The Great Vessel Blog

Ancestor Worship in the Modern World

Ancestors and the Personal Altar is a new article on our site.

Some years ago I began to read about early Chinese culture in order to better understand the values, beliefs and imagery found in the Yijing. In those days I learned a little factual material about Ancestor Worship with the thought that the knowledge would help, but that of course it is a bit of “What they did then” and that I would have to work with it as a metaphor.

In my day job, in mental health, I work with a lot of displaced or estranged people. Some are displaced in that they may have come to the UK as refugees from very different cultures or who are parted from the culture and people who make up their feeling of home. Those who are estranged have lost the roots of their identity. An example of estranged people might be some of those British people who made the long ancestral journey by way of slavery, freedom and later a second migration. Some groups of these peoples are now doing a lot of work to reclaim their roots. This is an act of reclaiming identity, of rebuilding a foundation of the self with which to withstand the tugging winds of high speed western culture where every marketing campaign tries to redefine us by the image of the car we drive, the clothes we wear or some other fashionable commodity. Of course its more than just about marketing, there are many such winds blowing at us. Stephen Karcher wrote about the need for roots in The Furies and the Water Spirit Disorder . The part of this article which addresses the Water Spirit Disorder explores the act of reclaiming our place in the community in which we live and the community of ancestors from whence we came.

Ancestors and the Personal Altar takes a look at Ancestor Worship in ancient China. It may be read as spiritual fact, or as an expression of working with those Jungian archetypes which we hold within us, and its centrality to our use of the Yijing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we all need to build an Ancestor Altar on which to make offerings, though that act does fix (heng) the process in our hearts. For many of us it might mean recognising the hardships and struggles that our earlier relatives and their community made to continue the line. Perhaps to feel deep sadness at the trials they underwent, gratitude that they struggled through or wonder at some of the things they created, discovered or thought. Seeing ourselves in this light is to see ourselves as part of a long succession, or as the current holder of the torch in a long line of creative thrust. Seeing ourselves like this is to reclaim the anchor of who we really are and from whence we came. It is to be, ‘not alone’, it is also to feel the gravity of our responsibility to those who come after.

Hillary Barrett wrote a beautiful piece about her own experiences of loosing her mother. She entered into a dialogue with herself and the image of her mother at the ‘altar’ of her mothers old home. The process enabled her to re-form part of her identity, claiming the strength and abilities she needed. This, for me, is one very good example of how the idea of Ancestor Worship might be expressed in our modern world.

Kevin

Dedicated to Hillary and her mother.

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)

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

The Roots of Western Mysticism

Some months ago I was talking to a specialist bookseller. She was quite unusual in that she seemed to have read nearly all of the books she was selling. The conversation turned to Mysticism and Peter Kingsley. It would be easy to describe him as a scholar of ancient Greek works, but this would be to miss the depth and spiritual knowing which he brings to his work.

His books begin by exploring the writings of Parmenides who is credited as being the father of logic and the foundation on which Plato claims to have built. These are the roots of our modern world. In this extraordinary work Peter Kingsley re-translates Parmenides showing how and where he has been misunderstood in the past. He successfully re-claims this great work from the logicians and replaces it where it belongs as a major work of mystic wisdom.

Parmenides' world was one of using dreams and divination to heal and to govern. It was a world where wisdom was master and where the ‘real’ was something larger than the concrete world we measure today. So what has this to do with the Yijing and divination? The Yijing is itself a wisdom divinatory system, so what need of more wisdom? Parmenides poem is a report of a conversation he had with the Goddess. She explains much about the nature of the world and our lives within it. All the way through I found myself nodding and ah-ing. It forms an outer layer of a universal understanding in which the Yijing fits very comfortably. What’s more it is of the ancient root of western culture which had gathered knowledge from Mongolia, Nepal, Tibet, India and Persia before eventually being murdered by the Platonist logical world view. It survived by slipping across to Alexandria to be preserved by the Hermetic orders in Egypt.

Peter Kingsley writes exceptionally well. He manages to evidence his work whilst preserving the imaginal nature of the piece. Reading it is a curious experience. One moment he takes the reader through the evidence of how he came to this view or that and the next he lifts us into an imaginal realm where the ideas can be felt and appreciated. At times his sharp wit had me roaring with laughter.

The first book, “In the Dark Places of Wisdom” lays out some of the ideas arguments and background. To some degree I found it a little repetitive and frustrating though it does lay a good foundation to his second book, “Reality”, which is extraordinary. He sums up what he is doing in his work here.

This work is an uplifting journey of soul discovery.

Who is Kuan Yin? - And drinking tea in Wales

I will be away on holiday, up in the Welsh mountains, for a week. Meanwhile I have posted two articles. The first is Entering the Ghost River – The World of Change. Amogst other things the article explores the way pairs of hexagrams interconnect. The other article is Behind the Red Door. It explores some of the nature and background of the Goddess Kuan Yin and the Chinese oracle associated with her. I enjoyed this article a lot! All I have to do now is pack a weeks supply of my favourite tea and then to try and not get lost.

An Easter Blog - 'The Hidden Sayings of Jesus'

I recently watched a documentary on the lost Gospel of Judas. Though it was interesting the thing that struck me was the discussion of the Gnostics and the other 16 or so gospels which were excluded from the ‘Bible’ in the early centuries AD. One of the people being interviewed pointed out that some of these were the ‘advanced teachings’ which were not suitable for the every day promulgation of the faith. She made particular mention of St Thomas’ Gospel. Its full title is ‘The Gospel of St Thomas - 'The Hidden Sayings of Jesus’.

Though I am not a Christian I was intrigued. I went off and read this gospel and was amazed. All the way through it I saw echoes of Mysticism.

(2) Jesus said: He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.

(11) Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. And the dead (elements) are not alive, and the living (elements) will not die. In the days when you (plur.) used to ingest dead (elements), you made them alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day that you were one, you made two. And when you are two, what will you do?"

(18) The disciples said to Jesus: Tell us how our end will be. Jesus said: Since you have discovered the beginning, why do you seek the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who shall stand at the beginning (in the beginning), and he shall know the end, and shall not taste death.

 

I can see how a Church which was beginning to seek order and control over its members would find the Gnostics and their focus on personal spiritual experience a bit of a problem. Eventually of course they were crushed by the Church.

For me the Yijing is a direct connection back to this personal experience and knowing. Gnosticism is perhaps a deep part of our being.