The Toltec I Ching Blog

Summer Solstice.  Dawn breaks on the longest day of the year.  I look out across the town from my hillside aerie, watching the shadows pull back from the advancing rose light.  A train whistle moans low and lonely.  It’s a small town, dissected by the train tracks running north and south.  The train rumbles into view, heading north, blocking all the early morning traffic on the town’s main thoroughfare.

I stretch out my antennas across the internet.  What gives in other parts of the world?  What are people thinking and talking about?  What is on the mind of folks in Mexico and Brazil and India and Japan and Africa and Europe and China and Russia and the East Coast of the United States and all the other faraway places?  What is the state of affairs with the plants and animals kind enough to share the world with me?  What do I know of the atmosphere and the oceans and the movement of the tectonic plates on the planet’s mantle?  What of the greater world of the galaxies and black holes and dark matter and other universes beyond the horizon of this one?  What of the subatomic world of electrons and massless photons and quarks and strings and branes unfolding into all eleven dimensions?  What of the past, of all the people who have come and gone, of all their dreams.  What of all that I do not know and cannot conceive?

After more than 5,000 years, the Mayan Long Count Calendar is coming to an end on the Winter Solstice of 2012.  The date coincides with other prophecies and divinations.  What will people think when they look back on this date from the future?  What are we about to pass through?

I try to build a vision in my heart of what I am really asking:  What is the significance of 2012—and what follows in its aftermath? I shake the coins and let them fall in the full blossoming of synchronicity, six times.  The train rumbles north past the crossing.  Traffic moves east and west again.  The Oracle speaks.

The primary hexagram, the one that answers the first part of the question, What is the significance of 2012, is named “Provoking Change”.  It is the first of the 64 hexagrams and represents the power of ending something in the right way.

Image:  A male warrior dances with the storm, holding a lightning bolt in one hand and a feather in the other.  Where the lightning bolt forks, it takes the form of a serpent of fire, light, and energy.  The rattles around his ankles make thunder every time his feet strike the ground and his eyes are fixed on the sky above.

Interpretation:  This hexagram represents the great forces essential to creating a new beginning.  The male warrior symbolizes the way of testing and training human nature that increases its versatility and fortitude.  The lightning bolt symbolizes the focused application of action and intent that provokes dramatic change.  That it takes the form of a serpent of fire, light, and energy means that your vision is part of a living creative force whose movement shatters all that is cold, dark, and stagnant.  The dance symbolizes a personal ritual that connects you to creation’s underlying rhythm of movement and resistance.  Dancing with the sky, the storm, the lightning, means that you can sense the rhythmic force of love surrounding you as the feminine and masculine creative forces continue to create and sustain the spark of life within the night of matter.  Making thunder in the sky, making earthquakes in the land means that your actions trigger a great explosion of potential which, although it cannot be seen, sets in motion ramifications great enough to change what has come before.  Holding the feather means that you are rightly connected to the higher, celestial, forces of the sky, while holding the serpent means that you are rightly connected to the lower, terrestrial, forces of the earth.  Taken together, these symbols mean that your actions break up the inertia of the old and set in motion events that cannot yet be envisioned.

When the heirs of the patriarchal culture of greed and oppression renounce their inheritance and turn their backs on the very way of life that offers them advantages over their peers, then the end of that culture is nigh.  Here, the Oracle uses the male warrior to symbolize the challenge to the status quo.  Those who are reared within the culture of dominance and force, in other words, are in a unique position with just the skills needed to bring it to an end.  Although it would be easy to identify the patriarchal culture with one nation or a group of peoples, the sad truth is that most of the governments and religions across the globe suffer from this same disease.

The Oracle is clear on this point:  the warrior here is as at home in the sky of spirit as he is on the earth of life.  This is what sets him apart from his predecessors.  He dances with Creation.  As the masculine half, he provokes change for the feminine half.  He voluntarily shifts allegiance to the new.

Action:  The masculine half of the spirit warrior guides the movement and energy of the unseen forces, stirring them up and then setting them in motion, calling them forth and then directing them against places where benefit is dammed up and unable to follow its natural course.  Where greed, ambition, hatred, and contrariness are allowed to fester, true need goes unmet and people suffer unnecessarily:  the spirit warrior provokes change in order to break up stagnation and release pent-up creative energies, freeing up benefit so that it might achieve a new equilibrium and flow to all.  Before action, there is a heartfelt need whose power is so great that it moves you to act on its behalf.  After action, you find that the benefit you helped instigate has taken on a life of its own and no longer depends on your efforts for its continuation.  Because you are inspired by the ancients’ vision of a balanced and harmonious way of life, you win the hearts of others.  Because you place the interests of the whole ahead of your own, you help eradicate the selfishness, self-interest and self-centeredness that has lead to the present impasse.  Because you deliberately tip the scales so that they might right themselves again, the stagnation of the old is replaced by a new, dynamic, equilibrium.

The Oracle points at a wide-spread movement among people in touch with the unseen forces, who channel the power of enlightened intention into the transformation of the obsolete techniques of divide-and-conquer by which governments and religions have long kept people at each others’ throats.  This forecast predicts that movements already underway will grow and unite in their efforts to bring people together everywhere with the goal of creating a new balance based on an equitable sharing of resources and responsibilities.  It further forecasts that those instigating such profound change do so for the common good, out of a heartfelt passion to see a world governed by justice and humaneness, and not in anticipation of securing a position of influence in the new order.

But what, given the climate of mounting insecurity and authoritarianism, would provoke such a change?

What, given the history of civilization, would provoke such a metamorphosis?

The 2012 Imago Gene

Once a caterpillar hangs upside down and becomes encased in its chrysalis in preparation for its metamorphosis into its predetermined butterfly form, its digestive juices turn against it, dissolving the body of the caterpillar into a soupy juice.  There is no caterpillar or butterfly at this point, just a liquid phase between.  Then something altogether remarkable occurs.  Specialized cells, which served no purpose in the life of the caterpillar, are suddenly activated in this liquid state and take on their predetermined role of organizing the cells of that liquid into the body of a butterfly.  These are the imago cells.  They serve no purpose but to awaken at the time of complete dissolution and reorganize the other cells into the fully metamorphosed adult form.

Ours is not the first generation to envision the Golden Age of Humanity.  We are, however, fast approaching the time that has been intuited by prophets, seers, sages, visionaries, mystics, shamans, and poets as the turning point from a profound ending to a profound beginning.  Why a similar intuition in so many?  Because the intuition of the universal transformation is actually the dreaming imago gene of humanity, turning over in its sleep within the chrysalis of certain individuals, preparing to awaken at the moment of social disintegration and reorganize the juvenile body politic into its fully metamorphosed form.  The intuitions, prophecies and visions, in other words, are generated by the imago genes within our DNA.  The closer we get to the time of metamorphosis, the closer to awakening the imago genes come and the greater number of people begin experiencing the ever-strengthening sense of looming change.

New research derived from the Human Genome Project demonstrates that novelty and life-enriching experiences can activate gene expression within minutes throughout the body and brain:  we are actually transforming ourselves from the genetic level up when we are experiencing a healing environment or a creative act.

No other mechanism satisfactorily explains why so many people across so many different cultures and historical epochs have foreseen the same time as the Great Ending—or how so many people are to simultaneously undergo the metamorphosis of worldviews that is to lead to the Great Beginning.  That all this is predetermined may strike some as disconcerting.  But it is predetermined only because civilization disintegrates after a period of greed and animosity.  Most of us will take solace in the fact that a safety net has been set in place that, no less strange and incomprehensible than the magnetic poles of the earth reversing their polarities, will awaken the long-dormant will to transcend of humanity and reverse the self-destructive patriarchal worldview

Intent:  Whether the stagnation is internal or external, familiarize yourself with its inner workings, its strengths and weaknesses, who it answers to and who depend on it, what it ignores and what it overreacts to, the passion of its allies and its opponents.  As a pattern of weak points and blind spots emerges, focus your aim on provoking the greatest possible change using the least possible force.  Do not be concerned if you cannot match the strength or resources of others:  if you are in the right, then allies will join your cause.  Your endeavor succeeds because you purify your intent to sincerely strive solely to see benefit moving freely among all.

Here, the Oracle advises against fighting fire with fire or force with force.  To know one’s opponents better than they know themselves is possible, just as it is possible to adopt a worldview that one’s opponents cannot divine.  To know the pressure points by which one’s opponents can be thrown off-balance is possible, just as it is possible to be utterly inscrutable to one’s opponents.  No force is necessary when lightning and thunder startle one’s opponents.  Greater strength and resources are not necessary when people everywhere no longer fear  their opponents’ threats and intimidation.  Such a movement is based on the fact that when people look across borders and ideologies and see their own relatives, the forces of hostility and alienation are already dying from within.

Typically, the Oracle’s answer involves two hexagrams, the first of which refers to the present or near future and the second of which to the future developing from those present trends.  The present reading is no exception, involving a single line change in the first, or lowest, place.

1° The window of opportunity opens—you are poised to ride this wave all the way to the far shore.  While others alternate between disbelief and relief, you are learning lessons that will serve you well.  When lightning and thunder occur in the same moment, what follows afterward is the ecstatic life.

The bottom line of a hexagram represents the grassroots masses of people.  This particular line change is an exceedingly auspicious one.  It augurs complete success and foresees even the loftiest goal being exceeded.  It does caution, however, that not everyone will join the cause:  some will fluctuate between not believing that a real metamorphosis is possible and relief that something more equitable and humane is in the offing.  Such people make ineffective allies and should be allowed to go their own way without fear of persuasion or reprisal.

For those in the vanguard of the movement, however, the time of transition offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cultivate unforeseen aspects of their character, develop new horizons of their spirituality, and hone their political acumen to razor sharpness.  This turning point in history is unlike any other:  the immediacy of information planet-wide means that there is no delay between action and response, between call and coordination, no distance between one place in the world and any other.  It is like standing where lightning strikes:  there is no delay between lightning bolt and its thunder.  The long Dark Age of Humanity gives way to an equally long Golden Age of Humanity.

Whereas the first hexagram and its line changes can bee seen to answer the first part of the question, What is the significance of 2012, the second hexagram can be viewed as answering the second part of the question, What follows in its aftermath?

This is number 10 of the 64 hexagrams, entitled “Unifying Inspiration”.

Image:  A female warrior gazes at the moon and paints what she experiences.  In the sky, ancient creative forces sing of perfection and the moon echoes their song.  Lightning falls from the sky, providing the warrior with the creative energy to paint her vision.  The warrior’s heart opens and echoes the song of perfection, too.  On her paper made of precious tree bark, she paints of the song she hears and of the butterfly of transformation she feels.

Interpretation:  This hexagram represents a vision of the wondrous potential that can arise from shared experiences.  The female warrior symbolizes the way of nurturing and encouraging human nature that increases its sensitivity and loving-kindness.  That she paints the moon the way she sees it means that you contemplate the ways in which nature transforms itself and that you give them expression in your life.  The moon echoing the song of the creative spirits means that you learn the ways of the unseen forces and make them your own.  Painting with lightning means that you give voice to the perfecting power which runs like a thread of continuity from the past, through the present, and to the future.  Opening her heart to the song of the unseen forces means that you see into the essence of the world and rejoice in the perfection you perceive underlying the surface of appearances.  The warrior’s painting is heartfelt but modest, meaning that even our best efforts are incapable of fully capturing the power, scope, and grandeur of our vision.  Taken together, these symbols mean that even in an experience as universal as gazing at the moon, you see into its essence and translate its meaning in ways that draw others together in a vision of the true significance and potential of the whole to which they belong.

Here, the Oracle foretells the stage following the 2012 transition, depicting it in no uncertain terms as a time of return to the earth-based worldview of the feminine aspect of human nature.  Now that the mindset of competition and conflict has proven obsolete, it is replaced with a reawakened sense of camaraderie and commonality.  Reconciliation is the byword of the Age.  Benevolence spills from every pair of hands.  Loving-kindness shines from every pair of eyes.  Now that hands and hearts extend across borders and ideologies, people are free to treat one another like long-lost relatives, rather than the enemies that governments and religions painted them out to be.

The principal feature of this forecast, however, is its depiction of the creative forces both in the sky and being painted by the warrior.  This points to a spiritual transformation that coincides with the social and cultural metamorphosis underway.  Similarly, the focus on the song that the spirits sing and also pours from the warrior’s heart indicates that people hold themselves to the highest spiritual ideals, making a sincere effort to act as generously and lovingly as the creative forces themselves.

Action:  The feminine half of the spirit warrior reawakens the masculine half to the beauty, joy, and truth to be found in sharing benefit.  Fulfillment is not an intellectual state devoid of emotional conscience or social communion—it is, rather, a state of multiplying benefit that strives to overflow its vessel in order to enrich other vessels.  So powerful is its sense of purpose that benefit will eventually withdraw from those who do not use it to fulfill others.  The need here is for a sense of purpose itself, for those who are themselves misguided try to guide others and all concerned suffer from the leadership’s lack of perspective, compassion, and foresight.  The heart must be filled with a vision of the great endeavor, whose collective purpose explains past events and actions, increases tolerance and understanding among contemporaries, and prepares meaningful responses to future events.  People can sacrifice personal fulfillment indefinitely only if they feel themselves contributing to the fulfillment of something greater than themselves.  For this reason, meaningless work in exchange for personal material security cannot hold people enthralled very long—nor can threats of losing such meaningless security force compliance in the long run.  This is the time for a positive vision of unity that inspires people to set aside past conflicts, accept and respect one another’s potential, and work together toward a goal that ennobles the lives of all concerned.  Only when people feel that all partake equally from the pool of resources do they willingly take up as much of the great burden as they can carry.  Open your heart to the divine purpose of human life and your vision will be like a torch for others seeking to perfect their part of creation.

Here, the Oracle condemns the purposeless meandering of civilization up to this point in history:  no true leadership with their hand on the tiller to bring a planet of people to the other shore of universal peace and prospering—a damning condemnation of those steering, since that shore is within sight of all.  Instead, it is a civilization turning in a circle around material gain for the few at the expense of the many, demonstrating a profound “lack of perspective, compassion, and foresight”.  How long did they think they could just blunder along uncaringly?  How long did they think crisis management would work before the crises multiplied beyond control?

We see here the ages-old vision about to be fulfilled by the activation of the 2012 Imago Gene:  a universal state of emotional conscience and social communion, a state of multiplying benefit, a collective search for the Great Endeavor, the common purpose, that prepares meaningful responses to future events in a spirit of unity and ennobling mutualism.

Intent:  All those who have ever lived have gazed upon the moon, their dreams and memories and knowledge reflected forever in that mirror of the unseen forces.  All those who have ever lived have bathed in the light of the moon, purified by the ancestors’ expression of a life in harmony with the world of nature and spirit.  Every time the spirit warrior returns to the world, the moon awaits to inspire both the feminine half with an inner calendar for renewing the cycles of creation and the masculine half with an inner light for exploring the infinite night of the unknown.  Drawing this hexagram, be grateful you can hear the song of the creative forces, that you can hear the language of creation:  let what you hear echo in your own heart, dialog with it, and let it echo back out in your own thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

The Oracle concludes the divination by saying that this Unifying Inspiration is the natural outgrowth of thousands of years of the collective human experience.  A solid foundation of ethics survives from many traditions of mysticism that encourage a Life Way based on benefiting all others, including the plant and animal kingdoms.  As this worldview attains ascendancy, civilization itself will constitute a healing environment—one in which the exploration of the numinous, in the experience of truth and beauty and art, leads people to a time in which they are already fulfilled and no longer looking elsewhere for fulfillment.

In Spring, all the flowers blossom together.  In a time of Unifying Inspiration, people everywhere are free to contribute to the creation of a fully metamorphosed civilization.  Each person will experience the activation of the 2012 Imago Gene as if seeing the full moon for the first time, awakening suddenly to the underlying harmony that unites nature, spirit and humanity in a single heartbeat.

—Oracle cast Summer Solstice, 2009

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications.  It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.   Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.

“….. the spirit warrior relies on the intuition for help navigating the road of opportunity.  Because the world is a web of intersecting strategies, rational thought and past experience cannot always be relied on to anticipate what lies just around the next bend of the road.  Because other strategies are based on misleading and confusing your rational thought, it is necessary to develop the insight to grasp the actual direction and momentum of change in a direct and intuitive way.  Because other strategies are based on taking advantage of the expectations you have derived from past experience, it is necessary to develop the insight to grasp the true potential of the future in a direct and intuitive way.  Just as a ship creates a prow wake by pushing water ahead of itself, all strategies create prow wakes in the spirit realm:  no matter how distant the strategy’s origin nor how much its effects may be attributed to random chance, its movement through the sea of spirit creates waves ahead of itself that the spirit companion senses and conveys as intuition.  Listening closely to your spirit companion, you are able to avoid mistakes and seize opportunities, timing your decisions so that you neither move too soon nor too late.”

—Hexagram 27, The Toltec I Ching

Ethical strategies allow us to respond to wrongdoing without doing wrong.  We can feel our way through the crossfire of competing strategies by keeping our own intent free of ulterior motives and ill will.  This allows us to avoid many pitfalls, since keeping our intent clear makes us extremely sensitive to the ill-conceived intentions around us.  Pure intentions, in other words, attune the intuition to pure intentions, making ill-conceived intentions stand out in stark contrast.  Likewise, ethical strategies attune the intuition to ethical strategies, making unethical strategies stand out in stark contrast.

But how to clarify my intent?  How to trust that my intentions are pure?

It is just this effort that makes up the greater part of the spirit warrior’s training to defeat the enemy-within.

Such a discipline begins by accepting that most of what I think is nothing more than my opinions.  Many of my opinions, of course, are handed down to me by others but nearly all are the result of my familial and cultural conditioning.  Others are formed from direct experience and continue to linger because of my irrational conviction that precisely the same circumstances will recur at some future date.  Nearly everything I once took for truth is eventually shown to be nothing more than my opinions.

The practice of letting go of my opinions is hampered by the fact the that a large part of my identity is formed around them.  A big part of who I am seems to be determined by my opinions about what things are, how they work, what kind of a world it is, why people act as they do, and why I’m treated the way I am.  Letting go of old opinions and not creating any more new ones has a profound impact on my sense of identity.  With fewer and fewer “guideposts” to tell me beforehand what I am experiencing and how I ought to react, I find myself concentrating more and more on the matter-at-hand and treating it in a more spontaneous and innovative way.  Clearing away the cobwebs of opinion, furthermore, turns out to be the surest and quickest way to rid myself of ill-conceived intentions.

The second step in this training involves looking for the purities among my intentions.  This is like picking gold flakes out of sand or a loved one out of a crowd.  Not all my intentions are ill-conceived.  Some are fundamentally pure, relics of my true self before it acquired the conditioning of this artificial personality.  Picking out these wholly positive intentions and then concentrating on them attunes me to other pure intentions, which initiates an emerging cascade of pure intentions.  This is like concentrating on a dream, picking out a detail or two, concentrating on those, which reawaken memories of other facets of the dream, which in turn reveal further details.  Concentrating on my pure intentions creates a new, or more properly a reawakened, sense of self—an utterly realistic and spiritual self able to participate in the world in the most beneficial manner possible.

Participating in the world, however, all too often means confronting injustice and oppression—

“There is no true victory in force because those overcome eventually use the moral high ground to achieve their independence.  Such a turn of events is made inevitable by the fact that the spirit of those who oppress is progressively sickened by their past actions at just the time that the spirit of those oppressed is made progressively stronger and finer by the hardship they have endured.  Force corrupts those who use it and ennobles those who endure it.  For this reason, those who use force fail because they are brutish and short-sighted while those whose spirit cannot be dominated succeed because they are humane and wise.  When those who are stronger seek to dominate and control us then we must develop a strategy that ensures we defeat our oppressors without repeating their mistakes.  In this sense, it is necessary that we commit beforehand to making no attempt to exact revenge from those who have wronged us.  In order to emerge unscathed from domination we have to recognize the indomitable nature we have inherited from our ancestors and then ally ourselves with others committed to preserving inner independence until outer independence can be openly celebrated.  Because you take the time to gather inner strength without arousing any suspicion, you succeed in freeing yourself without harming another.  Because your humaneness shines on your oppressors, you succeed in freeing them without harming yourself.”

—Hexagram 41, The Toltec I Ching

Ethical strategies are especially crucial when confronting opposition—

“…..the spirit warrior accumulates force in order to resist the use of force.  Whether they are internal or external, it is necessary to confront the forces working in opposition to our goals.  This is a matter of grave delicacy, however, since the passions tied to self-interest run equally deep and strong among all concerned.  Old grievances and resentments, in particular, stand in the way of a peaceful and mutually advantageous resolution to the current discord.  For this reason, confronting others means we are forced to confront ourselves, restraining our own anger and righteous indignation by seeing how our own actions have contributed to the present conflict.  Only by holding our anger in check can we avoid escalating the problem at hand:  an uncompromising stance of having been wronged serves no one’s purposes here since it merely forces others to do the same.  The danger is that real hostility can be ignited under these conditions—hostility that can inflict profound suffering on all concerned and take a long time for any party to heal.  This is a time to treat your opposition with all the respect due a great warrior:  avoid inflammatory and provocative statements based on half-truths or a one-sided view of things, since slyly provoking others to hostility is doubly hostile.  This is likewise a time to act like a great warrior:  accept responsibility for past mistakes and make good faith commitments to remedy injustices and imbalances among all concerned immediately, since demanding others right their wrongs without following suit is doubly wrong.  For the spirit warrior, true force is exercised by not resorting to hostility even when it promises the shortest route to success.”

—Hexagram 32, The Toltec I Ching

Foremost among ethical strategies are the qualities of restraint and self-control, especially when under pressure—

“Whether you are the pursuer or the pursued, this is a time for holding back:  where the mother bird tries to hold back the hunting fox from discovering her nest, the hunting fox tries to hold back his first reaction to jump at every opportunity.  In the world of nature, both the nesting bird and the hunting fox are spirit warriors.  Every moment of every day is a battle for survival of the individual and the bloodline.  Each moment of each day requires unbroken attention to the strategies that enable them to successfully play their part in the on-going work of creation.  True spirit warriors master the art of holding back by studying what motivates others—and themselves—to act as they do:  the nesting bird succeeds because she knows the fox chases anything that runs from it; the hunting fox succeeds because he knows the bird runs away from the nest to protect her eggs.  Study what others hold valuable, study what you yourself hold valuable, and you can successfully act on the purposes you perceive behind every action.”

—Hexagram 35, the Toltec I Ching

Inspired Action likewise utilizes ethical strategies for resolving internal conflicts—

“….. the spirit warrior gazes into the smoking mirror of the true self without blinking.  It is a time for exhibiting the character traits you believe you should have exhibited when facing a similar dilemma in the past:  because you take advantage of this second chance to prove yourself to yourself, you erase past regrets and reveal your true self to the unseen forces.  By turning our perception upon ourselves, we are able to sense the lessons we have learned from past mistakes.  Until we have had the opportunity to act on those lessons and put them into effect, however, part of us remains frozen at that stage of our development.  For that reason, there are few more fortuitous times than those in which we can prove we are stronger and wiser than in the past:  by discerning our own patterns of behavior that run consistently beneath the surface of appearances, we are able to stop repeating past mistakes and emerge victorious over our own self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.  Because you intuitively know that turning points periodically return until they are finally resolved, you are fully prepared to act when the time comes:  because you wait vigilantly for the opportunity to revisit a period of darkness, you do not fail to use the present turning point to extend the continuity of your light further back into the past.”

—Hexagram 54, The Toltec I Ching

As the examples above demonstrate, Inspired Action adapts to circumstances but always reflects the balanced strategy of the spirit warrior, whose masculine and feminine halves constantly intermingle to produce just the right blend of metamorphosis and nurturance.

Without definition, defying expectations, free of contrivances of any kind, Inspired Action reflects the mystical philosophy of Flower-and-Song, grounding us in the ever-present center of the world and, paradoxically as always, giving us the wings to take flight into the Beyond—

“Just as someone who has mastered a musical instrument can improvise at will, you are able to move through this time with an untroubled spirit, adapting and responding to sudden and unforeseen changes by initiating sudden and unforeseen changes of your own.  Just as living music gains vitality and power when played by more than one musician, your efforts are in harmony with the unseen forces and aided by innumerable spirit helpers.  Just as master musicians become the music they play, you become the moving source of renewal that you express.  Just as the perennial presence of music is given new forms of expression every generation, your actions advance the collective work of renewing the perennial truth every generation.”

—Hexagram 48, The Toltec I Ching

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications.  It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.   Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.

Inspired Action cannot be defined or even imagined beforehand.

Why?  Because it must be tailored to the moment.  It has to be a response that circumstances evoke from us.  It needs to be an act of collaboration with the Living Whole.

It cannot be premeditated or calculated because we cannot know what the moment holds until it arrives.  We cannot sense what the whole of circumstances requires until we are fully immersed in it.  To imagine how we ought to act beforehand causes us to fall into predictable patterns of behavior that fail to express the miraculous nature of the ever-new creation within which we live.

Inspired Action reveals the wellspring of rejoicing forever bubbling just beneath the surface of appearances.  It engages the world as a vast mystery of unimaginable potentials and aims to participate in its ongoing creation in ways that benefit the most.  It is not so much something we do on our own as much as it is music we hear and feel and long to play, a dance we cannot wait to join.  It arises from our depths to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s talking to a stranger, shopping for food, driving to work, watching a movie, starting a new endeavor, walking in nature, meditating, repairing a relationship, making love, or creating art—if where we stand is authentic, our actions will be inspired.

Flower-and-Song

For the ancient Toltecs and the civilizations they spawned, the highest expression of a spirit warrior embodied the mystical philosophy of Flower-and-Song.

“Flower-and-Song” is a difrasismo, a common form of expression in Nahuatl that uses two words to form a metaphor for a third, more expansive, concept.  It is often translated as “poetry” but its meaning is more comprehensive than that, demanding that its practitioners live a “poetic life”.  Examining the difrasismo a little makes this clear.

“Flower” in this context involves a three-stage engagement with the world.  The first stage involves seeing each moment—and whatever that moment holds—as perfect as a blossoming flower.  The second stage involves seeing each moment—and whatever that moment holds—as already fading and passing into death.  The final stage involves bearing these two visions simultaneously in the heart, engaging the moment and what it holds with the full emotional realization that it is “perfect and dying.”

Far from an intellectual exercise, this practice demands the greatest courage, for to face these two soul-shattering emotions at the same time requires us to open ourselves to the profoundest joy and grief all at once.  Without flinching from the perfection before us, we are driven to our knees in awe at the impossibility of spirit taking form in matter.  Without flinching from the inevitable death of everything we know and love, we cannot help but burst apart with grief and empathy.

“Flower” forces us to a profound gratitude and appreciation in the face of perfection even as it forces us to honor each perfection for its nobility in the face of inevitable death.  It is the spirit warrior’s courage to authentically feel, Everything I know and everything I love is perfect and dying.

“Song” in this context means that the most authentic act a spirit warrior can perform is to give expression to the dual realization attained in “Flower”.  This is the reason that the difrasismo is generally translated as “poetry”.  But the deeper implication of this mystical philosophy of life means that “Song” involves treating every moment as an opportunity to express the truth of “Flower”.  It involves treating this entire lifetime as a single act of expressing the continuous vision of “Flower”.

Inspired Action makes use of every thought, word and deed to embody the ancients’ philosophy of Flower-and-Song.  Treating all things as miracles that pass away too soon, our thoughts, speech and actions take on a new caliber and timbre:  We concentrate on what is present instead of what is absent and we discover new depths of patience and tolerance.  Our lives take on greater meaning and our contributions meet with greater success.  We treat everything and everyone more nobly and we are enriched immeasurably.

Inspired Action enters each moment asking these two questions—

What is in front of me?

How am I treating it?

The answer to the second question is much simpler than the first.  What is in front of me? forces us to confront the ultimately unknowable nature of the world.  It forces us to accept the extraordinary mystery always veiled by ordinary appearances.  It forces to us to look harder:  Is this merely what I have become accustomed to through daily contact—or is it the sea of spirit in all its manifest forms?

How am I treating what is in front of me? demands that we watch our inner actions—our thoughts and intentions, our wishes aimed at things outside ourselves—as well as our outer demeanor and reactions.  Am I acting nobly or mean-spiritedly?  Am I ennobling my life or trivializing it?  Am I rising above pettiness or descending into it?  Am I treating others like superiors and inferiors, all in pursuit of my self-interest—or as peers bravely facing their own death as well as they can?  Am I spreading ill will, discord and sorrow wherever I go—or compassion, collaboration and joy?

None of this, however, should be interpreted as thinking or acting naively.  Of course, not everyone will treat you as you treat them.  Of course, there will be those who seek to take advantage of you.  Of course.  But how others treat you is beyond your control.  None of us can control what happens to us.  The only thing we can control is how we respond to what happens to us.

Inspired Action does not imply being a doormat or punching bag for untrustworthy people.  Wisdom is based on solid clear-eyed discernment, seeing things for what they are.  Understanding is based on a wide array of experiences, providing a keen grasp of human nature.

The question of ethical strategies is one we will take up in the third installment of this Inspired Action theme.  But to study strategies before we work to clarify our intent is to invite cynicism and self-interest in the back door even as we’re showing false hope and naiveté out the front.  There is little purpose to devising strategies, in other words, until we have undertaken the effort to rid ourselves of ulterior motives.

As we read in Hexagram 6, “Fostering Self-Sacrifice”—

“One of the ancients’ great teachings is that acting out of self-interest to the detriment of the whole injures all.  Because profit brings gain for one at the expense of many and benefit brings gain for many at the expense of one, the logic of benefit is superior to the logic of profit.  Because self-interest cannot injure the whole without injuring oneself and self-sacrifice cannot benefit the whole without benefiting oneself, the logic of self-sacrifice is superior to the logic of self-interest.”

And again, in Hexagram 62, “Conceiving Spirit”—

“…..the spirit warrior breaks through the barrier separating matter and spirit.  Such a barrier is erected in our minds by the constant training we receive from those who find advantage in promoting the separation of people from nature, from each other, and from their own true self.  If people everywhere perceived matter and spirit to be the same thing, after all, the ignorance, cruelty, and suffering that makes up much of human history would end:  if we were all to experience the material form of nature as spirit, we would stop harming it by diminishing it faster than we help it replenish itself; if we were all to experience the material form of people everywhere as spirit, we would stop harming one another by acting as if our own rights and desires were superior to their own; if we were all to experience the material form of our own individual bodies as spirit, we would stop harming ourselves by doubting that every thought, feeling, and action play a pivotal role in eternity.  Breaking through such a mental barrier is a matter of constant training, as well:  if we do not use every thought, feeling, and action to intensify our experience of matter as spirit, we continue to desecrate the temple of nature, the temple of civilization, and the temple of individuality.  Because you increasingly see the invisible within the visible, your thoughts are filled with insight, your feelings with good will, and your actions with benefit.”

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications.  It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams.   Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.