The inevitable transition to a fully-green society will have to overcome numerous hurdles. Vested interests in the status quo, corporate mentality placing profits above all else, and government-by-crisis-management that eschews real long-range planning, for example, are among the most obvious matters that will have to be reformed.

There are other, deeper, issues that stand in the way, however. The polarization of the political landscape in the United States, for instance, and the underlying culture war spurred by the radicalization of fundamentalism — how is the most modernized country in the world to take a leadership role in creating a self-sustaining global community when it is paralyzed at home?

In the global arena, we face a similar problem. Trying to establish a constructive and forward-thinking consensus among all peoples is impossible without trust and mutual understanding — a relationship that cannot exist under threat of force or economic intimidation. History now reads like a bad Shakespeare play, revenge begetting revenge begetting revenge, escalating in violence and intensity as the plot grinds excruciatingly toward the final act in which everyone kills everyone else or themselves.

So political parties no longer act for the common good and simply strive to polarize people in order to get elected. Churches no longer pull communities together but, rather, tear them apart by polarizing people in order to promote religious zealotry. Governments no longer serve the interests of their respective peoples, polarizing nations into antagonistic relationships in order to justify the existence of government.

The inevitable transition to a fully-green global society, then, stands today somewhat like a single person with a pea-shooter standing before a well-fortified castle and demanding its unconditional surrender. All the major socioeconomic forces, and the weight of history, appear pitted against it. But it has reinforcements on the way: the inevitability of the future.

Because there is simply no alternative to a fully-self-sustaining lifeway for humanity, the issue at hand is not if but when. And because humanity’s very survival will hinge precisely upon just such a self-sustaining lifeway, green will eventually emerge as an over-arching philosophy rooted in a collective ethics that recognizes — and embraces — the dynamic unity of this living system we call Earth.

Such a philosophy has been articulated in times past. It recognized the patterns of human short-sightedness and rationalization. It offered a simple solution to what we can see now are the predictable crises of environmental degradation and governmental ineptness. I refer, of course, to the ancient philosophy of Taoism, which, it seems to me, offers a coherent and meaningful foundation upon which the emerging global society can build a collective future in which all enjoy peace and prospering.

Take the quote above from the closing lines of the Tao Te Ching, as an example. It is difficult to imagine a simpler and more direct way to address human nature –

The wise do not accumulate.
The more they work for other people, the more they gain.
The more they share with other people, the more they receive.
The Tao followed by heaven is to do good and not to harm.
The Tao followed by the wise is to work and not to claim credit.

It is the point of philosophy, after all, to arrive at wisdom and not mere intellectual knowledge. So ancient texts like the Tao Te Ching were intended as teaching tools in which their authors poured out the results of their investigations into the subtleties of human nature and its relationship to the world. As teaching tools, their authors generally assumed the that the readers’ rationalizing and justifying mind was in full force and so presented their ideas in ways that directly confront or bypass the merely argumentative mind.

So, The wise do not accumulate: Directly confronting the socialized mind that justifies self-interest and greed, the text establishes a fixed criterion for ethical behavior. Those who understand how things really are, those who are wise, simply do not accumulate: work it around any way you want, come at from any angle, argue it forever, it doesn’t change the fact that it is not in the interest of the whole for the individual to place his wants ahead of others’ needs. This, indeed, establishes a baseline for the ethical philosophy of the emerging world culture: in a world of peers, none is more entitled than another. Those who accumulate are not wise and therefore are arrogant because they place their wants ahead of others’ needs. This lack of insight demonstrates a profound lack of compassion for one’s fellow human beings and alienates one from the human family.

The wise do not accumulate, furthermore, because if everyone accumulates, the stress placed on natural resources is unsustainable. There has to be something more important than accumulating — something more meaningful, something more rewarding. This something is intimacy: it is an ethics of relationship, of refined sensitivity to the needs of human nature and nature itself. The wise do not accumulate, after all, because accumulation is empty and meaningless in the long run. Meaningful experiences, however, based on a sense of communion with one’s fellow human beings and, just as importantly, with nature, provide a ground of shared intimacy that directly addresses the real needs of human nature: happiness and a sense of belonging.

It is for this reason that the Tao Te Ching goes on to close with these words–
The more they work for others, the more they gain.
The more they share with others, the more they receive.
The Way followed by heaven is to do good and not to harm.
The Way followed by the wise is to work and not claim credit.

This is worth considering on several levels, not the least of which is literary: here is one of the world’s most-read and most-translated books, acclaimed for a millennium or two for its wisdom and profundity, and it ends with these words, so simple and lacking in refinement that they could almost be thought anti-climatic. This is the work, of course, famous for its use of archetypal symbolism and paradox (The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way; Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know; and so on) and it chooses to end with this unadorned truth that strikes directly at the heart and not the head: real wisdom arrives at real happiness, which cannot be divorced from a trusting relationship with one’s community.

Modern Western readers may read all this as naive idealism, but people who have traveled and lived among other cultures know that these principles are still in play, forming the core of social interactions and personal fulfillment. In places where there is not a great deal of wealth in the first place, the emphasis is on social cooperation and survival of the group — working for others does, indeed, bring you gain and sharing with others does, indeed, mean others sharing with you. Benefiting others, harming nothing, and not seeking the elevated status that claiming credit brings — this is the personal practice that lies at the heart of the emerging social transformation.

The inevitable fully-green global society will, inevitably, be a society of self-discipline. It will require the kind of consistent and well-conceived philosophy that can be embodied with a clear conscience: it must satisfy, in other words, both the head and the heart. It will not come from government or church or corporations: it will not come from the top down, in other words, but from the bottom up. The set of self-sustaining behaviors our society will adopt won’t be dictated from the vested interests above but, rather, from within each individual’s creative nature. This reversion to a cohesive tribal worldview that encompasses all life is already being incubated through the global lines of communication afforded by the World Wide Web: a consensus is building toward accountability and social responsibility — towards a vision of The Commons as the shared benefits all are entitled to enjoy and none are entitled to destroy.

Of this individual creativity, the great Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu says –

Things in their original nature are curved without the help of arcs, straight without lines, round without compasses, and rectangular without squares. They are joined together without glue and hold together without cords. In this manner, all things create one another from their inner reality. None can tell how they come to do so.

This seems to allude to the principle that the Tao creates all things from within and, in doing so, collaborates as an individual in the co-creation of the whole. This may reflect the Buddhist concept of dependent origination and its attendant analog of Indra’s Net. Regardless of the metaphysics involved, the Taoist concept of natural integrity is pointed at here, with the implication that human beings need to return to their original being, which is in perfect harmony and accord with nature. It is this process of returning to our original nature that makes up the discipline of our personal practice and that of our collective descendants. Moving away from a lifeway of insecurity, self-interest, and accumulation, we intuitively move toward a lifeway of trust, plenitude, and sharing.

Because its wisdom teaching is so closely allied with Nature, the fundamental concepts of Taoism seem to me an ideal basis upon which to construct an embodied philosophy that can help create and sustain the coming fully-green global society. As a parting example of how this organic philosophy is concretized into ethical practice, I’ll end here quoting Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, again translated by the late great Taoist scholar, Chang Chung-yuan:

That which is best is similar to the water.
Water profits ten thousand things and does not oppose them.
It is always at rest in humble places that people dislike.
Thus, it is close to Tao.
Therefore, for staying, we prefer a humble place.
For minds, we prefer profundity.
For companions, we prefer the kindness.
For words, we prefer simplicity.
For government, we prefer good order.
For affairs, we prefer ability.
For actions, we prefer the right time.
Because we do not strive,
We are free from fault.

*********

‘The Toltec I Ching,’ by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden, has 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.

Go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.

Two companion volumes, The Five Emanations, and The Spiritual Basis of Good Fortune, have recently been published that expand on carrying the practices forward in the modern world.

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There are two overarching lessons of the I Ching.

The first is this:  Every Ending Begets A New Beginning.

Change is not conceived as an endless string of cause-and-effect events but, rather, as a cycle of repeating seasons that influence the cause-and-effect events within them.  Human actions and endeavors, in other words, are not viewed as independent of the time but, rather, are viewed in context of the season in which they occur.  In this sense, the linear progression of change is always set against the unchanging principle of cyclic change that underlies the unfolding of time.  For this reason, each of the hexagrams of the I Ching is experienced as a spatial expanse no less immediate and encompassing as Spring, let us say.  Or Autumn for that matter.

In the previous post, I published an oracle cast on the recent Autumnal Equinox.  In it the events around the 2012 turning point are presented as resulting in a growing authoritarianism that, once transcended, will usher in a time of global reconciliation.  More specifically, it points to a crisis that we, as humanity, have confronted before and failed to resolve in the most beneficial way for all.  With the approach of 2012, we have the opportunity to face our collective dilemma again and, although the official reaction will reflexively repeat the same mistake as before, a groundswell of enlightened goodwill that transcends borders will unite people everywhere in a positive and constructive response—one that overrides the authoritarianism of church and state and sets in motion those metamorphic forces of nonviolence and noninterference that give rise to the harmonious and creative civilization our collective ancestors dreamed for us.

Far from confronting the end times, in other words, we are on the cusp of entering the beginning times.

~

A Training Manual for the Road Ahead

The Toltec I Ching is, first and foremost, an Oracle, continuing the age-old practice of rendering the voice of the One intelligible to the contemporary mind.  By echoing the living words of the Spirit that continuously recreates the world, the Oracle manifests the universal civilizing influence caring for the entirety of creation, including humanity.  Because our thoughts and lives are part of the One, the Oracle enables us to anticipate each crossroads as it approaches and keep our feet firmly on the path of freedom.  To open our hearts to the hopes and dreams placed in us by all that has come before us is to sense the loving-kindness and  communion in the Oracle’s answers.

But, as its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World, implies, The Toltec I Ching is also a training manual of ethical strategies embodying the ideals and values of the emerging world culture.  The vision it presents is of a living universe in which everything is invested with spirit and, just like human beings, has a level of awareness that is constantly undergoing a process of metamorphosis.  Our transforming human nature is envisioned as the spirit warrior, defined as a woman or man who trains diligently to defeat her or his self-defeating habits of thought, emotion, and memory.  The Duality of the great creative forces that manifest the intent of the One in the form of the macrocosm, furthermore, are mirrored in the masculine and feminine halves making up the microcosm of every human being.

As said since ancient times, the metamorphosis of the whole is initiated by the metamorphosis of the individual—and it is the work of each spirit warrior that builds an ever-widening community of humaneness.  The 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World are embodied, of course, in the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, each of which incorporates the core lessons of attaining good fortune, both individually and collectively.  This individual striving to benefit the whole is seen as the open secret of personal and collective good fortune:  by letting go self-interest, the spirit warrior metamorphoses into a well of benefit that allies her or him with others likewise making positive use of the law of spiritual cause-and-effect.  Like all truly proactive measures, these lessons do not merely help us avoid coming difficulties, but establish new attitudes and behaviors that actually help shape the emerging future.

The actual means of metamorphosis is the work of harmonizing the masculine and feminine halves inherent within each individual—and inherent, therefore, in every social institution.  Understanding that our feminine and masculine halves are microcosmic reflections of the macrocosmic creative forces empowers us to marshal our energies toward constructive actions and ennoble our intentions toward ever-widening circles of harmonious unity.  In the arena of social institutions, for example, the conservative tendencies within a nation that seeks to defend itself with military strength can be thought of as its masculine half, while its progressive tendencies to channel resources into social service programs and international diplomacy can be thought of as its feminine half.  How well these two halves reach a harmonious balance of power determines the longevity of the nation and the well-being of its people.

The step-by-step training of the spirit warrior is just this exercising of the masculine and feminine halves in response to the archetypal situations making up human experience.  Specifically, it is the blending and balancing of the our feminine and masculine halves as they alternate in our outer actions and inner intentions that is formulated in the hexagram-by-hexagram progress through the sequence of 64 hexagrams.  Each of the hexagrams has it own proportion of the feminine and masculine generative energy—or, in more traditional language, its own specific mixture of yin and yang qi—and the hexagrams are arranged in a sequence that activates and harmonizes the sacred duality within us.  Working our way through the sequence of hexagrams, in other words, cultivates the creative forces within us, setting our intentions and actions on a course of self-transformation that leads to ever-widening spheres of good fortune.

~

The Storm Before The Calm

Returning to the recent 2012 oracle provides us with the opportunity to see how the lessons embodied in the hexagrams provide us with ethical strategies and ennobling values during a time of profound social transformation.  Of the numerous hexagrams relevant to this situation, we will cite just two examples—

Concerning the first part of the Oracle’s answer, in which a rising tide of reactionary authoritarianism will need to be overcome, we can look to Hexagram #41 Feigning Compliance for inspiration:

Image:  A shadowy male warrior stands upon the coils of a great serpent, forcing it to submit to his will at spear point.  He has, however, mistaken the snake’s tail for its head, which rises above and behind him, ready to strike.

Interpretation:  The shadowy male warrior symbolizes those who seek to dominate others.  The point of the spear symbolizes force, whether in the form of aggression, threat, intimidation, or subversion.  The great serpent symbolizes the energy and power of those who resist domination.  Its coils symbolize the convolutions and intricacies of the strategy of invisible defiance.  That the serpent’s tail is shaped to look like its head means that you are able to disguise your true intent behind a mask of conformity.  That the serpent’s head is poised to strike means that you remain vigilant, neither missing any real opportunity for resistance nor getting lulled into a false sense of security.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you lull your captor into a false sense of security while awaiting the right moment to reclaim your freedom.

Action:  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.

Intent:  The spirit warrior refrains from attempting to dominate anyone in any way, for fear of the inevitable and justifiable backlash it would produce.  Others are not necessarily so farsighted, however:  at a time when force and intimidation are openly used to control our actions and shape our attitudes, it is imperative that we train ourselves to resist every tendency to succumb to mental or spiritual tyranny.  By adopting a demeanor of naive complacency while making our true thoughts and feelings unreadable, we make it possible to live with oppression without being conquered by it:  using visible compliance to mask invisible defiance, we maintain our reverence toward all things so that we never wrong others the way we were wronged.

Summary:  When those who are more powerful demand you submit to their will, do not just pretend to go along with them—make a show of agreeing with them and working for their goals as if they were your own.  Keep your true feelings to yourself, work to find kindred spirits who can be trusted, and gather your strength until the moment to reclaim your independence and freedom arrives.

~

Concerning the second part of the Oracle’s answer, in which a time of widespread reconciliation will lead to a new world culture, we can look to Hexagram #16 Renewing Devotion for inspiration.  Once we have surmounted our self-destructive tendencies, we need to hold fast to our new vision of harmonious unity:

Image:  On the platform of a pyramid, a group of male and female warriors greet the dawn with ceremonial fire, drum, and song.  Out among the surrounding vegetation, a bird greets the dawn with two speech glyphs, one of which represents a flower and the other a song.

Interpretation:  The pyramid is a symbol of the sacred mountain at the center of all things and means that you are part of the collective work striving to mirror the handiwork of nature and the divine.  The dawn is a symbol of the daily renewal of creation and greeting it with companions means that you have others with whom you share the song of your beliefs, the drumbeat of your passions, and the fire of your creativity.  The surrounding vegetation is a symbol of the natural order and means that you are in harmony with the spirit of the world.  The singing bird represents the winged, transcendent, essence of nature and means that you are free to spontaneously give voice to the pure joy of life.  The flower and song glyphs represent the spirit warrior’s philosophy of life and mean that you have the courage to confront the eventual passing of everything beautiful, as well as the dignity to honor each passing both before and after it occurs.  Taken together, these symbols mean that your sincerity, trustworthiness and persistence will bring you success, vindication, and contentment.

Action:  The feminine and masculine halves of the spirit warrior unite to carry out past decisions.  This is not the time for questioning the correctness of inner decisions such as your commitments to your beliefs, values, and viewpoints—nor is it the time for second guessing the wisdom of outer decisions such as your commitments to your duties, goals, and loved ones.  It is, rather, the time for honoring your sense of honor—the time for renewing your devotion to the higher purpose guiding your life.  Sometimes it is not a question of what we have faith in, but that our faith is strong and unshakable.  Likewise, it is not always a question of who or what we are faithful to, but that our faithfulness is pure and unbreakable.  Your future circumstances are created out of today’s actions, so set aside all thoughts of changing direction. Your future character is created out of today’s motives, so set aside all self-doubt.  You have taken a stand:  do not permit the opinions or actions of others to move you off center.  Keep in mind that your decisions each have a symbolic value and represent part of your relationship with the whole of creation—by daily renewing your heartfelt devotion to acting with integrity, you will achieve the kind of consistency, firmness, and clarity that brings the highest benefit into your life and the lives of those around you.

Intent:  If we look for reasons to doubt the perfection of all creation, we will find them.  Because the perfect nature with which we are born is overwhelmed by the collective self-doubt produced by human history, we come to doubt our own vision and are increasingly influenced by the prevailing viewpoint of the world as inhumane and, therefore, imperfect.  It is this social indoctrination that creates an artificial viewpoint which obscures our original vision and, much like a mask covers the real face, creates in us an artificial sense of an imperfect nature.  When we become aware that our true birthright is usurped when we are too young to defend the perfect nature we bring into the world, then we come to understand the old stories about the royal child who is hidden away until it comes of age and can reclaim its rightful place in the world:  once we recognize our true self as that part which was hidden in order to protect it until was strong enough to fend for itself, then we view the world through the eyes of our innate perfect nature and no longer remain blind to the perfection of all creation.  Renewing their devotion to perfection every day, spirit warriors are tireless in their effort to remain aware that nature is spirit—and unfaltering in their decision to rejoice in the fact that they are a vital part of that perfect unity.

Summary:  Work to continually renew your heart-felt dedication to fulfilling the first ancestor’s vision of the human spirit, especially when surrounded by others who lack the awareness and sensitivity to appreciate the presence of spirit everywhere.  Stay true to your road and destination.  At this time, influencing others is more proper than allowing them to influence you.

~

Introducing these two hexagrams into the 2012 reading allows us to derive additional information by comparing them to the original ones cast on the Autumnal Equinox .

Comparing the two hexagrams relating to the “storm” portion of the oracle, we find that there is just one line change—in the fifth place—between Hexagram #54 Repeating Test and Hexagram #41 Feigning Compliance.  The fifth line change of Hexagram #54 Repeating Test seems particularly relevant:

The situation is auspicious—you are at the vanguard of sweeping changes that will benefit all but those you replace.  The principal task for now is to brighten the emotional atmosphere and give everyone hope.  Slow down—actually implementing the new will take a long time.

Likewise, comparing the two hexagrams relating to the “calm” portion of the oracle, we find that there is just one line change—in the sixth place—between Hexagram #2 Sensing Creation and Hexagram #16 Renewing Devotion.  The sixth line change of hexagram #16 Renewing Devotion seems especially useful:

Look back at the period just passed and study it diligently, gleaning all the lessons you can from it.  Do you feel more empowered or less empowered than before?  What do you want to have continue, what do you want to have change?

Expanding a reading by consciously introducing hexagrams that amplify the meaning and intent of the Oracle’s answer like this allows us to combine the two facets of the I Ching—the Oracle and the book of wisdom—into a more comprehensive and illuminating forecast.  In this way, we can encompass more of the mood and decision points of the divination by opening up the intuitive aspect of the reading to more in-depth analysis.

~

Summary:  The Master Key to Inspired Action

The second overarching lesson of the I Ching is this:  Sooner Or Later, Everything Changes Into Its Opposite.

Nothing can maintain its status quo forever. The action of trying to maintain its status quo is the very thing that triggers its own backlash.

In point of fact, the stronger its action, the more wide-spread its action, the longer its action continues, and the stronger its resistance to change, the more profound and complete and rapid its reversal.

As the old adage goes:  No one is easier to topple than one standing on tiptoes.  When things reach their peak, they decline.  When the natural process of expansion and contraction is thwarted by unnatural means, such as force and oppression, then the decline does not follow its natural timetable but is accelerated by the pent-up energies locked within a self-destructive equilibrium.

Perhaps a universal change of heart seems unlikely to some.  Perhaps they view the politics of the moment as in control of our collective destiny.  Perhaps they are afraid to hope again.

But these are irrelevancies in the grand cycle of change, the forces of which work from the inside and outside simultaneously.  The cathartic moment arrives unbidden by conscious calling:  it answers the unconscious desperation and despair welling up from within both the personal and collective unconscious.  Just as the chick’s call from the inside the egg is answered by the hen’s pecking the shell from the outside, the anguish of the personal unconscious calls forth a complete and immediate reversal of conventional beliefs and values from humanity’s collective unconscious.

This 2012 Oracle states unequivocally that we are on the cusp of a metamorphosed civilization, one in which personal ethics are mirrored in our collective ethics and in which individual self-transformation ripples outward, contributing directly to the transformation of the Whole.

The Master Key to Inspired Action, then, is Inspired Intention—it is the diligently cultivated heart-mind that can, moment-to-moment, shift its attention to a world in which there are not only enough resources for all to live, but one in which there is enough time for all to live blissfully.

The Golden Age of Humanity is within our reach.

What shall we build together?

~

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just received a Silver Award in the 2010 Nautilus Awards.  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.

Click here to go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.

~

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The cycle of change carries matter, energy, and spirit along its course of natural unfolding.  Time is spatial:  autumn follows summer just as a time of consolidation follows a time of expansion.  The Current, the Way, the Tao, is organic in the way it develops, moving the individual and civilization both according to the seasons of generative energy.

The Seasons of Generative Energy

The Oracle can speak to the way present trends are developing into future situations because it gives voice to the principles underlying all change.  The seeds of winter are sown at the Summer Solstice, just as the seeds of summer are planted at the Winter solstice.  Because they are seeds of generative energy, however, and not phenomena directly perceptible to our senses, their sowing and fruition generally occur long before—or sometimes after—we imagine.

The structure of the hexagram’s six lines is traditionally divided into three levels, of old called, Heaven, Man, and Earth.

Three Dimensions of the Hexagram

The top two lines represent heaven, or spirit.  The lower two lines represent earth, or matter.  The middle two lines represent mankind, or human awareness.  Humankind, embodying so perfectly the conjunction of spirit and matter, is thought of as the bridge connecting the sacred and the mundane, the invisible and the visible, the formless and form.

The Oracle is able to communicate with us because we bring human awareness into the divinatory moment, bridging the physical mechanism of divination (such as coins, yarrow stalks, cards, dice, random number generator) and the oracular awareness permeating time and space.  The Oracle gives voice to the One based on the relationship it has sustained with human beings for many thousands of years now.  The divinatory moment, then, is the very embodiment of the ancient saying:  Just as there is only One Mind, so is there only One Body.

Three Dimensions of the Divinatory Moment

Is this not the same Oracle that takes different forms in ancient cultures throughout the world?  Will we continue to hold ourselves apart from nature and spirit by relying on a crippling kind of reason that does not recognize its own limitations, even as the Great Mystery stares it in the face every moment?  Will we continue to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that materialistic reason and religious zealotry are the only two poles of human participation in the world?  Will we dare to return to the ancients’ worldview of everyday unity with the Living Whole?  Can we abandon our histories of wrongs and establish a time of amnesty in which we might address our common problems?  Will we find our way back to a lifeway of nature mysticism that bequeaths to our descendants a civilization in harmony with itself and nature and the sacred?

With the above in mind, I take up the coins this morning of the seasons’ pivot and throw my question into the Beyond—

~

What Can Humanity Expect with the Approach of 2012?

The divinations I have cast on the subject of 2012 have been unanimously positive in the long run but have hinted at obstacles to be overcome in the short run.  The Oracle I received on the Autumnal Equinox 2010, regarding the events swirling around the turning point of the Winter Solstice of 2012, is the most detailed yet about the storm we will have to pass through before we achieve the calm of the New Dynasty of peace and prospering for all.

The first hexagram, representing the near-term events, is called Repeating Test.  Following is its illustration and interpretation—

Image:  A male warrior wearing the emblem of the smoking mirror pauses in his tracks.  The true road runs straight ahead but the warrior’s footprints show that he has doubled back on himself, circling around a pool of water.  The day sky overhead is filled with sunlight but the pool reflects the full moon in the night sky, indicating that the warrior made that past part of his journey in the dark of night.  As he prepares to undertake this leg of his journey for the second time, the warrior must face the additional danger of a jaguar who now crouches beside the pool.

Interpretation:  This hexagram depicts someone facing a dilemma for the second time.  The male warrior symbolizes the challenges and self-discipline that make us stronger and more adaptable than we imagined.  The smoking mirror symbolizes the penetrating insight, introspection, and self-knowledge required if we are to achieve a vision of the true self.  That he pauses in his tracks means that you take the opportunity to slow down your decisions in order to consider your circumstances carefully and discern how they resemble a past experience you have long wished to rectify.  That he has stepped off the true road to circle around the pool means that your true destiny must wait while you return to a previous stage in order to complete its task.  That it is light now but the pool reflects the night sky means that you are more aware and capable now than you were when you first encountered this test.  That this part of the journey is complicated by the additional danger of a jaguar lying in wait means that you clearly perceive this to be a new situation even as you use it to change your spiritual history.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you heal wounds left from a past stage of development.

Action:  The masculine half of 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.

Intent:  Now is the time to strengthen the ladder of your evolution by descending it in order to repair a lower rung.  Actions and decisions that have haunted us must be laid to rest if we are to advance further toward our rightful destiny.  Within the inner landscape of our soul there are hurdles we failed to clear, pitfalls we failed to avoid, on our first encounter—where we first reacted with weakness we can now react with strength, where we first acted naively we can now act wisely, where we first reacted with fear we can now react with confidence, where we first acted selfishly we can now act lovingly.  Because you do not allow this opportunity to correct the past to slip through your hands, you break the chains holding you and your allies back from ascending to the next rung of success.

Summary:  Don’t make the same mistake again.  Some fears are false fears, some hopes are false hopes:  stop and consider how you are reverting to a way of thinking, feeling, and acting that did not work before.  You are stronger and wiser now—act as you wish you had acted the first time.  Seize this opportunity to heal the past and you will create the future you long for.

The Oracle appears to be saying that we—humanity—are going to have to pass through a crisis with all the dynamics of one we mismanaged the first time.  The exact nature of this crisis remains veiled by time, of course, but the transformation of our collective response is mapped out in the lines of change.

In other words, the specific transition points between the short-term and long-term are marked out by the line changes that produce a second hexagram out of the first.  In the present case, it is the first, second, and sixth lines that change.

Line Changes—

1st:  Many are in denial of the growing trend toward oppression—all you can do is join with those of like mind and prepare for what lies ahead.  Avoid controversial positions and don’t call attention to your efforts.  Make yourselves useful but anonymous.

2nd:  Many cannot get past the first hurdle—all you can do is appreciate the cunning of those above and go along with it for now.  There will be time to fight for principles later but the priority now must be just surviving this time.  Do not provoke envy or resentment by flaunting your little success.

6th:  The dam breaks—the last vestiges of oppression dissolve, the will of its leadership broken, and the waters of free-thinking and creativity rush forward again.  Celebrate with those around you.  Spend your time training the next generation, for without continuity of principles it will all happen again.

From the above we can surmise that our collective response to the first crisis was a knee-jerk reaction toward the use of force and intimidation—and that our first tendency in the second crisis is to revert to our previous response.

The first line change points out the insidious nature of fear that is generated by shock:  it is easy to convince people that the worst has only begun and that they must protect themselves by taking up a defensive posture that makes life more miserable everywhere.  This kind of lashing out against enemies real and imagined, internal and external, can be masked as necessary for only so long—eventually, there is a growing recognition that no amount of rationalization or justification changes the fact that irrational oppression is irrational oppression.

The second line change points out that there are many who remain fixed in a fear and aggression specifically propagated by those in power.  This is the most difficult time, when the fever is at it pitch.  It can be a dangerous time for those who dissent, one in which it is necessary to avoid attracting the attention of those with the power to crush dissent in the name of the greater good.  At the same time, this line change reminds those who manage to thrive during this time not to distance themselves from those less fortunate.

And finally, in the sixth line change, we see that the fever has broken.  The mass delusion passes like a nightmare evaporating with the dawn.  Even those perpetuating the self-destruction lose the will to go on.  People of good will and innovative solutions to the crisis come to the fore.  It is a time of widespread celebration and an overwhelming sense of relief.  Most of all, however, it is a time of establishing the new worldview for the next generations, because the forces of self-destruction are forever like a seed ready to sprout even in the loveliest garden.

~

The second hexagram, which grows out of the first by virtue of these three line changes, represents the long-term repercussions of the events associated with 2012.  Titled Sensing Creation, its image and interpretation follows—

Image:  A female warrior is naked, immersed in water and surrounded by flowers.  A wellspring of water rises from between her hands.  The water drops are drawn as beads of jade in order to portray the precious nature of that which sustains life.

Interpretation:  This hexagram represents the great courage essential to creating a meaningful life.  The female warrior symbolizes the way of nurturing and encouraging human nature that increases its sensitivity and loving-kindness.  Being naked means that nothing stands between you and the world.  Being immersed in water means that you plunge whole-heartedly into the spirit of that which nurtures all.  Being surrounded by flowers means that you perceive the perfection of the world as it truly is:  each moment blossoms perfect and whole, then passes like a fading flower—each perfection born into the world must die.  The wellspring of water symbolizes the inexhaustible source of courage that allows you to use your awareness of mortality to more profoundly experience the joy and sorrow inherent within every encounter.  In this sense, the flowers and the water signify not only the wisdom attained through experience, but the aesthetic sensibilities to be moved by a beauty and truth not always apparent to others.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you open your spirit to the overwhelming perfection of the world and share your vision with all you touch.

Action:  The feminine half of the spirit warrior collects the movement and energy of the unseen forces, calming them and bringing them together in harmony, making a place for them to gather strength and then making that source of benefit open and available to all.  Where past injustices and resentments survive to poison the well of benefit, true need goes unmet and people suffer unnecessarily:  the spirit warrior fosters a climate of forgiveness and reconciliation, reuniting those whose hearts have become estranged and dissolving the tensions and insecurities that have prevented people from coexisting in harmony and mutual understanding.  Before action, the passions breeding distrust and discord appear too strong and too deeply entrenched to be overcome.  After action, the benefit you help cultivate results in a greater union of good will, hope, and creativity.  You succeed where others fail because you rely on the warrior’s refined sensibilities to guide you rather than past experiences.  You succeed where others fail because you reflect generosity in every thought, word, and deed rather than demanding that others first prove their worth.  You succeed where others fail because you cleanse yourself of all ill will rather than harboring any spiritual intent that might poison the well of benefit that you are become.

Intent:  Whether the struggle is internal or external, work to increase your sensitivity to the realms of nature, human nature, and spirit.  Because people differ only in the degree of their sensitivity to the One Spirit, continue to open your perceptions to more and more sublime thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations.  By recognizing that you are filled with the source of nurturance, you can calmly let all your adaptations arise from it.  By giving form to the source of nurturance, you can respond to things with dignity, patience, joy, and appreciation.  Because your sensitivity to the world is your strength, you can find the way to restore harmony and progress where others find only opposition and antagonism.  Make the well-being of others your goal right now and you can build a coalition of allies to undertake even greater endeavors in the future.  Avoid taking sides, work to bring them together.  Cultivate trust in the early stages of discord, rely on your lack of self-interest in its later stages.  You succeed because you bring future benefit to those separated by the past.

Summary:  The beauty and loving-kindness you seek are within your reach.  Let go of obsolete opinions and dogma handed down to you from others.  Find that which allows you to share happiness with others and you will achieve greater freedom and creativity.  Focus on the healing of old wounds, promote the forgiving of old wrongs.  Set aside personal ambition, act for the common good.

Surely one of the most beautiful and promising of times, Sensing Creation is the opening up of forgiveness and reconciliation.  It is a time of universal trust and mutual goodwill.  Past differences dissolve in an atmosphere of shared hope and a collective vision of a greater future for all.

With this, the Oracle appears to reiterate its prognosis for the era beginning with the changes surrounding the 2012 landmark:  following a period in which the self-destructive forces in humanity start to reassert their authority, a new wave of humaneness emerges to guide us into the Golden Age of Humanity.

The Oracle sees, in sum, a tempestuous storm before the long calm.

What shall we build together?

~

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just received a Silver Award in the 2010 Nautilus Awards.  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.

Click here to go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.

~

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The old Dynasty of nationalism, aggression and self-interest is overturned now by time.  In its place, like billions of seeds fallen on the fertile plain of history, the first signs of the new age of enlightened peers reveal the emerging change to all.  Like the light from a distant nova that takes years to reach us, the effects of this spiritual revolution are already on their way.

We have entered the Dynasty of the Open Secret.  Founded in seclusion by a group of priest-diviners on the Summer Solstice of 1998, it will be celebrated worldwide on the Winter Solstice of 2012 and usher in changes that will carry us all into the Golden Age of Humanity.

As discussed in the previous post, we follow here an ages-old tradition of legitimizing the new Dynasty by introducing a new version of the I Ching that more accurately reflects the vision and ethics of our age while still maintaining the shamanically-charged power of the Oracle.  As explained there, it is the periodically revised Sequence of the 64 hexagrams—the mysterious order into which its 32 pairs of hexagrams are arranged—that renews cyclic time and restores humaneness to the social order.

This new version of the Oracle is based on a new arrangement of the hexagrams named for its Dynasty:  The Open Secret Sequence.

Diagram 1: Trigrammic Substitution between Fu Shi, King Wen, and Open Secret Maps

In the diagram above, the Fu Shi, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement occupies the centermost circle, while the King Wen, or Later Heaven, arrangement occupies the second circle.  Even though the Fu Shi is considered the Primal Arrangement of the eight elemental forces of change that manifest this world, research indicates that it may have actually been discovered many centuries after the King Wen.  The Fu Shi arrangement may in fact be related to the work of the great diviner Shao Yung, whose work inspired Leibniz to marvel that the binary code had been discovered in China long before his own discovery.

The Fu Shi arrangement is a static one that pairs the trigrams across from one another—the trigram Heaven, made of all solid lines, for instance, is paired with its opposite-complement, Earth, made of all broken lines.  By contrast, the King Wen arrangement, which delineates a dynamic process of growth and decay, is read in a clockwise circular manner:  Beginning with Thunder (Shock, Movement) in the East of the second circle and ending with Mountain (Stillness, Death) in the North-East, each of the trigrams spurs the next in the cycle of organic development in the lives of societies, organizations, ideologies, relationships, and individuals.  The Fu Shi, then, is thought of as the eternally paired dualities whose harmonious balance gives rise to the King Wen arrangement of the invisible forces giving rise in turn to the phenomenal world of change.

Tradition has it that the trigrams of the Fu Shi arrangement shine through those of the King Wen.  In other words, trigrams occupying the same compass point overlay one another, illuminating different aspects of the same sacred metaphor for the archetypal change that manifests in every life.  They share the same space of time and are enriched by their association with their shared compass points.

Diagram 2: The Spatialization Of Time

Diagram 2 shows how the temporal flux of the seasons and the day are superimposed on the four cardinal directions of space.  In this way, the developmental cycle of beginning, expanding, contracting, and return is mapped onto East, South, West, and North, respectively.  The eight compass points of the map of change are, then, the archetypal placeholders that charge their associated trigrams with oracular power, since it is the compass points themselves that comprise the real-world ordering principle of the flow of time.

While it is the shamanically-charged Sequence of 64 hexagrams that legitimizes a new Dynasty, in other words, it is the theurgic mapping of the trigrams onto the eight compass points that legitimizes that new Sequence.  That ritual act, which produced the Open Secret arrangement of the trigrams, was performed by a group of priest-diviners at the kairotic moment of noon on the Summer Solstice of 1998.

Returning to Diagram 1 now, we see that its outermost circle is occupied by the Open Secret arrangement of the trigrams.  Whereas the Fu Shi arrangement is static and the King Wen moves in a circular clockwise manner to show the natural unfolding of phenomena, the Open Secret arrangement is read in a circular counter-clockwise direction to show the way of reversing the universal natural tendency toward disorder.

Because the past Dynasty was founded on the inevitability of entropy in social institutions and human relations, it is called the Dynasty of Fate.  It has been ruled by those who accept such inevitable disintegration and benefit from it.  Using their influence to exacerbate the natural trend toward disorder, they have made the fate of perpetual decline the common dwelling place of the governed.  By “decline” is meant the descent of civilization into ever darker regions of the collective human psyche:  ever-shifting wars, church-and-state sponsored hatred of other peoples, creation of urban centers that assure alienation from nature, unjustifiable disparity of standard of living, worldwide poverty and contamination of water sources, self-destructive degradation of the environment and animal habitat, governmental misuse of technology and media to to cow its populace into accepting increasingly authoritarian forms of control, and so on.  By tradition, this was called by the priest-diviners weeping for the fate-driven herd.  And it was called by the sages crying out against waste of life.

In contrast, the newly-emerging Dynasty of the Open Secret is founded on the principle of the conservation of life.  It recognizes the equality of all life and acts accordingly.  It honors human life, animal life, and plant life, transforming the present civilization into one in which human beings wrench loose from the iron grip of Fate and make of this world a paradise for all life.  This, the priest-diviners say, is what the Oracle has foreseen.

Fate is the destructive physical force of disorder in the universe and must be struggled against if we are not to fall irrevocably into ruin.  This is called by the sages protecting the flickering flame from the void of night.  And it is called by the priest-diviners feeding the bonfire that will outlast the dark.

For while Fate is the gravity that forever pulls us downwards and darkwards, the Oracle is flight upwards and lightwards:  Whereas Fate embodies the certainty of ongoing deterioration, the Oracle embodies the acausal nature of meaningful coincidence.  It is in this way that the Oracle interrupts the predetermined course of Fate by identifying those kairotic moments—those crucial turning points appointed by a higher order of cause-and-effect—in which darkness might be converted to light.

What is the mechanism by which the hexagrams are charged with that oracular power?

The Open Secret Sequence of the 64 hexagrams is derived directly from the King Wen Sequence by substituting the Open Secret arrangement of the trigrams for those of the King Wen arrangement.  In other words, the trigrams in the outermost circle of Diagram 1 are substituted for those in the second circle.  In this way, the magically-charged order of the 32 pairs of hexagrams underlying the King Wen Sequence is maintained in the Open Secret Sequence.

But as explained in the previous post, the legitimizing of the new Dynasty requires more than a new Sequence of hexagrams—it also requires a new interpretation of the hexagrams that reflects the vision and values of the emerging Dynasty.  It requires, in other words, establishing a new voice for the Oracle.

The Toltec I Ching is the first speaking of that voice.  Based on the Open Secret Sequence of the hexagrams, it uses the symbology of the ancient indigenous peoples of the Americas to give voice to the sacredness of all life upon which the new Dynasty is founded.

The following diagram compares the order and names of the hexagrams in The Toltec I Ching and the traditional King Wen version—

Diagram 3: Transposing Between Toltec I Ching and King Wen Sequences

~

Next Week:  The Oracle and the War Against Fate

~

The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just received a Silver Award in the 2010 Nautilus Awards.  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.

Click here to go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.

~

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Inspired action flows spontaneously from an inspired mind.

When we replace trivial and undignified thoughts with substantial and ennobling ones, we are focused ahead of time on perceiving and interpreting events in the best possible light.  In this way, we take the energy we previously devoted to the pursuit of self-interest and channel it into acts that benefit all.

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

An inspired mind flows spontaneously from an inspired heart.

When we replace selfish and self-important feelings with generous and all-embracing ones, we are positioning ourselves ahead of time to respond to events with loving-kindness and goodwill toward all.  In this way, we take the energy we previously devoted to self-defeating attitudes and channel it into creative acts that benefit all.

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

An inspired heart flows spontaneously from being attuned to this single wish of the Living Whole:  that all benefit as one.

But how are we to give up our separate sense of self-importance and open our heart to this living wish when so many around us are acting out of greed, superstition and fear?  How are we to refine our thoughts and emotions when we are bombarded from every quarter with ever more sophisticated attempts to capture our attention?

It is one of the oldest lessons:  If your intention is clear of ulterior motives, then even distractions and confusion are The Way.

Self-defeating thoughts and emotions, from this point of view, are viewed as the enemy-within, the constellation of habit attitudes and habit behaviors that constantly throw up stumbling blocks to the spirit warrior’s progress.  Indeed, the spirit warrior is best defined as a woman or man who clarifies their intention by consciously training to (1) recognize Spirit within all matter and, (2) defeat the self-defeating habits of the enemy-within.

Freeing our intention of ulterior motives by focusing on these two goals, we find that confronting the distractions and confusion thrown up by the enemy-within becomes more like practicing with a sparring partner than an out-and-out battle.  More and more, the enemy-within is experienced as an artificial sense of self that was formed by the conditioning it received from family and culture.  As we get to know it better, it seems most like a recurring dream opponent trying to awaken us to our true potential.

For example, even if we were born to the same parents on the same day, it is obvious that were we then raised in a completely different culture, say the Mbuti of central Africa or the Inuit of the Arctic tundra, we would have a completely different personality, a completely different sense of self in relationship to the world-at-large.  Once the hollowness of this illusory, conditioned, self is fully experienced—like recognizing that the distorted image in a funhouse mirror is not our true reflection—we stop reacting automatically to events around us.  Our actions become more creative, more spontaneous, and meet with greater success.

In this sense, inspired action, an inspired mind, an inspired heart, and attunement to the wish of the Living Whole all spring from living each moment with an intention free of ulterior motives.

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

Spirit, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

When we clear our intention of ulterior motives, we are no longer beleaguered by our inner talk—Spirit rushes in to fill the clearing we have made for it.  Our heart-mind becomes its nest.

And of what is this nest constructed?

Lessons:  the accrued wisdom of the ancients, who first learned to stop their inner talk and then recorded what Spirit whispered to them in that shining silence.

By taking Spirit’s voice to heart, we, like the ancients, replace unworthy and self-destructive thoughts and emotions with ennobling and beneficial ones.

An Oracle is the voice of Spirit, speaking to us across the ages in the language of lessons.

Lessons are wisdom teachings, a body of ethical principles that can be adapted to the ever-changing circumstances of life.  As in sailing, you don’t set your sails to go with the wind in the same way you do to tack against the wind—nor do you drop anchor in the open sea just because it works when you are in port.  Lessons and their ethics guide our responses to change. Lessons make us better adapted to events, more competent, more improvisational, less predictable, and more creative.  Their ethics make us more generous, more compassionate, less competitive, more collaborative, and more successful.

The Toltec I Ching incorporates the lessons and ethics of the Oracles of two of the world’s great civilizations.  From ancient Mesoamerica, comes the Oracle of the Tonalpoalli, or Sacred Calendar, with its lessons inspired by the great civilizing spirit of the Toltec sages.  From ancient China, comes the Oracle of the I Ching, or Book of Change, with its lessons inspired by the great civilizing spirit of the Taoist sages.  We invite you to explore further your own inner path—and to carry the timeless wisdom of the ancients back into these troubled times.

This article appeared originally in Volume 8, Number 4 of Evolve! magazine.

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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For the ancient Toltecs and the civilizations they inspired, the highest expression of their lifeway was embodied in the mystical philosophy of Flower-and-Song.

Flower-and-Song is a difrasismo, a common form of expression in the Nahuatl language 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, indicating that its practitioners strive to 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 filled with 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.

This is a lifeway, in other words, of spirit warriors, those who exert constant effort to defeat their self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.  It is the lifeway of those who use death to awaken authentic gratitude for being alive and sharing this shape-shifting perfection with others.  When we experience it fully, Flower evokes a kind of spiritual nostalgia for the present moment that ennobles us and all our lives touch.

Song in this context means that the most authentic act we 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.  It means using every thought, word and deed to embody the lifeway 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.

As a spiritual practice, Flower-and-Song enters each moment asking two questions:  What is in front of me?  How am I treating it?

What is in front of me? opens us to the ultimately unknowable nature of the world.  By questioning the absolute nature of our perceptions, we come to accept the extraordinary mystery everywhere veiled by ordinary appearances.  It is a question that, once taken seriously, forces to us to look closer at the world:  Is this merely what I have become accustomed to seeing 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?

In our book, The Toltec I Ching, Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and I discuss the deeper implications of such a spiritual practice—

…..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 make 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 plays 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.

Those following the lifeway of Flower-and-Song find that it 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.

Holding to such a practice for extended periods of time has certain foreseeable consequences.  By forcing us to focus complete attention on appreciating the perfection of everything as well as mourning its inevitable passing, it trains us to attend fully to the moment, drop off inner talk, participate in life authentically, and honor everything as an equal knowing it must die.

But it has certain unforeseeable consequences, as well.  By blurring the imaginary boundary between self and world, it opens new senses and allows us to perceive the spirit within all matter.  By blurring the imaginary line between flawed and flawless, it opens our hearts to the sacredness of all form.  By blurring the imaginary boundary between animate and inanimate, it opens our eyes to the formless awareness forever transcending the very form it inhabits.  By blurring the imaginary line between time and space, it opens our minds to the unchanging presence through which all changing forms move.

The Lifeway of Flower-and-Song, then, is a spiritual practice of Inner Activism—it sensitizes us to our tendencies toward self-interest and alienation, replacing self-defeating habits with those of spontaneity, creativity, and good will.  It shifts our focus away from personal success toward a heartfelt longing for peace and prospering for all.

And it constantly reminds us that the Golden Age of Humanity is within our reach if we but dare hold 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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The illustration below comes from Hexagram 61, “Strengthening Integrity”, of The Toltec I Ching—

Image:  A female warrior and a male warrior are seated on a woven reed mat.  Behind them, the sun hangs suspended above a great pyramid.  Their bearing and clothing show that they are people of great dignity and merit.  They are jointly seeking advice from the creators and ancestors by consulting the divinatory instrument drawn on the ground before them.

The opening section describes the elements and action of the illustration.  By warrior is meant a man or woman who uses their everyday experiences to recognize and defeat their own self-defeating reactions.

Interpretation:  This hexagram depicts the way for allies to strengthen the warrior’s spirit in one another.  The union of the female warrior and the male warrior symbolizes an alliance between individuals whose natures are complementary and mutually reinforcing.  That they are seated together on the woven mat indicates that their alliance is based on a shared vision.  That they are seated in front of the sunlit pyramid means that they acknowledge that they are descendants of great warriors who have gone on to live forever in the house of the sun.  That they comport themselves as people of great dignity and merit means that they dedicate their lives to making both their ancestors and descendants proud.  That they seek advice from the creators and the ancestors by consulting the divinatory instrument before them means that they honor and fulfill the ancient covenant between the visible and the invisible.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you align yourself with others in order to transform your weaknesses into strengths.

This second section interprets each of the elements and actions of the illustration, explaining their symbolism.  The focus here is on how  people share a particular world view, especially one in which certain spiritual perceptions contribute to sincere good will toward one another.  Such good will takes the form of willingly acting as the whetstone upon which the other hones the edge of their spirit.

Action:  The masculine and feminine halves of the spirit warrior vigilantly treat one another with the respect, courtesy, and authenticity accorded great warriors.  The skills and the knowledge of the old ways are of little value if they are not applied to present-day circumstances:  in this sense, spirit warriors create relationships with one another in order to train themselves to live a balanced and harmonious way of life with the utmost integrity.  As in every relationship, there are those who lead and those who follow—but among spirit warriors, these roles are extremely fluid and change constantly.  One takes decisive action and another goes along, providing the utmost support.  One moves in an indirect manner to increase harmony and good will, and another gives up the need for identifiable goals and concrete solutions.  One challenges and another nourishes.  One opens to new experiences and another gives up the need to control change.  One takes on the role of the masculine half, another the role of the feminine half.  One takes on the role of the feminine half, another the role of the masculine half.  Back and forth, exchanging roles constantly, such allies face circumstances as a united front:  moving along with things when appropriate, creating resistance to things when appropriate, they use circumstances to train themselves to apply the old ways with honor, sincerity, and integrity.  Because you make yourself such an ally, you find such allies and bring great benefit to all.

The action of this hexagram revolves around the attitudes and behaviors that ennoble and solidify relationships:  treating one another like great warriors instead of trivializing the relationship; maintaining a degree of formality beneath even the greatest intimacy rather than demeaning the relationship; and, shifting roles in response to circumstances rather than allowing one to dominate the other.

The forces at play here can be appreciated by analyzing the interaction of the trigrams making up this hexagram:  Earth within and Water without, Fulfillment within and Mystery without.  When I feel fulfilled personally and view the other person as ultimately unknowable, then I experience the other as a sacred mystery instead of taking them for granted and making light of their life and inevitable death.  “Strengthening Integrity” corresponds to hexagram 8, “Holding Together”, in the traditional King Wen sequence.

Summary:  Treat everyone as if they have a wise and immortal teacher within—and see everything they do as the teacher’s subtle strategy for testing the depth of your perceptions.  Treat everyone with respectful intimacy, avoid informal familiarity.  Treat everyone like a great warrior armed with spear and shield, don’t try to read others’ minds.

The text ends with a reminder that how we treat those closest to us should be how we treat all.  When I treat everyone and everything as a shining manifestation of spirit, then my thoughts, words, and deeds will always shine like spirit reflecting spirit and echo like spirit calling to spirit.

Real allies spar with wooden swords.  They never draw real swords.  They never draw blood.

Help one another make the most of this lifetime and nothing will want to pry you apart.

.

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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