This comprises what Carl Jung called a synchronicity.  A term that get bandied about too loosely sometimes, a synchronicity is not simply a coincidence–it is a meaningful coincidence.

Synchronicities are, by their very nature, impossible to ignore.  They are unexpected coincidences that seem to hint at the existence of some hidden order to the universe, an acausal orderedness, as Jung and his colleague Wolgang Pauli labeled it.  It orders the world but not in the cause-and-effect way we are used to thinking.  They are meaningful coincidences because they link inner psychological-spiritual states to external physical events in such a way that something new is created–a new relationship between inner and outer realities, a new range of possibilities, a new sense of the Whole and our place in it.

THE ANCIENT FUTURE

That the Mayan Calendar ends on the Winter Solstice of 2012 is not held as a fact by all, however most interpreters of the calendar agree it falls within a range of a couple years, and in most cases, a few days, of that date.  The December 21, 2012 date is based on the correlation constant well-attested from the earliest days of the Spanish military conquest of Mexico.  The issue that most commentators forget in their passion to fix the precise date of the calendar’s end, however, is that such Mayan dates are symbolic, not historical.

This is clearly understood by looking at the origin date of the Mayan Calendar itself, which is generally held to begin on August 11, 3114 B.C.E.  This is a Founding Date, marking when time began again–when one period of 13 baktuns ended and another began with the gods creating this world of human beings.  This is the symbolic date that the Long Count calendar begins, the traditional founding of the calendar which, 5,125 years later, ends on December 21, 2012.  That it is a symbolic date is clear from the fact that it pre-dates the actual invention of the calendar by at least two thousand years.

The essential point, however, is that because tradition dictates that another 5,125 year calendar follow the one that is ending, this Winter Solstice of 2012 marks the Founding Date of a new age of creation.

The only known Long Count date to specify the December 21, 2012 date occurs as an inscription in stone on Monument 6 at Tortugero, which seems to state that a deity associated with endings and beginnings will appear on that date.  Deeply embedded in ancient Mesoamerican cultures was the concept of sequential Suns, or Ages, when cyclic time began anew. Such is the subject of the famous Aztec Calendar Sun Stone, which shows the four previous Suns that have come and gone–and shows this, the current Fifth Sun, the Age of Movement, which is to come to an end on the day 4 Ollin.  Just as each of the preceding four Ages gave way to a new one, this Fifth Sun is to give way to a new Age, the Sixth Sun.

In other words, endings are established in order to initiate times of Starting Over.  This is an important psychological and cultural need, marking the mature ability to recognize when mistakes have led us in the wrong direction and decisions must be corrected by making a radical and positive departure from the past.  This is simply the modern practice of making New Year’s resolutions embodied in a deeper order of psychological-spiritual complexity:  recognizing a dead end when we come to it, we exercise the only real choice we have and reverse course to look for a living road.  We do not engage in lemming behavior, following the most paranoid and panicked among us over the precipice of destruction–nor do we engage in apocalyptic thinking, secretly wishing for the world to end rather than accept the fact that it will go on without us.

The ancients formalized endings so that symbolic beginnings could renew the human spirit and restore social cohesion.

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE IS DEAD

Today, we are dying of history.  Our collective story is one of wrongs and revenge that cannot be forgotten or forgiven.  There is no going forward as a global civilization fully capable of creating a Golden Age for all humanity because we cannot stop going backward to justify our rage and violence and feuding.  We are imprisoned in a collective vision of pain and grieving for what we have lost when the prison cells have all been unlocked and the walls collapsed long ago:  the will to keep up the cycle of revenge and hatred is becoming more and more difficult to sustain when we see what we could be creating instead.

Whether the ancient Mayans intended it or not, the end of their calendar coincides with a profound turning point in human civilization.

The Spirit of the Age has been Reason–which has come to mean The Age of Materialism– and it is Reason that appears to be the focus of our present turning point.  The logic of the intellect has given us a scientific materialism full of technological wonders capable of large-scale harm to the environment and society both:  not only are species and their habitats disappearing at an alarming rate but people are alienated from nature and one another in ways unimaginable just a few generations ago.  Governments declare wars that people do not want, armies stockpile nuclear and biological weapons too horrible to contemplate, speculators ruin economies and people’s well-being, people are starving world-wide and lack potable water when neither is necessary, and basic health care is withheld by modern practitioners who simultaneously do everything in their power to discredit traditional forms of medicine.  Politics and religion simply polarize people instead of bringing them together and personal liberty increasingly comes under pressure from the demands for security.  This is not, in a word, the world any of us want to live in.

The intellect can justify anything, can rationalize any type of behavior, can explain away anything we are doing.

But it cannot make us happy.

Because human happiness occurs despite reason, despite the intellect’s unending parade of excuses to accept dwelling in misery.

And human happiness is an ideal that more and more people across cultures are holding dear.

LONG LIVE THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

The 2012 meme really came into being with Jose Argeulles and subsequently Terence McKenna, both of whom lent their considerable intellectual and creative capacities to the envisioning of a more positive and harmonious world.  Arguelles was also responsible for organizing the first Earth Day, for example, and McKenna, who calculated the King Wen sequence of the I Ching to culminate on the 2012 date, was once introduced by Timothy Leary as one of the five or six most important people on the planet.  Both men were instrumental in bringing the 2012 date to public awareness and tying it to their own efforts to transform human consciousness and, thereby, civilization in a positive way.  For this reason, the 2012 meme became early on associated with the the New Age movement.

These ideas surfaced as the works of Carlos Castaneda were really taking hold in popular awareness, his tales of the Yaqui shaman Don Juan introducing Western readers to the lifeway of Native American shamanism in present-day Mexico.  Interest overall, in the U.S. and Europe both, increased in regard to Native American beliefs, especially regarding shamanism, drumming, sweat lodges, journeying, and soul retrieval.  The underlying worldview of animism–that all matter is imbued with spirit–began pervading popular thought just as the environmentalist movement began to blossom:  people began feeling their kinship with nature instead of merely thinking about it.  This formed a perfect confluence of great rivers of thought as the nature mysticism of ancient Taoism and Zen also captured hearts and imaginations.

The monotheistic religions that had held sway for so long began to lose their appeal as people began turning to more traditional earth-centered belief systems.  Esoteric traditions from the Old World were finding their way into popular culture, reviving wide-spread interest in Astrology, Tarot, the Cabala, Magic, and Wicca.  All this arose as the feminist movement gained ground, spurring interest in cultivating personal power instead of expending external force.  Tibetan Buddhism entered our consciousness in a very real way as monks escaping the Chinese invasion began actively teaching in the West.  The Dalai Lama embodied a new model of how someone titled His Holiness ought to think, believe, and act.

The West was rediscovering the Heart.

And the internet became the new community plaza, the new city park:  people began meeting and exchanging ideas and, eventually, goods.  Its own innovation spurred further innovation and the capacity for free speech that could be heard world-wide drove the idea of democracy home in a new and startling real way.  The democratization of voices changed the way we perceived leadership and what actions we should accept from our government.  Our lives were being effected positively by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, not by the politicians who seemed only interested in getting elected.  And the betrayal by institutions people had trusted for their financial security drove the point home for folks who had never considered themselves outside the mainstream.

People across cultures began talking to one another via the immediacy of social networks.  Revolutions and demonstrations were coordinated using the new technology.  The idea of real democracy, not one nation’s copyrighted definition of democracy, has sunk in and is proving difficult to uproot:  in a world of peers, how can the disparity of wealth be justified?  when all cultures are created equal, can might really equal right?

Popular culture has changed.  What had seemed exotic had become natural, the new normal.  People form communities across vast distances, tied together by common ideals and purposes instead of physical proximity.  Invention, creativity, beauty, elegance, and spirituality have become ideals and purposes rather than self-interest, competition, nationalism, and religious zealotry.  People’s commonality has given rise to the Occupy Movement and the social networks have made it possible to coordinate those efforts across borders.

The momentum of change has intensified and its direction is away from empty promises and dead rituals and inhumane logic.

2012 AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

Whether the ancient Mayans intended it or not, the end of their calendar coincides with a profound turning point in human civilization.

The issue at hand is not whether the Mayan Calendar predicts anything.  There is no way to be certain of that:  there is no evidence, no fact, to make such a claim with absolute certainty.  There is no reason to think that its end was calculated to coincide with the alignment of the sun with the galactic center–what is important is that it does coincide with just such an event.  In the realm of synchronicity, things coincide as manifestations of an acausal orderedness underlying the ongoing creation of the universe.  The issue is not whether the ancient Mayans set their calendar to end on a year of greater than normal solar activity or weakening geomagnetic field–the issue is that it does coincide with such concerns.  These events don’t stand in direct cause-and-effect relationships:  they are part of the underlying harmony of reality that spontaneously produces things like whole numbers and the discontinuities of modern physics.  Some things simply are and the more of them that overlap in the same time-frame, the more impossible they are to ignore.  This kind of simultaneity of meaningful coincidences and the implication of their momentum has likewise been brought to view by more recent social commentators and activists like Daniel Pinchbeck.

Civilization is changing.  Instead of engaging in a culture war with the antiquated worldview of religious extremism and national militarism and fetishized capitalism, people worldwide are simply moving on with life.  Letting go of the past, forgiving the wrongs done them, hoping for forgiveness for the wrongs they have done, envisioning a better world rising from the mistakes of the Age of Reason–the worldview of the global counterculture is constructive and filled with goodwill toward all.  It is a counterculture well on its way to becoming the global culture.

The whole “world ends in the year 2000″ was simply too full of fundamentalist trappings to capture this culture’s thinking.  But the Mayan Calendar, filled as it is with mystery and mathematics, steeped in the Pre-columbian civilization of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico, expressed with such magnificent artwork!  This is an ending that excites and inspires the Spiritual Left to compassionate action, one that infuses animists and nature mystics with the promise of restoring the natural balance between humankind, nature and spirit, an umbilical cord tying the lifeway of indigenous peoples to the lifeway of modern peoples.

We steer into the Winter Solstice of 2012 with full sails.  The wind of change is at our back, the momentum for a profound and lasting transformation of civilization has built to this cresting point.  We need do nothing different than what we have begun:  trusting in the World Soul to call us forward on its sacred path, we just have to keep listening to the Great Mystery and following its loving intent.

The Winter Solstice of 2012 will pass, a symbolic milestone that initiates another 5,125 year period of human civilization.  The world will be a completely transformed place when next the 13 baktuns of the Mayan Calendar come to an end.  Be assured, people will celebrate that milestone, for the Mayan Calendar is one of the great achievements of the human spirit–what, if anything, of these days, of our deeds, will those people 5,000 years from now remember?

If the years leading up to this turning point are any indication, they will remember us for founding an age of peace and prospering for all.

Those attuned to the coming Spirit of the Age are themselves synchronicities.  Each is a meaningful coincidence, alive at this time because an unaccountable and unfathomable acausal orderedness has placed them here.  They are meaningful coincidences because they link inner psychological-spiritual states to external physical events in such a way that something new is created–a new relationship between inner and outer realities, a new range of possibilities, a new sense of the Whole and our place in it.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 The Toltec I Ching,  by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden, is published 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,” alludes to 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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Across the imaginary distance of culture and borders, I honor your contribution to the Beginning Times.

~

A dying oak tree, its trunk split and branches breaking, does not in any way resemble an acorn.

The new beginning—despite growing directly out of the remains of the old—does not resemble what it replaces.

While it is imperative to recognize endings before they arrive, it is self-defeating to dwell on them:  Endings serve to direct our attention to the new beginning already starting to unfold.  The Book of Changes is not simply about the art of avoiding misfortune—its deeper intent is to instruct us in the art of arriving ahead of time at the meeting place of good fortune.

An acorn, bright and gleaming in the palm of a hand, does not in any way resemble the giant oak tree dominating the forest clearing hundreds of years later.  And this is a critical lesson of the I Ching—one of context and chance and perseverance.  For, the same acorn that falls in a level fertile field and grows to great height and prominence will grow stunted and gnarled should it fall among rocks on the crags of a cliff face.  The same acorn.

Everyone recognizes that the old is ending.  Everyone.  Worldwide.  The question of concern is, What kind of ground are we preparing for this seed of the new?

The ancients had an accurate sense of the length of time that the pendulum of change takes to swing out to its extreme and reverse the passions of human nature.  Across numerous cultures, the ancients accurately foresaw that this time, the historical epoch in which we are living, would be the turning point for civilization to realize the dream of a Golden Age of peace and prospering for all.

That these are The Beginning Times.

Among those prophesies is the Mayan calendar, whose 5,000-year Long Count of 13 baktuns comes to an end on the Winter Solstice of 2012.  Because the Mesoamerican calendar itself was not in use 5,000 years ago (it is perhaps 3,000 years old, imaginably 4,000 years old), it means that the Maya chose a symbolic starting date for their calendar that would end on a specific date.

A specific symbolic date. 

A date that would get our attention.

This accomplishment of the ancients, to accurately set their calendar to end on the Winter Solstice several thousand years in the future, is a testament to their care and concern for the future.  It is like a message in a bottle washing up on the shore of our island of the present, reminding us of the dreams that our common ancestors carried in their hearts for the coming generations.

It is a symbolic date, not one to be taken literally.  As the old saying goes, Don’t look at the finger pointing at the moon—look at the moon.  It is meant to get our attention, not to become the object of our attention.  As I have noted previously, the actual turning point began to first show itself in 1998.  The reversal of direction that the Mayan calendar points to is this space of time, wherein the old regime of conflict and competition withers and falls, collapsing under its own weight, no longer supported by the beliefs or actions of those it subjugates.  This reversal of direction is predictable because the seasons of human nature are knowable—it is not the direction of outer conditions that the 2012 date points to but, rather, the reversal of beliefs and values within human nature.  When the collective conscience of humanity can no longer be cowed into accepting the desecration of its own nature, then what emerges from the ashes of its old beliefs and values is a united humanity bent on no longer desecrating its relationship with nature and spirit.

Those who cannot believe that sudden and rapid change can, nearly overnight, reverse the course of whole nations simply do not understand the unconscious longings of the human heart.  The longer that people’s true desires are repressed by force and intimidation, the more sudden and more profound the reversal of beliefs and actions.  The dying giant is split and cracking—but what we need to focus on is finding the common ground within which to plant and nurture civilization’s new beginning.

2012 Metamorphosis

As I write here on my little hilltop in Southern Oregon, the Winter Solstice of 2010 has arrived.  It is an auspicious event because it is the first Winter Solstice in centuries to coincide with a lunar eclipse.  For those who have been trained to sense the Qi of the world, the extreme of yin is sinking to its utmost depths, just on the cusp of the turning point back toward yang.  At the apogee of the eclipse, the earth’s shadow moves on and the full moon’s light begins to wax again.  At the height of Winter’s cold and dark, Spring’s warmth and light is born.

A full season ago, on the Autumnal Equinox, I consulted the Oracle, asking this question:  What can humanity expect with the approach of 2012? In the Oracle’s answer, the events around the 2012 turning point predict a time of growing authoritarianism that, once transcended, will usher in a prolonged period of global reconciliation.

More specifically, it points to a crisis that we, as humanity, have confronted before and failed to resolve in a beneficial way for all.  With the approach of 2012, we have the opportunity to face that collective dilemma again.  Although the official reaction will reflexively try to 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 religions and governments 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.

In my ongoing effort to expand on this message and present its ramifications as transparently as possible, I have executed the classic transformation of the reading’s hexagrams into their nuclear hexagrams.  This transformation produces a new pair of hexagrams that represent the underlying forces at work beneath the surface of events.  The hidden motivations, the unconscious currents, the dreams demanding expression.

The primary hexagram of the 2012 reading is #54 Repeating Test.  Its nuclear hexagram is #63 Awakening Self-Sufficiency.

This is interesting because this same hexagram appeared as the future outcome in my June 2009 reading as the answer to my question, At what crossroads does our global civilization stand now—and in what direction does good fortune lie?

For those not yet familiar with the Toltec spirit warrior, it is defined as a woman or man who trains to defeat their own enemy-within (which is in turn defined as their self-defeating habits of thought, emotion and memory).  We can see that there is a growing movement of individuals worldwide who have taken up such training—which appears under different names—in order to restore humaneness to our collective life.  It is this metamorphosis of individuals that is striking the spark to the kindling-nest so that the phoenix might arise more glorious from its ashes.

As a nuclear hexagram, #63 speaks to the unconscious desire to free ourselves from those baser instincts that divide us as a people from ourselves, nature and the sacred.  As its text illustrates, this hexagram seeks autonomy from that which trivializes human nature by seeking to restore its full creative power.  It is a nuclear hexagram that overcomes outer conflict by understanding that the instincts dividing us are universal to all people and, so, constitute the very source of our inevitable unity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Summary:  Only the body marks the passage of time—for the soul, there is only this everlasting moment of growing.  Let five rivers of energy come in through the senses, let them run together into a sea of growing power.  Do not expend it on petty thoughts, moods, or goals.  Send forth your rain clouds only to water the valuable.  Condense intent into actions that foster peace and prosperity for all.  Your success is inevitable.

The derived hexagram that appears in the 2012 reading is #2 Sensing Creation.  Its nuclear hexagram is #39 Reviving Tradition.  As the future outcome, #2 Sensing Creation is profoundly inspirational.  It presages a time of worldwide reconciliation and heartfelt collaboration towards an emerging vision of what civilization might become.

As its nuclear hexagram, #39 Reviving Tradition reminds us that our common ancestors lived closer to the time of creation than we do.  It shows that the underlying forces of #2 Sensing Creation are part of the emerging reversion to values and beliefs grounded in a more traditional—and meaningful—lifeway.  This could have evolved into a time in which the reversion to traditional values and beliefs led to greater conflict and confrontation, but the movement into #2 assures us that the mistakes we have made in the past will no longer be repeated.  This is because the general amnesty and forgiveness of past wrongs is based not upon the surface differences between traditions but, rather, upon their shared foundation in the sacredness of everything.

Image:  The ancient spirit of fire takes the form of a male warrior, who is made part of the land by the roots growing like veins through his body and the earth.  His arm is raised, greeting the long line of people in shadow that approach him.  Another line of people, their torches rekindled, depart in light.

Interpretation:  This hexagram depicts the ancestors’ inheritance passing from individual to individual and from generation to generation.  The ancient spirit of fire symbolizes the universal tradition of fire-making, whose timeless ritual unites all people in a common heritage.  The male warrior symbolizes the self-discipline and training needed to stand against greed, ambition, and materialism.  That he is made part of the land means that you find your spiritual home in the site of your own lifetime.  The long line of people in shadow is a symbol of those seeking to find their way back to a balanced and harmonious way of life.  The line of people departing with torches rekindled is a symbol of those who find the light of the ancestors inside their own hearts and carry it through the darkness of their own time.  Taken together, these symbols mean that you resist spiritual erosion the way a mountain of righteousness stands against the wind of corruption and the rain of meaninglessness.

Action:  The masculine half of the spirit warrior views everything as a buried treasure left behind by the spiritual ancestors for their descendants.  It is a time for holding fast to what lasts rather than getting distracted by the novel or overwhelmed by the fleeting.  Avoid participating in the fads and fashions of the day, seeking instead to uphold the values and world view of a more spiritual time.  This means, first and foremost, respecting and honoring all that is not human:  when matter is seen as devoid of spirit, then nature can be desecrated without a second thought; when one form of nature is seen as devoid of spirit, then all forms of life can be desecrated without a second thought; when one form of life is seen as devoid of spirit, then human beings can desecrate one another without a second thought.  For this reason, the spirit warrior sees the world as the divine homeland shared by the living and the dead and those not yet born.  Recognizing that meaningfulness is hidden from those who attack it, you look into the secret heart of things and see the One Spirit of creation everywhere you look.  Recognizing that meaningfulness is an open secret to all but the greedy, ambitious, and materialistic, you bury the treasure again in your own turn so that your descendants will find their secret heart.

Intent:  Even though you feel out of step with the wounded spirit of the time, you are actively involved in healing it:  recognizing that its illness is meaninglessness, you feed it the medicine of meaningfulness day and night throughout your life.  Just as the fire of light and warmth must be fed wood and air to continue burning, the spirit of the time must be fed the joy and insights born of meaningfulness if it is to continue living:  without the tradition of meaningful consecration to feed it, the spirit of the time will eventually die and be replaced by that of meaningless desecration.  For this reason, the spirit warrior keeps alive the ancient tradition of training every thought and feeling to reflect the hidden sacredness of every moment.

Summary:  The more you put the world view of the ancients into practice, the more you have to offer others.  Be generous with what you have learned but do not stop learning:  just as people depend on a well for their water, the well depends on the invisible river below ground for its water.  Assume that you will understand matters better in the future and act with a corresponding degree of humility.

The 2012 reading, with all its associated meanings, reminds us to reject utterly the paranoiac heart-mind of this wounded age that would have us dwell in the irrational belief that unseen forces are conspiring to do us ill.  Rather, it reminds us to keep in mind the definition of the word Pronoia:  the irrational belief that unseen forces are conspiring to do us good.  It is irrational only in the sense that spirit warriors do not confine their efforts to the rational world.

It is two years exactly now until the Winter Solstice of 2012 arrives.  Priest-diviners everywhere are focusing the generative energy of their intent on plowing the field of the World Soul to receive the rain of spirit seeds already falling and taking root in the open heart of human nature.

~

Across the imaginary distance of culture and borders, I honor your contribution to the Beginning Times.

~

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 Oracle can speak to our lives from its timeless dwelling place because the timebound changes we encounter in the historical present follow certain invariable cyclic processes.  The Oracle and its body, the 64 hexagrams, do not change.  But the world of nature and civilization does, dragged into the black hole of ever-greater disorder by the gravity of entropy.  The Oracle speaks to us from outside time because it is the voice of the generative energy that continues to sustain the on-going creation of the universe around us—it speaks to us about the way to escape the trap of Fate because it is the voice of the loving-kindness of the one spirit nurturing the on-going birth of all creation.  It speaks to us because the one spirit taking form in all matter strives to awaken in matter, to continue its own limitless growth by calling us to join it at the further end of the road of Freedom.

It speaks to us, in other words, because it is calling itself home.

The Oracle and its body, the 64 hexagrams, do not change.  But its clothing does.  More than that—its clothing must change.  Because the Oracle must speak coherently to each Age, the interpretation of the hexagrams and their lines must change periodically in order to adapt to the evolving worldview of civilization.  The reasons for a new interpretation of the I Ching have all been laid out in the previous three posts and I point to those articles rather than repeating them here.

The received version of the I Ching is the King Wen version, which was originally called the Chou I, or Changes of Chou, as it was specifically identified with the emerging Chou Dynasty of the time.  Its order of the 64 hexagrams is attributed to the titular founder of that dynasty, who is said to have arranged the hexagrams in a progression of 32 pairs.  Although each pair is linked by a discernible relationship—generally that of the second being the inverted form of the first—the reasoning behind the sequence of the pairs remains a mystery.

Regardless of the actual origin of the hexagrams or the originator of the received sequence, what we do know is that this sequence cannot be divorced from the oracular nature of the I Ching.  Its more rational use as a book of wisdom, in other words, does little to disguise the mystery lying at the core of its use as an Oracle.  Lest anyone enter thinking that the art of divination is a rational affair, they ought be assured that it is, instead, a matter of engaging the numinous, the sacred, the supranatural, aspect of reality and so is essentially an act of mystical union with the One.

Of course, we draw an imaginary line here between matter and spirit in order to work with concepts existing only in our minds.  The non-dual nature of reality means that matter and form Itself are the numinous, sacred, supranatural Itself.  It is this absolute identification of matter and awareness that establishes the oracular communication:  our question, the coins, and the Oracle’s answer are all drops of water in the same sea of thinking matter.  How could there be any boundary between thought-drops and matter-drops in the single sea of spirit-matter?  It is this absolute merging of our awareness with all of creation that reflects the embodiment of spirit in all matter.  And it is this merging of self and world that allows us to dissolve the subject-object barrier between ourselves and the Oracle.

Comparing the New and Traditional  Sequences

Looking at the King Wen Sequence from a distance, we see an overall pattern of 32 pairs of hexagrams divided into two uneven parts.  Part One consists of 30 hexagrams that begins with the pair #1 The Creative (Heaven 0ver Heaven) and #2 The Receptive (Earth over Earth) and ends with the pair #29 The Abysmal (Water over Water) and #30 The Clinging (Fire over Fire).  Part Two consists of 34 hexagrams that begins with the pair #31 Influence (Lake over Mountain) and #32 Duration (Thunder over Wind) and ends with the pair #63 After Completion (Water over Fire) and #64 Before Completion (Fire over Water).

We know that the trigrams Fire and Water are delegates for Heaven and Earth, since they often represent the Sun and Moon, respectively.  So ending Part One with the doubling of the Water and Fire trigrams as a response to the doubling of the Heaven and Earth trigrams at the beginning of Part One makes good sense.  As does the final pair of hexagrams in Part Two (Water over Fire and Fire over Water), since this is the intermarrying of the two opposing trigrams rather than their doubling.  If the goal had been absolute consistency in this regard, then Part Two would have started with the symbolic counterparts to #1 The Creative and #2 The Receptive, namely #12 Standstill (Heaven over Earth) and #11 Peace (Earth over Heaven).  But such is not the case.  Part Two begins instead with a pair of hexagrams that use the intermarrying of the remaining four trigrams (Lake over Mountain and Thunder over Wind).  So where the beginning and end of Part One and the end of part Two are all marked by hexagrams comprised of the trigrams Heaven and Earth and Fire and Water, the beginning of Part Two is marked by hexagrams comprised of the other four trigrams:  #31 Influence is made up of the youngest daughter and youngest son (Lake over Mountain) and #32 Duration is made up of the eldest son and eldest daughter (Thunder over Wind).

There is a kind of symbolic structure to the traditional Sequence, in other words, that depends on the doubling and/or intermarrying of [1] trigrams specifically related to the first two (Heaven and Earth, thence their delegates, Fire and Water) and [2] trigrams expressing the familial relationships among the eight trigrams (Lake and Mountain, Thunder and Wind).  As has been often noted, Part One appears as the Upper Half of the hexagrams, representing cosmological forces at work, whereas Part Two appears as the Lower Half, representing the social and cultural forces at work.  Indeed, the traditional interpretation of #31 Influence (Lake over Mountain) and #32 Duration (Thunder over Wind) is that they represent the institutions of courtship and marriage, respectively.  The text of these two hexagrams not only refers to the “superior man” but the traditional interpretation, such as that found in the standard Wilhelm-Baynes translation, contains such parochial material as:  “During courtship the young man subordinates himself to the girl, but in marriage, which is represented by the coming together of the eldest son and the eldest daughter, the husband is the directing and moving force outside, while the wife, inside, is gentle and submissive.”

This emphasis on the well-known familial relationships between trigrams lies at the very heart of the King Wen Sequence.

Diagram 1: Family Relationships Among Trigrams

In other words, the first two hexagrams of the traditional King Wen Sequence are those symbolizing the father and the mother, which are considered the parents of the following 62 hexagrams.  This representation is due in large part to the fact that the father/heaven hexagram is comprised of six solid lines and the mother/earth hexagram of six broken lines, whereas the remaining 62 hexagrams are all made up of combinations of solid and broken lines.  The father/heaven and mother/earth hexagrams are the only two that exist as pure yang and pure yin forces, while the remaining 62 hexagrams exist as combinations of yang and yin energies.

This dependence on a paternalistic model of creation and change goes hand-in-hand with the top-down model of rulership to which the traditional I Ching has long contributed.  As part of the wisdom tradition of ancient China, the I Ching played a role in the instruction of rulers in the ongoing effort to create enlightened rulers, whose adherence to the Way would lead the nation into a time of peace and harmony and prosperity.  As the Oracle, moreover, the I Ching played a role in advising rulers in their decisions of statecraft.

As discussed in the previous three posts, this faith in the education of rulers has worldwide proven a disastrous failure and any continuing alliance between the I Ching and the ruling elite is unethical in the extreme.

We are a world of peers and neither governments nor churches are our parents.  No fellow human being stands above us to mediate between us and the infinite.  We are not children to be led.  We are, in fact, those most in touch with reality, possessing worldly wisdom and capable of determining our own destiny, whereas those pretending to rulership live in a shared hallucination of power far removed from the needs and dreams of those they would govern.

The old dynasty of rulers has come to an end and the new dynasty of peers has begun.  The Toltec I Ching reunites the ancient worldviews of the indigenous peoples of China and Mesoamerica by fusing the symbology of the Toltec culture to the I Ching of China, thereby reuniting the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of global consciousness.  The Toltec I Ching marries visual and written imagery to each  hexagram, thereby reuniting the Left and Right Hemispheres of the individual consciousness.  The Toltec I Ching, both in its role as a repository of wisdom and as the Oracle, allies itself with the emerging Dynasty and legitimizes it by reflecting its universal equality in a new Sequence and interpretation of the hexagrams.  The mechanics of this new Sequence are discussed here, which produces the following arrangement with its corresponding hexagrams in the King Wen Sequence—

Diagram 2: Toltec I Ching and King Wen Sequences

Viewing The Toltec I Ching Sequence from a distance, we can make our several principle features.  First of all, we note the beginning and ending pairs of the 64 hexagrams.  #1 Provoking Change (Thunder over Thunder) is paired with #2 Sensing Creation (Lake over Lake).

Here we see that the initiating force is something that has triggered or activated a change.  Its attribute is Shock or Surprise that motivates and inspires us to take up the challenge of transformation.  To quote from the text:

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.

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……

~

Its paired hexagram, Sensing Creation, accompanies it as a profound immersion in and heartfelt appreciation of the wonder of existence.  Its attribute is Joy or Appreciation that sensitizes us to the underlying perfection of creation.

To quote from the text:

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……

From the very beginning of the Sequence, then, we see that the parent-child relationship of the King Wen Sequence has been replaced not by another creator-couple but, rather, by the archetypal human responses to times of new beginnings.  Something has triggered a time of crisis and #1 Provoking Change responds by trying to increase the potential for all concerned to benefit, to which #2 Sensing Creation responds by establishing an atmosphere of widespread relief and reconciliation.

Similarly, there is not any talk of the “superior man”.  Every man, woman and child is considered a spirit warrior to be honored and respected for their facing the inevitability of death.  That both male warriors and female warriors have within them a masculine and feminine half is likewise considered self-evident and a key element in each individual’s process of self-realization.

~

Turning to the last two hexagrams in the Sequence, we find #63 Self-Sufficiency (Wind over Mountain) and #64 Safeguarding Life (Mountain over Wind).  Rather than the artificial structure of the King Wen Sequence with its final pair intermarrying the Fire and Water trigrams, we find ourselves approaching the end of an organic sequence in which social forces (#63) finally coalesce to achieve a harmonious self-sufficiency that (#64) ultimately cannot be sustained and threatens to extinguish the very lifeway that is most treasured.

The attribute of #63 is Peaceful Adaptation.  To quote from the text:

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.

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.

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……

~

The attribute of #64 is Obstructed Adaptation.  To quote from the text:

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.

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.

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……

~

No Conclusion

As with all organic processes, every ending begets a new beginning, so it comes as no surprise that #64 Safe-Guarding Life is itself the crisis that sets in motion #1 Provoking Change and, thereby, another round of the Cycle of Fate.

When the Oracle answers our questions with a hexagram that includes one or more lines changing to a new hexagram, it is providing us with a way to leap out of the Cycle of Fate and create our lives outside the entropic law of increasing disorder and disintegration.  When we receive an answer without any line changes, however, then it means that we are temporarily held fast in the Cycle of Fate and should see ourselves as eventually moving into the next hexagram in the Sequence.

Of old, it has been said that if we quiet our heart-mind then we will transform it into a lodging-place for the One.

As the speaking of the One, the Oracle rushes in to fill the vacuum created by our question.

Standing at the border of the known and the unknown, we step out of our familiar worldview of self-and-other duality and into the longed-for unitary experience of the eternal return.

May we all transcend the Law of Fate and create the Golden Age of Humanity in the nearest possible present time.

~

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 Unity of all things dwells in an undifferentiated state of living potential.  Neither awake nor asleep nor dreaming, it is the shining awareness everywhere present, the fount of time and eternity.  It is still and silent, utterly at peace and filled with harmony.

The Unity of all things produces a secondary world of birth and death when its living potential is activated by the intention of its parts.  This is unavoidable, since the harmony of the Whole could not be perfect if it denied in any way the natural creative impulse of its parts.  The unitary nature of the living potential produces a single field of intentions, so that no intention exists in isolation but, rather, enters the universe of intentions, where it becomes part of the vast interconnectedness of cause-and-effect.

The living potential bifurcates its generative energy along a line of further-dividing dualities:  the 1 becomes 2, the 2 become 4, the 4 become 8, and so on.  These numbers represent the ways in which generative energy distributes intention throughout the phenomenal world.  They are entities in the sense that they are comprised of intentional parts and comprise an intention of their own as a part of a larger whole:  the 8 trigrams is an entity that both contains all 8 of its trigrams and extends the intention of the 4 bigrams. The 4 bigrams double the original duality of solid and broken lines, producing two pairs of dualities.  The 8 trigrams double the duality of the 4 bigrams, producing four pairs of dualities.  This process continues until the 64 hexagrams produce 32 pairs of dualities. None of these entities, however, actually precedes another:  they all exist simultaneously and symbolize the multiple points of view required of human perception to appreciate its environment and respond to it successfully.

Diagram 1: Emanations of Duality Arising from the Process of Doubling

This cosmological process is perceptual in nature because it cannot be divorced from human perception—it represents the identification of human nature with the whole of the universe.  Because our perception arises from the same process as the rest of creation, we perceive the unfolding of the cosmos by perceiving the unfolding of our own perception.  That unfolding comes in a series of emanations coincident with the vast undifferentiated One.  Awareness stirs within the stillness of the Unity of all things, its creative urge producing a division in the unity.  Now there are two.  Thus is born Number.  Which produces Symbol:  in the case of Two, it is the Duality of complementary feeling-tones of Autonomy and Love, for the movement out of the unity requires independence of spirit even as it establishes the relationship with the Whole.  From Symbol comes Name:  in this case, yang and yin, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, creative and receptive, movement and stillness, and so on.  With names, things enter into the universe of all other names and the ensuing relationships they form produce an intricate web of Meaning that explores all the possible distributions of generative energy within civilization.

The cosmological process whereby the material universe gives body to the spiritual Unity of all things, in other words, is mirrored in the process whereby civilization gives body to the original undifferentiated perception of human nature.  In both cases, it is the cosmological unfolding of ever-dividing dualities that creates a relational order and structure to the world of phenomena and experience—an order and structure resulting in the natural tendency of all things toward increased disorder and decay.

The unfolding of the Many out of the One, then, is the Way of Fate, where all things and relations between things forever spontaneously changes in the direction of greater disintegration.

And it is the return of the Many into the One that is the Way of Freedom.

~

Reversing the Course of Fate

The return of the Many into the One is an ancient formula symbolizing the spiritual transformation we undergo when we cultivate our present self to the point where we spontaneously re-experience our original undamaged nature.  This return to our true self as it exists before and after social conditioning is likewise called uniting heaven and earth.  It comes about because we train ourselves to stop viewing the inner and outer world as pairs of dualities (like good and bad, right and wrong, self and other) and develop greater sensitivity to the Unity of all things.  This is commonly referred to as the mystical experience arising from the reunion of subject and object:  it points at the profound metamorphosis we undergo when there is no longer any distance between us and the universe nor is there any boundary between our individual mind and the one mind.  This is called reversing the outflow of generative energy and has long been associated with the real person, or sage, whose enlightened nature has been reclaimed.

As noted in the previous two posts, the Way of Fate is the entropic process carrying all things and the relationships between things ever further into disorder.  From the perceptual cosmology, this is the result of the initial division of the Unity of all things and its subsequent doublings into further dualities.

The Way of Fate is the realm of birth and death.  Everything that enters this realm must progressively deteriorate and die.  This is the first and greatest of the perceptual dualities.  From it arise all the other dualities comprising the law of Fate governing the lives of so many.

Running counter to the Way of Fate is the circulation of generative energy.  This is the flow of the subliminal force that gives life to life.  From the perspective of spirit, generative energy is matter.  From the perspective of matter, generative energy is spirit.  From the perspective of entropy, generative energy is information.  From the perspective of life, generative energy is mind.  It circulates among all things, entering all the dualities in order to hold them together in the Unity of all things.  It is the subliminal force that can postpone the arrival of Fate indefinitely.

The true person, the sage, the enlightened person, have long been those who cultivated this generative energy of the universal return within themselves and others.

~

The Oracle of Freedom

Uniting heaven and earth is an act that happens within the human being.  It occurs within us in the present mind-moment when we stand at the center of the compass and open our heart-mind to the ever-present Unity of all things.  We bring the one spirit of heaven and the one body of earth back together within ourselves every time we re-experience the nonduality of reality.  Reuniting the one spirit and the one body in a conscious act is an act of conception that gives birth to a timeless intention—fueled by the generative energy of the return of the Many into the One, it reverses the course of Fate by spontaneously and immediately returning to the Act of Creation.  Such experiences not only benefit those who undergo them but spill out into the world of intentions, contributing to the metamorphosis of civilization itself.

There are many traditions of self-transformation whose goal is the mystical experience of nonduality.  Our complete metamorphosis into a true person that constantly stands at the center of the compass takes many years of genuine insights and sincere cultivation.  Standing at the center point of nonduality, voluntarily collapsing the distinction between subject and object, voluntarily letting go of all boundaries between my self and the One—this is the method and the goal of self-realization practices.  It is not a practice undertaken lightly nor attained effortlessly.  It is the Path of Freedom in every sense and those who keep it underfoot their whole life are still too few.

But it is not the only way of uniting heaven and earth.

There are many, equally old, traditions of divination whose goal is to make the voice of the one spirit accessible to the one body.  Across cultures and the millennia, the tradition of priest-diviners has arisen to give voice to the ancient Oracle guiding humanity away from the cliff edge of self-destruction and back toward the Living Monument of self-creation.  It is a tradition based on the recognition that our self-awareness works according to the same laws as the rest of creation:  our spirit speaks most directly and powerfully to our body in our dreams, just as the one spirit speaks most directly and powerfully to the one body in its symbols.  Long considered the first language, symbols speak with a directness and power that words cannot—laden with complex layers of meaning and emotional associations, they appear all-at-once, spatially, rather than in the linear, temporal, string of words of conscious language.

Divination, then, is the art of translating the symbols of the Oracle.  It is the human awareness breaking through the barrier of subject and object, voluntarily merging self with the one spirit, re-coupling the primal duality of spirit and matter.  It is the spontaneous and immediate act of uniting heaven and earth.  It is not necessary for the diviner to consciously strive to effect such a union—the act of divination collapses the subject-object duality by its very nature.

Engaging the Oracle automatically entails stepping back into the Unity of all things.  We cannot seek an answer from the Oracle and hold ourselves separate from the one spirit, we cannot receive the Oracle’s answer and hold ourselves separate from the one body.  To open ourselves to the invisible realm of unity underlying this world of the senses is to lose the ego-self and step into the oceanic dreamtime of nonduality:  this is called becoming the site of the return of the Many into the One.  As has long been said of the I Ching, inquiring of the Oracle is not a matter of any special knowledge or skill— the divinatory act activates a mysterious conjunction of dualities solely by the power of the questioner’s sincerity.

The Oracle is the speaking of the generative energy that circulates between the beginning and end of time, between the Act of Creation and the Act of Completion.  It circulates in the same way that the ocean’s water evaporates, forms clouds that are carried by the wind to the land where it falls as rain that accumulates in streams and rivers in order to flow back into the sea.  It is an all-at-once-ness circulation that is spatial and not a linear progression of time.  It is the flow of the unchanging life-that-gives-life behind the flow of perceptible change.  To life, generative energy is the unborn mind that moves at will backward and forward between the beginning and the end of time:  it is unborn because it does not ever enter the realm of birth and death and so stands forever outside the realm of Fate—it can move at will between end and beginning because it is the circulation itself.

The 64 hexagrams constitute the map of Fate.  They show the 64 possible mixtures of yang and yin generative energy that produce the world of phenomena.  They show the pitfalls and traps everything and everyone faces in the realm of birth and death.  They show the vast archetypal landscape of entropic change driving all changing phenomena.

Engaging the Oracle activates the creative intent of the living moment, revealing the way to transcend Fate and create a lifetime of good fortune.  Circulating among the lines of the hexagrams, the generative energy calls us to follow the way of freedom in every sense.

Diagram 2: Clockwise Circulation of the Four Bigrams

The Oracle speaks to us by selecting from the 64 possible hexagrams just those that represent the present situation we face and how it is developing into the coming situation.  In doing so, it points out the choices we have if we are to keep the path of freedom beneath our feet.

The Toltec I Ching is the newest iteration of the Oracle’s speaking.  By recasting the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico, its interpretative material gives a new voice to the emerging Dynasty of the Open Secret.  By marrying the two great cosmovisions of the indigenous civilizations of China and Mexico, it unites the East and West hemispheres for today’s global civilization.  By interpreting each hexagram with both original illustrations and written material, it unites the right and left hemispheres of the brain for today’s global consciousness.

I cannot distance myself from the I Ching anymore than you.  Those who haven’t yet internalized the I Ching may think the above considerations to be mere abstractions but those who know that the 8 trigrams are their own sense organs have already discovered that the 4 bigrams are the opening and closing of the Gate of Good Fortune.  May benefit pour out of you to cover heaven and earth.

~

Next:  Reading the Map of Fate

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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

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Next Week:  The Oracle and the War Against Fate

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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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My first teachers of the Book of Change impressed upon me the perceptual aspect of this ancient work, as opposed to the historical interpretation so prevalent in modern versions.  They focused my attention on the natural symbolism of the trigrams, encouraging me to develop an emotional, or heart-mind, experience of the real world energies they represent.  This meant spending long spaces of time in nature, learning to cultivate a communication with these energies based on the kind of spiritual intuition I was being taught at the time.

My nature pilgrimages led me to more remote areas of the Americas, especially the least-traveled parts of the Copper Canyon in Mexico, where I was adopted by a family of Tarahumara shamans.  My initiation into the densest Pre-Columbian rituals of these descendants of the Toltec peoples opened the gateway of energies connecting each of us with all others.

Stumbling into Native American teachers, in other words, brought me to the understanding that my teachers of the indigenous Chinese I Ching had insisted I learn.  This makes profound sense in retrospect.  Nature is Nature everywhere.  And shamanism, though its techniques and descriptions differ by culture, is everywhere based upon sensing and interacting with the spirit within all matter.

Beyond this, however, it is self-evident that the indigenous peoples of ancient China and the Americas share the same mother culture, which spread not just through Asia but crossed the Bering Strait and populated the whole of the New World.  It was only after I encountered the sacred divinatory calendar, The Day Count, or Tonalpoalli, of ancient Mexico that I glimpsed the thread of an oracular tradition running through both cultures.

In the meantime, my continuing studies of the I Ching proceeded without books.  I pursued my teachers’ advice to grasp the real world nature of the trigrams in order to see through their eyes.  Experiencing the trigrams as the archetypal structure and pattern of human perception allows us to extend that structure into the hexagrams, whose combinations of trigrams reflects the real world coupling of internal and external dimensions.  This perceptual approach to the I Ching provides us with a way to encounter the living Oracle, as opposed to sticking to the dead words of the historical rendering.

There are many good books published on the I Ching.  However, they are all based on the King Wen Sequence of hexagrams and rework the same historical material over and over.  This is not in and of itself bad, of course.  There is much to be gained by mining such a rich vein of interpretive material.  But we now know that those interpretations of the hexagrams and trigrams, attributed to King Wen and the Duke of Chou, are based on historical events that occurred at the time of the transition from the Shang Dynasty to the Chou Dynasty.  The naturalistic symbolism of the I Ching, in other words, was used as a vessel to contain and express the power of righteous change that cannot be fulfilled without the righteous effort of righteous individuals.

Undoubtedly the work of several generations of priest-diviners spanning the Shang and Chou Dynasties, this historical interpretation infuses the hexagrams and lines with the oracular power of an ancient lineage of shamans using the historical developments of the time as a living metaphor for archetypal change as it manifests in any Age.  This remarkable accomplishment explains the predictive power of the historical interpretation, originally titled the Chou I, or Changes of Chou, and its continuing efficacy as an Oracle.

But the real power of the Oracle does not lie in its interpretive material—it lies in the real-world energies that manifest in all matter, including human nature.  The real power of the Oracle lies in the real-world energies that likewise manifest as the living symbols of the I Ching in the form of its lines, trigrams and hexagrams.  This correlation between the real-world energies that form the unchanging pattern of change within nature, spirit, and human nature is the real dynamic that establishes the Oracle’s communion with unfolding events across the entirety of the eternal moment.  It is this naturalistic perspective that needs to inform the interpretive material and not the historical events of 3,500 years ago.

The concept of righteous, for example, is based on both a specific spiritual presence and spiritual ethic:  it indicates something that is both in accord with the One and actively pursues the course that benefits all.  It is a concept that runs like an unconscious assumption throughout the traditional text:  because it was written by the court diviners, who were advising the political leaders of their time, it is a top-down model of change that assumes an enlightened, righteous, ruler will lead the many into a time of peace and prospering for all.

Such an ideal, noble and well-intentioned as it is, can now be said without any fear of contradiction to be ill-founded and antithetical to human nature.  Power creates institutions to perpetuate power.  The many suffer at the hands of the few that hold the reins of power.  Wealth and power are concentrated among the few, who enjoy privileges at the expense of the many.  Rulers serve their own purposes, not the needs of the governed.  Even if one such ruler established a reign of real equality and justice, we know now that the succeeding generations of rulers would not cease in their efforts until they had undone all those reforms.  Power is anonymous and perpetually seeks the line of least resistance, following the pull of gravity, towards totalitarianism.

If we are to reach the Golden Age of Humanity that so many generations of sages and savios have prepared us for, it will not be because of the trickle-down righteousness of a ruler.  It will be because the ground-up awakening of righteous individuals continues to build into a sea change of self-governance that spans borders and guarantees peace and prospering for all.

Rather than being written for the rulers, the I Ching needs to be written for the governed, who must adapt to the political, economic, and social pressures of the day, all the while seeking the path of personal and collective metamorphosis.  The question is no longer how to rule but, rather, how to deal with rulers.  It is not how to influence the many but, rather, how to deal with those seeking to influence.  Rather than being written for those seeking to maintain the status quo, the I Ching needs to address those seeking to create the most meaningful life possible for themselves and all others at the same time.  Rather than being a vessel for the elite, the I Ching needs to be a raft for those seeking to free the elite from their slavery to greed, dominance and self-interest.

Some might argue that there have been efforts to update these anachronisms in various modern interpretations.  But this argument fails on the single issue of the Sequence of hexagrams, upon which all those interpretations are based.  As mentioned above, this Sequence is attributed to King Wen, who masterminded the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty and the founding of the subsequent Chou Dynasty.  This Sequence he allegedly devised while under house arrest by the Shang emperor.  It is this Sequence and its appended interpretive material that came to be known as the Chou I or Changes of Chou.

In fact, this Sequence, which begins with the hexagram formed by the doubling of the Heaven trigram, is completely identified with the founding of the Chou Dynasty.  The importance of this cannot be overstated.  Legend has it that the Sequence of the hexagrams was different during the preceding Shang Dynasty, where it began with the hexagram formed by the doubling of the Earth trigram and was known as the Guizang Sequence.  Likewise, the even older Xia Dynasty that preceded the Shang had its own Lianshan Sequence, which began with the hexagram formed by the doubling of the Mountain trigram.  Thus, each of three succeeding dynasties had their own Sequence of hexagrams.

The historical accuracy of this legend is less important than its symbolic import, for what it means is that the new Sequence of hexagrams confers upon a new Dynasty its legitimacy.

The Mawangdui manuscript is the oldest physical copy of the Chou I and, even though it starts with the same hexagram formed by the doubling of the Heaven trigram, it presents a different Sequence and even different names for many of the hexagrams.  Not only, then, were there different Sequences of hexagrams associated with different Dynasties, but even within the same Dynastic tradition, it was permitted to alter the received Sequence as well as the names of the 64 hexagrams.

Why?  Because such altered sequences were not intended to be used to communicate with the Oracle.  Similarly, the masterful Sequence of Shao Yung that was based on the natural number values of the hexagrams arose in conjunction with the Chou I but neither was it intended to be used to communicate with the Oracle.

Why not?  Because the order of the hexagrams in the Dynastic Sequence alone is charged with Oracular power.  The Sequence and even the hexagram names can be changed in order to investigate the pattern of change among the 64 hexagrams but the Oracle answers only to the sacred unchanging pattern of change among the hexagrams as exemplified in the King Wen Sequence.

However, the priest-diviners of the Shang, who were seeing the end of their Dynasty—not just in the events surrounding them but in their oracular divinations—faced the problem of constructing a new Sequence for the coming Dynasty.  This they would have considered their sacred duty since their ultimate allegiance was to the Oracle and not any political entity.  The specific problem they would have faced, then, was how to devise a new Chou Sequence while maintaining the magically charged Sequence of the Shang Dynasty, which began with the hexagram formed by the doubling of the Earth trigram—the same problem their predecessors faced during the transition from the former Xia Dynasty, whose Sequence began with the hexagram formed by the doubling of the Lake trigram.

What we know as the King Wen Sequence, therefore, is conceived as at least the third iteration of a magically charged Sequence of hexagrams, each of which began with a hexagram formed by the doubling of a trigram.  Much research and discussion have followed the King Wen Sequence over the millennia in an effort to explain what appears to be the random ordering of its 32 pairs of hexagrams.  It is, of course, this mysterious relationship among the real-world energies of the trigrams and their emergent hexagrams that gives the Oracle its power—which makes formulating a new Sequence that holds this same charge a question of profound import as we enter this new Dynasty.

Next Week:  A New Version of the I Ching

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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 concept of a world soul arose among ancient philosophers and endures in the heart-mind of many modern people. It was expounded by Plato for one, and can be found in many other belief systems throughout history, up to the present where it appears as the Gaia principle.

In this sense, the physical world is perceived to have a soul or spirit no less than we human beings have.  In the same way, moreover, that “the world” is actually all the things within it, including human beings, “the world soul” is actually all the individual souls within it, including human beings.  But where does this concept come from—and what does it have to do with a world butterfly?

As to the first point:  The world soul does not originate as a thought but, rather, as a sensation.  It is the inevitable result of nature mysticism, of lives so thoroughly immersed in the natural world that they can sense the one soul of which they are a part and experience their unity with it consciously.  This unifying experience of the underlying reality is what gives rise to the spiritual perceptions and practices known as animism and shamanism.

In The Toltec I Ching, Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and I make the point that people differ only in the degree of their sensitivity to the one soul.  Here is an excerpt from Hexagram 2, Sensing Creation—

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.

Keeping in mind that every individual is a spirit warrior with a feminine and masculine half, the formula for increasing our sensitivity to the unseen world soul can be phrased like this:  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.

This calming of the spirit in order to make a place, much like a womb, for the world soul to gestate in stillness and then be born in acts of benefit is an age-old formula by which men and women across cultures have attained states of profound bliss and meaningful success.

As to the second point:  The world psyche, like the individual human psyche, grows and evolves without limit.  Its only constant is one of change, always seeking further refinement and a higher order of universal benevolence.  Its only unchanging law is that of unending metamorphosis—what better symbol of our collective spiritual metamorphosis than the world butterfly?

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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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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.

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awareness is.  Will does.

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

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

Wisdom is.  Knowledge does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Map of Inner Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

Bookmark It

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