I Ching Readings Panel

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Reading 16:

Marrying the Maidens

Question:

What is the meaning of the Vallecitos Retreat "Mirror of the Heart?"

The Inquirer:

Stephen Karcher as Leader of the 2007 Vallecitos Yijing Retreat "Mirror of the Heart."

The Situation:

The question was posed last June, just before our trip up into the middle of Carson National Forest (New Mexico) to Vallecitos Mountain Refuge. The participants were assembling; we were poised at the threshold of a weeklong intensive retreat involving both teaching and ritual experience. I wanted to know what awaited us, what my attitude toward it might be and what could grow out of it.

Result: 54

Reading Matrix

The Primary Figure

On the most basic and “predictive” level, this is a very straightforward reading. The Primary Figure sets the stage:

		Zhen: Thunder, Rouser and Exorcist
		Dui : Mists, Lake, Open, Joyous Dancer

This figure gave me much to think about at the time and even more in hindsight – things I want to explore further in a series of readings about the Vallecitos College of Diviners posed during our Retreat.

The first insight the Figure offered was that our capacity to “give the spirit a voice in the human community”, the quality of the lower trigram Dui, Joyous Dancer, was being taken by forces beyond our control to an entirely new place and capacity. The process would not be easy – the upper trigram, Zhen Shake/Thunder, the Rouser and Exorcist, is certainly neither gentle nor predictable. In this context it would bring out all of our hidden desires and compulsions. But it is a force we had to confront, for better or worse, if we were going to deal with our “power and responsibilities to the human community” and the underlying responsibility in all ritual work - to give the Ancestors a place in our lives.

As a mediating site, the primary drive behind the retreat would be to open and maintain a ritual space where the primal powers could be connected to our personal lives. The configuration of the group added another dimension – I was both Leader and the only male amongst a group of very intelligent, strong-minded and sometimes deeply wounded women. This left me in a dual position which I might be able to manage, but with great difficultly - a kind of tightrope act. I would partake of the nature of the Shake as driving force while, at the same time, my own capacity to express the spirit would be “trained” in a quite challenging way. The configuration of the group also pointed directly at what we would confront – the inner corruption of the Father and Mother images that carry the grief, rage, pain and sense of betrayal that haunts us from childhood. The Retreat proved to be a very difficult and tumultuous time that in one way or another opened all of us to the possibility of a new sort of “conjunctio” or inner marriage of the Primal Powers effected in the Mirror of the Heart. But it would only occur through a clearing of our personal Gu or Corruption.

In this context, the Change Operators of the Reading became a central theme:

Inner Inspiration Operator:

		Kun : Earth, Field, Dark Animal Goddess
		Kun : Earth, Field, Dark Animal Goddess

If we could be truly receptive to the Core Theme, 63 the ongoing process of change, we might release a wave of creative and inspiring energy, a real connection to the world of the Ancestors.

Outer Realization Operator:

		Qian : Heaven, Inspiring Force, Dragon
		Qian : Heaven, Inspiring Force, Dragon

The Name of the Figure, Gui Mei, gave us clues to the characters that would be enacted in the drama to be unfolded:

The first term in the Name is associated with Zhen, the Rouser and Exorcist who begins all cycles. As the upper or hui trigram, he is both the distress or challenge we would face and the means through which it can be overcome. This is where we could be taken if we gave up “chastising”, imposing order and pre-conceived old ideas of identity, purpose and habits.

Gui marry/convertwith the radical or category meaning foot and to stop or halt evokes gui ghost, gui turtle, gui precious, gui cave or empty and gui a ritual vase. The signifier for the group is composed of a hand and a broom made of gathered linen shreds, a much honored symbol. This graph was used by late commentators to signify the destiny of the wife. In earlier characters, however, it shows a female shaman or wu with the marks of her power, particularly a feathered crown, and the house in which she dwells. It further suggests the rolling, waving movement of a marriage procession.

 

One meaning of this term is to return or re-enter, suggesting the ritual visit of a young wife to her parents’ home three days after the marriage when she says a final good-bye to her old family’s ancestors, those who return, the revenants or gui jen.  Other meanings include to transform, reveal hidden potential, restore, revert, return to where you belong; to make a gift, to surrender, to return to yourself or house; to bring a young bride or “sprout” home (as in 3 Sprouting and 22 Adorning); to take refuge (used for the Buddhist Three Refuges); to return to a former state, goal or destination. Gui yuan means to return to the Source as in death. Daoists used the term to describe the spontaneous movement of returning to the Way, giving way to one’s true nature and thus fulfilling one’s destiny.

 

The second character in the Name is associated with Dui, the Joyous Dancer who gives the spirit voice in the human community. As the lower or zhen trigram she represents the foundations of the situation, the gift given by the divination. Here this gift from the spirits is expressed as a potential in each of us to be realized through gui, to marry the rousing thunder.

Mei maiden denotes a young girl who is not yet nubile, a younger sister or daughter of a secondary wife or a person in a servile position. It is made of the graphs for woman and the combined graphs for tree and a negation used to mean “not-yet”, as in 64 Not-yet Crossing. This suggests the “sprouts” of a new generation and the idea of abstaining from yang-action, like the imprisoned King Wu seen in 9 Small Accumulating/Gathering the Ghosts. The maiden is seen as a luxuriant tree and a kneeling woman, her head filled with spirit through submission to the process of the sacred marriage and the transformation it entails.

 

The obvious association was to myself as the Rouser – the only male in a group of women, but even more to the capacity in each of us to “give the spirit a voice in the human community” being taken by forces beyond our control to a place when we could begin to realize our innate potential or “destiny.”

More clues came through the Season, which was ripe for rousing new potentials, new thoughts and imaginal children.

• Season: Spring, rousing new growth, issue from the source; children, new thoughts; East, sunrise, Wood, green.

The Hidden Stimulus revealed the spirit pushing us on, the spirit in which we might successfully confront our inner corruption to effect the “sacred marriage”.

• Hidden Exchange/Stimulus: 17 Joyously Follow the new spirit.

It implied a hidden shape to the core of the rituals to be unfolded:

The Time Cycle gave us a look at how this process might evolve:

• Time Cycle: Summer: ripen the fruits through 38 Diverging, turning conflict into creative tension by dealing with the shadow; Fall: harvest the crop through 64 Not Yet Crossing, gathering energy for the decisive new move; Winter: find the seed of the new through 40 Deliverance from past sorrows.

Stepping outside the collective Dwelling of our inner family and the cultural collective on a healing mission to confront the ghost that haunt that Dwelling could ripen the fruits of our new thoughts; the crop we could gather was actually the preparation for a decisive change within each of us; and the seed of the process could be a deliverance of our Thunder energies from the lonely sufferings and heroic strivings of the past.

To me, all this put a very strong emphasis on finding out just what this magic place we were being taken to and, paradoxically, must create, really was. I was reminded of the Ideal and Shadow:

• Ideal and Shadow: Think of this as a time to open a still space within where old life is brought to an end and its lessons learned (52). You will be entangled in the shadows if you focus on preparing a decisive new move now (64). Let go of this need and the preparation will occur of itself.  

What is this “still space within where the old life is brought to an end and its lessons learned”? How can we give it a voice?

If we could focus on hearing this inner voice and establishing it, the “new move” or transformation would prepare itself with no conscious planning or effort.

Creating Ritual Space
Perhaps the hardest thing to understand and accept when we use Change is that its symbols (hexagrams, trigrams, words and myths) are not just cognitive signs. They are operators; they “do work”.  These symbols form a language that mediates human and spiritual forces. It can pick out or delineate an individual's crisis and join that crisis with a spirit or spirit-process that sanctifies it. The situation then speaks to our feeling and our thought if we can open a space where we can truly see it, entertain it and let it affect us on a deep and essentially non-rational manner.

When we realize this and allow the symbols to work on us rather than us working on them, we can open what has been called ritual space. This is a place or theatre in both the soul or imagination and the literal world where actions taken have a direct effect on the Dream Body, the imaginal self that shapes and colors the realities we experience. Actions taken in ritual space alter the shape and configuration of the xin, our heart-mind, transforming our awareness of the complex realities of the soul and the spirit and our synchronistic relation to the world around us. Here we must act-in instead of acting-out, reverting our personal suffering to its roots in archetype and culture.

The Mediating Sites

The Pair 53:54 Gradual Advance and Marrying the Maidens is one of four mediating sites in the Matrix of Change (11:12, 17:18, 53:54 and 63:64) where this sort of work takes place, “sites of intense shamanic and ritual activity that connect the primary powers to personal life”. The four form an interconnected series that seeks to connect us to the great processes of cultural change enacted in high ritual. The Pair 53:54 is the culmination of the series, just before contact with the Burning Water, the prima materia.

Making the Ritual Connections
When we delve into the connections between this Pair and the Matrix that exists between the 64 figures in the King Wen Sequence and imagine these technical details as pathways through which energy and information is exchanged and meaning is created in the deep psyche, a very powerful portrait of the Ritual dynamic involved in a Mediating Site emerges.

Using these technical interconnections, we can say that the “working” of the all important Rang Ritual of “giving a Way” (41:42) is the central process of the sites. It is offered as the way in which we can fix an omen given by the spirits so that it might endure in the heart and serve as a guide on the voyage of life (31:32). This is the very heart of the ritual process embodied in the interconnected mediating sites that “connect the individual to the great processes of cultural change.” It acts through the four shamanic operatives (Zhen the Rousing Thunder and Gen the Mountain and Sacrificer; Sun the Lady of Fates who finds the hidden sickness and Dui the Joyous Dancer who gives spirit a voice in the human community) to open the Way to and for the Burning Water, the paradoxical prima materia, to enter and influence our lives. The interiorisation of this Burning Water and the Fire-Water or Kan-Li Axis it represents is both goal and stuff of the transformational process of the great Matrix of Change.

See Appendix Mediating Sites

We can further see that: 53:54 The Great Marriages that Change the Time is connected to and powered by 61:62 The Opened Heart and the Flying Bird, the expression of a life fully lived as a message that can cross the Burning Water to inspire a new generation.

See Rang Ritual and Kan-Li Axis

This is what the Retreat was preparing, the Harvest of the process and the seed of our personal deliverance from the sufferings of the past. By engaging this great Engine of Change, the interconnection of our mediating site with 61:62 we let the Voices of Change it represents speak to us as we go up the Sacred Mountain.

This gave particular importance to the message of the Spirit Helpers:

This process of “inner self-reflection”, separating ourselves from the old thought-forms that have grown corrupt and oppressive in order to embrace what is truly enduring in the Paper Horse that was born from the Retreat.

The Magic Mountain (54 Marrying the Maidens)
Held by the Fire-Water Axis (above and below) that is preparing the decisive new move, we enter the Ghost River (below) with our eyes on the Bright Omens (above). We load our hopes, needs, prayers and offerings into the empty space at the center of the brave horse that breaks through corruption of the past and ascends the Mountain to the truth of the Opened Heart to open the Way for all.