Entering the Ghost River:

The World of Change

Stephen Karcher, PhD
Lecture: LA/Cleveland February, 2003

 

 

In A World of Change

 

Lucifer’s realization in Paradise Lost – “which way I fly is Hell: myself am Hell”- could be a motto for our world at the brink. Freud began his ground-breaking Interpretation of Dreams with the prefix: Flectere si nequo superos, Acheronta movebo”- if I cannot bend the Gods on high, I will at least set the cold river of Hades in uproar.” Marx’s Das Kapital put the underworld slums of industrialized London at the center of political thought. Picasso’s shocking painting, Les demoiselles d’Avignon, offered a demonic brothel filled with savage masks as the locus of beauty and desire. And Rimbaud’s Un saison en enfer proposed a poetic that loosed those caged voices of desire through a “systematic derangement of all the senses.” Western culture, ever in search of a new vision, has been irresistibly drawn into what Jung called The Shadow.  The dream of a European theologian, cited by Jung in 1934, is still paradigmatic of our culture on the brink.

I dreamed that I saw on a mountain road a kind of castle of the Grail. I went along a road that seemed to lead straight to the foot of the mountain and up it. But as I drew near I discovered … that a chasm separated me from the mountain, a deep darksome gorge with underworldly water rushing along the bottom. A steep path led downwards  …

 

“This water is no figure of speech, Jung observed, but a living symbol of the dark psyche … earthly and tangible, it is the fluid of the instinct driven body, blood and the flowing of blood, the odor of the beast, carnality heavy with passion.” Here we confront what the old Chinese called the Ghost River. And it is in this fluid, dark, interior world where blood, thought and image mix that any change takes place. 

Yijing, the ancient Chinese book of oracles, enters modern culture through just this Luciferian “nick” in the hierarchy of values. It turns us away from logical thought to the underworld of the psychic image, the demons, daimones or guishen, the “living units of the unconscious psyche, that are the architects of dreams and symptoms.” And, for Jung, it was a sign that “we are finally beginning to relate to the alien elements in ourselves.”

 

What is the Yi Jing?  A Book, a Technique and a Way

Yijing or Change (yi), as it is usually called, is a text, a divination technique and a Way, a spiritual and imaginative process and discipline. The book consists of 64 Figures or symbols (xiang), often referred to as hexagrams (gua). These symbols are combinations of linear diagrams, short vivid pronouncements and chains of associations. You do not so much read Change, however, as talk with it, for the figures only truly come alive in response to an individual question. The book then “speaks to your situation,” giving you a mirror that “reaches the depths, grasps the seeds and penetrates the wills of all beings under heaven.” It teaches you about the destiny (ming) that Heaven bestowed upon you and helps you follow and express your innate nature (jing).

 

Imagining Change

Perhaps the best way to imagine Change is as a stream, a living stream of images, words, emblems and myths that marks the Way of Water, the fundamental image of the Dao. It is a flow of symbols like the images in dreaming. This flow is described as wang lai, going and coming, the river of time/space. “Going” represents what is leaving the field of awareness. It is the stream as it flows away from us, carrying away what is finished. It suggests the past, the dead and the waters of the dead. It means leave, flee, as well as go in the direction of, reflected in the wang-sacrifice, an exorcism of noxious influences. “Coming” is the stream as it flows towards us, carrying the symbols that will unfold into events. It means what is arriving from the future, attracting good influences, what comes from Heaven and the High Lord. It is the Tree on the Earth Altar. It gives us the seeds, the spirits (shen) and the symbols (xiang) which they will unfold into events.

 

The Books of Change and the Mandate of Heaven

The tradition was also associated with a series of historical events of mythic proportions, the change in the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming) that brought the Zhou Kings to power, enabling them to overthrow their corrupt overlords, the Shang. These events, inscribed throughout the text, are what make the earliest form of Change, the Zhouyi, unique.

 

The story of the Change of the Mandate of Heaven revolves around the idea that Heaven (Tian) confers a Mandate (ming) on a ruling family, a mandate that can be revoked for immoral or evil behavior that flaunts the ancestors or harms the people. According to this story, the last Shang kings were tyrants who ignored the ancestors, oppressed the people and indulged in murderous drunken debauchery. Their overthrow by the rising Zhou line is the story of the establishment of an order that renews the time, an order under which communication with the spirits is re-established and the blessings once again flow for all in a “golden age.” The story centers on King Wen, the spiritual father of the Zhou who brought them to prominence, and his sons King Wu and the Duke of Zhou, the ruler and war leader who received the mandate and launched the armies. This history is woven into the texts of Change at specific places or sites.

This mixture of image and purpose is the foundation of the “Great Enterprise” described in Dazhuan, the Warring States text on Change as a vehicle of transformation. It turns Change and the mythology that it carries into a kind of portable altar, a personal link to the great river of time and space on which the symbols that unfold the way flow toward us, and a way to put those symbols into action, to “renew the time.”

 

II Entering the Ghost River

Between the Sun Tree and the Moon Tree flows the underground Ghost River that interconnects them, the home of all souls. “This world is not only populated by humans, but by the souls, the ghosts and spirits (guishen). Between Heaven and Earth there is no place the guishen do not exist. This is why we are transformed when we drink of Kan, the Ghost River.

 

Through Kan/Pit we become the Rushing Water, the Ghost Dancer,
the ditch and the drain,
the hidden,
the concealed circumference,
the crooked wheel,
people with many worries,
sick at heart
with pain in their ears.
This is the sign of the blood,
the red,
horses with beautiful spines,
earnest hearts,
hanging heads,
thin hooves dragging,
chariots with many scars and dents,
traffic and crossings,
the moon,
the thief,
the tree with a solid heart.

 

According to contemporary African shamans and healers, when we are separated from the ancestors and the spirits we experience the “water-spirit disease.” The symptoms of this disease include moodiness, lability, stomach problems, a sense of alienation and disconnection from one’s community and the world at large, excruciating empathy, being undone by and afraid of one’s responses to the suffering of the world, a history of tragedy and mishap, bad luck, money troubles, money easily made and lost, vivid dreams and daydreams, extreme visionary activity, dramatic and incomprehensible, social awkwardness, not knowing how to deport oneself in the world. It is a general instability and dislocation caused by disconnection from the spirit world.

 

To Dream the Myths Onward

I am going to give you now a fairly long passage from Deena Metzgar’s book, Entering the Ghost River. It was inspired by a Yijing consultation done in September 2001, just after the attack on the World Trade Towers. The character Augustine is an African shaman and healer; Michael Ortiz Hill is Deena’s husband, an experienced diviner in his own right with a great first hand knowledge of the world of spirits and initiations. Deena is quoting from Michael’s work and from the work of a cultural visionary, Paul Shepard.

Augustine says the Spirits want to heal. He recognizes that ancestors want to assist, not haunt us. His major work is not to exorcize spirits but to teach us how to make a place for the ancestors so they can be at home and do their work. There are times a spirit has to be exorcized but in that process a place is found where the spirit can properly reside.

 

At the beginning of my first initiation, says Michael, I awoke from a terrifying dream: late night in the San Fernando Valley facing off against a huge black man in the employ of a white gangster, both of us armed with crowbars and covered with blood.
                  
When I told Augustine the dream, he laughed: “That was a good workout. I know that spirit well.  He is a slave that your ancestors kept.”

 

Augustine proceeded to do ritual work on behalf of Michael and the spirit.

For perhaps three seconds I was the black slave, says Michael, enraged, humiliated and absolutely powerless beneath the master’s whip. And then – gone.

 

Augustine continued: “That one will soon be back in his village and he will be greeted by a feast because a warrior has returned and will protect the people. Now climb in the water and pray thanks. Now your spirits can be free.”

We heal the ancestors so they can heal us. We make amends. We create an altar. We live according to the sacred. We humans are instinctive culture makers; given the pieces, the culture will reshape itself.

 

Let us think of this as we look into the Yijing, that “mirror of the east” which  Jung saw as a precise mirror of the deepest levels of our psyche. For this is truly the “return of the repressed.” The ideal of traditional cultures - the sacred landscape, the cycle of seasons and their ritual reflection, the periodic return to chaos envisioned as “comings and goings” through life and death, and the presence of the ancestors – this is our shadow. And it is at this border that the “performative linguistic act,” the central mystery of divination and synchronicity, that much maligned and overused phrase, is created.

 

The Beast Mask and Re-experiencing Chaos

But most of all, when we look into the mirror of the east, we see the shan miao, the Beast-face, the animal ancestor. The animal mask or beast face acts out a myth of beginnings, how the Ancestor died and changed state. It is a ceremony of initiation, a primordial instrument for returning us to the sacred chaos, a “creative, participating ecstasy” or magical implement. It lets  us enter broader and deeper spiritual worlds without departing from natural existence. A primitive no-face, it dissolves the false or outmoded face of the civilized to reveal the animal shape of cosmogonic ancestors and the amorphous dead.

In traditional Chinese culture, the dance mask and the spirit tablet were used to “fix” (heng) the departed being, which divides at death into the “returning” ghost (gui) and the wandering spirit (hun), into an ancestral image. This represents the creation of a new kind of face for these problematic spirits, and is the prime inter-face between chaos and the social world. The dance mask represents the entry into the chaos time, while the spirit tablet is the ‘fixing” of the dead into the form of a beneficent ancestor. These are the operations through which we move to and from the Ghost River.

 

The Gift of the Wu and the Shi

Now, we tend to underestimate, indeed can hardly understand the immense creative shaping power of the mythological imagination of early cultures and its “holographic” capacity to produce dynamic models of very complex realities. Levi-Strauss described this modeling capacity through the figure of the bricoleur, one who “picks among the rubble” of traditional images and symbols, re-arranging them until a quantum change occurs.

I see the gift of those old shamans and diviners as a particular structure that is at the heart of the Matrix of Change: the Pair, a dynamic structure that models the shape of the “living units of the unconscious psyche, the architects of dreams and symptoms.” They allow us to see, for the first time in perhaps 2000 years, the complexity of the matrix and its modelling of multi-dimensional states of awareness.

These pairs offer a precise parallel to what Jung called a complex and what Grov calls a COEX System: a system of condensed experience that revolves around the birth matrix, relating personal, karmic and archetypal contexts. They give us a way to encounter and honor the ghosts and spirits that haunt our souls. Through the “performative linguistic act” of divination, they allow us to weave them into a fabric of living meaning that opens the sacred world.

 

The College of Diviners

Let us imagine a convocation of the Wu and the Shi, the shamans and scribes gathered together to revise the sacred traditions at a critical point in history. Such a meeting could have occurred at various times in ancient China. The purpose of the meeting was to create an instrument that could “renew the time,” connecting the “fallen” world we live in with the sources of ancient virtue.

 

Prima Materia: the Dynamics of the Pair

The first problem confronting this College of Diviners would be the arrangement of the matrix, and their basic material would be the sets of related six-line figures called Pairs. The Pairs are the prima materia used in the construction of the Matrix of Change. Each locates and describes a transformation, an “operation” with specific thematic concerns. They are a set of spindles, and the thread that runs between them is the thread of life itself, as it passes back and forth at every level of our being.

Here we need to look at a basic difference among the 64 six-line diagrams or gua that were available to the assembled group, the “technicians of the sacred.” This difference would be immediately apparent to those who contemplated the gua and would have a deep significance for them. This distinction is reflected in the two Chinese words for “change”: bian and hua.

The 64 gua or six-line diagrams constitute 32 pairs. Of these, 23 pairs or 56 diagrams are related to each other by a process called inversion or rotation: one figure in a pair becomes the other when it is inverted or “rotated” on its central axis. This reflects the process called hua: gradual, “normal” change. It is the norm in the matrix. 

 

 

The other smaller group represents the “symmetrical pairs.” They do not change when rotated or inverted. To effectuate the change here, each individual line must be transformed or converted into its opposite. This is bian, a radical change of state.  

 

 

In the mind of the bricoleur, these symmetrical pairs represent zones of radical discontinuity, where the stream of time is disconnected, turned, and re-connected in a different way. They are “negentropic;” they reverse entropy, re-charging a situation by connecting it to primal sources of energy. They are distributed at key points in the matrix, beginning, middle and end, acting as the “engines” of transformation. These are the great landmarks and zones of radical transformation.

 

Interconnections and Transformations

The spaces or “local logics” between these great landmarks are modeled out of what we call “normal” or rotational pairs and their interconnecting lines.  A “normal” or rotational pair generates a regular set of other paired figures through the change of the interconnected lines (1:6, 2:5, 3:4, 4:3, 5:2, 6:1). This describes a basic pattern of interchange (hua) that passes between the limits, centers and thresholds of the two figures involved.

 

 

These generated pairs of figures (53:54, 9:10, 42:41, 13:14, 22:21 and 63:64) accomplish two things. First, they mediate and focus the interchange between the interconnected lines involved. This establishes a basic “site” where the omens can be displayed in their complexity, across the spindles of “inspiration” and “manifestation.”

Second, these interconnections provide a set of “nodes,” places where a given pair is connected with other pairs in the matrix, echoing backwards and forwards in the stream of time. This projection includes an exchange with another pair in the series; a inner charge that powers the interchange between the two figures; and interconnections between all the transforming lines that show how the omens develop. 

Together, these “magical numbers” give us a rich and very evocative picture of the “time” and process symbolized by a Pair. All of this information would be in the mind of an old diviner when he or she looked at a set of two related six-line figures called up in response to a specific situation. 

 

Responsibility and the Leading Out of the Soul

The divinatory process of Change and the symbols it uses do not represent an ideology founded on belief, but an imaginative discipline through which a sacred cosmos is continually being constructed. Divination valorizes the experience of liminal space; it engages in what archetypal psychology has called soul-making.

A live divinatory system is suffused with what is called a pre-rational verbal therapy. The verbal formulae of such a therapy, and the performative linguistic act through which they appear, “seek to produce and do in fact produce a real and effective change in the mind of one upon whom they act.”  The Greeks called this effective change psychgogia, the leading-out of the soul. Through its daimonic symbols, a divinatory system such as the Yijing  involves its user with a spirit not cut off from the soul, a light of nature or lumen naturae previous to the splitting-off of psyche that produced what we have come to call the disenchantment of the world. And it is through these images that we can be truly responsible, can re-spond once more to the invisible world and the beauty that surrounds us.

Edith Cobb remarked, in a seminal essay called “The Ecology of the Imagination in Childhood”, that “a child seeks to create a world in which to find a self.” When we look into Yijing and what Jung called the “mirror of the east” it provides, we are in the position of this child who seeks to create a world to “in which to find a self.” We seek meaning, real meaning for our experience, our lives, who we are, and what our purpose is in the world we live in. We seek what Jung called the psychic connection to the imago dei, the image of god and spirit that dwells deep within us that is our duty somehow to find and manifest.

 

III A Divination for Our Time

I usually do a live divination using the material presented at the end of a lecture such as this one, but this time I asked Change a question for all of us, myself and those to whom this would be presented, relating directly to a kairos we seem to be confronting: ‘What about President Bush and his plans for a war on Iraq. What attitude or stance can we take towards this?”  

The response was: Figure 52, no transforming lines.

 

The Pair 51:52 represents the Operators, figures who work with the spirit. They are a threshold between winter and spring, the New King and the Old King, the celebrant and the sacrifice or victim. They contain the Hidden Possibility of re-imagining our difficulties to release bound energy, if we will tolerate the “coming and going” across the Ghost River they embody. They are the Rouser who incites things to action, reminding us of King Wu and his War leader the Duke of Zhou; and the Sacrificer or Limit, the one who stills action and sacrifices the old, literally cutting open the body of the victim to reveal the hidden omens. This reminds us of King Wen, the “pattern king,” imprisoned in the court of the Shang tyrant. According to the legend, he spent the time in his cell composing the Book of Change. So we might begin by imagining ourselves in this situation, imprisoned in the court of a corrupt king at the end of a corrupted dynasty. It is the darkness before the dawn. 

 

 

Bound (gen) is the active agent that fixes the omens and binds the fates. He is the guard and protector, the spirit of the “inner work,” the mountain temple filled with images of the spirits. He is the Mountain Men, the sages and diviners who soar like birds beyond the ordinary limits of life. Bound stands at the limit and makes limits, like the mountains that limit the fertile plains roused to life by Thunder. He is the limit of Heaven and Earth, the limit of old and new, the culmination and articulation of things. The power of Earth works through Bound. From this comes renewal.  

The term parallels the binding and opening of a sacrificial victim and the stilling of the body, the release of inner awareness through meditative practices. Stilled, and sacrificed, the body becomes the source of holy omens, footprints of the spirits. Through Bound we read the subtle signs and make the proper offerings within ourselves. Bound opens the subtle body.

 

Bind its back. Make the sacrifice.
Still your personality so it does not catch on things.
Move through the Royal Court without seeing the people.
This is not a mistake. 

 

The Pair generates a series of what I have called Karmic Nodes:

15:16 17:18 (19:20) 21:22  23:24 53:54 55:56

 

These are the places where the ghosts will come streaming in, where we confront our own involvement with violence and our country’s deep fascination with war, conquest, power and fear. My own associations here are to the period of my adolescence and early adulthood, and the horrific war in Vietnam that sent me into exile as a criminal. This is a wound that is definitely still open, both personally and culturally. We may be on the eve of another such tragic fiasco.

 

The period 53-56 might be in my own life: a marriage that has taken me to an entirely new place and state of being, a shelter from this cataclysm, and the composition of the material I am presenting to you now, what I feel is a direct reflection of the Change in the Mandate of Heaven and a powerful tool to renew the time.

The Shadow Site here is13:14, Gathering of the People and the Great Being that Emerges. This is the first appearance in life of what we might call “manifest destiny” and the gathering that fuses the people into one, to make love and to make war. The individual is lost in this great collective “harmony.” As here it is presented as the Shadow, I would simply allude to things like Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This is the thing at all cost to be avoided, both in the exterior and the interior world. We are challenged, rather, to become true individuals who can think for themselves, independent of great collective emotions. The only way we can do this is to confront the ghosts within, the ghosts that represent, in Michael Ortiz Hill’s words, our “addiction to violence.”

 

The spirit’s words bind us now to accomplish fate.
This is the Sacrificer.
This is a time when Noble One does not issue forth
from the hidden place.
Stay within and ponder your own nature
and the nature of fate and spirit.

 

At the beginning of this process of sacrificing ourselves, we bind and open our “feet,” our basic stance, the impulses that lead to compulsive action. For biting into this “meat-bundle” will let us “bring home the bride,” a new sense of the beauty of the world. All around us our neighbors are terrified, seized by the shock waves that twist and turn, enwrapping them like fearful snakes.

As we reach the inner center, we bind and open the “calves,” the muscles that move us into “following things.” We cannot rescue the “followers” here: “My heart is not glad.” But by following this inner image, we can renovate the ancestral, specifically the parental, images. Here we confront the Bad Father and the bad Mother. Corruption lurks here, so beware. This releases angry ghosts. Don’t lose your purpose and there will be something real to serve.

As we reach the threshold of manifestation, we bind the “loins and separate the spinal meat.” Here we meet the hungry souls and angry ghosts that demand action. A bitter black smoke arises that threatens to smother us. We temper the heart in this, “smoke the heart,” turning action into writing or signs that we can read. We strip the corpse, and this releases the spirit from the bog or swamp in which it is imprisoned.

As we cross the threshold between lower drives and upper centers, we bind and open the “shen.” This word means body, pictured as a child in the womb. It also represents the mask or persona, the public face we might put on the signs read in the smoke of the council fire. Stripping away this persona or mask opens the abounding time of the New King and his brother, the Wandering Sage. This is manifestation. Search outside the norms. Don’t be afraid to act alone. You are connected to a creative force. The spirit revives in the world around us.

As we reach the outer center, we bind and open the “jaws,” the support of our words and the way we gain our daily bread. Based on the encounter with the angry ghosts, now these words can have order and “the cause for sorrow disappears.” This is the marriage time, the hieros gamos, the marriage that will lead to a radical transformation. in embryo. Beware, it may work a transformation in the job you do and in your relation to the rest of humanity. Here we meet adversity again, and “lose a hundred thousand cowries.” Remember all those people who were fired for criticizing their President and his program? Climb the Nine Mounds, don’t pursue what you have lost. On the seventh day you will acquire what you need.

And the culmination: Generous boundary. Wise Words! The Way opens. Here the frightening and inspiring force of the new re-emerges, bounding out of the earth. This omen contains a peculiar and unusual phrase: dun gen, a direct allusion to Old Mr. Hun dun, the primal chaos.

 

Dun/tun (911793 66/8), is a round form, the form of the Daoist “gourd” or “empty-headed sage,” and a grave mound, a cover, the cover of a coffin and a covered jade or wooden vase used to offer millet. It suggests alone, solitary, only, the Solitary One or ruler. It is a direct cognate with hun (5145 85/8), a part of the expression hun-dun: the confusion and chaos of the “beginning” or primal state. It suggests the surging of furious troubled waters, to sow disorder, trick or dupe, and vast, immense, profound. It is the name of the Western barbarians. It means an idiot, a “natural,” to laugh at or ridicule something or someone, like a Daoist laughing at Confucian seriousness. It describes the “nebulous aspect of a saint or Mountain Immortal whose heart is open to all, receiving all, because his head is empty as a gourd. It combines trickery, destruction, being a social idiot, death and the grave mounds, with immense fertility and abundance.

 

When this word is directly attached to another character, here the fruit of a sacrifice, an opening or emptying of the body and mind, it can only point at the return from chaos, the flowing out of the blessings at the sacred meal, and the “empty head” that has opened the heart.

 

Stilling. Generous at the Boundary. Offer this.
Wise Words! The Way opens.

 

Meet people with generosity, honesty and care and you will receive it in return. This is the end of your isolation. You have learned what you need to face the new life. The way is open. Direction: Activate liminal powers to prepare the future. This is inspiration. These comings and goings release bound energy. The situation is already changing.

 

If all the lines change, if the process of interiorization and confronting our ghosts comes to fruition, it generates figure 58 through a radical conversion or bian. This is the figure of the Joyous Dancer who gives the spirits a voice in the human community and brings people together at the great spring and autumn festivals and marriage times.  

Open is the Joyous Dancer, the wu or spirit-medium who calls down, mates with and speaks for the shen or spirits. She is instrumental in opening the fields in spring, going up to the Mountain Shrine to meet the Tiger spirit and bring back the fates of beings who are rejoining the human community. She is the Young Ancestress who conceives by stepping in a footprint of Di, the High Lord, or becomes pregnant after swallowing the egg of the Dark Bird. In all things, she is the mediator, the one whose inspiring words bring joy. We see her in the luminous vapors rising from open waters, fertile marshes and sunlit lakes, and in the words from people’s mouths that connect and inspire us. She is words that connect people, and she presides over the marketplace where people come together and news passes from mouth to mouth, hand to hand. She is joy, delight and pleasure (yue), expressed as the moment when the harvest is home and the winter secure. She is the stimulating and loosening one, persuasive speech, delight and freedom from constraint, the joyous dancer whose words make the spirit present here among us. She gladdens all things that welcome her. She is the peacemaker, who leads through joy, not fear.

 

The last symmetrical pair in Change, 61:62 The Opened Heart and the Flying Bird, is directly produced by the Rouser and the Sacrificer. It describes a place where the events of life can be seen through, back across the threshold of life and death to the source of all. This, I would suggest, is the imaginal place from which those old diviners and sages launched their vehicle of transformation, their “joyous gift of words.” A final picture emerges here, the figure of the “limping” shaman who strides across the gap between life and death, one foot in each world. A true Ancestor, he walks backwards and forwards through time, a “flying bird” that spreads the word of the great enterprise of transformation.  It is Yi Jing, the classic, scripture, sutra or loom of the magical quality called “Change.”