The Toltec I Ching Blog

The Lesson Of Autonomy revolves around the practical application of these wisdom teachings.  While they may appear somewhat abstract at first glance, their principles demand of us concrete changes in our behavior and attitudes.  This is perhaps most evident in the way we think of ourselves:  if I look through the eyes of the relative self, all I see is loss and death—but if I look through the eyes of the true self, all I see is communion and immortality.

In order to exercise the right to change things for the better, we must first allow ourselves to be changed for the better.  This means allowing the relative self to be changed by the true self.  Voluntarily submitting to the higher self’s purpose like this allows the relative self to awaken to the life within its life, to remember the life beyond its life—by becoming more than just the sum of our body’s experiences, we let go of the personal history that has conditioned our reactions and we begin acting without being constrained by precedents and preconceptions.  Rather than acting only on our own interests, we become devoted to making things better for the people, animals, and nature around us.  When we allow ourselves to be changed by the true self, in other words, we are no longer concerned with how circumstances affect us—what concerns us is how we affect the circumstances around us.

Undergoing this self-transformation leads us to the Fourth Paradox Of Wisdom:  it is only by voluntarily submitting to the will of the true self that the relative self achieves Autonomy—it is only by recognizing its dependence on the true self that the relative self achieves real independence. But the will, ambition, and impatience of the relative self are not easily tamed and it requires sincere dedication to the true self’s purpose if we are to master the kind of self-control that carries us along the path of wisdom.

We may be devoted to changing things for the better, for example, but the interconnectedness of everything means our actions become part of a web of causes that is interwoven in increasingly complex ways, making it impossible to ever predict the ultimate effects of any single action.  This is why one of the principal symptoms of wisdom is humility:  we can act in good faith that our motive will guide our action to its intended effect, but we must not harbor the pretense of knowing its final outcome.  To exercise creative power and the right to change things for the better without a firm grasp of the governing principles is the precise opposite of wisdom.

Humility, then, is the practical face of Autonomy:  we can be devoted to changing things for the better, but we cannot be attached to the results of our efforts.  Rather than imagining we can control all the potential ways our actions might interact with all other actions over time, we must free ourselves from the relative self’s perspective and adopt that of the true self:  the successful fulfillment of the true self’s purpose cannot be understood as spanning a single lifetime but, rather, must be viewed as a long-term enterprise spanning many lifetimes.

Freedom, therefore, is the ideal face of Autonomy—the freedom to act and react without being unduly influenced by externals, the freedom to act and react without being controlled by past experiences, the freedom to act and react without being inhibited by fears and expectations of the future.

The freedom, in other words, of the untroubled spirit.

And herein lies the difference between freedom and imprisonment—for the untroubled spirit is untroubled no matter how difficult things get, whereas the troubled spirit is troubled no matter how good things get.

If we are to exercise the freedom of the untroubled spirit, we need to relinquish control of events and take control of the troubled spirit—yet because this is the precise opposite of how most people conduct themselves, we come across few people after whom we can model our behavior.  Even though this makes finding our way in life more difficult, it does force us to find our own way.  There was, of course, a first enlightened person.  A first healer.  A first shaman.  A first artist.  A first poet.  A first storyteller.  Autonomy forces us to live as if we were each the first person to see the world and respond to it in a wholly unpremeditated and original way.

Freedom is what happens when the relative self and the absolute self act as one.

Autonomy must not become just another kind of strength to be relied upon in our effort to overcome others in the competition for social resources.  It needs to be the center from which we act and feel and remember.  It needs to replace the sense of identity that has been unintentionally patched together by the relative self through its reactions to the body’s experiences.  Just as the vulnerable caddis worm crawls along the streambed picking up bits of debris it passes and then attaching them to its body to make a protective shell, the relative self builds up a reassuring sense of identity by piecing together a personal history out of the random events to which the body has been exposed.  Autonomy needs to become the sense of self from which all our actions and reactions arise without any ulterior motives.  Once our only motive is the creation of constructive change, the only obstacle to success is our desire to succeed:  by detaching our attention from any sense of success and failure, we have already succeeded in shifting our sense of personal purpose away from what is created and toward the act of creating.

Herein lies the short path to Autonomy.  By experiencing the act of creating first-hand, we are led to recognize that all of creation stems from a single source.  And by withdrawing our attention from the creation itself, we are subsequently led to experience the inexpressible purpose driving the act of creating itself.  After that experience, it is no longer possible to create anything counter to the underlying purpose to the whole of creation:  from that point on, our personal purpose is wholly aligned with the single purpose of the universal source.  Taking an active part in the universal act of creating, in other words, leads us to discover our own personal purpose in the grand scheme of things and, thereby, the unique sense of identity that transcends our individual lifetimes.  The short path to Autonomy runs straight through the quagmire of cultural conditioning without ever diverging into the quicksand of self-importance.

With this background in mind, let us turn to our training exercises and receive, in the experiences they engender, the answers that the Lesson Of Autonomy gives to our most stubborn questions.

Exercise One—Sit quietly with eyes closed, silently repeating to yourself, My Heart Is Another Sun.  Concentrate your attention on the center of your chest, visualizing a grapefruit-sized sun there radiating light and warmth out into the world.  Allow the visualization to sink into your emotions, so that the sun-heart within your chest emits unconditional loving-kindness and goodwill out into the world.  After these first steps are accomplished, allow the emotional feelings to sink deeper yet into your material body, producing physical sensations of a corporeal sun from which emanate life-sustaining rays of golden light.  After this stage of the training is mastered, carry the exercise out during all your daily activities until it becomes second nature.  Keep in mind that no shadow can ever fall upon the sun as you silently repeat the catch-phrase, My Heart Is Another Sun.

Exercise Two—Sit quietly with eyes closed, visualizing a spider web upon whose every knot there gleams a dewdrop.  Visualize further that each of these many dewdrops is reflecting every other dewdrop and, indeed, that each dewdrop is reflecting the whole of all the dewdrops together.  Once you can sustain this image, place yourself in the visualization as one of the dewdrops and then place everyone and everything you know as the other dewdrops on the web.  Allow yourself to feel how you are reflected in each of those dewdrops.  Allow yourself to feel how everyone and everything you know is reflected in you.  As you stabilize this image, allowing yourself to feel both how each dewdrop is reflected in the whole and the whole is reflected in each dewdrop, silently repeat the catch-phrase, All In One, One In All. When this stage of the exercise is mastered, extend the spider web to infinity and eternity, allowing everything in all places and in all times to become a dewdrop similarly fixed on the living web of creation, radiating All In One, One In All.

Ultimately Autonomy means to sense the omnipresent Act Of Creating and then aligning ourselves with it rather than going along with those who are not aware they are being motivated in large part by a mass hypnosis that has, over the generations, settled upon human nature.  Strive to see the world the way it really is rather than allowing yourself to be unduly influenced by the received wisdom of civilization, since that world view is the one that has created the history of suffering we are trying to change.  True Autonomy allows us to exercise freedom of perception and judgment, even as it draws us into a more passionate and compassionate involvement with the times in which we live.  Similarly, true strength allows us to defeat the self-defeating habits of thought, feeling, and memory that make us confuse weakness for strength, failure for success, and folly for wisdom.

Of all the exercises in this training regimen, the Lesson Of Autonomy is the most trying, for it demands the most of us, prodding us on to climb heights we never imagined attempting.  So take your time, re-read the background material regularly, and practice the exercises by steeping yourself in the feelings they evoke.  Move from the abstract to the bodily, making your experiences ever more concrete.  What we are searching for is not something that happens to us—it is something that we ourselves produce.

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The above is an excerpt from The Spiritual Basis of Good Fortune by William Douglas Horden.

If you’d like to learn more, visit the website:  http://spiritualbasisofgoodfortune.com/

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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.

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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There is One Mind and each of us is one of Its Ideas.

Such is the script inscribed on the memory stone of my dying.

Some six years ago, I was fortunate enough to die, fully conscious, for the two or three minutes it took the emergency room staff to revive me.  And, as validated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I experienced those few moments in the after-life state as a much longer period of time.  As it happened to me, I catapulted out of my body into a sphere of conscious light, a single radiant presence within which everything that exists, had existed, or ever will exist, was present at the same time.  Each of us was likewise a sphere of conscious light, a microcosm of the greater sphere of which we were a part.

Each of us was, in fact, an Idea within the One Mind.  This constituted our true self or essential identity, our meaning as established in relation to all the other Ideas in reality.  We were constantly coming into contact with other Ideas in both intentional and accidental ways.  And “contact” there was of a very specific kind, for the act of one sphere touching another meant that all that those Ideas held instantaneously passed between them without friction or resistance.  I learned much more in that brief stay there than I could in many lifetimes here.

I mention my personal experience to make it clear that I am not constructing a mental framework for intellectual amusement.  What happened to me went straight to my heart, only later to be sorted out and given words.  Which has made me realize that we Ideas are not cold fragments of rationality and reason but, rather, warm reflections of passion and compassion.

It is this profoundly moving emotional aspect of the nature of Ideas that has most greatly impacted me in the time since I returned to my body.

I understand One Mind to mean that everything, material and immaterial, is of one substance, is of one unitary indivisible nature.  One Being.  One Presence, Alive and Aware throughout all Creation.

Likewise, I understand Idea to refer to each and every thing, material or immaterial, animate or inanimate, as an elemental and intrinsic Thought in the Living Awareness of the One Mind.  Each stone.  Each star.  Each molecule.  Each electron.  Each plant.  Each animal.  Each person.

Which is why the ancient indigenous lifeways feel so natural to me.  And why I choose the lifeway of an animist.

It is that singular word Spirit that combines the twin concepts of heart and mind—of profound emotion and identifying thought—into a single harmonious symbol.  It is in the ancient lifeways that we find an un-self-conscious participation in the natural world based on the sense of self-knowing:  Since everything is Spirit, then everything shares a common way of being.  And since I am half form and half formless—which is to say, half body and half spirit—then other things are likewise half form and half formless.

Every other thing in creation, in other words,  is likewise alive and aware, just as I am, each of us sacred vessels of the One Spirit.

Every other thing in creation, therefore, is likewise a person, whether a human being or not, and is to be treated with all the respect and purity of intent with which one would address the One Spirit itself.

Such a lifeway arises from a deep-seated love of Nature.  A constant sense of awe in the face of Creation.  A sincere appreciation of the sacredness of everything.

And it leads to spontaneous and natural intimacy between Ideas.  Immediate communion between the individual and the One.  Universal loving-kindness among all Creation.

Everything arises from the same font of Spirit.  Form Itself is Spirit.  There is no other from which we must protect ourselves or which we ought to fear.  The material universe and all its stones and rivers and trees and animals and people arise from the same origin.  Belong to the same family.  Deserve the same peace and prospering.  When we treat nature and humanity and all our creations as The Sacred, as the living awareness of the One Mind, all the walls around us crumble, our hearts open in gratitude, and our every thought, word, and deed manifests good will.

I repeat here what I learned there when I came into contact with other spheres of conscious light:  This road—the road of treating everything as a sacred person, including other people and including ourselves—this road is the shortcut to peace of mind, bliss, and self-liberation.  It is a straight-forward discipline that trains us to see through the surface of appearances and into the living meaning of whatever has engaged our attention.  It is a wide open gateway to awakening here in this lifetime to our own individual and timeless Idea.  It is the well-worn path of freedom in every sense.

It is, in a word, the path of the spirit warrior, of men and women who sincerely undertake the task of defeating their enemy-within by moving away from self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and memories and towards a self-liberating presence within the ongoing universal Act of Creation.

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The word psyche means both soul and butterfly.

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

Inspired action flows spontaneously from an inspired mind.

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

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

An inspired mind flows spontaneously from an inspired heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

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

And of what is this nest constructed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The ancient Mayans, along with the other peoples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, held a view of time as cyclical and spiritually potent.

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

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

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

The Map of Inner Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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