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

Yes, dear

"Consideration"
Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 14 is formed of Fire over Heaven. Its name is DA YOU. Da, of course, means big, expansive, full. There is nothing bigger than Heaven.

In modern Chinese, you means ‘have’. The character was originally formed of a hand: to have, to be, there is, to be rich, offer. In ancient times you also meant a good harvest, and da you referred to a 'best year' or 'best harvest'.

Da you is ‘Big Having’: the harvest, when you can reap what you’ve planted. It implies material possessions: abundance, prosperity, loadsa money. But a key question is whether you possess a lot, or possess what is great.

In the Rogue Commentary, Bradford points out that value, appreciation and interest, prize or endowment, although regarded as tangible ‘things’, were all once verbs:

"We forget that to be able to treasure is as good as treasure itself."

When my son was in his teens, he had several friends whose parents gave them every new mobile phone, computer and widescreen television going. My son, being the child of parents who struggled to simply keep a roof over their heads, got a modest allowance, which he carefully hoarded, along with birthday and Christmas money. After saving up for two years, and researching every sound system on the market, he bought himself a stereo system – which is still going strong, more than ten years later. He once said to me that although his friends had better ‘toys’ than he did, he got more pleasure out of his, because he appreciated them more.

That’s the real Midas touch: not the ability to acquire, but to value what you have. Our greatest wealth consists of things like knowing and living out your purpose; or just being in the same world, at the same time, as people you love; or having a sense of the unity and sacredness of life as it unfolds. It’s the capacity to see beauty, to be touched by the ongoing miracle of this world, to experience life as deeply satisfying.

This is embedded in our language:

dear, adj.

• Loved and cherished: my dearest friend.
• Greatly valued; precious: lost everything dear to them.
• High-priced; expensive.
• Charging high prices.

From O.E. deore "precious, valuable, costly, loved".

We place value on what we cherish; we cherish what we love. If this sounds like a tautology, consider the question:

“How can we learn to better appreciate the riches of the world in which we live?”

Fellowship

"The Beekeepers"
Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 13 is TONG REN. Ren means human. Tong means the same, or similar, as in these compound terms:
Tong + to be = both
Tong + appear = coincidence
Tong + step = synchronous
Tong + nature = identity
Tong + emotion = to sympathise
Tong + heart = to be of one heart

How do we recognise the resonance that signals tong ren – fellowship?

The da xiang tells us:
The noble young one, according to kind and family,
Distinguishes the beings

Generally, the first thing we tend to distinguish is between “our kind” and “the others”. Every human society that has ever been have called themselves “human”. Some human cultures have not imagined themselves elevated above the rest of the natural world, but have sought to understand their place in it. Others ride roughshod over anything perceived as “other”.

LiSe points out that “among your own kind, you are what you are not”. Within those collectives of sameness, we have differences.

One way to consider similarity is in terms of holons. A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The term was coined by Arthur Koestler, who observed that wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist; rather the terms rely upon the level at which we observe: every ‘thing’, from a sub-atomic particle to a human society, is simultaneously a self-contained whole in relation to its subordinate parts, and a part of a greater whole.

Holons exist in nested hierarchies: individual holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence; they are at the same time subject to control within the context of a larger whole. Those larger wholes have a degree of autonomy, but are subject to the organising influence of still larger wholes. And so on and so on.

Take bees as an example. If you look inside a beehive, there are workers, drones and queens, all doing a hundred complex tasks in exquisitely orchestrated coordination, like the systems of a living body, which is precisely what a beehive is. A beehive is a terrific example of a society in which everyone knows his place and function; individual needs are completely subsumed into the needs of the whole. The whole thing runs at maximum efficiency, even down to details like the most dangerous tasks being taken on by the oldest workers; if they perish in the line of duty, their loss will make the smallest impact on the hive as a whole. This makes sense, since individual bees depend utterly on the hive for their very existence.

Edward O. Wilson, referring to ants (another species that operates as a superorganism), once said that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species".

As we go up the holarchy, however, the holons become more complex, and hence less predictable. Down near the bottom of the scale, an atom of copper is a holon; it has certain properties that determine how it behaves in any set of circumstances, and it always behaves in that way. Bees have more choice about their actions, as long as those actions fall strictly within their job description, in service to the hive. Mammals stretch the envelope of conformity-to-the-needs-of-the-whole, with many more unpredictable behaviours. By the time we get to the human level, things start to get really interesting, which is to say, pretty damned random.

E. O. Wilson also said that humans enjoy their maximum level of Darwinian fitness only when they look after themselves and their families, while finding innovative ways to use the societies they live in for their own benefit.

But there’s a balance to be struck here. As human beings, we have the capacity to choose whether to behave in ways such that the viability of greater wholes – human society, for example, or the biosphere, on which we depend utterly for our very existence – is compromised rather than enhanced.

Like everything else in this universe, we do not have the power to be other than what we are. But this is what we are: we are holons with choice.

So, if we ask the question: “What is Tong Ren?”, i.e. “What is human similarity?”, we are asking a question about what it is to be human. And one of the many answers to that question is “We can choose”.

The choices that define us as individuals – from the sublime, through miles of the ridiculous, right down to the downright ugly – also define us as human.

And that begs and begets a further question: “How different can we be, and still recognise each other as tong ren, as “our own kind”?

Sometimes it's a stretch. Perhaps that’s why the gua ci reads:
Worthwhile to cross the great stream.
And worth the noble young one’s persistence.

Belonging

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

In the Study Group last week, we looked at Hexagram 8, Bi, Union or Belonging. It is composed of Water over Earth – five yin lines and just one yang line, but where it counts the most: in the position of the Emperor, or the Heart. The Heart, in the Chinese model of the human person, is the residence of the shen.

The shen are the “messengers of Heaven, the principle of life, that which transforms an assemblage of matter into a living being” (Larre and Rochat 1992). They are spirits, but not 'individual' spirits; they are indestructible and immutable; they transcend yin and yang. The shen are what make you a conscious being. They order and organize our lives and our destinies, but not through any mechanical or deliberate action. Rather, they 'radiate virtue', which 'diffuses of its own accord', exerting their influence like a magnetic field or a temple bell, through resonance.

Whereas Hexagram 7, The Militia, is about getting people together for a purpose, Hexagram 8 describes an association not based on a task, but on mutual affinity: a resonance, or least a common interest. When the militia is retired, and things get back to normal, there is still something that holds people together. What is that? Who and what do we resonate with? Who and what do we choose to resonate with?

Last night I watched one of my favourite films, Neve Campbell's “The Company”, directed by Robert Altman. The film is about the Joffrey Ballet Company; it bears witness to the sacrifices made by dancers: their talents, their creativity, literally their blood, sweat and tears are channeled into the company. And why? They do it so they can dance: so they can realize and manifest their own personal nature, their own extraordinary gifts. They sacrifice some degree of individuality in order to become part of something which allows them to be who they truly are.

This paradox, this seeming contradiction, is only possible when there is such resonance. At its root, the word sacrifice means 'to make sacred'. It is an extraordinary gift to find relationships, communities, places and circumstances, that are so aligned with our own character, that by sacrificing our smallness we find our greater, our deeper and truer, selves.

In the film, the director of the company speaks to the dancers in rehearsal: “Why do you do always do this, babies? You always get phony on me. I don't know why you do that.... It's not the steps, babies. It's what's inside that really counts. That's when you really begin to soar. You see, thinking the movement is not becoming the movement.”

Thinking like others is not becoming like them. Commonality of belief does not a community make – ask anyone who has ever tried to create an 'intentional community' based on a belief system or credo.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Text reads in part:

Belonging is drawn by attraction; it’s not a thing to be pushed. Holding the people together is not a thing that you think, plan, then jump up and do. It is something you make yourself ready for, or worthy of, or appropriate to. The spontaneous ones arrive first, feeling their way in, finding their place, the preliminaries done in accord with their natures, not in accordance with judgement and logic...

Sometimes we feel such a need to be part of something that we make compromises. If 'sacrifice' means 'to make sacred', 'compromise' means 'a settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions'; it also means 'to impair by disease or injury'.

This is word-play, but there is a real difference between sacrificing something relatively insignificant (like fame or fortune or a belief system), and compromising your life and destiny.

In my own life, the moves I had to negotiate with myself usually led to something small. The big moves toward fulfilment came as a spontaneous knowing. My decision to study Chinese medicine came out of the blue, or out of my Heart; the same was true of teaching, and emigrating to the UK, and getting married. Sometimes we outgrow a particular form of expression, but growth is always in the direction of a truer expression of an unchanging essence. Like a figure taking shape under the hands of a sculptor, or a photographic image appearing in a developing bath, we emerge, even to ourselves, coming to recognize our own character: in the words of James Hillman,

that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a “me”.

It's a piece of wisdom to be able to distinguish between the influences that shape us in our own image, and those that compromise us.