The Ritual Cauldron

Buddhist temple, Saigon

Last weekend I participated, along with fourteen other women, in a ceremony to celebrate the passage of a dear friend into mid-life. In a four-hour ritual of our own design, we made a container in which our friend could undergo an initiation into the next phase of her life, leaving behind old wounds, and embracing a life more faithful to her true nature.

I had a similar ceremony on my 50th birthday; my closest friends gathered, invoked the spirits of fire, water, earth and air; they washed and anointed me, accompanied me through a life review, mirrored back what they saw in me. They witnessed the burning of fears that had far exceeded their ‘best before’ date, wrote wishes for my future, and wove them into a six-foot dreamcatcher.

Ceremonies like these tend and feed the fire of transformation in our lives.

Hexagram 50 describes something like this. It is formed of Li (Fire) over Sun (which in this case represents Wood). This is a fire under a ritual cauldron. Fire has two purposes: to burn and to cook; here it is clearly to cook, implying an alchemical transformation into a new state.

The name of the hexagram is Ding. A ding was a specific kind of bronze cauldron used in connection with the founding of a new dynasty. It was a ritual vessel for offerings to the spirits: a means of connection with the ancestors, and specifically the ancestral line of the Emperor. The emperor would have nine dings cast at the founding of a dynasty, to maintain a supportive and beneficial connection with the ancestors, and celebrate the initiation of the new dynasty with their blessing.

By extension, ding means to found a new dynasty, but with the implication that it is properly aligned with one's spiritual lineage. Huang calls this hexagram ‘Establishing the New’.

Ding is the only manmade artifact in the I Ching. It’s about personal, human power: your true path, and how you express it. On a personal level, it is a crucible in which

"the alchemy serves higher purpose and powers, the leadenness of our being turns into gold, into a life to which we give value…To sacrifice does not mean to lose things: it means to make them sacred. Thus the past is made sacred here, redeemed for a higher value”. (Brad Hatcher)

The Great Image says “The jun zi rectifies his position to manifest higher purpose”.

It's good to do that every once in a while: to reconsecrate your life. And it's a great privilege to participate in such a ritual for someone dear to you.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

Imagination

Morro Bay, California

Following on from last week’s blog on Hexagram 15….

I had a conversation with my Sweetheart recently about different kinds of photography. There’s prosaic documentary photography, like holiday snapshots; and there’s ‘art photography’, such as the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Robert Mapplethorpe, in which the artist creates a tableau and photographs it, much as a painter composes and executes a painting.

And then there are the photographers who manage to do both in the same stroke, like Ansel Adams, or Dorothea Lange, or Long Thanh, or any of the fabulous photographers whose work is collected in Edward Steichen’s timeless and exquisite classic ‘The Family of Man’. They take the world as they find it, and deliver an image rich with meaning.

Several years ago, I spent four weeks in Viet Nam. I completely fell in love with the country – its lush jungle (humming like high power wires), its richly cultured cities, gorgeous food, and above all, its people, who are for the most part living examples of Buddhism in action.

I took hundreds of photographs, which I showed to my father on my next visit to him, the following year. “This is a hill tribe village…this is a water buffalo…this is a fruit seller…”

My father, who in a previous life was an accomplished photographer himself, launched into me. “A good photograph shouldn’t have to be explained.”

It was true. I had been trying to capture not only an image, but the beauty, or poignancy, or sheer strangeness that had touched me deeply and changed the way I saw the world. And in almost all of those photographs, I had fallen short.

And maybe that’s the clue to the difference between an ordinary ‘documentary’ photograph and the work of an Edward Steichen or Dorothea Lange. An image by a great photographer tells you more than the facts; it hints (or hollers) about what it might mean. It never tells you “in so many words”, but involves your soul in a conversation about the complex possibilities of what it could mean.

A merely documentary image tells us too little; an explicit explanation tells us too much. As James Hillman says, the image is always more inclusive, more complex than the concept.

The same is true of writing. There is writing that documents facts (even if those facts are fictional), and there is writing that evokes meaning. At the moment, I’m reading a sensational book by Michael Ventura called ‘Shadow Dancing in the USA’. It’s one of those books that ignites a bubbling cauldron of ideas: the kind of ideas that make me look at the world with new eyes and fresh vision.

Bradford Hatcher has produced a rendering of the I Ching that does both. His Yi Jing (http://www.hermetica.info/) is both rigorous in its translation – perhaps the most rigorous translation that exists in the English language – and includes his own commentary, which is original, but grounded in a deep and wide knowledge of not only the I Ching and Chinese history, but several other wisdom traditions.

Brad’s Rogue River Commentaries are true commentaries, not an interpretation of other commentaries or traditions. They are based on an intimate knowledge of the I Ching, but consist of his own personal elaboration on the images. In the Introduction, he makes it clear that is what he is doing:

“Before anything else I should be clear that this effort does not in any way attempt to explain the texts of the Book of Changes. It is not an attempt to do any of your thinking for you or to make your task of understanding any easier…I tried to put on the original text and walk around in it some more, stretching it further, exploring some of its tangents and implications and, in the process, try to drop as many clues and hints as possible to some of the layers of meaning in the original.”

And that’s what raises his work to the level of soul as well as scholarship: he serves up images, in poetic language that presents possibilities: a cauldron of ideas that makes you look with new eyes and fresh vision.

In his Yi Jing, he has managed to do what I couldn’t do in most of my photographs of Viet Nam: faithfully documented what he found, and conveyed how it touched him and informed the way he saw the world.

I’m in awe of his work. And grateful.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/

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

a world of struggle





http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/

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/

Inner Truth

It was an evolutionary leap when mammals first evolved, not least because one of the features that distinguishes mammals from reptiles is a capacity known as limbic resonance. Unlike reptiles, a mammal can detect the internal state of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match it. It is our capacity for limbic resonance that makes us emotionally responsive, which is to say, capable of relationships, and capable of love.

The capacity for love is a marker of spiritual health – perhaps its most important marker. What the saints and realized beings of every spiritual tradition share in common is an extraordinary capacity for love.

It is love, reflected in the eyes of our parents, that tells us in infancy, who and what we are. In our earliest days, the physical presence of loving adults may mean the difference between life and death, quite independent of the provision of food and warmth: recent research suggests that Sudden Infant Death Syndrome may be the result of the physical separation of mother and child. The countries with the lowest rate of SIDS are those in which infants sleep in physical contact with their mothers.

As a baby’s growing awareness takes in more of the world, including himself, he continues to learn from his parents what it is to be loved, and to love. This is not an intellectual learning; it is not something that can be defined and taught with words. A child learns from the experience of love; his internal world, as it grows and takes form, is shaped by that experience. Relationship, for mammals – and we are mammals – is in large part a physical experience, and it changes how we experience the world.

For millennia, right back to the dawn of our species, human children – like all mammalian young – spent virtually all their time with their parents and extended family until they themselves were ready to venture out into the world, their independence emerging naturally and effortlessly from the satiation of their dependence. By observing everyday life within their families, they learned both values and survival skills, including crucially important social skills: how to live in relationship with others.

But human children learn something in addition to survival: in the loving gaze of parents who truly see them, they find a sense of themselves as unique individuals. Adults who were fortunate enough to have enjoyed the consistent presence of a supportive family tend to be confident, emotionally stable, and able to withstand the knocks that life deals out. They know who they are; they have a sense of their own value, perhaps even a sense of destiny. And they are able to form close relationships with others; they are able to love.

There are intimations of many of these themes in Hexagram 61, ZHONG FU. Zhong means centre. The character Fu is formed with the legs of a bird on top, and a child underneath: thus, it means to hatch. It implies the quality of a mother hen: steady, faithful, loyal, trustworthy. In the context of Hexagram 61, it is most often interpreted as truthfulness and sincerity, and particularly being faithful to yourself. Zhong Fu is the equivalent of the Daoist concept of ‘zhen’: authenticity: being faithful to what is at the centre of your life, to your own nature, your own Dao.

Huang sums up the essence of the lines, from 1 to 5, thus:

The Duke of Zhou says that, being sincere and trustworthy, one should be at ease and confident. It should be as natural as a mother crane calling affectionately to her young. One should persist in being sincere and trustworthy. First beating the drum and then stopping is not the proper attitude. Being sincere and trustworthy, one is able to link with others in union…

This might well be paraphrased as a description of good parenthood: being at ease and trusting our own instincts, we respond to our children as naturally as we breathe. We are there for them, not when we can fit it in to a busy life, but steadily, all the time; we don’t make a fuss over them and then ignore them. If we give them this foundation of relatedness, they will then be able to form loving relationships with others.

Modern Western society does not support us in spending the time our children need to establish their strong centre, their personhood, their inner truth. In Southeast Asia, I observed a different norm: families spend most of their time together. Extended families live together; small children are looked after by their grandparents, and wander in and out of their parents’ place of work; the whole family takes meals together, often in the workplace.

But even in Asia, this is changing, as ‘developing cultures’ begin to ape the patterns of social isolation that have poisoned the West. Most of us have lost the immediate proximity of extended families; most of us in nuclear families work outside our homes.

It is into the cracks opened up, as families fracture, that we slip deeper into Kali Yuga. I applaud those families who are raising their children to be strong enough in their personhood to eventually pull us out of it.

Huang says of Hexagram 61: “In hatching chicks, the hen must be faithful to her obligation.”

The Tuan commentary for the hexagram says that sincerity can transform a country.

In the 21st century, we need it to transform the world.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/

Abiding Passion

I’m having a love affair with my garden. Every day we bring each other gifts. I bring water, or new seedlings; or I prune or weed, or build supports for the beans and climbing tromboncino courgettes and wineberries and tomatoes. It produces something new and surprising, magical and beautiful every day.

I came to gardening in my 40’s, with a half acre allotment which I tended for ten years. It was way too big for me to keep up with, and parts of it always looked like it had reverted to jungle, but it churned out a vast array of fabulous fruit and veg.

I’m still passionate about gardening, though more relaxed about it. I know that not everything always works as I expected or hoped, and that’s OK. The garden goes on and on and will always continue to be magical and surprising and beautiful.

This constancy through change is Hexagram 32, HENG. Heng is variously translated as Duration, The Long Enduring, Long Lasting, Constancy. But it lasts precisely because it is always changing. The hexagram is formed of Thunder over Wind: two different types of movement, the Gentle and the Shocking. Both trigrams have the quality of movement, but the relationship endures. This is the hexagram of lasting marriage: stability in the midst of changing circumstances, a living marriage, a steady state of constant renewal.

The character heng has the ‘heart’ radical – representing feelings, the realm of the mental and emotional – plus an ideograph of a boat between the banks of a river. This is a ferry one relies on to cross the river, always making the same journey, continuous and dependable. It’s a cyclic journey, not a linear adventure. Thus the meaning is: to rely on, constancy; something that will go from here to there and back again, without ceasing: a steadfast heart.

This hexagram is exactly in the middle of the I Ching, and is the heart of the I Ching: in the middle of change, something is permanent. The theme is beautifully stated in the Confucian commentary on the Decision: ‘The four seasons change and transform; thus can their production of beings long endure.’

Reminding me of this truth is the very best gift my garden gives me, and it gives it every day.

www.ichingconsultation.com

www.daoistpsychotherapy.com

Limbic Resonance

Standing in the mud at WOMAD with my Sweetheart last week, my heart was captured by a couple who started dancing at the side of the stage. While almost everyone was moving in time to the music in some way, these two were twirling and swaying as one. I don’t know if they had just met and fallen madly in love, or had been together for twenty years and were still madly in love.

That sweet madness is the subject of Hexagram 31. This hexagram opens the second half of the I Ching, the half dealing with humanity, and specifically with personal and social relationships.

It is formed of Mountain over Lake: a pairing of opposites in harmonious conjunction. Mountain is stable and rises upward; Lake is on top and sinks downward, so they are coming together. Mountain is the youngest son, Lake is the youngest daughter; it is a picture of courtship. It’s also a great Taoist image: Stillness (Mountain) inside, and Joy (Lake) outside – a perfect marriage of Yin and Yang.

Although the name of the hexagram is XIAN, Huang says that according to Confucius’ Commentary on the Decision, it should be GAN. Gan means influence; it has the connotation of moving the heart, being emotionally excited or stimulated. But there are also resonances with xian, which has two meanings: (a) to bite or be bitten – what we might call ‘smitten’, and (b) entirely or completely. All of these meanings are aspects of being in love.

It’s a hexagram of feeling, of being moved or touched by someone. Wilhelm translates it as Influence (Wooing); Blofeld as Attraction, Sensation. Huang calls it Mutual Influence. Wu calls it To Influence, To Move. LiSe calls it Affect and Affection.

Brad Hatcher calls it Reciprocity, and relates it to Eros. He says:

“Beyond simple union, beyond putting our fractured, fragmented selves back together as viable, functioning wholes, there might be no other purpose or plan. Every human being alive has myriad generations of human and near-human ancestors to thank for bringing them here, not to mention the primates and far longer lines of descent. Each of these beings in turn had something to give in exchange for something they wanted. Each self struck a bargain with other, to negotiate a new pairing while acting in what they hoped was their own best interest. Each had to take a lover. Life learned long ago that the self by itself is extinguished. It learned to want and desire, and that it would need to merit its rewards and fulfilments. This is what brings out our best.”

We can also consider this quality in terms of ‘limbic resonance’. In A General Theory of Love, authors Lewis, Amini, and Lannon explain the concept of "limbic resonance" as the special ability of mammals (including humans) to become attuned to the inner states of others, influencing them and in turn being influenced by them. Mammals, unlike reptiles, regulate each other's internal states – not only their emotional states, but physiological function. An example of this is the way a group of women who spend time together will often find their menstrual periods coming into spontaneous alignment; close friends will achieve synchrony more readily than women who merely share a living space, even though the latter may spend more time together.

When two people are in deep limbic resonance, they are in love. They are in touch, they are ‘touched by’ each other; and being the responsive, malleable beings that we are, they are influenced by each other.

The authors conclude that humans, like all mammals, have "open-loop" physiologies, and require the sympathetic presence of others to maintain systemic balance.

“That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.”

Since the heart has its reasons (that the Reason knows not), this would imply getting our own Minds and Hearts (our cognitive and limbic selves) on the same team, or to reprise Brad Hatcher’s commentary, “putting our fractured, fragmented selves back together as viable, functioning wholes”. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, in his book True Love, in order to truly love, we must practice oneness of body and mind, to be 'entire', to be 'complete', to be xian.

I don’t know the real story behind that beautiful dancing couple, but they sure looked like – at least at that moment – they had it sussed.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/