The Huffington Post was kind enough to publish my article, "The I Ching of Magic and Enlightenment", today.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-horden/the-i-ching-of-magic-and-enlightenment_b_5786850.html


All The Best

l congratulate you, William Horden, on getting this in the Huffington Post, which I often read because it requires no subscription, making it far superior to the restrictive New York Times.

I had learned that I absorbed his lessons better if I didn't look at him.

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Also my experience. His I Ching book departed with the late Mary Halpin, and I never expect to see it again. Glad you are getting rain, the stuff of life.

it is the quiescent state of the Oracle's mind, before it has received a question, that the diviner quickly comes to emulate.

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Not too common at Clarity, but it happens. The conservative that I am, I would be satisfied with much less than ecstatic.

pocossin,

thanks for the kindness of your thoughts and words.

the decades have left me feeling very old school:
we ennoble our quest, i believe, by honoring our teachers.

and thanks for the hospitality—


all the best

Great to meet you, William.

I really enjoyed the last article in the Hufpo. I've been following there for years. I look forward to your new book.

Welcome to Clarity!

Thank you, Luis, for your kind thoughts. I'm gratified that the article finds some resonance with you. Thinking back on the lessons shared with me is a reminder of just how fundamental the I Ching is to our own human nature.....

Wishing you all the best

How lucky you are to have had such a wonderful guru. I treasure the signed copy of his book I have.

May I ask, did you ever hear him speak of Yi Jing meditation? It is a subject that is near and dear to me, since I do Yi Jing meditation daily as part of Yi Dao Morning Reading.

cjgait, I studied with Master Khigh for two years (1970-1972) and much of his instruction to me revolved around meditation and concentration on the hexagrams and trigrams. This he felt was instrumental to sensitizing ourselves to the Oracle, which he held as the "speaking" of the World Soul (an emanation or manifestation of the One Mind). The starting point was with the trigrams, which he taught were our "real senses", those that we can use to sense the underlying reality of the world of appearances. "Mountain is the archetype of all things holding still," he would say. Meditating on this trigram meant finding that sense within ourselves and thus being able to recognize all the manifestations of the archetype of holding still, wherever they appeared. The "presence" of Mountain was the object of such meditations. Because there is no "inside and outside" in this nondual universe, Mountain is a presence of me as much as anything else. Obviously, this is so for the other trigrams. Meditations on the hexagrams focused on the interaction of the trigrams, which he felt was more essential than grasping the hexagram as whole--this because the hexagrams have taken on interpretations based on cultural perceptions and historical events, whereas the trigrams are living archetypes of natural phenomena. It was not that he discounted the hexagrams, to be clear, but that he felt meditating on the trigram interaction revealed the deeper essential meaning of the hexagram that lies beneath the cultural/historical artifact. "The only difference between people is their sensitivity to the One," he always maintained--and that it was the Inner Work of diviners to make themselves ever more sensitive to the One whose speaking is, literally, the Oracle.

I apologize for such a long reply to your question but it is a joy and honor to share his thoughts with someone who appreciated his presence in the world.

All the Best

Ah, Hsin, please do not apologize for the length of reply. I'm sure many, many people would like to hear more. Have you considered writing a book of what you learned from the master? The discussion of the trigrams vs. hexagrams is most valuable, for instance. In my meditation you breath the trigrams in and out, moving through the hexagrams one by one and row by row. There is a rapid and slower method, in the rapid method you breath in the lower trigram and breath out the outer. In the slow approach one does a full breath for each trigram. Qian and Kun always get a full breath even in the rapid method. The methods are used in particular ways. For instance fast meditation is used when standing or walking, but also when doing ritual meditation (in Morning Reading and the beginning of Sabbath). The slower one is used for most other meditation.

Did he ever use anything to keep track of the hexagrams while meditating? I use a mala of 64 stones called an Yi Dao circlet. The different shapes and textures of the stones help to prompt the fingers to where you are in the 64 gua. I have not been able to find others using such a mala, But your master was so innovative with Yi Jing devices that I have always wondered if perhaps he also used an Yi Jing mala.

hsin said:

.... sensitizing ourselves to the Oracle...

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simple and beautiful !!!

cjgait, thanks for the generous reply, your practice sounds exacting and highly productive. i want to thank you for presenting it here, the use of a mala is really intriguing, it would have made some of my exercises much easier! I will try to answer in kind...

Being first and foremost a Taoist, Master Khigh distinguished between meditations and concentrations. The first meditation was of course one of mindlessness in which there are no objects of thought but a return to essential Being. This has analogs in Chan/Zen, especially as represented in teachings like "The Secret of the Golden Flower". The second type of meditation I described in the earlier post, which was an identification with the trigram or hexagram. Both these mediations were accompanied by breathing exercises he had learned from his teacher. The use of ritual objects, especially a candle, were held to be valuable but, again, being a Taoist, were not held essential: formlessness of form, the need to be able to perform one's meditations without external forms, was held to be the ultimate form. But ritual actions and objects, he taught, were valuable because they sacralized the meditation, which through personal repetition, fused with the meditations of other practitioners throughout the ages in a collective return to the Act of Creation. This return has implications in that it opens a way for the diviner to be in more direct contact with the Oracle--by re-entering the sacred space of Communion, diviners make themselves more open to the World Soul (and its voice, the Oracle). He likened this to Jung's idea of the Collective Unconscious, to the Sufi idea of the Secret Garden, and even to the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines. Concentration, or as he called it, single-pointed concentration, was key to entering this sacred space. He was aware that there were other divinatory instruments, other sacred technologies, endemic to other cultures and he felt that the indigenous Taoists shared the animistic-shamanic worldview with many of them.

The concentration exercises focused on some straight-forward ones, like clearing the mind and then concentrating on the question in a way he called driving a wedge into empty space. By single-minded concentration, sometimes for 30 or 60 minutes, he believed the diviner's mind achieves a deeper rapport with the Oracle. Certainly, I feel this is so, having benefited from those exercises. The more complex one was what he called the 4,096 exercise, which consisted of (over a very long period of time: it took me months) visualizing every hexagram turning into every other hexagram through a specific formula of line changes. It was 4,096 because that is, of course, the square of 64 (including the 64 hexagrams that have no line changes). Like I said above, I could have used the mala for that.....

I hope this gives you a picture of the way Master Khigh encountered the I on a diviner's level. And, again, I trust I am not abusing the privilege of speaking here.

All the Best

Thank you once again for insights too the master's approach and techniques. I really smiled when I read the number 4096, since it plays such a large role in my life. The Jiao Shi Yi Lin (the Forest of Changes, or as I call it, the Garden of Changes), is a Han Dynasty work that attaches a verse to each of the 4096 permutations of the Yi. I am currently translating the book, even though my skills are not really up to it.

I have love and respect for the Daoists, but my own path is Confucianist. The traditions of meditation in Confucianism are a lot rarer and more sketchy than in Daoism, but they are to be found. The practice of 'quiet sitting', for instance, in the Song Dynasty, but also in the work of a contemporary master: http://www.amazon.com/The-Confucian-Way-Contemplation-Quiet-Sitting/dp/0872495329

In Yi Dao the 4096 is indeed tracked by the mala, but also by by counters. At my inner order altar downstairs I keep a counter made of deer leather and yak bone rings. Each time I complete a cycle of 64 meditations of the 64 gua (tracked on a mundane metal counter like you see greeters use at a market), I move one bead. Thus when completed the cycle will be 4096 meditations on the gua. I have to admit I have slowed down on meditation lately, so it's going to take a while. Perhaps when I retire I can take on a kind of Hesychast approach to Yi Dao and meditate on the figures constantly. Right now it is at the edges of my day. And of course the one meditation a day at Morning Reading is not counted.

Well, you've shared wonderful things from Master Khigh again...and I've prattled on about myself. I'm incorrigible, really.

Any chance you could tell us more about the master's breathing techniques in meditation?

1. Counting: Inhale count 4, Hold breath in count 4, Exhale count 4, Hold breath out count 4.
Same, increasing to count of 6 each.
Same, increasing to count of 8 each.
The point is to reach a vey slow rhythmic breathing that no longer relies on counting.

2. Inhale: Breathe in the hexagram (visualizing its lines) from the Oracle
Hold breath in: Visualize the hexagram as its trigrams
Exhale: Breathe the hexagram back out into the Oracle (speaking back to it in its own language)
Hold breath out: Empty the mind/imagination in preparation for breathing in the next hexagram

3. This focused attention/concentration opens possibility to access altered state of awareness,
marked by "womb breathing", which is essentially breathing so slight it is imperceptible,
creating the sense of breathing through one's umbilical cord, connected to the Heaven and Earth.

I believe this has correlates to other forms of breathing exercises with the possible exception of step 2, which integrates the I into the practice.

All the Best