Dear All,
The I Ching or Book of Change is part of the primordial wisdom tradition that sees mind and world as aspects of a single Way or reality.
As contemporary humans, we instead feel our bodies and minds to be separate from an outer world other than ourselves.
Our personal well-being and the very survival of the planet depend on our taking the hint from the Taoist and other traditions. We can find for ourselves that the world, the universe, all heaven and earth, is in fact our individual identity.
The Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu try to coax us out of our self-enclosed spirit-centers into a broader experience of identity that includes all of the Way. David Hinton
This seems to coincide what David Spangler means when he says his goal is to be in the world as the world.
On Tuesday, we let the 24th chapter of the I Ching, in Hinton’s spare version, speak to us of this possibility under the heading of “Return.” Every perception, every discreet item, returns to its root: we tried to experience this rootedness in meditation and in dyadic exercises.
We’re not using the I Ching for divination, but mining it for meditations. Still, divination is not irrelevant: by trusting to the Way of the cosmos in the fall of the yarrow stalks or the tumble of coins, and then interpreting the hexagram to which they point, the practitioner allows for an interweaving of fate, mind and world. It is a way of participating in the Way, going from frozen things and sequences to a more churning, creative, living, participatory universe.
We’ll take Hexagram 10, Walking, as our next focus.
all blessings to all,
Michael
