Posts tagged ‘oracle’
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.
Mark Forstater's Blog 