The great Chinese sage Chuang Tzu calls our attention to a strange tree beside the road.  Its bark is so tough that no ax can penetrate it, its wood is so twisted that it cannot be split or used for carpentry.  We can imagine this ancient tree, growing in the most dramatic and inspiring way, its leaves no good for tea, its fruit no good for medicine.  Of what value is this Useless Tree?

As Chuang Tzu points out, perhaps we ought to simply seek out its shade and be grateful for a place to rest or even admire the uniqueness of its form and beauty—perhaps we ought, in other words, to seek its true usefulness instead of pressing our own wants on it.

He goes further, however, to point out that the tree is ancient—and indeed, will continue to go on as it is—precisely because it cannot be exploited.  It remains true to its nature, so its life is not cut short by the whims of others.  Because it cannot be exploited, it lives on to fulfill its destiny of inspiring all who value the sublimely useless.

Objects of inspiration capture our attention because they defy our attempts to categorize them or domesticate them or explain them away.  They are troublesome in the sense that they speak to an older part of us, one that longs for symbolic communication, authenticating our own symbolic self.  And they can be particularly troublesome when their symbolic utterances precede actual events, as if there exists an underlying order to the world that synchronizes its happenings in a way that is completely invisible to our human senses.

Like the Useless Tree, they root alongside the road, offering us a place to rest and seek inspiration but oblivious to all who pass oblivious to their antiquity.  Such objects of inspiration are sublimely useless, beyond the exploitation of our own wants, precisely because they themselves are inspired.  Emerging out of the mists of prehistory, like great pyramids suddenly revealed by evaporating fog, they speak the language of our common ancestors.  They speak the language of our common soul.

The I Ching of ancient China is one such monument.  The Mayan Calendar of ancient Mesoamerica is another.  Both are divinatory systems that have survived now for more than three thousand years.  Both will still be standing, offering respite and inspiration, three thousand years from now.  They will outlive us as they have outlived all those other generations.

Troublesome indeed.  They beg so many questions.  Like the great pyramids, we wonder at how they were built in the first place, who conceived of their form and symmetry, what was the original source of their own inspiration.  But unlike pyramids that are built stone-by-stone, the I Ching had to emerge full-blown as a flower blooming overnight—what mind grasped the whole of its system all at once?  And unlike pyramids that are built stone-by-stone, the Sacred Calendar had to emerge full-blown as a flower blooming overnight—what mind grasped the whole of its system all at once?  Troublesome indeed.

Particularly now.  Because it is now that the Mayan Calendar completes its 5,128-year cycle.

On December 21st, 2012, the Winter Solstice, the Long Count of the ancient Mayans will arrive at the last day of its journey through the 13 Baktuns that comprise the Grand Cycle of 1,872,000 days.  Yes, that is correct:  the Mayan Calendar, originating among some of the world’s greatest astronomers and mathematicians of antiquity, comes to an end after nearly two million days, precisely on the Winter Solstice of 2012.

Troublesome indeed.  What are we to make of this strange coincidence?  Certainly it has now become a cultural meme of the first magnitude, propagated by an apocalyptic movie, dozens of knowledgeable books, and thousands of concerned websites.  The noise, for those tuning into the conversation, is an escalating crescendo of mixed messages and contradictory predictions.

What are we to make of this strange coincidence?  Here we are, alive at the time that the Mayan Calendar completes its Grand Cycle.  The stirring of voices around us grows louder with warnings, alarm, and scientific debunkings.  The media has jumped into the fray with both feet now and its ratings-driven programming requires as sensational an approach as possible.

I have written elsewhere in these blog postings about the actual mechanics and meanings of the Sacred Calendar, as well as the tendencies of groups to move unconsciously as a herd, so I am not going to cover that ground again here.  At the suggestion of Paul Cash of Larson Publications, I have consulted the Oracle of The Toltec I Ching regarding the meaning of this strange coincidence and what changes this 2012 cultural meme augurs.

With all this in mind, I cast the Oracle on November 14, 2009, and received an answer of Hexagram #5, Restoring Wholeness.  The result contained no line changes, indicating a relatively lengthy period—at least two years long—of similar change.  In other words, there may be fluctuations in the degree of change but not in kind.  The clearest way to think of this is that each Hexagram represents a season:  although every day in summer may bring some changes, they are within the context of summer and do not partake of the spirit of another season until that one passes.  We are entering the situation of Restoring Wholeness and there are no prevailing trends within in it signaling a move into another situation any time in the near future.

The term Restoring Wholeness, of course, indicates first and foremost that the situation we are coming out of is one of division, conflict, and alienation—a not-too-far-off description of the past few years of our collective, even global, experience.  Since the 2012 cultural meme has expanded beyond any borders in particular and is considered significant in nearly every country in the world, the present reading should address the global human situation as well as possible.

Image:  An old woman heals a young male warrior, who wears an arrowhead necklace.  While she chants an ancient curing song, she places a lizard on his shoulder and administers purifying herbs and water.

Interpretation:  This hexagram depicts great benefit fulfilling great need.  The old woman personifies the great-great-great-grandmother, the feminine force of profound wisdom and nurturing, the inner healing force within all, the aged and loving medicine woman.  The male warrior personifies the strength and vitality of youth, the great potential of the young, the idealism and insensitivity of the inexperienced, the impatient and reactive nature of the untrained passions.  Taken together, they symbolize the exchange of forces needed to heal old wounds and enable you to bring benefit to all around you.  The herbs symbolize the feminine medicines of compassion and the understanding of relationships.  The arrowhead represents the masculine medicines of single-mindedness and the pursuit of new experiences.  Taken together, they depict the exchange of energies whereby the new must be refined by the old and the old must periodically be revitalized by the new.  For this reason, the hexagram shows that the young warrior is both a patient and an apprentice of the medicine woman, learning firsthand the ways of restoring natural and original wholeness and, thereby, bringing much needed energy to the feminine half that has been giving to others for so long.  The lizard, the one who grows back its tail, represents the spiritual medicine of regeneration whereby the original state of wholeness is restored.  The medicinal herbs and water together represent the purifying and cleansing away of the useless, the wasteful, and that which only confuses and drags down the original energy of body, mind, and spirit.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you reclaim your spiritual birthright of indivisible wholeness.

The most obvious aspects of this hexagram are the discrepancies between the healer and the warrior.  She is aged, wise and benevolent.  He is young, inexperienced and independent.  She is the ancient healer, whose vitality is no longer that of the young.  He is the youthful warrior, whose vitality is not yet that of the aged.  In terms of the global rift whose wholeness requires restoration, she symbolizes the older naturalistic worldview of heart-based spirituality, while he symbolizes the newer technological worldview of head-based scientific materialism.  She is the nature mystic, attuned to and immersed in the sacredness of everything.  He is the manipulator of nature, the controller bending dead matter and insentient life to his will.

Interpreting the Oracle’s answer in terms of these two worldviews is dictated by the context of the question, which seeks to uncover the meaning behind the confluence of the ending of the Mayan Calendar and the way the modern mind is reacting to it.

These worldviews are no longer confined to ethnic cultures or geographical regions, of course.  Now entire sub-cultures of people living in the technological culture, for example, have abandoned the worldview of matter as dead and insentient, taking up a lifeway of revering the sacred in every form.  This movement back towards the animistic—or what is often thought of as the shamanistic—worldview can be seen as the vanguard of the coming widespread restoration of humanity’s ruptured wholeness.  It is not necessary to recapitulate all the elements of that rupture.  Everyone in the world knows that things cannot continue in this way. We have entered the time of Restoring Wholeness.

This Hexagram says that nature and people will no longer be treated as disposable resources.  Heartless greed and cold intellectualism will no longer make policy for the whole of nature and humanity.  The head is a good adviser but a heartless tyrant when allowed to rule.  The newer worldview of technological hubris will voluntarily step out of the leadership position and take up a power-sharing stance with the older worldview of openhearted reverence for all of nature and humanity.  The head is gradually realizing it is part of this relationship between spirit and matter.

Knowledge is not wisdom.  Knowing how to wreak havoc is not the same as having the wisdom not to do so.  Knowing how to harm ourselves is not the same as having the wisdom not to do so.  The young warrior in this hexagram knows how to produce vast technological changes but not how to reverse their unintended consequences.  The old healer in this hexagram knows how to avoid creating unintended consequences by sustaining a more simplified, if less materially extravagant, lifeway.

The warrior’s arrowhead symbolizes the directness of his approach to matters.  The drawback to this strategy is that different circumstances require different approaches—the approach cannot always be direct and purposeful action.  Such a one-sided focus on doing creates tremendous stress on the body.  Those brought up in a worldview of doing are constantly frustrated by the fact that they cannot act yet, or that they missed the opportunity to act, or that increasing competition among other actors conflicts with their own actions.  Those brought up learning how to change things do not learn how to accept things that do not need changing.  This fundamental level of chronic stress upsets the body’s natural response to life, causing poor sleep, an impaired immune system, a heightened sense of alarm, anxiety, and impaired judgment.  Impaired judgment—not the best resource for people bent on doing at every turn.

Awareness is.  Will does.

The healer’s medicine, the power to restore wholeness, is based on the ability to be with things.  This is not nearly as nebulous as it sounds to the modern mind, which generally translates being with things as not doing anything.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Or closer.

Being with things means being a part of things, feeling ourselves a part of things, sensing the world around us—indeed, the entire universe—as the larger body of which we are an integral part.  So not doing anything does not describe the active process of psychologically merging with the one body of creation.  It requires dropping away boundaries of the self-other duality and feeling ourselves fully immersed in the Whole, just as each of our cells is fully immersed in our bodies and each fish is part of the sea.   On the other hand, not doing anything does precisely describe the ancient worldview, since it is the world itself that is doing and any active striving on our part to exert our own will on things inevitably results in unintended consequences. The ability to move along with the flow of change, making sure that all people and animals and plants are living in peace and shared prospering, is an ancient art and one built on the wisdom of sustaining a lifeway that is in harmony and balance with the entire world.  Of what good is progress, in other words, if it leaves the majority of people in the world behind and drives other species into extinction and sows the seeds of our own destruction in the environment?

Wisdom is.  Knowledge does.

By answering with this hexagram, the Oracle is saying to us all, the solution is not coming from outside you:  you must commit to an extended period of healing this immature warrior mentality—only then will you have the sense of belonging together that you need to move forward as an entire world.

Action:  The masculine and feminine halves of the spirit warrior replenish one another.  It is a time for seeking new experiences that will broaden your vistas and deepen your joy of life.  Your innate wisdom and compassion do not have their source in thought but, rather, in life—they are not replenished by good intentions but, rather, by meaningful experiences.  In order for a well to bring benefit to others, it must tap into the unseen river of benefit flowing beneath the surface of the world of the senses.  Take no comfort in your accomplishments or knowledge now.  Instead, look to your need and pursue new interests that hold the possibility of discovering more meaningful joy in this lifetime. Because you make yourself whole again, you succeed in bringing benefit to others likewise seeking to restore their own wholeness.

Restoring wholeness with the world is an essential step.  But real wisdom knows when to open the heart to compassion and forgiveness.  Old enemies will find the profoundest source of relief and joy as they put away arms and forget old wrongs.  Difficult as it is to imagine before it has happened, this will feel like the most natural and foreordained of events once it has occurred.  The worldview of the nature mystic fosters not just mutual respect among all but reverence, love and adoration.  Life cannot hate life.  Life cannot hold one life more sacred than another.  The change that is coming is one of universal reverence—we will be One again once we hold the sacredness of all things in our hearts, we will be Whole again once we feel nothing but benevolence and good will toward all.  The lost art of regeneration is a soul art:  it is the forgotten practice of dissolving guilt, anger, hatred, revenge, and hostility with the open heart of joyous gratitude.  It is the lost soul art of dropping every expectation that joy is going to come from outside and setting forth to spend every moment producing joy regardless of circumstances.

Intent:  When people’s reactions are out of proportion to events, it is a clear signal that an old wound has not fully healed and is being reactivated by present circumstances.  Such reactions barely disguise the fact that something in the present is provoking an individual or group to relive the emotions of an old injury.  But disguise it they do, for the impact of many injuries is either long-forgotten or unrecognized.  Whether you find this imbalance in yourself or others, the nurturing-medicine of the wise feminine force must be augmented by the directing-medicine of the single-minded masculine force:  while it is essential that the wounded warrior be healed through reassurance and loving-kindness, it is just as necessary that the wounded warrior take up the discipline of recognizing that the new is not the old.  At the first sign of distress, the wounded warrior must immediately name the present and not allow the past wound to be re-opened.  Using the beneficial masculine force in this way allows you to keep the past from infecting the present.

The Oracle closes with these final words regarding the intent we need to carry forth with us into the coming time of Restoring Wholeness.  The day-to-day practice involves constantly reminding ourselves that this is not the past.  We must all be willing to start over, recognizing that there is more than enough blame to go around on all sides and that the old worldview of forever keeping old animosities alive by constantly recounting the wrongs of history needs to be replaced with a worldview of universal amnesty and goodwill.  The past is dead, long live the present.

Everyone in the world knows that things cannot go on like this any longer.

The Oracle says everyone in the world is on the verge of acquiring the wisdom to act on that knowledge.

The Golden Age of Humanity is within our grasp if we will but dare reach out our hand.

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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.

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Cyclical in the sense that history is divided into a series of Ages (sometimes called Suns), each of which led to a better, more humane, world.

Spiritually potent in the sense that the creative forces governing certain time periods (sometimes called gods in Western thinking) have sacrificed and invested themselves in the creation and sustaining of the world.

We moderns tend to view time as linear, forgetting that, as one Taoist sage put it, Everything we know about spirit we learn by analogy from nature.  The seasons of the year correspond to the times of day, both of which correlate to the four directions of the compass in what has been termed the Spatializaton Of Time—

The Map of Inner Change

By analogy, we know that Spring symbolizes the sowing of seeds, that Summer symbolizes the cultivation and care of what we are growing, that Autumn symbolizes the gathering in and harvesting of our efforts, that Winter symbolizes the resting and saving up of energy for the next creative effort.  This is the cyclical aspect of time:  starting something new, nurturing and developing it, sharing the benefit with others, and consolidating resources for the next endeavor.

But the spiritually potent aspect.  That is something else.  It requires that we sensitize ourselves to the Livingness of Space.  It means leaving behind the view of matter as dead and directly experiencing stone and tree and animal and weather and the sun and stars as Alive and Aware, with no less a spiritual half of their body than ours possesses.  It means standing in Spring and feeling the mood and intention of the creative force governing that season.  It requires, in a word, returning to the world view of indigenous people everywhere who hold every thing in creation as sacred persons, each with a lifetime and heart-mind of its own.  It is only our lack of sensitivity to the mood and intention of the creative forces invested in, and emanating out of, each thing that keeps us bound up in isolation and alienation from the loving embrace of Spirit-Nature.

It will seem strange to some to think of a stone as a sacred person.  But then again, have they ever thought of themselves as a sacred person?  They may know that indigenous people ask the plant for permission to take its leaves or ask the stone for permission to carve it but do they understand that the plant or stone are being treated as a sacred person?  One thing we can see as utter fact is the equality with which the universe treats all things:  the eagle may take the hare, but it dies touching the high-voltage wires around its nest, dooming the rabbits offspring as well as its own.  Any hierarchy we imagine to exist is leveled by death and accident.  The electrons making up my body come from stone and tree and sun and stars and, when this body disintegrates, its electrons will fly off into billions of directions to help constitute other persons, many of whom will not be human beings.  The webwork of subatomic particles forming the space-time continuum has no “holes”.  It is simply one unbroken interwoven Livingness of Space.

Every practical person in the world knows that things cannot go on like they have been any longer.  Only blindfolded ideologues and self-serving demagogues continue to push civilization closer and closer to self-destruction.  The rest of us know—or are rapidly coming to recognize—that we cannot simply go on propagating the same old dead worldview that allows the most brutish among us to continue desecrating Nature and Humanity.

The ancient Mayans and their counterparts throughout ancient Mesoamerica—as well as other indigenous peoples around the world, such as the visionaries who constructed the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching—were well aware of the patterns of human behavior, both individual and collective.  Intrinsic to such worldviews is the concept of a universal duality that makes up the universal unity of the world.  While this has many cosmological significances in term of the creation and sustaining of the world, it plays itself out in the patterning of human perception and behavior through the rule of action and backlash.

The future, in other words, becomes predictable simply by understanding that sooner or later, everything changes into its opposite.  The art of such predictions lies in being able to recognize when things are getting to be either “too much” or “too little”, states which call forth their opposites.  This requires a sensitivity to the underlying mood and intent of things, which manifests itself as a keen sense of timing.  The greater the historical shifts from one opposite to another, the longer the time frame.

December 21, 2012 marks the end of a 5,128-year cyle.  The Mayan Long Count calendar is established as beginning on a purely mythological date of August 11, 3114 BC in order that its end date would occur in our time.  The Mayan mathematicians went so far as to drop the date directly on a Winter Solstice, just to get our attention.  Aware of the patterns of human perception and behavior, the Mayan priest-scribes foresaw this time, our time, as the one in which the dead worldview would give way to the Living Worldview.

Let us honor their sensitivity to the changing Ages of human nature and their keen sense of timing.

Let us honor our own sacred nature by ending this Dark Age of inhumanity and joyfully advancing in the next, more humane, Golden Age of Humanity.

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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.

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By way of example, a Mayan tribal elder is quoted recently as saying that the idea of the calendar predicting a catastrophic doomsday springs from Western ideas and not Mayan.  This has been followed up even more recently by a Washington Post article approaching the matter from a scientific perspective, in which the astronomical basis of the movie 2012 is viewed as sensationalizing for profit.  That article does not take Sony Pictures to task strongly enough for its setting up a phony (and very hi-tech) website called Institute for Human Continuity, whose goal is Ensuring the end is just the beginning and where you can vote for who ought to lead humanity in the post-2012 era.  Sane and caring people everywhere ought to boycott this film just to protest this kind of commercial exploitation.

Think none of this matters?  Think everyone knows its entertainment?

According to the Post article, David Morrison, the author of an online feature called Ask an Astrobiologist, has “gotten nearly 1,000 e-mails from people who think something dire is about to befall the planet. One teenager wrote to Morrison that he’d rather commit suicide than see the world destroyed.”

An even more recent Los Angeles Times article entitled, Scientists try to calm ‘2012′ hysteria, notes:

Morrison says it’s hard to know whether the people who have written to him with their fears represent a fringe or a larger cross-section of Americans who, distrustful of traditional sources of information and the authorities behind them, are falling victim to the Internet’s snake-oil salesmen.

In such an environment, the viral marketing campaign for the movie “2012,” which encourages people to “Vote for the Leader of the Post-2012 World,” can seem like confirmation of the apocalypse, rather than of an upcoming 90-minute entertainment vehicle.

A spokesman for Sony Pictures, Steve Elzer, said: “We believe consumers understand that the advertising is promoting a fictional film.”

Morrison said the movie’s distributors are feeding the “panic” by creating some of the fake science websites. Most of the sites, Morrison said, are full of misinformation and speculation, often by people who have written books they are trying to sell.

But scientific and ethical considerations aside for the moment, let’s return to the source of the 2012 phenomenon, the ending of a 5,128-year cycle of time as marked by the Mayan Calendar.

Drawn away from purely academic writings for the moment, David Stuart, arguably the foremost expert on Mayan glyphs in the world,  spoke his own words of reassurance for informed lay readers, in which he clarified his previous statements regarding the now-famous Monument Six of Tortugero, one of the few surviving Mayan texts that actually seem to predict events—and that specifically mentions the December 21, 2012 date.

Or does it?  Stuart references an article by his colleague Stephen Houston, who points out greater ambiguity in the reading of Monument Six than previously recognized.  The date may not reference any objective date but rather be ceremonial, having to do with the consecration of a particularly sacred building.

Great pains are being taken by such noted experts and the Mayans themselves to point out that the misconceptions about the world ending simply because the Mayan calendar turns over and begins another 5,128-year cycle are based on exaggerations and decidedly Western apocalyptic myth-making.  Why?  Well, obviously, the release of the special effects extravaganza 2012 may push already-anxious men, women and children into fear overdrive.

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I take a deep breath and ask the Oracle my question out loud, determined not to flinch:  At what crossroads does our global civilization stand now—and in what direction does good fortune lie?

A rare thunderstorm shatters the Oregon twilight.  Lightning strikes the foothills, thunder rattles the windows, the wailing wind drives sheets of rain sideways against the house.  The lights blink off on off on.  I shake the coins, drop them, count them, six times.  The squall passes on to the next valley.  The Oracle speaks.

IMAGE:  A male warrior holds the funeral bundle of his child, preparing to place it in its burial site.  His face reflects the shock, anguish, and horror that fills his heart.

I almost flinch.  This is surely the most ominous of the 64 hexagrams.

INTERPRETATION:  This hexagram depicts the inevitable result of carelessness and irreverence.  The male warrior symbolizes the versatility and fortitude that are at the core of outer nurturing.  That he prepares to place the funeral bundle of his child in its burial site means that strength cannot accomplish afterwards what nurturing can accomplish beforehand.  That his face and heart are filled with shock, anguish, and horror means that he is in the grips of the most terrible truth:  that which we most cherish cannot be replaced.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you avoid causing suffering by honoring and nurturing all that your spirit touches.

Animism is the world’s oldest Life Way.  It’s a world view in which everything has spirit, in which every thing is alive and aware.  A world view in which all is sacred—humanity no more or less than anything else.  It is not driven by self-interest but by reverence.  It’s not that I treat nature right so that I might live better, for instance.  It’s that I treat nature right because it is the living body of the One Spirit.

The corpus of practices by which people interact with Spirit in a mutually beneficial way is called shamanism.  The way in which human beings communicate with Spirit is a principal concern of shamanism and that gives rise to systems of divination.  An Oracle gives voice to the essence of situations and the trends developing out of them—it is the spontaneous response of the One Spirit to an individual’s act of divination.  The I Ching is one of the world’s best-known Oracles, having been in continuous use for at least 3,500 years.
For all who perceive the world as something grander and more noble than a merely materialistic set of mechanistic causes and effects, the Oracle issues this dire warning of imminent loss.  The last line of the Interpretation reminds us that the only thing that cannot be taken from us without our permission is our spirit of reverence and good will toward all.

ACTION:  The masculine half of the spirit warrior draws back from the brink before it is too late.  It is not a time for pursuing desires and ambitions:  those who cannot temper their strength run the risk of losing a source of that strength.  When our masculine half goes too far in pursuit of goals and becomes short-sighted and impatient, it is necessary to balance it with the strongest medicine possible:  real problems can be avoided only by balancing the masculine half with the power of the feminine half’s protective love.  It is the feminine half’s sense of caring and reverence that holds the key to fulfilling the real goal of happiness, companionship, and a clear conscience:  those who do not hold the emotions of caring and reverence dear to their hearts run the risk of causing pain for themselves and others.  Just because we can acquire something doesn’t mean we should, just because we can accomplish something doesn’t mean we have to:  stopping to really consider what we are risking, allowing ourselves to feel the full brunt of such an emotional loss—this is the protective and loving nature of the feminine half’s medicine.  Likewise, stubborn pursuit of goals even in the face of warning signs, longing for something that threatens to cause suffering for others, refusal to change course when it endangers the greater good—this is the short-sighted and zealous nature of the masculine half when it loses its balance and sense of proportion.  Because you treat nature, other people, and your own creations with the care and reverence you would your own infant child, you counteract every self-defeating action before it ever arises in thought or feeling.

The spirit warrior is a man or woman who aims to defeat his or her enemy-within, his or her own self-defeating habits of thoughts, feelings, and reactions.  The dual nature of Spirit, whether cosmological principles on the largest scale or complementary halves of each individual, are symbolized by the terms masculine and feminine.  The masculine half is often thought of as direct purposeful action, such as the act of tunneling through a mountain to get to the sea.  The feminine half is likewise thought of as unconditional open-hearted nurturing, such as the river that waters everything it touches as it winds around mountains to get to the sea.  Obviously, the goal of the spirit warrior is to bring her or his two halves into the kind of dynamic balance that allows for the optimum response to circumstances in the most timely manner.

Here, it is the stubborn pursuit of obsolete and self-destructive goals that the Oracle warns us against—and encourages us to envision the irreparable loss of the true benefits of civilization, to feel the emotional pain of those losses ahead of time in order to motivate ourselves to immediate action.  As it makes clear, this is not the kind of action that has brought us to an impasse:  we can’t get out of a hole using the same shovel we dug it with.  As the Life Way of ethical values and behaviors becomes more widespread and replaces the consensus of self-interest and needless consumption, the rigid patriarchal hierarchies supporting—and supported by—such decadence give way to self-directed egalitarian groups coordinating their efforts to protect what is valuable.  It’s this emotional connection to what needs to be salvaged, this treating all things as we would our own child, that forges us together in a sense of shared purpose and mutual respect.

INTENT:  The foolish ruin even that upon which they depend.  When we recognize the sanctity of life, however, and work to protect it from unnecessary and pointless harm, then we safeguard our own spiritual foundation and that of all who touch our spirit.  Consider what cannot be replaced and then cherish it, planting seeds of intent in the spirit realm to nurture it and keep it from being lost forever.  Shun materialism and self-interest as you would a poisoned well:  keep to the path of the balanced and harmonious way of life, revering all that the life-giving and life-sustaining forces themselves love.  By maintaining an unbroken alliance with the helping spirits, the community of spirit warriors ensures that the hidden storehouse of life-giving power is never depleted:  only in this way can human nature continue to draw upon the power to create its own, unforeseeable, future.

Not everything can be quantified and brought down to plans of action.  Those who simply act as if they care and merely feign sincerity continue to make bad decisions because their intentions are still rooted in self-interest.  Those who sincerely maintain that all of matter is imbued with spirit, on the other hand, do so from direct personal experience and treat their thoughts and emotions as inner actions that are just as consequential in the field of intentions as physical actions are in the field of material cause-and-effect.  Within the shamanic Life Way, our inner actions are as significant as our outer ones.

The text of this hexagram closes with this demand on those wishing to transform civilization while there is still time—that we open our hearts, drop off all the trappings of cynicism, and consciously wish the best for all.  The curative demeanor for the coming Age is the feminine face of loving-kindness and good will, not merely a re-painted mask of the patriarchal grimace of conquest and dominance.

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 line changes in the second and fifth places.

2nd    The primal relationship between humans and nature has been disrupted by your predecessors’ short-sightedness.  Look upon nature as you would your beloved and work to repair this rift.  Begin by puncturing the bubble alienating you from the affection surrounding you.

The second line refers to local leaders and groups.  Here the concern is clearly with remedying environmental problems, which have been initiated by earlier generations.  As before, the Oracle advises us to become inspired not by appealing to our heads but to our hearts.  But now, it reminds us that we have stopped pouring out open-hearted affection toward nature because we have closed ourselves off to the love and generosity pouring into us from the natural world.  Being too absorbed in the strictly social sphere deprives us of the time and attention we need to share in the strictly natural realm.  It takes no leap of imagination to foresee that we must strive for greater intimacy with nature if we are to salvage civilization or, in the worst case, survive its fall.

5th    You have made a good start but do not really have the stomach for some of the difficult decisions ahead.  Find someone trustworthy to enact reforms.  Focus on encouraging people to advance by reminding them of the positive accomplishments of their predecessors that will remain in place.

The fifth line refers to leaders at the highest levels.  Here it clearly faults them for lacking the character and resolve to make the necessary reforms.  While we have little hope that they will voluntarily step aside and hand over the reins any time soon, we can see that the Oracle envisions a smoother, rather than a more drastic, transition of power.  Ultimately, however, difficult decisions will have to be made, which entail reforms that can only be enacted by someone that people whole-heartedly trust.  If a successful transformation of civilization is to take place, then the sacrifices people have to make will be made easier if they know what they are sacrificing for:  a better world that will carry over the best of the past while jettisoning the rest.

Whereas the first hexagram and its line changes can bee seen to answer the first part of the question, At what crossroads does our global civilization stand now, the second hexagram can be viewed as answering the second part of the question, In what direction does good fortune lie?

Image:  A great feathered serpent hatches out of the earth as if from an egg.  Its feathers are adorned with conch shells and it senses its surroundings with its bifurcated tongue.

The Plumed Serpent is the symbol of the enlightened human being.  In a historical sense, it refers to the great Toltec spiritual and political leader, Quetzalcoatl, who lead his people into a time of great peace, prosperity, and cultural flowering.

INTERPRETATION:  This hexagram represents the great forces released by the accumulated efforts of spirit warriors over the ages.  The feathered serpent symbolizes the collective intent and vision shared by spirit warriors in every time and every place.  That it hatches from the earth as if from an egg means that the community of spirit incubating within the material world emerges as a living, dynamic force of creation.  The conches adorning its feathers symbolize the call for all to join the community of spirit.  Its bifurcated tongue symbolizes the duality that is one.  That it uses its bifurcated tongue to sense its surroundings means that you are attuned to the universal presence of the masculine and feminine creative forces.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you align yourself with those whose only need is to bring benefit to their surroundings.

Though times are dark, we are the light bringing it to an end.  For millennia, women and men with the highest motivations have dedicated their lives to the creation of a Golden Age of Humanity.  That their names are not always celebrated in history books is of little matter—their spirits live on just as ours will.  Just as a pyramid is raised stone by stone, the world we wish to bequeath to the future is built life by life.  The cumulative effect of light-bearing individuals inevitably tips the scale to an equally long period of history in which universal good will prevails.

Beyond this, the very nature of the One Spirit is to benefit all in equal measure.  Joining forces with others who wish to practice unconditional benevolence is the path of good fortune.

ACTION:  The spirit warrior reverses the flow of power, channeling it inside instead of outside:  by storing up power internally rather than expending it externally, we are able to both free ourselves of habits and gain control over our actions.  This inner autonomy also extricates us from social influences that strive to mold us into obedient marionettes even as it allows us to be more tolerant of the deeper motives of those social influences.  From the spirit warrior’s perspective, the original intent of religion is to awaken the higher soul to its potential freedom while purifying the lower soul of fear, greed, envy, and hate—just as the original intent of government is to awaken the higher soul to its responsibility to others while instilling in the lower soul the capacity for self-control.  From this perspective, the fact that religion and government acquire ulterior motives over time and begin to act in their own self-interest merely demonstrates that they are managed by human beings and must be viewed accordingly.  Similarly, the fact that all religions and governments strive to awaken the higher soul and purify the lower soul—even when they have forgotten how and why—simply demonstrates that the quest for metamorphosis is a universal and irresistible force.  Just as our inner autonomy releases us from the trap of depending on social influences for our sense of self, in other words, it also releases us from the trap of not seeing how those social influences contribute, however unintentionally, to the gradual unification of humanity.  Reversing the flow of power, we gain inner autonomy and, paradoxically, become one with the universal civilizing force.

We give away our power when we are dependent on something, especially when we are dependent on it for our sense of self.  We reclaim our power when we pull it back from externals and cultivate an independent sense of self, one not reacting to circumstances in a predictable and automatic way.  When we can no longer be manipulated by others or controlled by our own unmanageable desires, we achieve the kind of autonomy that is free to respond to the needs around us in creative, innovative, and successful ways.

Such autonomy also frees us from seeing overly simplistic snapshots of complex processes.  It allows us to consider the potential value of social institutions that have fallen into disrepair and disrepute, especially by considering their original value and working to revive it.  When a temple was to be rebuilt or enlarged in ancient Mexico, for example, the old temple was not torn down and replaced—the new temple was built around and over the old one because it was recognized that it was the site itself that people already held sacred.  The shock of dramatic transformations of culture can be mitigated by slowly and methodically reshaping the institutions people have long held in esteem.  History holds clear examples of failed reforms that attempted to remake society from the ground up.

INTENT:  The wise become independent even from what they revere.  Like children who are grown up and independent of the parents they love and admire, spirit warriors take their place among the community of spiritual equals.  Because you use this lifetime to bring the most benefit to others, you incubate the higher soul that is preparing to hatch from the lower soul:  joining in the collective labor shared by spirit warriors in every time and every place, you contribute directly to both the fulfillment of humanity’s destiny and the creator’s vision.  Becoming part of the universal civilizing spirit, you contribute directly to the founding of a free and harmonious world of equals right here within this world.

Wisdom isn’t so much knowledge as it is freedom—freedom in every sense imaginable.  Freedom even from what we have held valuable, since everything changes, rigidifies, loses its original impetus and takes another direction.  And freedom, especially, from emotionally-charged words, since they are among the most potent manipulators of behavior.

Breaking through the barriers that have long been used to divide and conquer a world of peers, we are, individually, a microcosm of the greater metamorphosis at work on the whole of civilization.

Thunder still echoes in the distance but the rain has stopped.  I close the book, put away the coins.  Not quite as ominous as it started out, the Oracle’s answer to my question doesn’t just point to the darker side of human nature—in fact, it spends much more time illuminating the light half of our nature.

Perhaps, ironically, it is easier for us to stare into our darker half than it is for us to gaze into our own nobility.  It would be the cream of the jest if civilization faltered and crumbled simply because we averted our eyes from the Smoking Mirror’s reflection of the grandeur of our true nature.

—Oracle Cast  2 June 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.

This article first appeared on the Reality Sandwich website July 7, 2009:  http://www.realitysandwich.com/oracle_and_smoking_mirror

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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.

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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.

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This is the lesson I’ve learned in my sixty years.  It’s the lesson I repeat to myself constantly.

Like a favorite song you hum to yourself all the time.  Or the heart of a story you don’t want to forget.

I am part of a Living Whole that wants the best for me and all others at the same time.

We don’t have to go far or look hard to see this lesson at work.  The sun shines everywhere and on everyone equally.  Water nourishes everything and everyone it touches equally.  The soil nourishes every seed equally.  Air breathes life into all equally.

The lessons we repeat to ourselves, like the songs and stories we identify with, become part of us.  They color our moods and influence how we see things.  They are like a filter on a camera that changes the whole tone of light before it is ever recorded—they form a predisposition toward interpreting our experiences in a certain light.  We are open or closed to things, ready to be excited or irritated by things, primed to encourage or criticize others, already leaning forward or holding back, already wanting to smile or scowl—all before the experience has even begun.

In this sense, the lessons we learn determine ahead of time how we will react to whatever comes our way.

The problem, of course, is that the early lessons of life are learned without our consent.  We are too young and lack the independent sense of self needed to reject lessons that will prove self-defeating later.  In fact, we lack the criteria by which to make such judgments—and even the awareness that such rejection is possible—until we reach a certain level of maturity.  By that time, such lessons have become ingrained, part of our unconscious disposition, habits coloring every thought, emotion, memory, and reaction.

Such habits are the opposite of Inspired Action.  They result in thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, reliving the same memories, responding with the same reactions, over and over and over.  Rather than inspiring us to new and surprising insights, demeanor, and behavior, they lock us into a rigid and routinized way of interacting with the world.  Rather than sparking our spontaneity and creativity, they make us predictable and, therefore, prone to manipulation.

But not all lessons lead to self-defeating attitudes and behavior.  Those we learn voluntarily and accept consciously can lead to thoughts, emotions, and actions that are better adapted to life and therefore bring us greater happiness and success.

Since habits are kept alive by repeated reinforcement, trying to eliminate them by focusing on them merely reinforces them all the more.  For this reason, they have to be replaced, not eliminated.

We replace old self-defeating habits by focusing our attention on new lessons—lessons that we consciously choose to learn.  By focusing attention on these new lessons, repeating them to ourselves all the time, we find our feelings changing and our reactions to events surprising us.  Like musicians and athletes training to peak performance, we train ourselves through repeated practice to see the world in a different light and participate in it with a greater sense of purpose.

We unlearn self-defeating lessons by holding our attention on new ones that bring us into closer harmony with people, nature, and spirit.  All people, not just those it is convenient or easy to get along with.  All nature, not just those parts it is convenient to care for while ignoring the harm done to the rest.  All spirit, not just the conventional idea of spirit but the living presence of the sacred everywhere at hand.

I am part of a Living Whole that wants the best for me and all others at the same time.

We live in a time when intense competition and self-interest is promoted as the greatest good.  A time when natural resources are not protected by the governments who should be stewarding the land.  A time when religious ideology spreads hatred instead of love and factionalism instead of universality.  Not precisely a time promoting harmony with all people, all nature, and all spirit.

After more than 5,000 years, the Mayan Calendar is coming to an end and starting anew on the Winter Solstice of 2012.  People everywhere know that things cannot continue as they are.  The future doesn’t exist yet.  There are more than six billion of us.  We can create whatever we collectively choose.  We do not have to let governments, religions, corporations, or the media choose for us.  We are a world of peers and we can decide our destiny.  We can learn new lessons.

We can create the Golden Age of Humanity if we choose.

I am part of a Living Whole that wants the best for me and all others at the same time.

Inspired Action transcends self-interest and benefits the whole.  It arises from a sense of trust in the world and reveals itself in acts of generosity.  It is fascinated with how accurately it can discern others’ needs and how well it can benefit others.  It is self-sacrificing in the sense that it places the needs of the whole ahead of self-interest.

Inspired Action arises from a sense that all things, including human beings, are sacred.  It is based on the lesson that all matter is spirit.  It reveals itself in the personal experience of all spirit being immediately present.  It is self-transcending in the sense that it draws us into ever-closer communion with all spirit, all nature, and all people.

The Toltec I Ching incorporates the common lessons of the ancient cultures of Asia and the Americas.  The sum of these lessons embodies a worldview in which humanity stands precariously balanced between nature and spirit—a worldview that forever balances between (1) the guilt of having to take other lives in order to live and (2) the awe of being consciously alive in the maze of matter.  These roots of the indigenous cultures produced a brand of moral ethics based on personal responsibility for (1) genuine sorrow and remorse for taking the lives of plants and animals and, consequently, taking no more than absolutely necessary, and (2) making this life as meaningful and as rewarding as possible by treating everyone and everything honorably and nobly.

With this introduction to the concept of Inspired Action under our belts, let’s consider the worldview in which people can communicate with spirit through the practice of divination.  In ancient Mesoamerica, divination was conducted using the Sacred Calendar, or Tonalpoalli, while in ancient China, it was accomplished through the Oracle of the I Ching.  The logic of that worldview can be seen as we follow the line of reasoning outlined in the book’s Glossary—

Oracle The means by which the One Spirit gives voice to the essence of situations and the trends developing out of them.  The natural, appropriate, and spontaneous response of the One Spirit to an individual’s act of divination.

Divination The art and practice of interpreting signs and symbols to see into the essence of things.

Essence The living presence of the One Spirit manifesting itself in every creation at every moment.  The unchanging background of all change that makes up the underlying harmony of all creation.  The timeless perfection of all things underlying their apparent imperfection.

One Spirit The single immaterial living awareness of the material universe.  The origin and destination of every individual soul and, thereby, the eternal repository of all the memories and experiences of all who ever lived.  The marriage of the masculine creative force and the feminine creative force, whose union of Light and Love creates and sustains all of creation.

Soul The personal aspect of spirit.

Spirit The invisible half of nature.  The living awareness within all matter.

Nature The visible half of spirit.  The single body of the One Spirit.  The living and aware form of the sacred.

Masculine Creative Force The creating half of the One Spirit.  The natural, appropriate, and spontaneous catalyst of all creation, whereby all things are inspired to take form and strive toward continual metamorphosis.  The universal principle of fire, which ignites all it touches and, within the individual, manifests as the masculine half of the spirit warrior.

Feminine Creative Force The sustaining half of the One Spirit.  The natural, appropriate, and spontaneous benevolence of all creation, whereby all things are accorded an equal measure of essential benefit.  The universal principle of water, which nurtures all it touches and, within the individual, manifests as the feminine half of the spirit warrior.

Spirit Warrior A man or woman engaged in consciously defeating the enemy-within.  Women or men consciously training themselves to unite their feminine and masculine halves in order to promote and share in the good fortune of all.

Enemy-Within The conditioned and artificial aspect of every individual’s personality that is acquired unconsciously from their surroundings and must be consciously extinguished through training in order for each to return to their essential nature.  The set of self-defeating behaviors and perceptions that the spirit warrior defeats.

Metamorphosis The natural, appropriate, and spontaneous return to essence, understood as the result of self-liberation, which does not imply liberating the self but, rather, that liberation can only be achieved by oneself.

Benefit The natural, appropriate, and spontaneous response to need.

Need A temporary blockage in the free flow of benefit among all things.

Training Consciously working to eradicate the thinking errors based on self-interest by concentrating on thoughts and feelings based on good will toward all.  Consciously working to quiet the inner monolog and experience each moment of life just as it is, without interpreting it in reference to oneself.

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.

Bookmark It

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