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Metaphysics and Psychologies of Change

From: The UPR Lectures - Session 9: Death and Renewal

Stephen Karcher, Ph.D.

A short biographical note can be found here.

 

 

In this session we are going to look at the theme of death and renewal and the still point in their center in as pictured in Change. This is a dramatic re-presentation of one of Richard Wilhelm’s lectures given between 1926-29 at the China Institute in Frankfurt. I would ask you to imagine that Wilhelm himself is speaking.

  

In the old Chinese concept of the world, all existence is conditioned by the polar contrast of light and dark, positive and negative, yin and yang. They are the Two Powers or the Sun Tree and the Moon Tree, connected by the underworld Ghost River, the river of souls. In the metaphysical realm this appears as life and death.

Now, the old texts put this in a particular perspective. They say that finding happiness is finding a death that crowns life – your own particular death. The greatest unhappiness is a death that tears life apart instead of completing it. For the dark aspect is not only something opposed to life; its presence and shape determine the light. The meaning of life is derived to a great degree from what is outside life, that dark something we go to meet.

We tend to affirm the light as real and regard the dark half with doubt and fear. In traditional China, the concept of reality is different. Life is not as real as we take it to be and the dark, death, belongs equally to the world of appearances. Existence, real existence, lies beyond both. This is what the Great Treatise says about our situation.

 

Change contains the measures of Heaven and Earth.
We can use it to stay in complete alignment
with the Way of Heaven and Earth.
Change looks up to include the signs in Heaven;
it looks down to see patterns on earth.
It offers us knowledge of what is dark and obscure
and what is light and clear.

 

The Sage People who made Change
went to this great beginning
and returned to trace the ends of things.
Through Change they offer us the knowledge of death and birth.

 

Listen: The seed we see in a symbol
unites with body-energy
through the earth's power of realizing.
This is what creates the beings. A being is born from a symbol.
When the soul wanders, detaching itself and floating up,
a transformation occurs. This is what is called death.

 

It is through the symbols and the transformations
That we can know the spirits and the ghosts
and understand their appearances and desires.

 

This is life and death, the movement of the symbols or seeds. It is said that when a child utters its first cry, the two principles, united in the mother’s womb, separate. During life they lead a deceptive unity in the body (shen), for the person, the persona or mask, is the body. The sage is one who succeeds in finding or creating harmony by “dissolving the body” through a ritual death and taking his standpoint in the middle, the void prior to phenomenal existence.

At death, the two elements separate. One, the bo-soul, remains with the body and goes into the tomb; the other, the hun or spirit-soul, begins to “wander”. At this point the sage constructs a subtle body for this spirit, a body of thought and work where the shen or hun can find shelter. This is the significance of the ancestor rituals: their remembering permits the psychic element to dwell as living substance.

Death here is conceived of as a gradual disappearance, a fading into twilight and the Ghost River. For the ancestors will return after a lapse of time in the general spiritual reservoir, sooner or later uniting once more with human bodies and human souls, as our stimuli and impulses to life.

Angry or hungry disembodied beings may manifest as what we know as ghosts, seeking to live out and fulfill their unfulfilled pains and desires. Very great humans will also manifest directly as shen or spirits, what we might call cultural archetypes, enduring in the cultural pantheon. They have put their being into constant circulation by being creatively and securely anchored in the complex of culture that has formed and supports them.

Now, Daoists tend to see the great importance we ascribe to death as a rather silly misunderstanding, a kind of joke. They regard death as an easy farewell. In death, it is as if the ropes of someone suspended by his feet are loosened. To achieve this standpoint, they seek to expand the experience and identification of the “I”, the ego, from the transitory to ever wider spheres. “Whoever can walk together with the sun and the moon will endure as long as they do; whoever goes beyond them lives eternally in the Way.”

For unique psychic contents or complexes accompany life and death: it is “I” who live and it is “I” who conceives of the death of my life. We humans seem to be a special species in this regard, endowed with the dubious gift of self-consciousness and therefore capable of great follies. This consciousness or “I” is a mirroring of what takes place in the brain-mind, on an incorporeal plane, and its existence is our greatest riddle.

Love of life is not an anonymous power: it is MY love of life, MY fear of its ceasing that demands a solution. And, as most religious traditions affirm, the life of the soul/body unit is of great importance in the solution. It is our only weapon in the struggle. Thus the care of the body so valued in eastern thought. We have not yet learned to die; we have not yet reached the point where we would not die sloppily, but as befits us to die. We must secure as much time as possible to reach this stage in our life cycle. If the death that we endure is not a “proper death,” one that crowns our being, then what occurs afterwards cannot be proper.

The means for prolonging life in this tradition center on “concentration of attention” on the important psychic centers, activating these centers that are at rest in ordinary life, through “directing the will.” This is not a heroic effort, however. It is achieved through “the magic power of the image.” These “empowered images” or xiang attract consciousness and concentrate attention. Arranged in a definite manner, they establish relationships with the centers of the new life. Gradually and subtly, they activate psychic powers that are capable of acting on the psychic nature, bringing about an “internal renewal of the blood.”

It is through depersonalizing or disassociation that this shaping and renewal can take place. For in states of dissociation, we are sufficiently “freed” to directly absorb cosmic influences. The soul concentrates its entire life in the present moment, freed of hope and fear, allowing what must disappear to disappear, allowing to approach what must approach. The heart then comes to resemble a mirror, the old water mirror of the jian, and reflects the things as they come and go, evoking the correct or centering reaction, not an artificial  imitation, an acquired “fictional goal.” In the process we cultivate what one psychologist has called an imaginal ego, one capable of seeing itself, always, as a fiction, a collection of stories being told by the Gods.

Traditional Chinese thought conceives of life with limits set by nature or heaven, the ming. These are the ‘heavenly years,’ a life expanding in time with a beginning and an end. Life itself is not predetermined, but its abundance, constancy and rhythm are given, as is the experience of death. This is neither fortunate or unfortunate, but an accepted fact.

The problem arises when “I” want eternity. For the body has an underside; it has consciousness and imagines death before it dies. This is probably one of the single most important forces in the history of humanity. We have built pyramids and political systems, waged wars and fought battles and annihilated millions of people through our aversion to being transitory.

What is to be done? The problem in the Chinese tradition is to form a new body within the temporal body. This is the idea of re-birth. The new body is a body of energy, a body of “symbols”. A psychic seed is formed and surrounded with physical energy. Thus a concentrated latent force develops that reaches a point where it separates from primary or transitory time. This is achieved through contemplation or Viewing: Guan, figure 20, watching the signs of the new spirit as it manifests in the fields of experience, after the death of the ego and its fixations. 

Such process is felt to unite thought and existence, to be effective in the world of existence, to unite the “field” and the “heart.” We are concerned here with the very practical problem of becoming independent of life while alive, not just theoretically but practically. The issue is to acquaint ourselves with the state after death while still in life. It is the theme of the Mountain, figure 52 and the depersonalizing of experience it represents.

The preparation consists in creating something which, time and again, represents the experience of the infinite and to center the “I” in that state. When we reach this standpoint, we fear death no longer, but experience it as another one of the “revolutions” of heaven and earth. We see it like sleep, a physiological process common to all, easily managed if not regarded too seriously. There is no need to cross over to the other side, for, though we continue to live in this one, we are already there. The “beyond” is neither temporally nor spatially separated from the world: it is the Way, that permeates all existence and becoming.

One day the Master said:
Qian and Kun - are they not the two-leafed gate of Change?
Dark yin and light yang join virtues
to give the strong and the supple a form.
The fates given by Heaven and Earth
take shape through these forms.
This is how we can penetrate to the bright spirits.
The names are different, but they cover the way of all things.
What is upstream from the moment we call the Way.
What is downstream from the moment we call the vessel or tool.
The moment of transformation we call Change.

 

Death and renewal, change and transformation, culture and individual, humans and spirits and the great symbols that connect them, all of these are presented to us in the old Magic Mountain of the Change.