Archive for January, 2014
Concerning the I Ching (from my journals 2007)
March 10, 2007
I have been reading The Taoist I Ching, starting at Hexagram 1 to hopefully the end, and as I read it, I realise that my understanding of it before was totally selective and subjective, in fact discriminating in the extreme. Because I was reading it then to understand yin and yang, to understand how the changes occur and how to read them and respond to them. In other words I was reading the I Ching looking for personal advantage, and I was also consulting it (as everyone does) for answers to personal questions. That must be a valid approach to the I Ching: ask it questions that concern or bother or intrigue or baffle you. The I Ching supplies a cryptic answer. But when you just read it (The Taoist I Ching being a specific Taoist interpretation of the book) you realise how you did not understand it before, because you ignored some of what the book was saying and concentrated only on those bits that you felt you could use, put into action etc. But the bits you read but really skipped over were (are) the important parts: they are about living your own truth and if you can’t do that then all the other stuff in the book really can’t help you.
First you must be able to tell the truth from the false and then you have to live that truth. It’s obviously as simple as that, but somehow we can’t seem to live that simply. We like to follow obscure deviations, or believe there is some arcane secret that will reveal to us how to live well, when all the time it comes down to what the simplest child knows deep in its heart: it is better to tell the truth than to lie. And if you can tell the truth you must live with and by that truth no matter how inconvenient it may be for your ideas of personal advantage (ideas of benefitting the self), which all your life you have acted on. Acting like this is just wrong, and it’s now time to set aside personal advantage (the self) and follow the truth wherever it leads, this being a selfless action. It’s taken you a long time to get to this place, but better late than never. Time after all is relative. and can go back as well as forward.
A Cultivator’s Diary Pt 8 (From my journals 2007)
February 27, 2007
My generation, me included, started our adult lives with great optimism, wanting to change things, to live by different values, not to follow the conventions set by our parents. But we abandoned all that, and as John Carpenter said, we all turned into money-grubbing guys, just like our parents’ generation, perhaps even worse than that.
Is it possible to go back to that earlier state of mind and of being, to want to change things for the better, to live by a different set of values, a more human set. Can I do this for myself before it is too late, before I lose it, age and become useless to myself and others. This would be a great project to set yourself. Are you capable of it? Can you in fact go back to that 11 year old you who you admired so much. This is the great work for you: to reverse your aging, reverse your body and mind, and go back to the state of being of your 11 year old self. Can you do it?
A Cultivator’s Diary Pt 7 (from my journals 2008)
March 21, 2008
Woke this morning wanting to read again about Cheng Man Ching’s idea of accepting loss and accepting pain, since this is what I have to do, in fact what I feel I have now done. No more anger, no more bitterness, no more regrets, now these need to be transformed into compassion for the Pythons, for their ignorance.
Also reminded of Richard Sennett’s ‘corrosion of character’, about dealing with failure. He says there are many books about achieving success but few about coping with failure. We have to buy into our failure in the same way that Cheng says buy into your pain and loss- they are all the same thing. Accept your failure, incorporate it into your body and mind, let it become part of you, but not to let it distort you. To make loss, pain and failure streams that flow into the ocean of your strength and therefore can’t harm it or alter it but only add to it.
That which does not destroy you makes you stronger.