The Great Vessel Blog

52 Mountain or Bound

52 Mountain or Bound is a very powerful image or symbol (a xiang or imaginal operation) of Stopping or bringing things to a still place. It the strongest possible injunction against "acting anything out."  Rather, it is a crucial time when we have to "act it in"  or become the victim of our own negative emotions. Jesus said "when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" not to make us into doormats or robots, but to break us out of the endless cycle of wounding and retribution.

52 Bound shows not just a mountain full of peace and calm, but a mountain where a bloody sacrifice is being enacted - and we are the "victim" in that sacrifice, the "body of our past". All our literal attachments to the past, our compulsive identifications and our pain-and-desire circuits are "cut into" one by one. The mettas, enacted in stillness, are a great challenge here. What does it mean to wish George Bush, Osama bin Laden and our own oppressive parents "happiness, health, safety and security, and freedom"? The basic lesson is that anyone who possess these things will not and cannot act in a compulsive or negative way. The secondary lesson is that any of these terrible encounters with fate actually might be a gift, releasing us from our compulsive identifications and freeing us to walk the "axis of the universe - Love". For the sacrifice of the literal in 52 Bound "opens the subtle body." It makes our response to any situation a matter of imagination and ritual rather than literal activity and affirms that this imaginal or ritual activity is the most efficacious thing we can possibly do in the situation we are confronted with.

Stephen

Answers from Yijing and the De of the Inquirer

Somewhere in the Mawangdui (commentary) texts, “Confucius” is quoted as saying something like: “If you use the Yi for ‘fortune-telling’ it is right about half of the time. If you use it to find the De (actualizing-dao or “power and virtue”) of a situation, it is right all of the time.”

If we take this to heart, it turns our questions about whether the Yi’s answers are “right” or “wrong”, whether they satisfy us or not, back on themselves. It points not at the “accuracy” of the Change in predicting the future but at the quality of our De, our motivation in asking the questions, the integrity of our desire for a particular outcome and our willingness to submit to the “judgment of the Others”.

Now, according to my friend Scott Davis (whose work I am paraphrasing in the following) the development of both writing and high divination in old China was conceived as a foray into the future, a “narrated risk”. The vocation of the diviner was as at least as much to create the future as it was simply to foresee it. The mission was to confront the future, to capture its emerging signs and to manifest the “royal intelligence” (for the King was the first diviner) in permanent form. This involved configuring the projects of present activities in such a way that they risk the encounter with significant events in the future, creating “meaningful coincidences” or synchronistic fields by casting the outlook on the future in terms that are amenable to confirmation (or not) by turns of events in the outcome. It narrates the outcome (success or failure) in terms of what was agreed to be risked. And one of its main concerns seems to center on the “license to become an ancestor.”

Technically, this effort might be called the cognitive analysis of metaphor, metaphorical coherence, and complex coherences across metaphors. Unlike simile or equation, metaphor doesn’t operate on the basis of similarity – it creates similarities, takes the risk, and this risk involves locating the De or “actualizing-dao” in the metaphorical field. It selects for experiences that involve both risk and the feedback the world and the ancestors offer.

This kind of metaphorical “gambling” sets our intelligence out in a temporal field of not-yet-existent events as conveyed by no-longer-living ancestors. Its specialized symbols (xiang) are like transducers of the intelligence of these ancestors. It moves backwards and forwards in time, involves previous divinations, observed ritual attitude, moral character, dreams, visits from ghosts and other coincidental events that accompanied past episodes as omens and turned out to be correct – the risk is whether or not they will here and if so, in what manner.

The “risk” in this kind of narrative is directly connected to the stance, integrity and De of the Inquirer; it documents the operation (or not) of what was called bao - return or reciprocal action. If the narrative features of the outcome match (dang) the narrative features of the omens, the coincidence counts as a divinatory achievement. If they do not, it points at a failure of the perception of the De of the situation. 

In its origins, this kind of divination was a gesture of wagering the present to the future based on the De of the Inquirer (the King). It exposed all action to the risk of divinatory narrative and awaited the future to adjudicate the outcome. The xiang involved in the reading were not “mere symbols”, but real things in the world – “operators”. “No coincidence, no make book,” an old literary maxim says. Without coincidence between the desire and the outcome through the xiang, there is no divinatory narrative. The Inquirer’s wager has failed through insufficient De. We need to look somewhere else for the “meaning.”

This “looking elsewhere” sets the action in terms of the moral/ritual imperfections of the “losers” and the subtle insights and moral/ritual integrity of the “heroes”. The narration dissolves human events into a multiplicity of signifying features in which the actors risk producing the structural features that “correspond to” unfavorable outcomes through lack of ritual integrity or risk not being capable of matching (dang) the structural features correctly to produce a satisfactory narrative, again in terms of a lack of De or actualizing power, the power to perceive the “real” connections. This re-forms the divinatory narrative in terms of the working (or not working) of bao.

The purpose of the symbolic narrative was to sensitize people to the manifold points of significance that crackle around human action like an electric field, with the potential to connect somewhere with future structure and become a story. Once an action is performed it has a life of its own, takes on its own volitions much in the way the notes on a scale want to return to the tonic note in a musical system. Called bao, these dynamic moments of behavior constitute its risks. They await the coincidences that will reveal the pattern of the character (De) of the agents who initiated them.

The main element of risk here is how the “world tells our story back to us” (or not). Configured in a progressive-regressive time frame, it is concerned with the “justice” of the closure of the structural openings the question and the reading have opened. Ritually reflected, this “justice” involves us directly in the realm of the Tiger and our own Gu or inner corruption. It foregrounds a quality of “blame” that is not attached to a random scapegoat, a broken taboo or a dysfunctional system, but to the De of the Inquirer.

Now, the most characteristic feature of this divinatory world view is ritualism, the priority of formality over finality, of De over fortune-telling. This would ask us to reflect our dissatisfaction with the Yi’s answers back onto our stance and integrity as Inquirer. It has been my experience that the Yi seldom gives a “wrong answer”, though the answer might not be what we would like it to be. If the answer is “inaccurate”, it is probably pointing at a disconnection between the pattern of our desire and the actual situation. It is time to look at what we were asking for and why. It is time to see the distance between the De of the King as Inquirer and our own inner motivations. If the answer is “confusing”, perhaps it is a very accurate reflection of our own inner confusion. It may be a reflection of a lack of bao or reciprocal action between our “inner base” and the “judgment of the Others”, a cloud of confusion that surrounds us and cuts us off.  

This kind of De or ritual integrity was seen as the studied form upon which one should model all types of action, the real base of divination. It is called Li, reason or pattern, cognate with Li rites and rituals and Li, footwear and to step (as in 24.1). When we embark on a divination we are potentially stepping in the ancestor’s footsteps. The whole purpose is to step in their Way, not to try to make them wear our shoes.

Stephen

Weaving the Canvas - The Act of Divination I

As diviners we generally develop a deep personal resonance with the Yijing. Our methods and perspectives become complex and closely intertwined with our psychological, or spiritual, beliefs and values. It is as if we settle into our own spot on the hillsides surrounding the ecologically rich valley called Yi. We all see the same things, but from the perspective of our different positions. So for me the sheep is in front of the tree and perhaps to you on the other side, it is behind it and of course you may be much more concerned with some other valley feature which for me is less interesting. What follows are the broad brushstrokes of two of the slopes where diviners might be found.

One perspective is that when we perform the act of divination we are making an opening across our liminal threshold into our fertile unconscious. Here we can experience the images moving around, resolving their dynamics until we perceive an understanding of the moment. This is often referred to as the ‘Jungian’ perspective of how the Yijing works. We enter that inner landscape rich with dynamic archetypal images which the moment of divination has illuminated through our imaginal apprehension of the images generated by the Yijing.

Another broad perspective is that of the spiritual or psychic belief set. Here the act of divination makes an opening through to the Yi spirit, the spirit of the ancestors, or to whatever other cosmological perspective works for us as individual diviners. For this group the ‘hand that writes on the wall’ gives us text references in the Yijing and through reading those texts we come to understand its message.

There is a group of diviners on both of these hillsides which are worth a brief mention here. For many of us the Yijing is a text rooted in a foreign culture with images and stories which relate to other places far away in distance and time. Understanding as much of that culture as we can gives us a better depth and appreciation of the words and their possible meanings. However pushing this to the point where we reduce a piece of text to a single meaning is as pointless as trying to reduce an image rich line of poetry to a single descriptive point. Such a reduction makes the Yijing oracle prescriptive with overly fixed sets of values and meanings, cognitive sets of ‘this is’ and ‘this is not’. I have to accept that this approach might suit those of us who prefer the security of setting ourselves into prescriptive projections which define our choices and paths more tightly. Freedom of choice and imagination can be unsettling and letting images circulate within our minds can leave us confused about what really is and what really is not.

It appears to me that the two broad approaches of the spiritual and the Jungian, are so closely parallel that the difference in appreciation and outcome is of little matter. One locates the knowing in the Spirit of the Yi flowing through the informative text into our spirit mind and then finally into our perceiving mind. This person might be seeking to keep their actions within the flow of the Dao, or be seeking to find the best paths through the potentials of the time. The other sites the knowing in our unconscious which is illuminated by the text and images of the Yijing. These are then appreciated by our imaginal mind before being grasped by our perceiving mind. This person might be seeking to work with their own potentials within the time or to find the path back to them through divination as an act of healing.

This is perhaps a case of two rivers with different sources flowing in the same river bed.

For me this is the canvas of divination. In my next piece I will sketch out a perspective of divination as a creative act.

Kevin

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)

Does the World's future hang on a cardigan?

Do we imbue objects and perhaps people and events with more meaning than we should? Or is there more meaning than we rationally perceive? Professor Hood developed a number of experiments which he believes demonstrates that even the most rational of us gives greater credibility to ‘superstition’ and intuition than we realise.

I am not too convinced of his cardigan experiment. ‘Disgust’ has long been known to play a deeply functional role in humans. Disgust of a person covered in suppurating sores is thought to be functional insofar as people naturally avoid situations which might expose them to infectious diseases. Similarly bovines avoid the rich sweet grass which grows up from around their fertilizing faeces. Thereby they avoid one opportunity to be infected by parasites.

Disgust, is deeply innate within us. It is thought to have generalised in humans to become socially functional. By being disgusted by those who do things which are socially dysfunctional we both exclude them and reinforce socially acceptable (and functional) bounds. Whether or not the cardigan experiment is confusing the disgust response with some idea that people imbue objects with added meaning is uncertain from this report, but it does raise an important question. Are we humans naturally disposed to imbue things with meanings which they do not possess? Is that cardigan somehow symbolically powerful as an emblem of an unacceptable behaviour? Does wearing it ‘signify’, at some primitive social level, support for the previous owners actions? Or even worse does it carry some psychic taint? I don’t know.

This is one of the difficulties we face. Is our tendency to see meaning and patterns in things some faulty carry over from primitive functionality? Or is it a natural deeper perception of the way energies circulate and persist between people and people and objects? The former position is safe and comfortable. We can all read a psychologists report about some hang over functionality with a slight blush and the comfortable knowledge that our minds have penetrated this self deception and so we still feel in control.

Professor Hood invites us to consider whether we might have outmoded wiring or whether there is something more… Whether it is actually real. People who use divination are already sitting fairly comfortably on one side of this question. To a large degree we have decided our position.

It seems to me that we could divide the human race as being on one side or other of this question. My experience of synchronicity and the effectiveness of the Yijing make me more than a little biased. But when I look at history and at some of the rational decisions we have made in this world, with their obvious deep flaws, I can’t help wondering whether we should give the benefit of the doubt to an extended world complexity view… one where meaning not outcome counts and where the way we perceive and do things is more important than the goal we think is desirable.

Flying - Predicting the Future

The other day I again I heard the assertion that the Yijing cannot predict the future. This was from someone who had been studying it for a number of years and who also seemed to have a good knowledge of various Eastern philosophies. When asked, “Have you ever tried?” They replied that they hadn’t because they knew it could not.

My usual response to people who say this sort of thing is, “try it and see what happens.” It seems to me that this is a reasonable test for folk who eschew divination whilst advocating the firm ground of scientific fact. It is like someone looking at an aircraft for the first time and asking, “Does it really fly like a bird?” Well the simple answer is, “get in and try it, see what happens.” Maybe some folk are worried that one of the Ten Wings will drop off.

I don’t think the Yijing is about predicting the future as such, just like a plane does not fly like a bird. But it does do other things, perhaps more remarkable things... Based on my own experience I will assume three things in order to explore this:

• That people have some facility to understand more than is perceived by thinking about words or events. For brevity I shall call this deep intuitive understanding.
• That there is a font of information, knowledge and understanding, which is generally just beyond our perception.
• That using the Yijing is a process which links our intuitive understanding to this ‘font’.

These would seem to be the minimum three assumptions for divination to be able to work fully. In practice it does not matter that the “font of information, knowledge and understanding” might be a God for some, the spirit of the Yi for others or, for others still, merely their own knowing soul.

Without the first assumption, that we have an intuitive understanding, the act of divination becomes severely reduced. Many people use the Yijing this way and they report getting ‘good results’. It would appear that they cast the oracle, read the text and gain a cognitive understanding of their situation and their choices within it and perhaps also an intuitive sense of its aptness. I have done many readings for people who think this way and there is nothing wrong with it per se. One such person, whom I read for from time to time, told me that it was very helpful and that the Yi gave him a deeper understanding of the issues at hand, more sensitivity to other perspectives and a dose of good ‘Eastern Wisdom’ on which to reflect. This person is definitely meeting the ‘flying’ criteria. Additionally he is not looking for a fixed prediction which might curtail his thinking, but seeks choices linked to 'oracle indicated potentials' and ways of doing what is best. This seems all well and good.

What really turns the Yijing into something extraordinary; something more than a look up book with added wisdom, is the use of Xiang and of deep intuitive understanding. I have continued here in the hope that you will give your views and experiences.

The Love of Fate - Amor Fati

Michael Ortiz Hill, Writer African Shaman, Nurse, Husband and more has led an extraordinary life. He has kindly allowed us to post his article Amor Fati – The love of fate. In it he weaves moments from his life together in a beautiful and evocative manner. Moving times in Africa are brought together with childhood struggles in a family farming the Mexican desert after being ambushed from California. This collage of his struggle toward understanding is compassionate and beautifully written. It speaks of a path toward compassion and wisdom. The jewel buried within it is Amor Fati.

Divination – What it is and what can happen when we divine.

Re-Enchanting the Mind is a major new article by Stephen Karcher. In it he explores divination, what it is and the processes which take place when we enter into that practice. He explains how it came to be marginalised in Western culture and the reasons why we are now having to repossess it and the other world to which it links us.

He approaches the act of divination from a number of angles. A Jungian explanation is put forward as well as those of the shaman and the ancient mystic.

It is entirely possible to get meaningful answers through divination without plumbing the depths outlined here. However these descriptions point to the road which empowers the diviner to enter into a deeper discourse and a more profound relationship with their (fill in the blank).

Here are the powerful arguments which led Stephen to write the Total Yijing in a symbol rich language and why he promotes symbols and language to jump the reader out of the cognitive mode and into heart mind understanding. There is much here which those who work with divination, dreams and the Total Yijing will find useful.

It is a primer for those who would travel further.

Caroline Casey talks with Sallie Ann Glassman and Stephen Karcher

Appearing on Thursday 2nd March on the Visionary Activist Radio Show on radio stations on the west coast of America, see the above link for times and frequencies. The link to listen to this show online will be posted here on Friday.

Caroline is a leading American astrologer. Her radio show is an experiment in broadcasting which seeks to look at topical events in terms of divination, myth and symbols. Sallie has trained in Voodoo in both the Haiti and the New Orleans traditions. Voodoo is not the evil art that Hollywood portrays, but is the religion, divination and medicine which grew out of the pain of slavery and the meeting of ancient West African religions and Christianity. Sally is the author of ‘Voodoo Traditions’ and the co- author of “Voodoo Tarot’.

This should be an interesting discussion. One of the themes of this show is ‘Syncretisation’, the combining of different teachings and beliefs. So we can look forward to a rich discussion by proxy between Astrology, Tarot, Voodoo and the Yijing.

Stephen has already worked with Rachel Pollack a leading Tarot practitioner. They each used their connections to enable the Yijing and the Tarot to talk to each other with very interesting results. During this work both the Tarot and the Yijing said that they want to talk together in order to find voices that meet the needs of our time, more syncretisation.

Sally appeared on last weeks Visionary Activist show. She lives in New Orleans and talks about Voodoo and the trials and hopes of New Orleans from a Voodoo perspective you can listen to it here.

Stephen Karcher in discussion with Caroline Casey

Stephen appeared on Caroline Casey’s Visionary Network radio show to discuss the state of the world and our role within it.

Caroline did a Yijing reading for this show and received 64.3 > 50. This forms a thematic foundation for their discussion, generating ideas and images which they explore and apply to the current world situation.

The discussion ranges over large areas such as the Han and Song dynasty commentators and the way they moved some of the Yijing text around to accommodate the idea of Yang - male, inspirational good and Yin - female, passive and evil and the way this was echoed in the first few centuries of the Christian Church with the outlawing of divination on pain of death. Both these movements were involved with the excommunication of our own  inner underworld and its communication with us through symbolic imagery.

Thus the Confucian movement, by moralising the text, cut the user off from the animate images which were there before and in their place developed  correlative categories of meaning and moral principles.

The theme which runs through this topical discussion is the way these symbolic images can be re-animated and how they can then be used to guide and inform. The way we can live the symbol, inviting it in, rather than cognating the it from above and beforehand.

I enjoyed listening to these two as they moved the symbols around and found the messages thus conveyed. They are both adepts at myth and imagery.

You can hear the show here.

Caroline Casey - Visionary Activist Radio Show

Recently I have been feeling a little low about our world and the madness that seems to be unleashed on every quarter in these turbulent times. Hearing that our own Stephen Karcher was about to appear on Caroline’s show I decided to go to her website to see what she does. Her Candlemas broadcast on February 2nd had me captivated. In it she talked of the nature of the troubled times in which we live and pointed to the causes and their attendant solutions.

Her delivery is fast, animated and is clearly the product of considerable learning and wisdom. Caroline has a biography which leaves me a little breathless.  She has appeared on many of the leading TV stations in the U.S. along with being featured in People Magazine, the Washington Post and the Sunday Times in the U.K. She is the author of Making the Gods Work For You - the astrological language of the psyche (Harmony Books/Random House or Random Harmony).

In her Candlemas show she talked about how we are bound and circumscribed, or expanded, by the images we hold in our minds and the way in which our ‘literal’ style of thinking has systematically excluded those ways of understanding our world, which we need, in order to deal with the problems we face as individuals and as cultures.  

We are caught up in a compelling illusion of realism which excludes mythical images whose role has traditionally been to make plain to us those parts of ourselves which they represent. We have excluded our shadow world, the place in ourselves where we need to confront those difficult, disturbing and uncomfortable things which are a part of us. If we fail to recognise these things we are doomed to project them on to others. Thus on the world stage it is some other regime which becomes the demon. This polarized world we create is bereft of true dialogue and is one which is prone to wars and other ills. By recognizing the difficult shadows within ourselves we can find a position from which to dialogue rather than to polarize.

She illustrates this with the myth of Demeter searching for Persephone who has been abducted to the underworld. In the myth Persephone begins her ascent to the outer, real world, bringing with her the magic from the underworld thus making the outer world whole. This magic is the non literal, the non logical, it is creativity and intuition, it is the knowledge of our darker potentials which, if not recognized will burst forth in a dreadful manner. When Ishtar (Persephone in another cultures myth) wanted to return to the outer world she told the gatekeeper that should they not open the gate then she would smash it down and the outer world would be consumed by the dead. If we don’t have a regular process to go down into difficult places inside us, to be unfertile, to be depressed and face uncomfortable things then this part of the psyche will smash down doors and the dead will eat the living.

So it is that Caroline makes the case for the need to de-animate the images which set the current trail in motion and the task of bridging the two worlds of our psyche. Only then will we be able to find the dream or a vision we need to live up to.

She tells us that one of the ways we can begin this healing journey is by the use of oracles which are one medium for dialogue between these parts of ourselves. Hey, I have heard this before. It is one of the central tenets of Great Vessel. And it just so happens that the Total Yijing program is written in and dedicated to reviving the language of the mythos. 

Stephen walks us through some of the features and stages of this healing journey in his article, The Shaman of the Shadows. In it he shows how Hexagram 38 is an instruction set for this passage.

Caroline’s website is here. I hope you will try one of her broadcasts, I expect to be blogging her again so please leave feedback.

Somehow I don’t feel as confused and helpless after listening to her and reading Stephen’s paper. But the journey is not easy and it has to be ongoing.

Michael McKenny – A must read!

I very nearly didn’t write this blog entry as I was too busy reading Michael's web pages! There is a very good brief history of Chinese divination here.

Michael has a flare for bringing colour and depth to his subject whilst writing in a brief and informative style. Other parts of his site cover Amerindian Lore, Paganism, Celtic Lore and more. Much of his work, here, is in the form of descriptive book reviews. He explains the content of each book chapter by chapter so that they are in themselves very informative. This is a great place to loose a half day with no regrets.

You can find his homepage here.

Kuan Yin goes home to China

Voicing Change

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we usually use Change as a sort of self-help device. Maybe that’s part of our personal development culture, all those psychological gymnastics, something I have certainly bought into in my time.   But when I took a look at what divination does in traditional cultures I got my eyes opened to a whole different world. It’s a thing they use to create sacred space. It tells everybody in the community that the ancestors and the spirits haven’t forsaken us. A consummation much to be desired.

Those other kind of diviners see themselves as a kind of “talking instrument.” People use them to speak to the spirits and, mirabile dictu, they get answers that open their hearts and minds.  The words help heal them. And this kind of divination does something even more interesting. It opens up what I call the Secret Sickness Pathways that connect what we might think is our own little problem or crisis to a disorder in the culture we’re born into. So it helps to heal the culture, too. And face it, we live in a pretty sick culture.

I want to look at this. I want to explore some of the ways we can give Change this kind of voice, how we as diviners can make its mythic images work, not just for personal development but to help heal the world we live in.