A Gift for Resemblances

 

Divination is the effort to discern the divine will: to identify what supports and what opposes an individual or a community. When properly conducted and interpreted, what comes through may show the shape of things to come. Divination has never been out of style.

      The oldest and most effective forms of divination are those in which you look very carefully at what the world, and your dreams, telling you. You have a question on your mind and you pick up a stone, or examine the bark of a tree, and see what patterns they suggest to you that may hold an answer. The women seers of the German tribes, who gave Roman commanders plenty of trouble, liked to find pictures and hear voices in running water. Plutarch wrote in his biography of Caesar: “Their holy women used to foretell the future by observing eddies in the rivers, and by finding signs in the whirling and in the noise of the water.” When the Romans themselves needed guidance on whether the divine will was favorable or unfavorable to a certain undertaking, they sent their augurs up onto the Capitoline hill to monitor the behavior of birds.

      From very early times, humans have constructed divination kits to limit the answers the world can give you to manageable numbers, that can be read according to an agreed and teachable method of understanding. African diviners carry pouches containing stones and pieces of bones and other objects and artifacts that represent certain themes or outcomes. They can be cast as lots, like runes, to make a story.   

      The world’s great divinatory systems, such as China’s I Ching, West Africa’s Ifa, and Europe’s Tarot, are more than tools for fortune-telling. In their design, the hexagrams, the odu and the cards bring together symbols representing all the forces and processes at work in the world, including those that emanate from a deeper world. The magnitude of the design is clear in the oldest text of the I Ching, from Mawangdui, where it is written that the ancient sages “drummed” the patterns of heaven and earth into the hexagrams. Such patterns give form to the ever-shifting dynamics of manifestation. The world is before you, with all of its players, marshaled in finite numbers adapted to the finite understanding of humans: the sixty-four gua of I Ching, the sixteen master odu and 256 derivative patterns of the Ifa diviner, the 78 cards of Tarot.

      A reading is designed to show what forces and factors are at play in a given moment of time, and which are absent. For a devoted reader of one of these systems, what is missing from the field may be as significant as what is present. If you do a daily card reading, for example, and you find that a certain card or suit never seems to show up, you will want to ask yourself why that element or power is absent from your life. A recurring pattern of absence may be comparable to a medical test that reveals, for example, that you do not have enough iron in your body.

     Great readers, using any of these systems, rely on memory, intuition and a gift for resemblances. Phenomenal memory is required to learn and carry the poetic oral recitations that hold the possible meanings of Ifa. A great babalawo (“father of the mysteries”, the title of the Ifa divination priest) may carry in his head a hundred poetic stories about each of the odu, and will scan his memory banks in a reading to see which of these, in which combinations, are relevant to his client in that moment. A great reader of I Ching will remember, as coins or yarrow sticks reveal a hexagram, not only the commentaries of past masters that he has memorized, but incidents that followed when a certain hexagram came up before. In the presence of the Hanged Man, the Queen of Cups or the Seven of Swords, a great Tarot reader may wander through a personal memory palace where each of the rooms holds a living history of each of the cards – its transformations, its consequences – and there is a great room where the cards move together and interact, as in a medieval pageant with its mystery plays.

     Intuition may involve courting, or at least being receptive to, the guidance of past masters. In China, for many generations, the yarrow stalks preferred for casting the I Ching were plucked from the gravesites of previous masters, including Confucius. The babalawo recognizes that certain odu not only feature the ancestors or the orishas (the gods and demigods of the Yoruba) but may announce their irruption into the space. When the pattern of Ogun, the iron lord of justice and retribution, is revealed, everything comes to a stop while his praise-names are chanted. Those who work deeply with variants of Tarot based on Kabbalah or the work of Western esoteric orders may come to feel they are in contact with the intelligences of some of those who traveled before them on the roads of the Tree of Life.

    In all cultures, attitudes to divination range from superstitious credulity to impatient skepticism. The most pragmatic approach may be the one the great Roman statesman and advocate Cicero attributed to his brother Quintus in a celebrated treatise in which he argues both for and against divination: eventa non causae – pay attention to “outcomes, not causes.” If it works, use it.

From time immemorial, dreams have have been the favorite source of divination, for amateurs and professionals. The dream interpreter is never likely to lack business – even in a society that disparages dreams – because people know that their dreams are important, but need help in three important ways: to figure out the meaning of dreams, to determine appropriate action to be taken, and to disperse or ward off bad energies that may be operating during the night.

The prime requirement for a dream interpreter, according to Artemidorus, the most famous practitioner of this trade before Freud, is “a gift for resemblances.”

The meaning of dreams is often mysterious, and in many societies it has been maintained that a professional - shrink or priest or seer - is required to interpret them. The truth is that dreams are a personal oracle that travels with us everywhere, and we don't need someone else to tell us what they mean if we are prepared to do our own work. Asked why dream symbols can be so difficult to read, a wise ancient interpreter responded that the gods who are kindly to humanity want us to get smart, so they set us puzzles to figure out. This was also sometimes cited as a reason why the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle were famously mysterious and ambiguous.

Graphic: Ifa divination tray

 

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

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The Way and the Changes

 

We find in China a word and a way of understanding synchronicity that are simple and profound. The word is Tao (also transliterated as Dao). It is sometimes translated as “way”, or the Way, which is good enough for me. If we are attuned to the Tao, then our ways are open.

    The Tao of Psychology, Jean Shinoda Bolen’s lively little book from 1979 is one of the very best expositions of the theory of synchronicity. She goes looking for an easier and more elegant way to explain the phenomenon Jung struggled to define. She found it waiting where it has been for thousands of years, in the Chinese understanding of the Tao, the Way that had no name but generates the ten thousand names. 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.[1]

     As Bolen observed, “the Eastern mind has considered the underlying connection between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the universe, the essential reality and called in Tao.” [2]  The I Ching is a way of invoking the Tao; its first successful Western translator, Richard Wilhelm, decided that the best one-word translation of Tao is “meaning.”
     Jung’s thinking about synchronicity flowered when Richard Wilhelm sent him the text of an ancient Taoist treatise, The Secret of the Golden Flower, for which Jung wrote a preface. Wilhelm also introduced Jung to the Book of Changes, or I Ching, for which he provided the first translation that made the Chinese oracle accessible for Western readers as a divination system. Jung studied I Ching closely, and realized he was entering the mind of a culture for which synchronicity — as the Way and its Changes — was the fundamental law of life, and the preferred way of understanding what wants to happen in life.
     The dynamic interplay between yin and yang is at the heart of I Ching. It is the interplay between the receiving and the creating forces, between dark and light, between cool and warm, forever intermingled and turning into each other.
    The emergence of the I Ching is wrapped in legend and mystery. By tradition, it was the ancient Dragon Emperor, Fu Tsi, who “noticed” patterns in the cracks of turtle shells, and distinguished these patterns as the eight trigrams (pa kua) that are the root of I Ching. Then later the “King of Writing”, Wu Wen amplified the system into the 64 hexagrams and the Confucius ordered and numbered the arrangement.
     Archaeology suggests an evolution over some 4,000 years. Under the Shang dynasty, shamans read auguries in the cracks that appeared in the bones of animals offered as burned offerings. It was believed that as the appeals of humans traveled upward in the smoke, messages and warnings from higher powers came down. The relation between patterns of cracks and subsequent events was noted, and cracked bones were kept in pre-literate “archives”. Later turtle shells were substituted. They provided a larger surface, and their shape was thought to resemble the dome of heaven above and the square fields of earth below. With the coming of the bronze age, turtle shells were cracked with bronze pokers. Patterns corresponding to later events began to be marked with simple symbols, suggesting fire or flood. From these symbols, Chinese writing emerged. Under the Chou dynasty — before the supply of turtles was exhausted — shamans and diviners began to record the code of the I Ching on strips of bamboo, tied together with silk ribbons. And the first books of China emerged.
    The ancient method for casting the I Ching involves a fistful of dried yarrow stalks. The yarrow most valued for early divination as found growing on the graves of past teachers and masters of I Ching, including Confucius. Early translator James Legge reported seeing yarrow growing on the grave of Confucius. The Chinese still believe that when a good diviner in the right state of mind is doing his/her stuff, there is communication with the spirits, whether you are using yarrow stalks or coins or grains of rice, which my first teacher recommended, after lighting some incense.
    The Great Treatise (one of the earliest long commentaries on the I Ching) maintains that the I Ching contains "the measure of heaven and earth" — ie, it is a microcosm of the whole cosmic game — and that if we place ourselves in exactly the right point in its revolutions, we move in synchrony with the workings of the universe and can help to shape events on every scale through our conscious participation. The Great Treatise suggests that you not only learn to meet every event in the right way but may be privileged “to aid the gods in governing the world.”
    The I Ching hexagrams are stacks of six lines, broken or unbroken. Variations on a single binary code. The unbroken lines are yang, the broken ones are yin. One way to understand them is to see an unbroken line as a portal that is opening, and a broken one as a portal that is closing. Through this binary code, the Book of Changes reveals the interplay of three realms: the earthly, the human and the heavenly. The two lowest lines of the hexagram relate to the Earth realm, the middle lines to the human, and the upper pair to Heaven.
    You don’t use I Ching for fortune-telling. It’s not about seeing the future; it’s about seeing when and how to manifest your hopes and plans for the future, which is actually much more interesting. This is a tool for helping you to create the future you choose. You bring your clear intention — your project — and you ask for guidance on current conditions and the strategy to be followed. The I Ching does not bind you to any determinist scheme of things. It gives you a diagnosis of how things are, with the world and with you now, whether this is the right time to pursue a goal and what strategy you should follow.
     Since Jung’s death, we have had access to a manuscript of the Book of Changes that is more ancient than those available in his lifetime. It is a broken text, and therefore not useable — without creative addition or fabrication — as a full oracle. Nonetheless, it makes very exciting reading for those interested in the shamanic origins of the oracle and the different levels on which it registers and provokes synchronicity.
      The text dates from about 175 BCE. It was discovered in the tomb of a duke of the Han dynasty at Mawangdui that also contained the text of the Tao Te Ching, clearly placing this version of the Changes in the ancient Way. The ordering of the hexagrams in the Mawangdui version is quite different from that of the familiar Duke Wen arrangement used by Wilhelm and other translators. The two primal hexagrams have different and sexier names. Among the “appended statements” to the text, in Edward Shaughnessy’s translation, we find this: 

The sage…takes the real characteristics of all under heaven to their extremes and causes them to reside in the hexagrams; drums [emphasis added] the movements of all under heaven and causes them to reside in the statements; transforms and regulates them and causes them to reside in the alternations; pushes and puts them into motion and causes them to reside in the unity; makes them spiritual and transforms them and causes them to reside in his person; and plans and completes them…and causes them to reside in virtuous action.[3] 

     Inspired by this, when I led a course in I Ching, we drummed the binary code of the lines, changing and constant, yin and yang, on our single-headed frame drums, and pictured early diviners doing something similar.
     We drummed the six lines of the twentieth hexagram, which is called Watching and whose shape is that of a watchtower, the kind that Chinese armies placed along the borders. We saw how rising up through the lines of the hexagram is like climbing steps from the lowest level of an observation tower to the very top, from a place of limited or impeded vision to a space from which we could see, without restriction, across time and space.
     A great revelation came when we worked, with drumming and also with body movements, with the 61^st hexagram, Wind on the Lake, called Zhong Fu, or Inner Truth. The hole in the center of the hexagram can be seen as the opening of the heart, and also as the unveiling of a window between worlds.
      In Philip K. Dick’s fascinating novel of alternate realities, The Man in the High Castle, the casting of this hexagram brings a shift between parallel worlds. In the main narrative, we are in a world where the Axis powers were the victors in World War II, and North America is divided between Japanese and German occupation armies and other entities. Yet a subversive work of fantasy is circulating, a story in which the Allies won the war and everything is different. When Juliana casts Zhong Fu for Abendsen in the last pages of The Man in the High Castle, he understands (if only for a moment) that the alternate reality he thought was fiction is true, the real world. We see the observer effect working on a human, and even global scale. If only for a shimmering moment, as the coins roll and settle, we glimpse how it may be possible to switch worlds.
     The way we see reality generates our experience of reality. A method of seeing like the I Ching can make us co-creators of our worlds. The Great Treatise suggests that through deep study of the Book of Changes we not only learn to meet every event in the right way but may be privileged “to aid the gods in governing the world.” [4] The Mawangdui text asserts that the Book of Changes “knows the reasons for light and dark” [5]. It “strengthens beings and fixes fate, taking pleasure in the way of all under heaven…This is why the sage uses it to penetrate the will of all under heaven.” [6]

References

1. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.
2. Jean Shinoda Bolen, The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self  (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982) xi 
3. Edward L. Shaughnessy (trans and ed) I Ching: The Classic of Changes. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997) 203
4. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, trans., The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) 294.
5. ibid, 191
6. ibid, 199

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Graphic: The precursor to I Ching as China's main system of divination (besides dream interpretation) was the Shang dynasty system for reading the "oracle bones": shoulder bones of animals and the plastrons from turtle shells.

Dreaming with Einstein

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.

- Albert Einstein

 While leading a workshop in Chicago, I recorded the following dream:

 Einstein tutors me on time travel

I enter a landscape that can be folded like a map, or crumpled so that points that would normally appear distant in time and space are next to each other. I see a beaming Einstein figure sailing across the vista. He seems to be gliding in midair, but may be traveling across the surface of an invisible screen.

      Einstein wants to talk to me, and begins to speak in a thick German accent. I am amazed, delighted and skeptical. Who would a great scientist wish to communicate with a scientific ignoramus like me?

      Einstein explains that there are two reasons. First, from his current vantage point he has an even greater appreciation of the value of dreams and the central role of dreaming in our future science. Second, he reminds me that he was always a dreamer, and that his greatest discoveries were the fruit of his dreaming. “Dreaming was central to my lifelong work, from my vision at sixteen of riding a beam of light.”

     Einstein tells me that dreaming will help to unlock the secrets of time travel – which could, however, be a mixed blessing. He continues to insist on the physical impossibility of human travel backwards through time. On the other hand, according to “my” Einstein, it is possible to enter the past and interact with beings and situations in the past in other ways – for example, by materializing a body at an earlier time or by occupying the body and awareness of a person living in that time.

    “Higher entities are capable of direct intervention in any time,” says my dream Einstein, who proceeds to tutor me on the existence and nature of five-dimensional (and higher-dimensional) beings who are not confined to the rules of the universe, even the relative universe. 

 This is one of a series of dreams and visions in which “Einstein” has appeared to mentor me on the structures of multidimensional reality. He gave me a very interesting working model of synchronicity described in my book Sidewalk Oracles. Some of his dream transmissions are extremely complex. I have shared some of my reports with scientist friends who can compare this material with their own explorations in string theory, particle physics and the nature of time. Sometimes we journey together, into a shared dreamscape – like the scene in which a landscape is folded like a map, or the courtyard beyond a Chinese gate where Einstein introduced me to Fu Tsi, the legendary creator of the I Ching, and explained why the I Ching is an accurate model of the universe and its patterns of manifestation.

    Whether “my” Einstein is an aspect of myself, or a fantasy figure, or a holographic legacy of a great mind, or the scientist himself, making a visit from his research center on the other side, this ongoing dream series is provocative and thrilling, and gets me thinking about what dreamers and scientists have to offer each other.

In the wake of the Einstein revolution of 1905, physics became a science of uncertainty, improvisation and wonder. It revealed that behind the seemingly solid surface of things is an incredible dance of energy, or pure consciousness. It showed us that time and space, as we experience them on the way to the office or to pick up the kids from school, are not conditions for any other kind of life in the universe, merely human conveniences (although they often seem more like inconveniences). 

   Today, popular hypotheses in physics suggest the following:

* Time travel into the future is possible.

* Time travel into the past may be possible. (Einstein, in his time and in my dreamtime, maintains that it is not a physical possibility for a human body – but allows, in the dream version, that it could be accomplished in other ways.)

* There is no firm separation between subject and object in the universe. The observer and the “outside world” he thinks he is observing are enmeshed together. Indeed, at subatomic levels, it is the act of observation that plucks events from a soup of possibilities.

* Humans have an innate ability to communicate and influence people and objects across a distance.

* The mind is nonlocal. Consciousness acts outside the brain and outside spacetime.

* Any event that occurs in the universe is immediately available anywhere as information.

* Our experience of reality, like our experience of linear time, is a mental construct. Change the construct, and we change our world.

The new physics shows us a universe that baffles common sense, a universe that operates along utterly different lines from one in which the commuter train   leaves at 6:05 (if we’re lucky). Yet the findings of leading-edge physics have brought us scientific confirmation of the worldview of shamans, mystics and dreamers, who have always known that there is a place beyond surface reality where all things are connected, a place beyond time where all times are accessible, and that consciousness generates worlds

    How do we bring all of this together with our lived experience, our human needs, and our hopes for world peace and a gentle upward evolution of our species?

    Through dreaming.

    Dreaming, we swim in the quantum soup of possibilities, where the act of looking brings things into being. Dreaming, we discover the existence of alternate realities and parallel worlds – including dimensions that escape human conceptions of form – and can actively explore them.
     Dreaming, we confirm that consciousness is never confined to the body and that we can reach people and objects at a distance. Dreaming, we are time jumpers, able to visit (and possibly influence) both past and future. Dreaming, we can experience the six (or seven) “hidden” dimensions of physical reality, separated from our everyday sensory perception at the time of the Big Bang, that are posited by string theory.

     As dreamers, we can achieve experiential understanding of the multidimensional universe that science is modeling.

     As active dreamers and researchers inside multidimensional reality, we can contribute in important ways to what will be – if we are lucky – the foremost contribution of the twenty-first century to science and evolution: the emergence of a true science of consciousness.

Part of this text is adapted from Dreaming True by Robert Moss. Published by Pocket Books.

Lady of Changes

Her face glows in the dark of my bedroom like a yellow moon. The lovely young Chinese woman is studying me intently. She is as near as the foot of my bed. Her eyes are both very dark and very bright, her hair is lustrous black, cut neatly at shoulder length to produce a helmet effect. She is wearing a yellow tunic dress, and I remember that in China yellow is the color of Earth.=

    She communicates her intention: to teach me the real I Ching. As I look in her eyes I see they are like 8-balls, in constant rhythmic motion, displaying the eight trigrams that compose the essence of the Book of Changes, marrying in pairs to make the 64 hexagrams.

     If this is a Lady of Earth, of the receptive power of K'un, where is her consort? I see him now, wearing a robe of deep blue silk, embroidered with what may be bronze dragons. He is a Lord of Sky, and I know he personifies Ch'ien, the Heaven of the Changes. His lower body moves, indistinctly, like that of a great serpent-dragon, its coils turning like a mobius strip. I sense that his lower body interweaves with that of the Lady.

     I recall that according to tradition, the trigrams were invented by the dragon emperor Fu Xi, drawing knowledge from Heaven, and that in certain Taoist temples Fuxi and his consort Nuwa are depicted together. Their upper bodies are human; their lower bodies are those of serpent-dragons, intertwined. Awed by the energy presence of these ancient beings in my space, I am also embarrassed by my faulty memory of the Changes. I try to rehearse the names and forms of the eight trigrams in my mind. The primal pair: Heaven and Earth, Ch'ien and K'un. Fire and Water, Li and Kan. Lake and Mountain, Tui and Ken. Wind and Thunder, Sun and Chen. Do I have that right?

    Not that way. The code of Thunder flares in the Lady's changing eyes. Her fierce intent interrupts my effort to recite the list of the trigrams. Like this. Her eyes change again. I see a green mountain rising in a soft mist. There is a gentle lake at its summit, and around the peak a perfect cloud ring. Lake on the Mountain. I struggle to remember the name and the attributions of the corresponding hexagram. Something to do with lovers, newlyweds, attraction.

     Not like that. She is opening a different way of seeing and reading the code of the Changes. I relax into the embrace of Earth, and soon find myself in a different scene.

     I am on top of a very tall and steep hill, with warriors dressed in skins and armed with bows and spears. There is an intense feeling of being alive up here. The wind is fresh and brisk, lifting my hair, fluttering a loose fringe. We may have a battle to fight, but our spirits are high, our defensive position is very strong, and we can see whatever is coming at us from far away. This hill fort has a commanding view. I can see across great vistas in all directions.
     Access to our hill fort is via a wooden ladder that goes up the hillside for hundreds of feet. It can be pulled up to deny access to strangers. My lieutenant is so agile I doubt that he needs a ladder. Laughing, he sways his body over the edge of the drop until his back is almost horizontal. This defies human physiology. Maybe he has feet that can grip like fists. Respecting my human limitations, I take a step back from the brink, then smile at myself because the body I am using here can do things the body I left in bed can't manage.
     Remembering that my regular body is in a bed in a snowy town in western New York, I recollect my encounter with the Lady who told me she would teach me the real I Ching. Am I inside one of the hexagrams? If so, which one? My guess would be the 20th hexagram, which is called Guan, or Watching. Wind over the Earth.

-

The wind blows over the earth.
This is the image of Watching.

In this way ancient kings
looked across the four directions
observed the people
and gave them instruction.

-

     I hang over the precipice, studying the ladder. Despite its great height, it has only six rungs. Now I recall that ascending the Watchtower whose shape is concealed and revealed in the lines of the 20th hexagram is a journey of six steps. Few can manage these six steps in the course of a lifetime. On the first step, we see as an un-wise child; we notice only what relates to our cravings and fears. On the second step. we see like a nervous homebody peering out through a slit in a wall; protected by structure, we see little beyond it. On the third step, we look in a mirror and begin to observe ourselves, and what we have done and not done on our life journeys. On the fourth step, like lookouts, we can see across the land and provide news and warnings for our communities. On the fifth step, we return to self-observation, looking harder and deeper at our true selves. If we make it to the sixth and final step, we can see the whole. We can look at ourselves from a witness perspective. We no longer look from the ego, but from the greater Self.

     Again, I see the changing eyes, with the turning codes, and sense the movement of the dragon coils in their mobius dance. I have read thirty books on I Ching, and made my own guide to the hexagrams, giving personal names to each one and noting incidents that followed a particular reading on a certain date. I once taught a course titled "I Ching for Dreamers" in which we drummed the patterns of broken and unbroken lines, inspired by the most ancient, fragmentary text of the Book of Changes, found in a lacquer hamper in the tomb of a lord at Mawangdui as recently as 1973, where it is written that "the sages drummed the movements of all under Heaven" into the oracle. 

    However, I consider myself a rank amateur in this area, and would not trust my ability to read the Changes until I have internalized the 64 hexagrams and the changing lines without the need to look anything up. In Chinese tradition such mastery requires either a lifetime of training, memorizing and practice, or the direct inspiration of past masters, or both.

    The shining eyes give me Heaven under Earth, the desirable placement since this means the primal pair are coming together. Maybe I can aspire to know a little more of the Changes in the years that remain to me. Maybe, with the Yellow Lady and the Blue Lord as gatekeepers, I will lead others on a journey through the cycles, to climb the ladder of six steps to the Watchtower.

AFTERTALE

Oracles have their own life, and can call you even when you are not calling on them. I took up the study of I Ching because Einstein met me at a Chinese gate and instructed me that the Chinese oracle is the best working model of the universe that is generally accessible. Months later, on a snowy night in a motel in western New York, the oracle came alive for me. Jung knew something of this. He wrote that “One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experiential dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature.” (Letter to the Rev. W.P. Witcutt, August 24, 1960). The Mawangdui text quoted here follows the translation by  Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching, The Classic of Changes: The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Texts (New York: Ballantine, 1997) 203.

Adapted from Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image at the top: ancient painting of Nuwa and Fuxi

An Emperor of China Governs by Synchronicity

Ours is not a dynasty that shuns bad omens 

                

-          Kangxi, Emperor of China 1661-1722

Kangxi, Emperor of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, ruled China for over sixty years, surviving wars, rebellions and numberless intrigues. He was a man of science and reason who personally attended to many details of government without getting overwhelmed by those details. Dissatisfied with the quality of graduates from the all-important civil service examinations, he personally graded hundreds of exam papers while campaigning under a military tent. 

     Unimpressed by his generals’ handling of river pirates, he issued exact and savvy directives on the recruitment of agents, the deployment of special forces, and the need for rulers to have personal knowledge of the character and motivation of the enemy: "To learn about pirates you need more than official reports – you can question pirate leaders in person, as I did…You can employ captured pirates themselves as advisers, or use them to take messages to their fellows and induce them to surrender. ..One needs, too, to examine the type of person who is a pirate."

     One of the most instructive aspects of this Emperor’s long and successful reign is that he governed with the help of synchronicity and, in particular, with that remarkable Chinese vehicle for pattern recognition, the I Ching or Book of Changes. From his own surviving writings, beautifully edited and arranged by the distinguished Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence* we can track Kangxi’s study of the Changes and decisions he made based on specific readings. There is absolutely no flavor of credulity or superstition in his practice or his commentaries. We are observing a ruler who simply understands that whatever is happening – or is likely to happen – in a given moment is connected, and that by reading those connections , and reaching for the secret harmony, we can do better.

      In 1680, Kangxi embarked on a “preliminary reading” of the Book of Changes with three counselors. They devoted three days’ study to each hexagram. Four years later, they went through the hexagrams all over again. The emperor noticed that his diviners were placing some things in the category of “things there was no need to discuss” for fear of offending their master – for example, the sixth line in hexagram 1, Ch’ien: “Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent.” Kangxi instructed that nothing would be off-limits for discussion of a reading. A warning against arrogance was especially important since “arrogance means that one knows how to press forward but not how to draw back…something about winning but nothing about losing.”

     In 1683, after the capture of Taiwan, the Emperor discussed hexagram 56,  Lu - “Fire on the Mountain” - with his diviners: “The calm of the mountain signifies the care that must be used in imposing penalties; the fire moves rapidly on, burning up the grass, like lawsuits that should be settled speedily. My reading of this was that the ruler needs both clarity and care in punishing: his intent must be to punish in order to avoid the need for further punishing.” Here the Emperor’s reading is based on considering the natural qualities of the two elemental trigrams, Mountain and Fire – not on looking up the wordy and obscure commentaries of Confucian bureaucrats (which, however, he uses in other readings). Be calm like a Mountain, and look on things from a higher perspective; be quick and decisive in cleansing, like Fire.

     The Emperor gives us excellent guidance on the need for a ruler to be open to receiving unwanted messages:

My diviners have often been tempted to pass over bad auguries, but I have double-checked their calculations and warned them not to distort the truth: the Bureau of Astronomy once reported that a benevolent southeast wind was blowing, but I myself calculated the wind’s direction with the palace instruments and found it to be, in fact, an inauspicious northeast wind; I told the Bureau to remember that ours was not a dynasty that shunned bad omens.

He notes that while some phenomena once held to be supernatural are now known to have natural causes and may be predicted “with absolute precision”, their guidance within the weave of change must still be acknowledged and honored:

Human affairs are involved in the phenomenon of eclipses, and it makes no difference that we can now calculate them with absolute precision; we must still make the reforms necessary to avoid trouble and obtain peace.

He insists that we make our own fate, and should “urge on Heaven in its work”:

Things may seem determined in our lives, but there are ways in which man’s power can help Heaven’s work….We must urge on Heaven in its work, not just rely on it….In our own lives, though fixed by fate, yet that fate comes from our own minds, and our happiness is sought in ourselves…If you do not perform your human part you cannot understand Heaven’s way. 

Late in his reign, he celebrates the Book of Changes in these words:

I have never tired of the Book of Changes and have used it in fortune-telling and as a source of moral principles; the only thing you must not do, I told my court lecturers, is to make this book appear simple, for there are meanings here than lie beyond words.

We can learn today from Emperor Kangxi’s curt response to the diviners who tried to pretty up a disturbing portent: "Ours is not a dynasty that shuns bad omens." In other words, give us the data straight, whether we like it or not – notice the larger patterns - and do not ignore any source that can be checked out.

* Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi. (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).

Images: (top) Kangxi in ceremonial armor, on the hunt. Qing Dynasty (bottom) Fuxi drawing a trigram. By Gua Yu,circa 1503.

The Sidewalk Book of Changes

Walking east with my dog on a city street in the early light, I pause to inspect some business cards spilled on the sidewalk. There is the logo of the ABC News network, and the name of a local anchor; I recognize her name because I recently saw her on TV. What's the message for the day? A news theme, perhaps.
    I am struck by the number of spilled cards: six. That is the number of lines in a hexagram of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. 
    Can I read the pattern of these cards like a hexagram delivered by the oracle of the world? A crazy idea, perhaps, but not altogether crazy, since the cards on the sidewalk form a distinct pattern: four up, two down. If I read the cards that are face down as yin or "belly" lines, and the the ones that are face up as yang lines, I have a pattern that is easy to recognize.
    It is the repetition of the trigram Li, or Fire, producing hexagram 30 in the sequence of the I Ching, which is itself called Li, Fire or Radiance, but also The Clinging. Whether I look at the pattern while facing east, which is how I first saw it, or facing west - as I saw it later, walking back from the park - the arrangement is the same. Fire above Fire. "That which is bright rises twice."

    At home, I pull out my personal workbook on the I Ching. This is a collection of the notes, commentaries and readings I've assembled over the years, rich in illustrations. It came fully together in the year when I taught a class on I Ching for Dreamers. We worked back into the primal, shamanic level of the Chinese oracle, drumming the patterns of the changing lines, watching like hawks to see what followed from each casting, and adjusting our associations with each phase of the Changes according to what the world revealed after it appeared.
    Themes suggested by the hexagram Li, I noted, include


Enlightenment. Shedding light on things. Sunny day. Brightness. Need to understand synergy and interdependence; fire has no definite form but "clings" to its fuel.

     I look again at the Chinese ideogram for Li. There are two figures. The one on the right is called zhui and may be seen as a golden bird, a bird with sun-bright feathers. The figure on the left is more mysterious, and - for traditional Chinese readers of the oracle - is sometimes seen as ominous. It could be a very ancient bird or animal, or a demon; it could be holding a net to catch the sun bird.
    All in all, I like Fire as a pattern for today. Yet I remember that tomorrow I am traveling to Boulder, where fire has not been a pleasant theme in recent weeks. A "net" to contain a fire could be good.
    Every morning in the city, I am alert for a fresh message from the Sidewalk Oracle. I'll watch to see what happens next, since the oracle spoke in the language of the Book of Changes. It's fun reading what turns up in everyday life - in the woods or in a gritty urban neighborhood - as a language of signs and symbols. Playing games like the one I've just played here is a way of growing the power to notice what rhymes in a day; it helps maintain what Baudelaire described, with a poet's clarity, as a necessary state of "poetic health".
     

Lady of I Ching

Her face glows in the dark of my bedroom like a yellow moon. The lovely young Chinese woman is studying me intently. She is as near as the foot of my bed. Her eyes are both very dark and very bright, her hair is lustrous black, cut neatly at shoulder length to produce a helmet effect. She is wearing a yellow tunic dress, and I remember that in China yellow is the color of Earth.

=

She communicates her intention: to teach me the real I Ching. As I look in her eyes I see they are like 8-balls, in constant rhythmic motion, displaying the eight trigrams that compose the essence of the Book of Changes, marrying in pairs to make the 64 hexagrams.

If this is a Lady of Earth, of the receptive power of K'un, where is her consort? I see him now, wearing a robe of deep blue silk, embroidered with what may be bronze dragons. He is a Lord of Sky, and I know he personifies Ch'ien, the Heaven of the Changes. His lower body moves, indistinctly, like that of a great serpent-dragon, its coils turning like a mobius strip. I sense that his lower body interweaves with that of the Lady.

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I recall that according to tradition, the trigrams were invented by the dragon emperor Fu Xi, drawing knowledge from Heaven, and that in certain Taoist temples Fu Xi and his consort Nuwa are depicted together. Their upper bodies are human; their lower bodies are those of serpent-dragons, intertwined. Awed by the energy presence of these ancient beings in my space, I am also embarrassed by my faulty memory of the Changes. I try to rehearse the names and forms of the eight trigrams in my mind. The primal pair: Heaven and Earth, Ch'ien and K'un. Fire and Water, Li and Kan. Lake and Mountain, Tui and Ken. Wind and Thunder, Sun and Chen. Do I have that right?

Not that way. The code of Thunder flares in the Lady's changing eyes. Her fierce intent interrupts my effort to recite the list of the trigrams. Like this. Her eyes change again. I see a green mountain rising in a soft mist. There is a gentle lake at its summit, and around the peak a perfect cloud ring. Lake on the Mountain. I struggle to remember the name and the attributions of the corresponding hexagram. Something to do with lovers, newlyweds, attraction.

Not like that. She is opening a different way of seeing and reading the code of the Changes. I relax into the embrace of Earth, and soon find myself in a different scene.

I am on top of a very tall and steep hill, with warriors dressed in skins and armed with bows and spears. There is an intense feeling of being alive up here. The wind is fresh and brisk, lifting my hair, fluttering a loose fringe. We may have a battle to fight, but our spirits are high, our defensive position is very strong, and we can see whatever is coming at us from far away. This hill fort has a commanding view. I can see across great vistas in all directions.

Access to our hill fort is via a wooden ladder that goes up the hillside for hundreds of feet. It can be pulled up to deny access to strangers. My lieutenant is so agile I doubt that he needs a ladder. Laughing, he sways his body over the edge of the drop until his back is almost horizontal. This defies human physiology. Maybe he has feet that can grip like fists. Respecting my human limitations, I take a step back from the brink, then smile at myself because the body I am using here can do things the body I left in bed can't manage.

-
Remembering that my regular body is in a bed in a snowy northern town, I recollect my encounter with the Lady who told me she would teach me the real I Ching. Am I inside one of the hexagrams? If so, which one? My guess would be the 20th hexagram, which is called Guan, or Watching. Wind over the Earth.

-

The wind blows over the earth.
This is the image of Watching.

In this way ancient kings
looked across the four drections
observed the people
and gave them instruction.

-

I hang over the precipice, studying the ladder. Despite its great height, it has only six rungs. Now I recall that ascending the Watchtower whose shape is concealed and revealed in the lines of the 20th hexagram is a journey of six steps. Few can manage these six steps in the course of a lifetime. On the first step, we see as an un-wise child; we notice only what relates to our cravings and fears. On the second step. we see like a nervous homebody peering out through a slit in a wall; protected by structure, we see little beyond it. On the third step, we look in a mirror and begin to observe ourselves, and what we have done and not done on our life journeys. On the fouth step, like lookouts, we can see across the land and provide news and warnings for our communities. On the fifth step, we return to self-observation, looking harder and deeper at our true slves. If we make it to the sixth and final step, we can see the whole. We can look at ourselves from a witness perspective. We no longer look from the ego, but from the greater Self.

-

Again, I see the changing eyes, with the turning codes, and sense the movement of the dragon coils in their mobius dance. I have read thirty books on I Ching, and made my own guide to the hexagrams, giving personal names to each one and noting incidents that followed a particular reading on a certain date. I once taught a course titled "I Ching for Dreamers" in which we drummed the patterns of broken and unbroken lines, inspired by the most ancient, fragmentary text of the Book of Changes, found in a lacquer hamper in the tomb of a lord at Mawangdui as recently as 1973, where it is written that "the sages drummed the movements of all under Heaven" into the oracle. [1] However, I consider myself a rank amateur in this area, and would not trust my ability to read the Changes until I have internalized the 64 hexagrams and the changing lines without the need to look anything up. In Chinese tradition such mastery requires either a lifetime of training, memorizing and practice, or the direct inspiration of past masters, or both.

-
The shining eyes give me Heaven under Earth, the desirable placement since this means the primal pair are coming together. Maybe I can aspire to know a little more of the Changes in the years that remain to me. Maybe, with the Yellow Lady and the Blue Lord as gatekeepers, I will lead others on a journey through the cycles, to climb the ladder of six steps to the Watchtower.

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[1] Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching, The Classic of Changes: The First English Translation of the Newly Discoevred Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Texts (New York: Ballantine, 1997) 203.

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POSTSCRIPT

Stories should speak for themselves. But for those who want to know more about the practice of dreaming, I'll note that the visitation by the Lady of I Ching was a just-so experience, that began when I closed my eyes around 1:00 AM on Sunday, February 7, in a hotel room near Buffalo, New York. I was in what I now like to call the "wakedream" state; in liminal states of hypnagogia we are especially receptive to visitations. When I drifted towards sleep, I was transported, quite spontaneously, into the dream scene I associate with the Watchtower.
--- Over several years, I compiled a personal book of I Ching, not intended for publication, and I confess that I consulted this after these visionary experiences to check some of my memories and perceptions.

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The graphic is a Tang dynasty image of the dragon emperor Fu Xi and his consort Nuwa.