“….. 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.