For me, this implies meeting the world with raw awareness, rather than through the filters of our models, which are basically stories we tell about the world, and the meanings we impose on it. There is nothing wrong with making meaning – it's part of what it is to be human – but the stories we tell are always partial, in both senses of the word: incomplete, and biased. And they obscure the intrinsic value of things as-they-are.

When we practise mindful awareness, immersing ourselves in direct first-person experience, we are simply trying to be as true to our own experience as we can. That experience will include both the 'external' world, experienced through our senses, and the internal world of our thoughts, feelings, and the quality of consciousness with which we meet them, as an ongoing process.

What is it to meet ourselves, each other, the world, with no preconceptions? With a sense of safety, so that we can touch and be touched without defences?

Many of us have only ever met our children in this way; some of us haven't met the world like this since we ourselves were children, with (to borrow Joni Mitchell's words) those “wide, wide open stares”.

But it's one thing to meet PRIOR to the formation of our defences and preconceptions; quite another to go BEYOND them, meeting the world directly, with maturity.

It may be simple, but it's not always easy. For in meeting the world directly, we must also meet all the reasons we do not. Peg Syverson says it so beautifully:

A bird song with the light rising behind it,

a slab of stone with a deep vein of color, a person

laying a whole life open right before you,

or the sharpened blade of pain in a shoulder

held for an eternity.

In “just sitting,” over and over again

we are stung by the complete failure

of every plan and strategy. And yet...

And yet, if you are like me you are both grateful

and terrified by the recognition

of this very life, bereft of all our fantasies and

illusions.  No use crying out “I am just one person!

What can I do about it?” Just stay.

The squirrel runs so lightly on the fence rail while I

struggle with my doubt and long for

a magic transformation into

something I can admire or even tolerate. Just stay.

The evening bells, the flame of a candle,

a long still evening ahead. In accepting

the gift of a life, even my own life, just this particular one

I took a dare. What can I make of this,

a human life? Days of rapture, nights of dread, 

the whole catastrophe, and yet, I wonder,

how simple can I let this be?

When you have nothing else to give,

offer the tenderness of your longing and the

awkwardness of your struggle. And on these

paltry crumbs you can feed multitudes.

                                               ~ from “How Simple”, by Peg Syverson