Where Is The Middle Path When I’m Stuck in the Middle With Me?
Where Is The Middle Path When I’m Stuck in the Middle With Me?
On Appropriate Eccentric Action Inappropriate Eccentric Action and Trauma
You have no idea how hard I have looked for a gift to bring you. Nothing seemed right. What is the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the ocean. Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient. It is no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these. So I have brought you a mirror. Look at yourself and remember me. — Rumi
Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you. 🙏
Playlist: Spotify. YouTube.
‘Plans? What Plans?’ the Appropriate Eccentricist Laughed Out Loud, Rolling on the Floor
In recent months I have advocated appropriate eccentric action, both in my writing and even when talking. And with that advocacy-duet comes the result, the actual music, the important walking with eccentricity, too. [Walk Like an Egyptian.] My clearly eccentric intention has brought to me the absolute experience of living more consciously with appropriate eccentric action. With intention comes form and, in a plethora of mostly small ways and some bigger ways, that is exactly what is happening. Perhaps none being so evident than in my writing. And this weekend has continued that experience of being surprised that appropriate eccentric action exists outside of actual plans.
How Do I Know When Eccentric Is or Is Not ‘Appropriate’?
And something else, something a bit more tenuous or subtle has arisen in this personal development. And that is a more embodied perspicuity of inappropriate action, eccentric or not. Most likely that ‘new’ perception is simply that I have mostly ceased to ignore my body’s acuity and aliveness in the moment. My body knows. Our bodies know despite how intensely we have been trained to ignore this ‘thing’ beneath our oh-so-clever heads, even though this body is the only thing we have that is alive in this moment.
In the above Dalai Lama tongue kiss, for example, my body clearly told me that there were at least two significant actions that were almost as inappropriate as something is likely to be for me, short of torture, rape, sexual abuse and sacrifice, Satanic or otherwise. The first was that the Dalai Lama, a man of spiritual practice and vows of sexual restraint, was unable to control his lust for touching the boy’s tongue — whether or not that lust was a purely sexual act on the Dalai Lama’s part. The lust to touch, be touched, was easily seen on his uncharacteristically ‘grim’ face during his brief, unspoken on-camera struggle, before he popped the question and stuck out his tongue. The second was that a significant number of people in the audience laughed while the boy looked uncomfortable and kind of trapped by social pressure to touch the Dalai Lama’s tongue. A later inappropriate action was the whitewashing of what he had done. Amongst other weak or even silly main stream media excuses was one of the most inane rationales I’ve heard, which coming in the time of covid is saying a lot. And that was, paraphrased, ‘With getting older, the Dalai Lama is losing his ability to speak and understand English well.’ As if that is a rational sentence to explain what he did with his body to a boy.
This essay is not about the nature of the Dalai Lama and his relationship with boys because I have no idea what those are. This essay is about appropriate action and trusting my body to know what is appropriate, ie truthful, and inappropriate, ie, false. This action by the Dalai Lama created in my body, instinctively not rationally, a kind of silent gasp-like scream that what he did was wrong, wrong, wrong. For the curious, perhaps this whitewashed swept under the carpet ‘incident’ is another rabbit dressed in a tux carrying a time piece to be chased after. I didn’t pursue this particular anxious rabbit too deeply, just enough to bring confidence to my life-long ‘irrational’ at best ambivalent or even dismissive attitude towards the DL: I’ve not read any of his books, nor watched his videos, nor felt that his wisdom spoke to me whenever it crossed my path, which of course it has. My body has simply kept me away from all things DL.
In the image at the top, to the right of the Dalai Lama is a wonderful poem and then painting, both of which were likely eccentric actions, by Rumi and by Angelo Thomas. This composition, pairing Rumi and Thomas, and then them with the Dalai Lama, was my own eccentric action (in part initially inspired from a now lost Facebook post). The pairing of Rumi with the Thomas painting gives to my body a kind of sigh of pleasure, of freedom or completeness, perhaps. Joy has expanded and the feeling of constriction has been reduced. That might be a ‘good’ eccentric description of appropriate eccentric action — at least, for this moment in time.
Putting them with the Dalai Lama’s strange behaviour is likewise an eccentric action. Is it appropriate? How will you know? How do I know? This is more nuanced question, without an obvious answer. Our egos will kick against and muddy our bodily awareness, especially for people who have, in this example, elevated the Dalai Lama as a kind of hero. And so I will rely on Gautama’s advice to Ananda on Gautama’s last day: ‘above all, trust your Self.’ And I have, with my recent discoveries within Gautama’s teachings, especially some that he gave that have been omitted or downplayed from most traditional Buddhist teachers, Gautama included the body as ‘the Self’ and perhaps, likely even, by ‘Self’ he meant the body. And with that, I stand, now, and following my PS-RAP (Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process), formally ask my body: is this an appropriate image within the context of the wisdom of this essay? [Here I paused to stand and do.] My body clearly suggests that this is an appropriate image and, also, that it may offend some people.
What is My ‘Process’ to Be, Now, After ‘Dear Terry #1’ and the ‘Two Krishnamurtis’?
For the last week I’ve been considering how to formulate the go-forward verbiage to follow the last three essays that have been as much a physical experience for me as they have been written ones. The plan, the plan, was a simple one: write ‘Dear Terry Epistle #2 to a Dead Mother’. Yup. It was clear in my head, also a clear intention. And I was approaching epistle two with some kind of expectation of … something significant happening to help me live with less pain and more freedom in body and mind. The previous Dear Terry epistle and Krishnamurti essays had very unexpectedly taken me into powerful discomfort in my mind and body as a Mara distraction in order to keep from me the threatened discomfort of looking at something buried in the body. (See Michael Stone on Mara.)
Krishnamurti’s body was a serious trigger with mine! His physical expression was as close to seeing my now mostly past physical self in a mirror as it is possible to imagine.
And as I was writing that, once again I see that I had fallen for the lovely ‘hit-the-bull’s-eye perfectly’ samskara, (samskara being a habit of mind and/or behaviour that keeps us trapped while pretending to be perfectly freeing). The sharp-eyed people reading the above will have noticed that I highlighted an apparent conflict of intentions: get results from a Terry-epistle that will make me free in mind and body. And the other being the earlier stated intention to be free to act with eccentric appropriateness. The latter is the true path to freedom, because it moves without the expectation of a ‘good’ outcome. In this case, writing an epistle in order to achieve a freedom is actually to reinforce freedom’s lack. That goes back to the Zen idea that to try to hit the mark is to miss the mark. And to try to do it with perfect intention is to miss it with absolute perfection.
Mara, the Improperly Maligned ‘Friend’ with Mis-Applied Good Intentions
This was to have been that letter. I began the writing part of it the previous afternoon, I mean actually started to write it rather than just wrestling with ghostly images and other acts of the imagination. And sitting down and typing provided relief because sitting and doing rather than thinking and chewing broke through some of that resistance that Mara has been directing towards me in a misguided attempt to keep me safe from being split again with the embodiment and processing of something horrific that I wasn’t consciously remembering.
The mind and body will do anything absolutely anything to keep us from re-experiencing that past event of psyche and/or body that was split off at the time for our survival. And that life-and-death threatening event also, in a significant way, created a split in our Selves to further assist in our survival. At the time those fragments needed to be stored because the perception of the event was life-threatening to the Self and remained an inward directed energy until the actual integrative experience of the event allows that event-energy to dissipate outwardly or otherworldly. Putting the energy of the ‘event’ into the mind-body complex was the Self’s method of survival at the time. And the ‘newly’ created split-off Self becomes a kind of ego-fragment that we begin quickly to persona-fy so as to become blind to it. That split becomes our new normal, hence invisible except by projection.
Donald Kalsched’s book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit is one of the best books I read on this.
Trauma Shawarma! Trauma WTF?!
Yogi-Buddhist-psychotherapist Michael Stone does a terrific job of describing this too, in one of his podcasts. He elaborates that talk-therapy, and I’ll add word-therapy (ie reading and writing), have poor records of healing these kinds of traumas because most often the event as it was experienced was stored in the mind-body complex as wordless energies. Yes. I spent almost forty years deep in word-therapies and the quantum shift in my healing happened when I joined a real yoga class and felt and understood as experience that I was storing the energy of anger and fear in my body. It is possible, and even likely, that all the word-therapies I did, and I did a lot of them, was a gateway to the body-therapies. Words weren’t enough to purge the wordless energy stuck in my system. And yet without them I may not have had the ability to leave them and return to the body.
Those stored energies were being expressed as extreme stiffness and pain. I have seen a huge drop in physical discomfort and an almost unbelievable, perhaps even miraculous, expansion of my freedom to move and freedom to be in comfort with stillness after nine years of dedicated daily yoga practice that included a significant amount of non-verbal movement.
It now looks and feels like the remaining inflexibility and discomfort in my body has reduced itself down to the nasty fluctuating pains in just one hip and in the front of my shoulders, especially the left one. All the other pains are now gone — except sometimes in the nose which intermittent compulsive picking when triggered keeps extending.
Similarly sister number two was faced with the psychological choice between death of body by suicide or death of dysfunctional Self with therapy — my paraphrase of her description. Fortunately she chose therapy and describes how the non-verbal therapies, such as art and family constellation therapies, were the most powerful and important in her path to integration and then dissipation of those trauma-stored energies. Word/ talk therapies didn’t cut the muster for her either. And, like me, the cleansing away is taking years, and often times appears to move backwards before going forwards.
Here is Michael Stone on trauma:
[After having an unprocessed traumatic experience, individuals] … feel that their life is at risk. And so their body and their brain set up systems to bear the pain. And the primary system that gets set up is splitting. We split off part of ourselves in order to stay alive. And when this happens you enter a new world. Your life changes. When you split something off, your life changes and you have a new — some people call it a ‘trauma world’ — that you live in. And it’s not the same world that you lived in before. And in this new world — and this is the worst part — you get used to it really quickly. And it happens a little bit differently for everybody, and it has three characteristics. The first characteristic is fear of re-traumatisation. That’s the first characteristic of this new world that you live in when you compartmentalise some part of your experience. …
First is fear of re-traumatisation, which means you will do anything not to have that experience again, at whatever cost, no matter how crazy or perverted. You will find a way to never have that experience. And never feel those feelings again. Even though, technically, you haven’t felt most of those feelings.
Number two, is you become really good at dissociating. And this is very very common for meditators. This is the meditator who sits down — you teach them meditation — they sit down to meditate and they get into this spacey bliss zone. Within two minutes. Not connected to their body. Not connected to the sangha [community — of meditators in this case]. And that’s one of the reasons why, when I teach a group like this, I like to keep all the bowing, because it keeps everyone physical and in relationship to each other. So it doesn’t allow people to go into this grey space that is a little bit dissociative.
The third characteristic of compartmentalising is shame. [Anneke Lucas a survivor of Satanic ritual torture, sexual abuse and mind control processes, talks a lot about the role of shame that was used in the mind-controlling techniques she underwent.]
And let me just remind you that everything I’m describing here is not accessible to language. This is like your nervous system and your hormones and the structure of your brain are creating this. This is not like you didn’t talk to yourself, [that] you didn’t talk yourself into this [sic] (~34:30 “Mindful Breathing Part 4 (Anapanasati” my emphasis.) Podcast link.
Stone’s discussion describes a before and after world of a traumatised person. If the trauma happens in infancy, there is effectively no before world, and the trauma-world is the whole world of experience. I am not sure what that means, exactly.
So, Why Not Just Take a Pill to Make Me Sicker Then Cut Out and Replace the Useless Bits?
What about that pain? Couldn’t it be the easily and oft-times rationalised scapegoat that I’ve become one of those who are simply getting old? And that it is time to take some allopathic pills (or as some have been pushing lately, remdesivir or midazolam), and/or to replace the ‘broken’ parts of myself? Yes, I’ve wondered if my aches and pains are purely physical. Whenever I have consulted my PS-RAP (Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process), I am assured that the discomfort is not absolutely a physical symptom, that it is stuck energy from my infancy and childhood. And that it is ‘curable’ and that it will dissipate with steady yoga practice and… and what? So far three years since the hip pain began, neither words nor physical practices have fully dissipated the pain out of my body. That pain has hugely improved since 2020 when it kicked in and when I sometimes would suddenly lose my ability to stand properly and I would gasp out loud uncontrollably, loud enough for Yoshiko to hear me, as I stumbled and nearly fell. That big improvement gives evidence that my mind-body practices will dissipate the pain, because they have, and supports the idea that growing old is not the critical cause of my current discomfort.
Still no letter? Sheesh!
When I was still directing myself to write that letter I was thinking about how to plunge into that pre-verbal trauma that I had experienced as an infant. How could I stick-handle past bad penis puns and other Freudian envies that were popping up, from time-to-time, in my imagination while pondering the Terry epistle? Despite those distracting thoughts, my initial idea and expectation of the Terry Epistle #2 was that I would, using words again, go more deeply into my unremembered infancy and somehow magically purge from my body its non-verbal memory and cleave whatever remnants of the split-off self that are floating around.
Today it came to me during movement yoga that an epistle would be missing the mark. And that that epistle to Terry at this time will be inappropriate because I was going to be posing questions or, what will be for me, hypotheticals to a dead woman. She has no opportunity to answer or comment on what the questions and emotional challenges that my writing has been making manifest in my body. With some distancing from being constantly in a state of triggered reactions I am able to see and understand now, that something in my infancy and early childhood, which includes the near death experience Terry confessed to me that she had ‘given’ me when I was an infant, has been stored in my body and has been a strange attractor that has warped my perceptions and reactions to Life. And has seen my painful bits move from limb-to-limb, muscle-to-muscle, joint-to-joint, over time.
Since This Isn’t the ‘Planned’ Life-Saving, Pain Reducing Letter, What Is It?
So, this will not be, is not, the letter that I started yesterday afternoon. That will be — may be — completed some other time. It was waylaid by a thought that has bubbled up once-in-a-while in the last few years. And recently it has been more and more energetically in my face, so-to-speak, and was full frontal head-on in the last two or three weeks.
For the last three weeks I knew that I would complete, at least for this now, that letter-writing process as a purge or nascent purge, of some of that energy stuckness or grippiness about my relationship with my dead mother. So what changed? Instead, this — whatever this something not-nameable thing around me is — has directed me to make an I Ching consultation. About my childhood and infancy relationship to Terry. This is my first I Ching consultation since investigating my shadow and projection that I experienced in a fascinating discussion with Tereza Coraggio a few weeks ago. I enjoyed how the I Ching had worked, and it worked powerfully, with this modern tool, for both me and Tereza. See
With that:
I Ching Journal Begins, as a Kind of One-Sided Literary ‘Conversation’, or ‘Play’ Before Asking the Question.
2023.09.23 3:00pm Las Salinas, Huayapam, San Andrés, Oaxaca Oaxaca Mexico, with very bright sun and a strong heat in the rural one room cabaña.
Hello, Sage Sensei [a recent honorific that I use when addressing the I Ching]. Good afternoon. I am sitting outside, cross-legged with a kind of zabuton from a pair of folded blankets. I am on a lovely covered Mexican tiled terraza. Today is the fall equinox, the sun was very hot and the rural community still. Not even the dogs barked much, and the nearby renovation site was mostly quiet. Around me, when I’m not looking at this screen, I see the limbs of a very large pine tree with beautiful long needles that drape in a near perfect representation of my favourite Tao/ Buddhist painters. On the one limb an orchid is in bloom, yesterday opening itself to the pine world of this corner of Mexico. Today was day three of my extemporaneous rain optimising ceremony to assuage the drought-like conditions that the Oaxaca Valley has been experiencing: the rainy season has not had enough rain and trees on the mountains are dying and the wells are dry. I created a long playlist for the ceremony that I’ve been playing as part of that ceremony. Go to Rain Ceremony, if curious.
2023.09.24 11:30pm: Sage, I have from time-to-time wondered if Terry, my mother, did in fact provide me with the near death experience that she ‘confessed’ to me, in the summer of 1979, that she had given me when I wasn’t even a year old. At the time of her confession, my body sighed with a feeling of truthfulness. She had spoken truthfully, even if she didn’t provide details and I didn’t ask for them. The feeling of deep understanding that I experienced was all that was required. I wound up leaving the family a few months later, which created a massive trauma for everyone present.
See
Since developing and expanding on my muscle awareness process, I have asked my body if Terry had spoken truthfully on that summer day. The initial feeling of ‘Aha! This is the truth I was hearing,’ could have been a false confession and my initial reaction wrong. And with that we can get a hint of how much we distrust our Selves and our Bodies! Anyway, my body awareness has expanded in trustworthiness and effectiveness. It confirmed that her confession was a true one, for me.
In the last couple of years a previously dismissed as basically unthinkable thought has been creeping up with increasing amounts of vigour. (Shades of Jung’s unthinkable thought-image of God standing over his church and shitting on it!) And that is, did Terry sexually molest me as well as nearly killing me? And, if she did, to what extent? Did it include anal penetration? I was surprised to the extent that Krishnamurti’s body was a mirror of my own. And when I learned that Krishnamurti had been sexually assaulted as a young man and had been processed by an occultist, the question of my having been assaulted similarly when I was an infant and/or as a young child rose up prominently.
During the course of writing my first epistle to Terry I talked with sisters numbers one and two about their remembrances and experiences, especially around sexuality. Number one doesn’t remember much about it, except to the degree that Terry had stripped her of sexuality by repetitively describing her in various asexual ways. Sister number two had been catalogued as sex personified, and has a very different memory of ‘sex in the family’. That memory includes our parents talking about the benefits of sexually stimulating young children, following what we now call the woke sexualisation of children agenda. And I remember very clearly, one of only a few very clear memories, a dinner table talk about the pros and cons of incest.
Sensei Sage, on Friday the thought that I may have been sexually assaulted as an infant and/or child was so strong that I decided to do a PS-RAP with it. And I smiled that I hadn’t thought of doing that before. So, before I share that, I state here that I don’t know exactly happened. I have no memory of anything, and would have scoffed at the idea of having been sexually assaulted by my narcissistic mother even a few years ago.
As to my being ‘given’ a NDE in infancy, I have little doubt about it because of how my body responds in a powerful kind of panic during certain not-too-difficult pranayama practices. A feeling of imminent death powerfully arises, and so I suspect that I had been suffocated in some way. I have muscle-tested (PS-RAP) this three or four times in the last four years or so. Always it comes up ‘Yes, you were suffocated.’ And in a curious life-is-ambivalent kind of way, there is some question as to whether or not asking is a form of fixation or gripping that gives the trauma-samskara additional energy. Maybe, because it is clear I still have something stuck in me, in the forms of discomfort, hunched back and relative inflexibility. My PS-RAP from my body says it is something from my infancy, my current physical ‘situation.’
So, Sage, with the last two essays and the Terry epistle it has come time for me to ask my body, this amazing living centre-point of my existence and experience of life, my only experience of life, the ‘big’ question: did Terry sexually ‘assault’ me in some way? And did that assault include anal penetration? So I got up, did the PS-RAP and got affirmation for both. Again, I am not stating that that actually happened, because by our current empirical standards, I don’t know. I am stating what my body is telling me, which I know by years of experience, does not lie. It tells me it did. She did.
I am here, Sage, to ask you that same question. Did Terry sexually assault me? Perhaps she did it in her delusional way with ‘good’ intentions about the ‘popularised’ ideas around the importance of sexual affirmation and stimulation of children for proper growth. And now I wonder if that was a kind of convulsive sociological behaviour that helped Freud’s assault against the truth of widespread sexual abuse of children, and his whitewashing of the actual abuse as fantasy? In a way, a kind of Stockholm syndrome, whereby the past abused becomes an abuser because it was the means of survival. And it may be too complicated to ask you the next part at the same time. And yet I will ask you if that assault, which has been locked in my body in some way, is now focused as stuck energy in my right hip, left shoulder and in my slowly being straightened kyphotic back. Thank you. (I will ask you about split-off selves another day.)
Stick Method
17. (8) __ __
17. (8) __ __
25. (6) __X__
17. (8) __ __
17. (8) __ __
17. (8) __ __
Hexagram 2, Receptive / Earth transforms into Hexagram 16, Enthusiasm / Contentment
My summary of the Result
Thank you Sage. An interesting and challenging answer! To get 6 broken lines is unusual and suggestive of something. So, earth. Earth. And you haven’t given me a clear ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer, as you sometimes do. ‘So,’ you are suggesting, ‘please look at this more deeply.’
For some reason, the image of Mara has always struck me as being female energy. LoL! Likely because I was raised by a devouring mother. And it came to mind, when I was quiet for a moment, that Gautama defeated the armies of Mara when Gautama called on the Earth to be his witness and pointed to the earth (Bhumisparsha Mudra).
The manner of the answers also suggests that moving forward happens without dwelling on whatever trauma was done. That to continue to stay grounded within and by and for my body on the earth.
And that has been a huge component and emphasis of my yoga practices. So I am to continue with my practices, because it “gives to his character breadth, purity, and sustaining power, so that he is able both to support and to bear with people and things.”
And I love that you have pointed out the importance of music! That is great, so thank you for that. Music was in no small part, one of my early-life life-jackets and I am sure that music helped to keep me alive for many, many years. And it is also funny because that is exactly what I’ve been doing here in my essays since deciding to create actual playlists.
And you are suggesting that I continue to keep or even expand being light in my approach, to horse around far and wide in my path into health and healing.
You do not say that the assault’s didn’t happen.
Find below the song-of-the-essay some extracts from the two I Ching translations I looked at. And below that is the complete transcriptions from the two translations.
Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.🙏
Playlist: Spotify. YouTube.
Song of the Essay
Selected quotations from the I Ching translations:
2 Receptive/Earth
“… the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as against time, the female–maternal as against the male–paternal. However, as applied to human affairs, the principle of this complementary relationship is found not only in the relation between man and woman, but also in that between prince and minister and between father and son. Indeed, even in the individual this duality appears in the coexistence of the spiritual world and the world of the senses.”
“… [W]hen [the Receptive] abandons this position [of being activated and led by the Creative] and tries to stand as an equal side by side with the Creative, does it become evil. The result then is opposition to and struggle against the Creative, which is productive of evil to both.
“… If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead, /He goes astray; / But if he follows, he finds guidance.”
“… the hexagram of earth the doubling connotes the solidity and extension in space by virtue of which the earth is able to carry and preserve all things that live and move upon it. The earth in its devotion carries all things, good and evil, without exception. In the same way the superior man gives to his character breadth, purity, and sustaining power, so that he is able both to support and to bear with people and things.”
16 Enthusiasm / Contentment
… music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind (my emphasis).
Complete I Ching Translations:
Baynes/Wilhelm 2 The Receptive ☷above K’UN / The Receptive, Earth ☷below K’UN / The Receptive, Earth This hexagram is made up of broken lines only. The broken line represents the dark, yielding, receptive primal power of yin. The attribute of the hexagram is devotion; its image is the earth. It is the perfect complement of THE CREATIVE—the complement, not the opposite, for the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as against time, the female–maternal as against the male–paternal. However, as applied to human affairs, the principle of this complementary relationship is found not only in the relation between man and woman, but also in that between prince and minister and between father and son. Indeed, even in the individual this duality appears in the coexistence of the spiritual world and the world of the senses. But strictly speaking there is no real dualism here, because there is a clearly defined hierarchic relationship between the two principles. In itself of course the Receptive is just as important as the Creative, but the attribute of devotion defines the place occupied by this primal power in relation to the Creative. For the Receptive must be activated and led by the Creative; then it is productive of good. Only when it abandons this position and tries to stand as an equal side by side with the Creative, does it become evil. The result then is opposition to and struggle against the Creative, which is productive of evil to both. THE JUDGMENT THE RECEPTIVE brings about sublime success, Furthering through the perseverance of a mare. If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead, He goes astray; But if he follows, he finds guidance. It is favorable to find friends in the west and south, To forego friends in the east and north. Quiet perseverance brings good fortune. The four fundamental aspects of the Creative—“sublime success, furthering through perseverance”—are also attributed to the Receptive. Here, however, the perseverance is more closely defined: it is that of a mare. The Receptive connotes spatial reality in contrast to the spiritual potentiality of the Creative. The potential becomes real and the spiritual becomes spatial through a specifically qualifying definition. Thus the qualification, “of a mare,” is here added to the idea of perseverance. The horse belongs to earth just as the dragon belongs to heaven. Its tireless roaming over the plains is taken as a symbol of the vast expanse of the earth. This is the symbol chosen because the mare combines the strength and swiftness of the horse with the gentleness and devotion of the cow. Only because nature in its myriad forms corresponds with the myriad impulses of the Creative can it make these impulses real. Nature’s richness lies in its power to nourish all living things; its greatness lies in its power to give them beauty and splendor. Thus it prospers all that lives. It is the Creative that begets things, but they are brought to birth by the Receptive. Applied to human affairs, therefore, what the hexagram indicates is action in conformity with the situation. The person in question is not in an independent position, but is acting as an assistant. This means that he must achieve something. It is not his task to try to lead—that would only make him lose the way—but to let himself be led. If he knows how to meet fate with an attitude of acceptance, he is sure to find the right guidance. The superior man lets himself be guided; he does not go ahead blindly, but learns from the situation what is demanded of him and then follows this intimation from fate. Since there is something to be accomplished, we need friends and helpers in the hour of toil and effort, once the ideas to be realized are firmly set. The time of toil and effort is indicated by the west and south, for west and south symbolize the place where the Receptive works for the Creative, as nature does in summer and autumn. If in that situation one does not mobilize all one’s powers, the work to be accomplished will not be done. Hence to find friends there means to find guidance. But in addition to the time of toil and effort, there is also a time of planning, and for this we need this solitude. The east symbolized the place where a man receives orders from his master, and the north the place where he reports on what he has done. At that time he must be alone and objective. In this sacred hour he must do without companions, so that the purity of the moment may not be spoiled by fictional hates and favoritism. THE IMAGE The earth’s condition is receptive devotion. Thus the superior man who has breadth of character Carries the outer world. Just as there is only one heaven, so too there is only one earth. In the hexagram of heaven the doubling of the trigram implies duration in time, but in the hexagram of earth the doubling connotes the solidity and extension in space by virtue of which the earth is able to carry and preserve all things that live and move upon it. The earth in its devotion carries all things, good and evil, without exception. In the same way the superior man gives to his character breadth, purity, and sustaining power, so that he is able both to support and to bear with people and things. Moving line: Six in the fourth place means: A tied–up sack. No blame, no praise. Comment on the line: The dark element opens when it moves and closes when at rest. The strictest reticence is indicated here. The time is dangerous, because any degree of prominence leads either to the enmity of irresistible antagonists if one challenges them or to misconceived recognition if one is complaisant. Therefore a man ought to maintain reserve, be it in solitude or in the turmoil of the world, for there too he can hide himself so well that no one knows him. 16. Enthusiasm ☳above CHÊN / The Arousing, Thunder ☷below K’UN / The Receptive, Earth The strong line in the fourth place, that of the leading official, meets with response and obedience from all the other lines, which are all weak. The attribute of the upper trigram, Chên, is movement; the attributes of K’un, the lower, are obedience and devotion. This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance, furthermore, is the law of movement along the line of least resistance, which in this hexagram is enunciated as the law for natural events and for human life. THE JUDGMENT ENTHUSIASM. It furthers one to install helpers And to set armies marching. The time of ENTHUSIASM derives from the fact that there is at hand an eminent man who is in sympathy with the spirit of the people and acts in accord with it. Hence he finds universal and willing obedience. To arouse enthusiasm it is necessary for a man to adjust himself and his ordinances to the character of those whom he has to lead. The inviolability of natural laws rests on this principle of movement along the line of least resistance. These laws are not forces external to things but represent the harmony of movement immanent in them. That is why the celestial bodies do not deviate from their orbits and why all events in nature occur with fixed regularity. It is the same with human society: only such laws as are rooted in popular sentiment can be enforced, while laws violating this sentiment merely arouse resentment. Again, it is enthusiasm that enables us to install helpers for the completion of an undertaking without fear of secret opposition. It is enthusiasm too that can unify mass movements, as in war, so that they achieve victory. THE IMAGE Thunder comes resounding out of the earth: The image of ENTHUSIASM. Thus the ancient kings made music In order to honor merit, And offered it with splendor To the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present. When, at the beginning of summer, thunder—electrical energy—comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical cont
David Hinton Translation 2 Earth All origins penetrating everywhere, earth is inexhaustible as a mare horse in bringing forth wild bounty. And so it is that when the noble-minded set out in the lead toward a destination, they soon fall into confusion; but when they follow, they reach the bounty of that wondrous host. Finding friends on southwest plains, losing friends in northeast mountains-the noble-minded remain inexhaustible and serene, and so come to good fortune. PRESENTATION How perfect and wondrous the earth of origins! The ten thousand things are all born from it. Yielding and devoted as a river, it supports the sky. It carries things along in its generosity, joins them boundlessly in its heart-sight clarity, opens them away all vast radiance in its embrace. And it unites all the various things in wholeness penetrating everywhere. A mare horse is like the land, for it roams the land boundlessly. All tender assent, yielding and devoted as a river, earth is inexhaustible in bringing forth wild bounty. And so it is that when the noble-minded set out in the lead toward a destination, they soon fall into confusion and lose the Way. But when they follow, yielding and devoted as a river, they master constancy. Finding friends on southwest plains, they move with kindred spirits. Losing friends in northeast mountains, they know blessings whole and through to completion. Inexhaustible and serene in their good fortune, they live boundless as the land. Earth (Yielding, Devoted) Earth (Yielding, Devoted) IMAGE The land's power: that is Earth. Using it, the noble-minded carry things along with earth's generosity, its heart-sight clarity. LINES 4 Wrap it all up together in a sack and hide yourself away. Though you'll earn no praise, how could you ever go astray? 16 Contentment In contentment, you depend on sage-advisors when sending the people to war in armies, and so bring forth wild bounty. PRESENTATION In contentment, you concur with everything steely as a mountain in cloud, and so bring your purpose to completion. Yielding and devoted as a river in your actions, you live in contentment. Heaven and earth are full of this same contentment, always yielding and devoted as a river in their actions, so how could you fail to depend on sage-advisors when sending the people to war in armies? Because heaven and earth are always yielding and devoted as a river in their actions, sun and moon never falter and the four seasons never waver. A sage ruler is yielding and devoted as a river in his actions. He keeps crimes and punishments perfectly clear, and so the people submit willingly. How vast, how utterly vast it is: the meaning of contentment following its proper seasons! Thunder (Dragon, Inciting) Earth (Yielding, Devoted) IMAGE At earth's appearance, thunder opening out: that is Contentment. Using it, the first emperors made music in veneration to heart-sight clarity, offered it in ravishing sacrifice to their Celestial Lord, and so made themselves worthy of their ancestors.
"Our egos will kick against and muddy our bodily awareness, especially for people who have, in this example, elevated the Dalai Lama as a kind of hero." I stopped there to comment on this sentence. What a brilliant observation of the human condition Guy. This paradigm can, IMO be applied to so many events in our lives. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I can tell you that this resonates profoundly with me. I'm now going back, with great anticipation, to reading the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to opine.
This post has *a lot* to unpack, Guy.
I'll start by saying that I trust my body. I first saw that image of the DL a year or two ago, and I immediately felt disgusted, like I needed to barf!
Second, I want to share that my husband is a board-certified music therapist!
Finally, my body has [mostly] kept me away from popular music/videos except when I consciously listen/view for analytical purposes. I have come to comprehend that anything put out by Hollywood or other conglomerates into the limelight is based on Luciferian/Satanic practices, inverting life-affirming messages that they have disguised as "love." One only needs to watch a few music videos to see the abject evil.
Furthermore, it is highly likely that everyone in the limelight (and not just Hollywood, but in politics, corporations/organizations, education, sports, medicine/"healing," et al) is there as a bloodline tool for the wayward wizards, playing a role to advance the agenda of enslaving mankind and replacing The Great Creator. Most of the "women" are trannies. It is for this reason that I no longer regularly use divination such as the I Ching or Tarot: They were developed by bloodline rulers who deceive and subjugate others based on their belief in their superiority.
However, I will occasionally employ a divination tool after alchemizing the tool itself and the entire process. And this is what I do with music as well. It's a kind of purifying-of-consciousness, saying "I know who made this and that it may have been made for mind-control or other evil purposes, but I choose to listen/watch *not for entertainment* but for critical thinking and/or for purposes that fit in with the principles of Natural Law." Perhaps you do something like that yourself when using the I Ching.