Hex 23 - stop or go

[candid]

Oy! With bated breath I wait!

Yes, I agree, one is not all one way, but some are very close to one way. Some are just stuck in one way because they refuse to leave one shell for a bigger and more suitable shell. Likes that image very much. Has 49 inclusive in it, as well.

I think the one factor that has the power to create a common ground for all is, mystery. A scientist, intellectual, analytical, priest or artist can experience this in common. But to explain what that mystery is, that will be expressed according to their individual nature. Hence different explanations of a hexagram or line.

 

[martin]

Yes, wait for me. Lol.
What is real? What do we mean when we use the words 'real' and 'reality'? It's probably impossible to define these words in an absolute sense but perhaps we can say something about 'more real' and 'less real'.
I hear a noise in the kitchen, I look and see a cat, I approach the cat and touch her. Hear, see, touch, with every sense that is added the cat becomes more real to me.
And there is something else. Touching the cat seems to convince me more of her reality than seeing her. The sense of touch is older, more basic (or primitive) and more direct.

So, 'more real' corresponds to more senses involved and older senses are usually more convincing.
This is also true inwardly. For every outer sense there is an inner sense.
(Or, if you like, for every gross sense there is a corresponding subtle sense. Or ... It can be formulated in different ways, but I will use the terms inner/inward and outer/outward. Hopefully it's clear what I mean)
There is inner seeing, inner hearing, inner touching, and so on. Inwardly there are in fact (!?) more senses than outwardly, there is a kind of inner knowing, for instance, that is not seeing, hearing, touching and so on. It's more subtle.
But the 'reality principle' is more or less the same. More senses involved --> more real, and some senses are more convincing than others.

Did I say anything deep or spiritual till now?
I hope not.

Now, give me a moment, while I'm trying to find my way back to hex 23 and what I said earlier about avoiding the real thing.

The real thing - there are some many paths, so many exercises, so many tricks. I believe that it was Alan Watts who once said (I think he cited it): "Yoga is the worlds most complicated way to postpone enlightenment." Or something like that.
Well, I have been there, on a path, got the T-shirt, etcetera. But in the early nineties I went through a long and intense 23.

As I see it hex 23 only describes the form of a process. The hexagram doesn't say anything about the energy level, the intensity of what happens. Sometimes the 'stripping' is not even noticeable.
And hey, stripping can also mean striptease!

It's not necessarily painful or tragic.

Anyway, the stripping that I experienced was very intense. And sometimes painful, although I never saw it as tragic, as far as I remember. It came to a point where I could only watch. I was watching my own destruction. Oh, that sounds heavy, well, it wasn't. Not for me. I was just watching.
What amazed me afterward is that I was never afraid. I guess that the path that I had walked till then - including all the exercises - had somehow prepared me for this. So, what I had learned on that path was useful. Thanks for that.

Yet, when the storm finally subsided and I slowly realized that I was still (or again?) on the planet the path had disappeared. The seeking, the reaching, the exercises, it was all gone. I didn't notice it immediately, it took me a while to discover that the seeking and all the rest had stopped. I didn't stop it, it happened.
Later, when looking back, I saw how double edged my path had been. Yes, it probably prepared me, but on the other hand it was also clear that I was stuck in it. I was running in holy circles.
Keeping myself busy and all the way avoiding ... what? My own execution perhaps?

Pffff, time for a break ...
More later perhaps. Hope I'm making sense so far.
Am I?

 

[candid]

Yeah, Martin. You're making great sense. Looking forward to more.

 

[martin]

After 23 comes 24, but the one who returned was not the seeker. The seeker never returned.
I remember him, vaguely. Outwardly we are look alikes and even our minds work more or less in the same way. Deeper down, however, the feel is different, very different.
It's like I'm much more real than he ever was and I believe this is related to inner touch. I can feel, touch my roots, my inner ground. He couldn't.
That's why he was a seeker, I guess.

Somewhere in the midst of the 23 episode there seems to be a gap, a nothingness. What happened there? No memories, nothing is registered. Perhaps there was nobody who could register it?
Sometimes I speculate that the original pilot of this body-mind-spaceship left. The ship was unattended for a while and then another pilot took over. If that is true it's not just that I changed. I'm somebody else!
An alien?

 

[lindsay]

Martin, that is really very interesting! Please continue, if you have a chance - I would like to hear more. I think I am learning something about stripping from your experience.

It meshes pretty well with my recent experience, but my experience has been much less drastic. Still, there is a sense in which stripping is beyond good or bad -- it is unavoidable. It is something that happens to you; you do not necessarily choose it. You can watch it happen, but it almost seems outside of your control. It feels like something impersonal catching up with you, the way I imagine stepping off a cliff would feel when you suddenly realize you are in freefall.

I think you have to get to a certain point in your life where you have done a great deal of the same thing before real stripping occurs. A lot of work, a lot of worry, a lot of seeking, a lot of practice. At the time, it seems like this phase of your life will never end, it could go on forever. Sometimes this is good - you think you are completely satisfied and content with things as they are. Sometimes it is frustrating, almost beyond endurance - you feel you will never achieve what you want or find what you are looking for.

I think one is ripe for stripping if you are often bored, or distracted, or flying on auto-pilot through life. Part of you is dead or dormant or atrophied. Everything is flat, completely predictable. Watch out! You are asleep, but not for long.

A law of nature I learned the hard way: Use it or lose it.

I do not think stripping in this sense has much meaning to younger people. What does one have to lose, when one has not completely identified yourself with your external situation? One has to have that inviolable daily routine, those habits you follow without fail, the TV show you cannot miss, the false sense of security and order only a middle-aged person can have.

The time comes when we lose it all, and what will we do then?

 

[lindsay]

Martin, our posts crossed, but this is getting very, very interesting. I had not thought about 24 being linked so closely with 23, but you are right. For a long time I resisted thinking in terms of hexagram pairs, I am very suspicious of facile patterns. But evidence seems to be mounting; now we have this remarkable association of 23 with 24.

I am old enough to look back on several versions of myself that seem almost like other people. I wonder if my body has been inhabited by multiple beings? That would be an easier explanation than accounting for the actual changes that have occurred.

24 is a paradox. Strictly speaking, returning is impossible. The old Greek gentleman who kept trying to step in the same river twice proved that point. So what does returning really mean? Maybe it means something on the personal level similar to reading a history book? Returning means reading your own history, seeing everything again from a different perspective, as a different person.

What is the use of reading history? What is the use of returning? I do not know.

 

[candid]

Don't think we ever lose it all, Lindsay. There's always something growing back. Even the dead tree grows mushrooms. mmmm mussshroooms...

What was I saying? Mushrooms, yes. Oh, and leaves that fall.

maple trees must lose their leaves in autumn
every rose goes back from where is came
summer's made for children in playgrounds
winter's made to start all over again

Now, 'scuse me while I kiss the sky...

 

[martin]

In general, I'm also not a fan of hexagram pairs, Lindsay. But in this case - 23 corresponds to the time just before the winter solstice and 24 to the time just after it, when the light returns.
The solstice itself, in between, would be hexagram 2 and perhaps that corresponds to the gap that I mentioned, the nothingness.

Meanwhile I'm surprised that I can talk about this at all. Well, at least a little bit.
What happened back then left me completely speechless. Much of it was so strange that I couldn't even think about it. I still feel that every story that I tell about it doesn't really tell the truth. Because it introduces frameworks and concepts that were not part of what I experienced. They are constructed and added afterward.
Well, it's not easy, but maybe I can say more, I don't know.
Thank you for listening.

 

[candid]

Lindsay and Martin,

"24 is a paradox. Strictly speaking, returning is impossible."

I know what you mean. When the call to return comes, I look around for the hole I came out of, and it's not there. So where to return to? It seems then that returning is more like evolving. Where you are, what you are born into becomes the new hole, or dwelling place. Never feels exactly the same twice.

 

[martin]

Greek 1: I never kissed that girl twice!
Greek 2: That's a deep one!
Greek 1: Not at all, she disappeared after the first kiss ..

 

[jeanystar]

Love your story Martin, love it!
Stripping, and decay, is not a bad thing. Even something like "faith" has to decay before it can be born into something new, before it can become not just faith but Knowing. and when the faith is dying, it feels like there is nothing to hold onto anymore.

Same with "love" or beliefs, or concepts we have clung to.
If we can just let them be stripped when the time comes, it feels like we will be left with no skin, no dwelling place, nothing to believe in , no 'right' or 'wrong', 'good' or "bad", and yet in that void, from out of that void, comes.....maybe another plateau on a higher ground.....or maybe the leap into the abyss where we hear the sound of our own wings.
NO constructs at all. Just being.

I had a terrible "stripping" day today...long story but I went, weeping, for a walk in the woods, feeling as though nothing would ever feel "normal" again. (could I be so lucky?) As I walked, I picked up a nice size stick. When I turned it over, it had a face on it. two little eyes... and am impish grin...I swear! An impish grin. The Fool. That stick is outside my back door right now, stuck in the ground. He is my shamann now. He teaches me to come back to ground zero. and smile.

 

[lindsay]

?Mussshrooooms,? Candid? I think you?ve been out in the Sonoran desert too long, my friend. I seem to remember a certain Yaqui named Don Juan who liked such things. Why strain to engage all your senses to find reality (a la Martin) when Mother Nature has provided us with such efficient little helpers?

Speaking of psychopharmacology, does anyone know a book called ?The Invisible Landscape: Mind Hallucinogens and the I Ching? by Terence and Dennis McKenna? I have not read this book, but I have heard it is really quite amazing. Lots of heavy-duty mathematics and methylated tryptamines. I wonder if it?s worth reading?

Leave it to naughty Martin to reinterpret Heraclitus?s famous dictum as ?You can?t kiss the same girl twice.? I tried this on my wife. ?Honey,? I said, ?I find - after much deep and spiritual thought - that I am philosophically unable to embrace the same woman twice.? Does anyone know how to reduce the swelling of a black eye?

 

[martin]

Oh, I love that, Jeanystar. It's like I can see that grinning stick and hold it in my hands.

Walking in the woods, I have done that a lot.
Trees are miraculous beings. Healers. When I was a student there was a tree near the entrance of the building where I studied. I saw the tree every afternoon when I left the building with a head full of academical stuff. It had a kind of aura, a light around it that made its leaves look like jewels. When I looked into that light I saw all the leaves at once, thousands of jewels, as if I focused on each of them simultaneously.
Which is impossible according to what I learned inside the building ... LOL

 

[martin]

LOL Linsday. You know, these deeper truths can cause a lot of trouble.
What do you think that happened when I told a former (!) girlfriend that I saw God in every woman?
23 !!
And I don't mean striptease.

 

[candid]

LOL Lindsay! Nooo, no no.. you say something like, "I lose myself in your every-changing beauty.."

Jeanie, a shaman?s staff, how wonderful! More wonderful is that you recognized it and brought it home.

There is a small alter here I call the ?myth alter?. Each item has come to me as a gift. Each from an entirely different place or person. Each lends me power. A deer antler I found while walking, 350,000,000 year old salt crystals from the Himalayas, a toy hero figure, a fishing shaman, an Avalokitesvara pendant given to me by my son, sea shells and an old horseshoe my dog dug up from the desert (what were sea shells doing in the desert?), and white sage to burn as a cleansing ritual. It is my quiet place.

I believe that it is important to see your own myth, have a certain reverence for it, and be able to seperate yourself from it. It is not the items themselves but the recognition of them in you, but none of which are really you. The myth of you. What is left is ...

 

[candid]

 

[midaughter]

Hello everyone and as Leonard says, "Namaste!",

A question appeared int his thread addressed to me:
Sun, I'm wondering how one might distinguish. Would it be correct to say, if the event comes at you from "outside", such as society-at-large-, work environment, natural disaster, there is not much one can do except learn to accept, but if the event is "internally" generated, then it should be possible to overcome, by changing attitude, changing your methods, etc

You know, I can't answer this off the cuff and will need to think about it. When I get the reading of Hexagram 23 I usually divine again about seeing whether or not deliverance is possible; I don't usually distinguish between inner and outer events. For example, a reading of 23 when going on a trip where external events might happen to you which are harmful, you might to decide to stay home and in inquiring of the Sage about staying home and get Hexagram 40, well, I would stay home. I guess this would be a mixed event, both inner and outer.

Candid: meditating in a cave in the presence of dead bodies is to embrace that which you fear, to see that ultimately we must embrace all aspects of this dualistic realm. Lately I have been reading about the Thugees of India who worship the Goddess of Destruction,Kali (discussed her on my page of Hexagram 29)

http://fortunecity.com/business/influence/1805/the_page_of_kan__the_middle_son.htm

The image of Shiva and Kali also is water dangerously flowing through an a abyss.

Wearing a necklace of human skulls, Kali stands for the cycle of destruction. The thugees were a death cult from which we get the word "thug." This is a way of embracing death to the extreme. They roamed the countryside is search of victims they strangled who were then offered to Kali. (a great movie about the British attempts to destroy this cult is "Gunga Din.," )

Tantrics embrace death as well, offering their own bodies ritually and drinking their own blood out of a cup made from their own skulls-it seems to be based on a Tungus (shamanic tribe near the Manchu)ritual.

I do see, as many have pointed out, that Hexagrams 23 and 24 represent the entire cycle of life, both destruction and re-creation. Hexagram 24 stands for the other side of the cycle, that of re-creation.

As ever,

Sun

 

[heylise]

An important meaning of 24 is turn again. It is also returning, but on the path which is yours, going it again and again. Like the earth goes its path around the sun, year after year.

When 23 has done its work, your 24-path comes closer to the one which is really yours. Not diverted by the things which used to cling to you, but were not really part of you.

LiSe

 

[heylise]

?The Invisible Landscape?, Terence and Dennis McKenna

Part one: Mind, Molecules and Magic
1 the figure of the shaman
2 shamans and schizophrenia
3 organismic thought
4 toward a holographic theory of mind
5 models of drug activity
6 an experiment a La Chorrera
7 psychological reflections on La Chorrera

Part two : Time, Change and Becoming
8 the I Ching as lunar calendar and astronomical calculator
9 order in the I Ching and order in the world
10 the King Wen sequence as a quantified modular hierarchy
11 the temporal hierarchy and cosmology
12 towards a physics of concrescence
13 the wave of time
14 evolution and freedom

not mentioned: introductions, epilogue, bibliography, appendix

I read it very long ago, and loved it then. It seems that the calculations are not entirely correct, but it was very interesting all the same.

Gene posted in Clarity about it, but I don?t know in which thread, not even which year, only that it was posted March 16. Give or take a day for the time difference.

LiSe

 

[lindsay]

LiSe, thanks for the information about the McKenna brothers' book. Perhaps I will read it sometime, but it sounds a little dated to me. I think it is a sign of growing maturity, of the coming of age of a subject, when that subject moves beyond the phase where many big and technical words are needed to discuss it. Finally, in the last few years, Westerners are saying serious and important things about the Yi in plain language. The Yi has become so compelling for us that we can discuss it without always referring to some other frame of reference, without dressing it up in borrowed clothes. Finally it is no longer necessary to justify studying the Yi by deriving every scientific, religious, and philosophic idea and principle from it. I do not think - in fact, I think it is ridiculous to claim - that the secrets of DNA or the origins of binary arithmatic were encoded by the ancients in the Yi. Such claims make the Yi sound important, but they completely miss the Yi's true value.

Stepping down from my soapbox for a minute, I also wanted to thank you for comments on Hex 23 and 24. Regarding 24, maybe a more accurate mental picture than a circle closing in on itself - return seen as "coming full circle" - would be the image of a spiral. From one perspective, a spiral looks like a circle constantly closing in on itself, but in fact something quite different is happening in its third dimension. There is no actual return to any point the spiral passed through previously.

When the intervals are short enough, return becomes mere repetition. Doing the same thing over and over again. Is it possible that 24 also refers to repetition?

 

[candid]

Lindsay, a dragon is said to move in coils.

 

[lindsay]

Candid, that's excellent! Now my image of 24 is a dragon corkscrewing its way up from the abyss. Looking down from his boat on the surface, the sailor only sees a small circular swirl going round and round that reminds him of returning. Won't he be surprised!

 

[martin]

Surprise surprise, my boat is a rocket and it was launched by the monster of Log Ness!

A long time ago (in a former life?) I read a novel by Ouspensky, "The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin". It is based on (his version of) the idea of eternal return.
Lives repeat endlessly (including the day, hour and circumstances of birth) with very little variation (the spiral is nearly a circle) as long as there is insufficient awareness. Ouspensky took this idea very seriously. He hoped that he would be able to escape from the circle in his next life but was apparently not very optimistic.
There is also a movie on this theme, "Groundhog Day".

Good to hear you speaking on the soapbox, Lindsay.
I always get a bit irritated when I hear about yet another book that tries to read quantum mechanics into old mystical texts. Oh no, please, not again!

And what one cannot say (in plain language), about that one must be silent.

Martin Wittgenstein

 

[heylise]

You are right - of course it is a spyral. The earth moving around the sun is also a spyral, never coming back in exactly the same point.
Loved the dragon too. The one who dares to face it, will see the circle, the others see only the waves.

LiSe

 

[candid]

Lindsay, that's a funny image. Reminds me of a time I was fishing off a low-to-the water-pier in Panama while in the Navy during the Panamanian crisis. Something very heavy was on my line. Suspecting it was a huge pile of seaweed, I tugged and reeled it slowly toward the surface, my feet dangling nearly to the water. With a final weighty lift of the heavy rod, a rather large octopus bloomed wide onto the surface. I suddenly found myself standing, looking down at this ?thing? from the deep, heart pounding in my throat! Now that was unexpected! To the locals it was just an octopus, but to me it was as a dragon. I ?returned? it, quickly!

 

[pagan]

Sometimes I think we all see ourselves as autonomous self willed entities with the inherent ability to decide our own fate. I really doubt that. We use the oracle to try to influence this fate instead of learning how to better flow with it.

We are individuals AND we are the body of mother earth. If you look at the earth as a living organism, and not as a dead chunk of rock, then we see that we are cells in her living body. If that is true, then we have a function in the biology of earth. Like the cells in our own body have a job to do, but any given cell may not know that it is part of a living human being.

Hexagram 24 seems to me that we return to a familiar pattern that is uniquely our role in the whole of things. Whether we like this role or not is somewhat outside the issue. It can never suit our ego entirely because our egos cannot ever be satisfied.

Complete autonomy as living creatures would not allow for us to function as part of a greater whole. Total free will is anarchy and madness. Total free will would be the reign of ego and existence would fall apart instantly. Fate is bigger than free will. Free will is a small orb of influence we have that effects very little of the larger whole. Fate leads on to a destiny that we have no control over. We are carried along in evolution despite our unwillingness to see our perfect part in it.

It is chaotic to think that we don't belong to the whole and that we have free will that can do whatever we want to. That ego-serving point of view causes a schism between ourselves and the great mother goddess.

To meditate on your inseparable connection to the whole will relieve the male ego of its need to conquer and detroy, and comfort you in knowing that you really belong and you are being taken care of completely, despite your distaste for being simply part of the earth and nothing more.
P.

 

[martin]

Our fate as a given that we encounter or as our own creation, in traditional Christian terms the will of God versus our own will - the last word about that has very probably not yet been said, Pagan.
But I don't really see or feel a paradox there, it seems that the two go together quite effortlessly in life. Until we start to think about it. Then it begins to look like we are dealing with opposites that exclude each other, either this or that.
I suspect that the polarity is an artifact that is created by our way of thinking.
For example, when I think about it - again in traditional terms - it seems that surrender to God must diminish me as an individual. As if I must become less myself in that surrender. But that is in fact not true. I become MORE myself.
The actual experience is very different from what the mind, looking at it from a distance, thinks it is.

As to 'ego', I believe that the problem - if there is a problem - is in most cases the superego, not the ego. It is the "I should be", "I should not be", "I should become", "I should not become". Including the spiritual versions, perhaps especially the spiritual versions. "I should become enlightened", "I should have no ego", and so on.
Self torture!

 

[heylise]

?I can feel, touch my roots, my inner ground.?
?it seems that surrender to God must diminish me as an individual. As if I must become less myself in that surrender. But that is in fact not true. I become MORE myself.?

Love it, and am in the wonderful situation that I experience it too.
LiSe

 

[RindaR]

Let's not should on ourselves...

*grin*

Rinda

 

[martin]

Or if you have to should then should at least in style ..