Consulting the Yijing (I Ching) is not something I do regularly. As with other divination techniques -- Runes, Tarot, etc. – I have fun playing with it, occasionally, but in general prefer accessing intuitive information in more direct ways. But every now and again I do consult this ancient Chinese Oracle, and this morning was one of those times.
The hexagram that emerged was #62 – Predominance of the Small. The version of the text I was using was Liu I-ming's The Taoist I Ching (translated by Thomas Cleary), which offered the following gloss on this hexagram:
Being fulfilled but acting empty; inwardly strong, outwardly yielding; inwardly firm, outwardly flexible.
In the body of the text and commentaries we find the following passages:
… when it comes to the great matter of nature and life, one must know the appropriate moments to advance and withdraw, to sustain and negate, one must know the principles of filling and emptying, effacing and fostering – since even the slightest miss can result in an enormous loss, no excess is permissible.
In relation to Inner Alchemy:
… a small affair means nonstriving, a great affair means striving. Striving is the way to find yang, nonstriving is the way to nurture yang. Once one has filled the belly, it is appropriate that the small predominate to nurture yang. If you are capable of the great but not the small, you will not only be unable to preserve yang, yang will even be damaged.
The hexagram is pointing (as all of them do!) to a correct relationship between yin and yang, masculine and feminine, action and tranquility:
The call left by a flying bird should not rise but descend … Action not straying from tranquility should not rise but descend, the small predominating and nurturing the great … When nurturance is sufficient, the auspicious outcome is great; the small predominates, but the good it does is great. Sublime and subtle indeed is the predominance of the small that is beneficially correct.
~ * ~
The Oracle’s advice felt spot-on in relation to what went amiss at the recent Sedona “sweat-lodge” incident. Had Mr. Ray been in alignment with the wisdom of the I Ching, the culmination of his retreat would have been a retreat into nonstriving, as a way of nurturing the yang that had been gathered via the previous days’ striving. This would have been an honoring of the sweat lodge’s potent feminine energy – a kind of withdrawal, surrender, dissolution, a “becoming small” as a means of consolidating the great.
Because he (and all of the participants) failed to align with the wisdom of this dynamic – but instead pushed further and further into a profoundly imbalanced “striving” -- the result, as predicted by this hexagram of the I Ching, was “enormous loss.”
~ * ~
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been leaning heavily upon (and feeling immensely grateful for) Vipassana and polarity-processing techniques, along with qigong practice, to transform my reactions to the Sedona event. Lots of victim/rebel/tyrant/savior entanglements bubbling to the surface – pretty much every “authority issue” I could imagine! In the process, noticing all varieties of ways in which I habitually project authority – either onto “others” in the creation of saviors and tyrants; or onto an egoic “me” which then plays out its chosen drama (as a victim or a rebel or a tyrant or a savior).
As a practitioner, I’ve come to understand that the level of “charge” I experience internally represents the degree to which I’m reproducing (consciously and/or unconsciously) exactly the kinds of dynamics which – when projected as the “world” – contribute to the creation of contexts in which the “offensive” events occur. So I work to resolve this stuff, as best I can – as a way of doing my part to unravel, instead of perpetuate, those conditions. In this way, the poison, the toxicity of a dis-eased appearance is allowed to flow and transmute into healing – rather than becoming fuel for something akin to a witch-hunt.
I’m not saying that Mr. Ray shouldn’t be held personally responsible for what unfolded at the Sedona retreat. On the contrary, I hope sincerely that that part is worked out fairly, and comprehensively, in the courts and mediation rooms. But the superior physician addresses not only the symptoms of dis-ease, but also – and most importantly – it’s root cause.
Included in the root cause of the Sedona “sweat-lodge” deaths are the thoughts, words and actions, of each and every one of us, which have contributed to a culture which privileges, to a point of gross imbalance, masculine striving over feminine nonstriving; action over tranquility, intensity over ease, and accomplishment over nurturance. Only by bringing these into healthy balance – by birthing into our culture a truly healthy “masculine” and a truly healthy “feminine” – whose balanced interweaving can then function as the pranic and mythic life-blood of our human bodyminds – will we be creating, at a fundamental level, the conditions for something different. Sobeit!
