The Great Vessel Blog

Nesting of Images by Glenroy Wolfson

He is an experienced diviner who has worked with the Yijing for many years. For me he has caught some of the essence of the sort of relationship that can be developed with the Yi and the way it comes alive and informs our perceptions. A thoughtful and evocative piece. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Kevin

"When consulting with the I-Ching the echo comes to us off of the I-Ching; coming back to us from us. It is our stance, our mind-frame, our emotional environment, our optical time-span, our "wanting to know" that colors the response, because the I-Ching is the echo - allowing us to see from where we have asked the question and in the answer we are reflected back to ourselves. But it is not though an obscure echo, for without that echo coming back from its encounter with the I-Ching, it might as well be our echo from the city buildings or the Swiss Alps, or the mirror on the wall.

The I-Ching is not a neutral tool with no consciousness - for the minute it encounters our voice it comes alive. It's life is a responsive life - its coming to life is in its encounter - it is a relational tool. It's wisdom catches ours and reframes it from its Empathy with the Tao. In so doing it finds the interference patterns of our mis-stepping from the Tao - our opposition to "what is." The Way of the Tao as the I-Ching is generating images of our correspondences or lack of correspondences with that very Way which is the echo, but the echo reflects both the Way as it is, and our mis-stepping from the Way - and it is this mixture (hologram) that is the Hexagram Images and the lines and their energy dynamic. This complex makes new eyes for us to see ourselves . It asks that our intuition open its doors to sense in its feeling/knowledge where we stand and where we are and where we may choose to go or not go, to act or not act, to continue or not continue.

More than this, because it is this visual echo (Hexagrams) with the added verbal texts and commentary texts - our lives become a commentary text that is being written as we continue to encounter and act on, or not act on, this echo. With our own kept records of our encounter with this echo, and our own internalization of this echo in the lives we live, we become a new commentary text, and those who observe and are effected by our lives see a visual echo of the I-Ching as a living entity in us. We then are not in one sense just scripts from the conditions of life, but become scriptures of life marking the values or errors of those very conditions.

When our sensitivity becomes refined through the impact of the echo, we begin to see nested images. There are questions that give an echo from close by - our myopia bringing myopic responses; but always a little beyond that horizon of our limitation. Other times we ask from a broader landscape and are returned an encompassing image. To become aware of the scope of our questioning and the echo, and noting those image that reflect the narrow mind, and those that reflect the broad mind, then allows us to nest images in a hierarchy of meaning. To take the "local" echoes from the narrow and emotionally constricted questions and set them inside of the open and objective meditative and peaceful questions with their echoes, can give us a nested picture of the way we have allowed our own attachments to the inferior man to overshadow an answer awaiting our expansion. This expansion is always hinted at in the wisdom of the sage-entity informing the echo to lead us beyond ourselves.

In our growing relationship with the I-Ching we will become an expansion of ourselves and less a caricature or ourselves. We will see and hear an echo of who we were before we were born into the conditioned.

Nested images of our own limitations and parodies reveal the multilayered masks we wear as faces to the world and even to ourselves. Pointed images of the armor we wear against the flow of the Tao allows us to see into the melting of the ice and the deliverance out of the nests we have made and into the source of the echoes which we see and hear.

The I-Ching springs instantly to life from its dormant state the moment we ask for an encounter. With it we become a new image and a new text. Each day there is a new life and a new image and a new text. The more consistent we become as followers of the Way, the more consistent will become our image and our text. To become re-made in the image of the Tao we become perfectly consistent with the time of each moment and perfectly spontaneous with the demands of each action. Within the change there is no change at all. Then the echo always has the same voice.

Nested images then become the points from which we learn to fly."

Glenroy Wolfson

New Jersey USA

(First posted on Midaughter - A Yijing Forum)

The I Ching’s Ten Year Cycles – A Structure within the King Wen Sequence

We are all used to a number of models which explain the shape our lives.

There is the, Birth, Childhood, Adolescant Struggle, Young Adulthood, Mature Adulthood, Middle Age and Old age and Death, model.

On top of this we might have a career plan which executive career mentors now promote. Each go ahead executive should now have a ten year plan it seems.

The King Wen sequence is structured around Decades. These repeating units of ten sequential hexagrams represent an archaic shaping principle used to sculpt the deepest layers of the Classic of Change. Each Decade represents a birth, death and re-birth ordeal that is simultaneously a personal narrative, a reorganization of the central nervous system, an evolution of culture and an experience of the continuous act of creation.

Given the complexity of each hexagram it is quite a profound model.

Stephen Karcher explores the basics of this in his article, “The Decades and the ritual World of Change”

I have found it very worthwhile to reflect on my past in terms of this model. I have also found it useful to consider what I am doing with my life in the present, considering it against the images of the hexagrams for my current time of life.

I suspect there might be great value in using this when counselling others. On a number of occasions I have helped people who were quite unhappy and for whom it transpired that they were trying to find fulfilment in ways no longer appropriate to their time of life.

However I imagine that sometimes our lives run behind and at others they may well run ahead of the model.

Kevin

Calling to the Ancestors in Ancient China

The main religious difference between us and the Chinese is that whereas our word “God” has no connotation of “Ancestor” the Chinese word Ti, which is roughly equivalent, was applied directly to the Dead. To sacrifice to the dead is Ti, no matter how recent or historical the departed person is. The whole of Chinese religion centered around the feeding of ancestors with offerings, whereas we have excluded this dimension that was prevalent in pagan ritual. However, our religious terminology still teems with sacrificial metaphors, words like sacrifice, blood, offering and lamb and though few of us have ever performed a sacrifice, the conceptions which center round sacrifice and offering are very familiar to us.

Chinese ancestor ritual and sacrifice revolves around the Shi, the Dead One, literally the “Corpse.” The word shih/shi means to “lay out” and is applied to laying out the dead, laying out the sacred meal and laying out the results of a sacrificial divination. Here it refers to the one who “dies” to become a vehicle for something else.  At these sacrifices this was a young man, prepared by meditation, fasting and drinking the “clear wine”, who impersonated or embodied the ancestor to whom the sacrifice was being made. For the time of the ritual, the spirit of the ancestor entered into him. This was no frenzied possession like that of the Siberian shaman; on the contrary the demeanor of the Dead One was extremely quiet, restrained and radiant. The spirits of the dead in these hymns are “very bright and clear”; a dazzling radiance surrounds them, the nimbi and haloes of their divinity.

All the Spirits are drunk.

Surely they will come now,
The Spirits and Protectors,
Requite us with great blessings.
We have brought them clear wine,
The meats well seasoned,
Well prepared, well-mixed.
Because we came in silence,
Setting all quarrels aside,
They will come too, will accept,
And send down their blessings numberless.
We shall have no cares in time to come.

There has been an answer from the heavens.
Swiftly they flit through the temple
Very bright, very glorious.
Ah the glorious Ancestors!
The happy omens, the rich and endless blessings come down.
To you, too, they must reach.

Here, then, I come.
I take myself to the Bright Ancestors and make my prayer:

“You that roam up and down in the Sacred Place
You that ascend and descend in the Sacred House.
Grant me a boon, August Elders!
Protect this my humble person, save it with your light.
I, a little child
am not wise or reverent.
But as the days pass, as the months go by
May I learn from those that the Bright Presence surrounds.
O Radiance, doubling and re-doubling!
Help these my strivings
Show me how to make real
the power and the virtue (De) of the Way.”  

So here’s long life to you!
May their Shining Light beam on you, beam mildly on you!
May they help and be with us all, the Glorious Elders
May they help and be with us all, the Mighty Mothers.

(adapted from from Waley, Book of Songs, 209, 226, 341)

Stephen Karcher

Ding as the Symbol of Change

There are two vessels in the Yijing: 50:Jing (The Well) and the 48:Ding (The Bronze Sacrificial Vessel).

The Well is the symbol of the Dao itself and the energy we draw on as well as a barometer for the ‘Who we are being’ in relation to it.

The Ding or Bronze Sacrificial Vessel is the image the Yijing uses to describe itself, as well as the barometer of our relationship to Change. How we are managing ourselves through the changes.

Both ask us to consider how we are being and what we are doing at a deep level.

Here is a brief article by Stephen Karcher which explores some of the subtleties of the Yijing’s view of Change itself. Some of the key ways we are destined to relate to Change merely by being alive. Ding as a Symbol of Change

Kevin

The Shuogua: A new translation by Stephen Karcher

Announcing the first of our eBook series: The Shuogua. This previously unpublished translation by Stephen Karcher is a powerful tool for those who want to deepen their understanding of the hexagrams in the Yijing.

The Shuogua, or Eighth Wing of the I Ching, describes the meanings of the trigrams which make up the hexagrams. It is often left out of English language versions of the Yijing because its structure, trigram by trigram, prevents the text from being divided up under the hexagram headings like some of the other Wings. However it is crucial to understanding the dynamic images of the trigrams.

When two trigrams come together, to form a hexagram, they resonate to form a new cluster of charged images. Understanding these enables the reader to enter into a deep understanding of the dynamic energies represented by the hexagrams themselves. Stephen refers to each Trigram as a ‘Spirit Helper’ - He says of this work:

“Like an incantation, each section includes natural powers and emblems, dream or totem animals, parts of the human body, colors and seasons through which the Eight Spirit Helpers can be invoked. These invocations hark back to the ceremonies of the Wu, the Intermediaries who call down the spirits to take their bodies and spread blessings to the human community. In making this translation, I have personified the gua to emphasize this aspect of the Bagua tradition, deliberately using archaic word meanings to emphasize their character as spirits and guides - semi-autonomous powers of the imagination that drive and open the Matrix of Change.”

His translation starts with an introduction which explains the Shuogua's origins and the different arrangements of the trigrams. Alongside the Bagua is a sparkling commentary which brings it together with the traditional meanings from the Yijing.

In addition he gives a beautiful translation of the Tuanzhuan (First and Second Wings) for those hexagrams which are made up of the doubled trigrams. This is often known as the Image of the hexagram.

Finally he returns to the Shuogua with a nicely rendered translation which maintains the evocative poetry of the original Chinese.

By bringing these parts together in one book Stephen has allowed the texts to amplify each other in a powerfully evocative manner. The work draws the reader in to these ancient Chinese images which really come alive in his translation.

We have taken a lot of care in choosing the software for our eBooks. It is friendly and renders the texts and images in a manner which is comfortable for on screen reading.

You can find out more here.