Divination: Art or Science? (2) : An Old Fire

| Steve Tanham
(Above: image Pixabay – originated by Adesala)

The man, still distinguished though his hair and moustache were now silver, sat before the fire. Once more, he was alone in his home by the lake. Before him, the old kettle, as black with age as he was white, rattled on the small iron grate beneath it. The flames from the burning wood flickered up around its sides and the noise from within said the water was approaching the boil.

Carl Gustav Jung kept his retreat primitive. Here was where he came to be alone, not to entertain. Here was where he experienced life as it was before the modern world fabricated its layers of comfort and distraction. There were no wires, no heating, or lighting. Running water was taken from a mountain stream. Burning wood, like that in the fire, was the only comfort. Each morning and evening, he bathed in the icy waters of Lake Zürich.

He looked again at the kettle on the fire… and smiled. ‘Chi Chi’. It came to him quickly, bringing a smile.”No-one in their right mind would put water over fire, surely?”, he mused to the morning’s sunlight, filtering in elongated patterns through the old window shutters.

His mind raced over the numbers and meanings of the I Ching Hexagrams to locate the one triggered by the kettle and the fire. ’63 – After Completion’. A very strange notion to the western mind… How could you have anything meaningful ‘after’ completion? “Live happily ever after,” he smiled into the cold morning air. “But life’s not like that, is it? It goes on, round and round. What rises falls, what falls rises.”

(Above: The traditional Tai Chi symbol, depicting Yin and Yang – the eternally dancing polarities of creation)

His memory took him deeper into the meaning of the hexagram. The water in the kettle was now boiling, rocking the vessel on its narrow base. He knew it would not fall; knew that he had designed the iron support well, allowing most of the heat from the surrounding burning wood to get to the kettle and heat the water. The Chi Chi hexagram told of the need for intelligence in the control of such potent forces – brought together in sophistication, even in this simple technology. Everything the mind of man was good at… if only the heart of man would catch up..

He probed deeper, letting his eyes gaze into the middle distance, a kind of trance state he found creative.

The luxury of something completed was dangerous – especially if the stakes were high, such as a societal upheaval, like a war, or a rift in the population. Healing that was long and hard, and required mediators who could bridge both sides. When people were exhausted with hatred and division, they turned to such wisdom… and the wholeness came back; allowing differences, seeing differences as an essential part of the whole. Then came the greatest danger – when the pot came to the boil and the tea was ready to make and drink. The potent forces of fire and boiling water had not gone away. The stewardship into the making of tea was filled with danger – something no-one would entrust to a child…

The wise one would extend their vision beyond the fire, beyond the tea, into the field of tranquility and know that only vigilance and the continued drinking from the fountains of wisdom would hold it that way… for a while, at least. For the universe knew no permanence. The universe was change.

The above is part fiction, yet wholly true. Carl Jung did have a ‘primitive’ dwelling on the shores of Lake Zürich. He was so influenced by his personal discovery of the I Ching (via his strong friendship with Richard Wilhelm, the scholar and renowned sinologist who carried out the classic translation of the Book of Changes) that he described it as ‘the end of my loneliness’. His idea of ‘synchronicity’ exactly mirrored the I Ching’s concept that the well-crafted oracle could become a ‘purse of the now’ (my phrase) into which we delve for help, comfort and advice.

In the previous post of this series, I promised to carry out a reading in preparation for this post. The question posed was: what is the relevance of the I Ching to the readers of this blog?

The method of the reading will be discussed in the next post. The answer I got was that quoted in the semi-fictional story, above: ’63 Chi Chi’. The content of the story is an attempt to give a first-level understanding of its implications.

Personally, I find it describes well the nature of our slow emergence from the tragedy of the Covid-19 virus, and the folly of ‘rushing back to the beaches’. The wise ones will go inside their wisdom and wait until their inner senses tell them the time is right. Then the wheel will turn, again, and we will be on with the next set of challenges. There are many that await us. You may find your own, individual meanings in the readings of Chi Chi. I hope you do.

The I Ching comforts us that, no matter how horrific the face of the tyrant, they are not bigger than the Cosmos and its wheel. Their arrogance and power will be the seed of their own undoing. There are many parallels of undoing in the world at the moment.

Carl Jung was a sincere and dedicated investigator of the inner nature of mankind. His concepts of synchronicity, archetypes, and the nature of extroversion and introversion fitted well into the deep and parallel map of life on Earth as given in the I Ching. In his introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s classic translation he says many things. For me, the most profound is:

“The method of the I Ching does indeed take into account the hidden individual quality in things and men, and in one’s own unconscious self as well.”

In the next and final post in this series we will look at the method of taking a reading from the I Ching.

Previous posts in this series:

The Old One and the Gatekeeper: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

Divination – Art or Science?: Part One, This is Part Two

©Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.

Spreading wings

| Sue Vincent

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The hill was a verdant emerald rising into a sapphire sky that sparkled with motes of light… so high and clear. My companion walked behind, following at a far more sedate pace as I ran headlong to the summit, an uncompromising, absolute joy within that seemed to inundate every fibre of being. The white path led me higher and higher until I could see the curvature of the earth and felt I could reach out my arms and embrace the whole world and gather it to my breast…

My dreams have been vivid of late. They always are but even more so than usual, with the clarity and reality I knew as a child. I recall the flying dreams with the rollercoaster feeling in the stomach… I cannot have been more than eight years old and every night I would soar. Far too young to have any knowledge or interest in aerodynamics, lift or thrust, I can yet remember the minute adjustments needed to stay in the air and direct my flight. I seem to remember them in my flesh even though it was just a dream. I can feel even now the memory of physical sensation as my body swooped and banked through the air, learning to ride the wind, seeking the air-currents and updraughts, like a small fish playing in water, darting and diving through sunbeams. It was sheer joy. Every night as I closed my eyes I would wait for that first moment of flight with happy anticipation.

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It felt utterly real… the sensation of rise and fall in the gut, the air on my face, the wind in my hair. So real that my waking self would stand on my bed beneath the window, certain I would not fall but would fly if I launched myself from there… yet knowing also that it was supposed to be impossible. Wasn’t it? There was always that doubt in the mind, even though the body felt it knew just what to do.

So real was the experience for that young mind that it was, in those moments by the window, impossible to distinguish dream from reality. It was as if I was perfectly poised between two realities, each equally valid by their own rules and in their own world… which I believe they are. Yet I was in neither… I was apart from both, a third reality, if you will, where I was subject to neither of the others but could see and judge with yet another part of me what fragment of experience should fit where.

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I had always been aware of the existence of that higher part of being that we call the soul, the essence… and many other names. It was simply something I grew up with, that awareness. Yet this was the first time I remember feeling conscious of its reality. Not because I could see or feel it specifically, but the observation of the two realities by the third… and the fact that on yet another level I was somehow ‘seeing’ that observer… So what was seeing it? And was anything watching that? And where did ‘I’ end and Something Else begin?  This seemed to ‘click’ and I understood somehow in a way for which I am still not sure I have words.

To the eight year old mind that was something of a revelation. To us now, as adults, it is an illustration of infinite regress, a concept we explored at the first of the Silent Eye’s Glastonbury talks some years ago, yet it took a while before I made that connection. One of the inner ‘observers’ finds that highly amusing, that the conscious mind should take the best part of half a century to really realise a gift given so young.

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However that is often the way of things and we are adept at accepting what we know and believe, filing them in the cabinet of facts by which we live and not revisiting them with the added experience and understanding of years. As we grow and learn our store of facts expands, but we seldom take out the old ones and update them. We can, indeed, get very protective of them and refuse to even consider that we may have misunderstood, or been plainly wrong, through lack of a salient piece of information.

Over the past few years, as I have examined more and more the entrenched beliefs to which I have clung, I have found myself being obliged to discard and update many of them. I have also revisited many ideas I discarded as facile when I was much younger, realising that with the knowledge and experience I can now bring to them, they are richer by far that I imagined when I first dismissed them. The adventures with Stuart and our books have made me re-evaluate many things, while the School has seen me set aside the framework of many decades and begin to look at the essence of those beliefs from a different perspective.

When, some years ago, a friend and renowned author who had walked a similar path, told me he had spent half a lifetime building the inner Qabalistic Tree of Life… and the rest steadily dismantling it, I was surprised and recoiled from the very idea… now I know what he meant.

The ideas we cling to limit us. We do not seek beyond their bounds… why would we if they satisfy us? They are our beliefs and they ‘work’ for us. Yet, should we step across those self-imposed boundaries, prepared to risk seeing what might lie beyond, a whole world of possibility may open before us. It is worth a thought. Who knows… some part of us may even learn to fly.

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Storytelling

| Sue Vincent

File:BD Weighing of the Heart.jpg

Our earliest ancestors looked out upon this world and framed what they saw in stories that reached the heart through the imagination. As man and his questions became ever more sophisticated, the stories evolved, couching abstract concepts and ideas within the age-old tales. The mythology of any culture goes back beyond memory and history to a time before time was… to the Creation and before… in an attempt to answer the questions that arise in all of us.

Stories travelled and changed with each retelling, taking on the character of the teller, coloured by the season, the place, the landscape and by the politics of the local priesthood or rulership… and the myths rooted in different forms in the places they reached.

Yet if we look at the stories mankind has told there are striking similarities beneath the surface. All the mythological systems have some common themes… star-crossed lovers, the trickster, good versus evil and the unlikely heroes. All have the slayers of monsters or demons, their tales of magic and the parallels with fertility, life and death.

Many theories have been propounded, arguing for a common psychological expression of religious impulse through to a simplistic attempt to explain the seasonal growth of vegetation. It has been argued that all the stories are poetic allegories for spiritual truth and, at the other end of the scale, that they are nothing but linguistic misinterpretations… where the functions of the gods arise from the words for their names and stories are built upon them.

I have a feeling there is an element of truth to all of the theories and that the birth of the mythologies arises in as much complexity as the multi-layered mind of man.

What is certain is that there is something in these old tales that speaks to us at a very deep level of intuitive understanding. We can see the morals clearly in some of them, get a grip on the abstract through others and relate to all of them on an emotional level of personal engagement and life experience in spite of the passage of millennia.

The Egyptian myths give us the most complete record of how a system evolves over the centuries and scholars can chart the rise, evolution and demise of the various versions across the landscape of Egypt in both time and space.

From the simplest of stories a cosmogony evolved which encapsulated much of Egyptian history, culture and religious change. Between the words and images that remain we have a window into the minds of those who walked the Two Lands.

We can read their stories for entertainment, much as they would have been told around the hearths of old to while away the hours of night.

We can read them as they might have been told by the priests to the populace and see through their eyes something of the sacredness of the world, learning to see once again that same wonder in our own world, where the landscape is alive and as holy as the gods themselves.

We may choose to look at them as the priesthood may have seen them and read a deeper meaning behind the images and relationships of the gods, seeing in their interaction the story of all things… of mankind and his fallibility, of the relationships between man and nature as well as between man and that which he perceives as greater than all… the Source of Being from whence all arose.

We can read them in another way also and see ourselves in the gods, understanding the fractured facets of wholeness that make up our personalities. We may see that as the gods are both the fragments and the product of the One, then so are we a fragmented whole… pieces of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle waiting to be reassembled… and in doing so might see that we too are of the same essence as the gods.

I have a feeling that the best way to read them is as a child would read, with an openness to wonder and wondering, without analysing too much or dwelling on apparent inconsistencies and impossibilities that the adult may reject but which the child accepts without a blink.

Perhaps we just need to remember how to listen with the heart.

Extract from The Osiriad (Appendix)

‘War in Heaven’…

| Stuart France

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… We have to wait until the final book of the ‘New Dispensation’ before we

encounter a Dragon.

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“And there was war in heaven:

Michael and his angels fought against the dragon…”

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The Dragon in question, though, is red and, “… has seven heads,

and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads…”

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This being the Book of Revelation we may well wonder about the symbolism…

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Unusually for this text we do not have to wonder for very long for we are told,

“… and the Great Dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan…

he was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.”

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At which point we realise that although the book purportedly deals with ‘last things’,

this particular vision has to do with ‘first things’, the Third Day of Creation to be precise,

and the expulsion from Heaven of Lucifer and the Fallen Angels…

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Why this Dragon should have seven heads is an interesting question made all the

more interesting by the fact that few if any of the depictions of St Michael

show him in combat with a seven headed Dragon or accompanied by any other angels!

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Also worth consideration is the attempt to visualise ten horns on seven heads…

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It can be done thus: the two ‘end-heads’ and the ‘central-head’ have two horns each,

and the other four heads have only one horn each.

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In this context the phrase, ‘for a time, times and half-a-time,’

which was first brought to our attention

in the Book of Daniel, and is again utilised

later in this Chapter of Revelation, springs to mind.

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It is possible that the Seven Headed Dragon is a symbol of time.

Satan is earlier described as the one, “…which deceives the whole world.”

A description which could also serve for time…

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The Creation, in this schemata, takes seven days to complete,

and seven is the basis for a number of natural rhythms and cosmic cycles,

and is the symbolic number used throughout the text of Revelation…

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Obviously, we still, in some part, retain this rhythm by following a seven day week.

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For the ‘Old Dispensation’, Friday, Saturday and Tuesday,

which is Venus, Saturn and Mars would represent, ‘times’,

whilst Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday,

that is, Sun, Moon, Mercury and Jupiter would be, ‘half-times’.

*

And for the ‘New Dispensation’, Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday,

and their corresponding Planetary Cycles would be considered, ‘times’,

whilst Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and their

corresponding Planetary Cycles would be the ‘half-times’.

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But does any of this really matter?

Over such things, traditionally, are wars fought and countless lives lost…

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With regard to this particular stained glass window we might wonder

why Michael needs to be armoured, with a hand resting on the

pommel of his sword, in order to weigh

the souls of the dead?

 

Divination: Art or Science? (1)

| Steve Tanham
(Above: The Yin Yang symbol depicting polar opposites united in their life)

For as long as there have been humans on Earth, we have sought to find answers. Wise women and wise men have been cherished throughout history for their ability to throw ‘light’ on complex problems and situations. In our modern age, more people than ever find at least comfort and, often, guidance in some kind of fortune telling. My grandmother used to read tea leaves, using the pattern left when the (leaf) tea was swirled out of a cup at the end of a routine or ritualised consultation. Her advice was often sought.

I had a interesting childhood. I was raised in a mystically-active family, but felt the pull of a scientific career – ending up in computing. I never had any trouble reconciling the two, but was always hesitant to talk about it to other scientific types… There is a ‘religion’ of despising such things among the purists of science. Their prejudice is a strong as any of history’s zealous priests. Having said, that, the scientific method has brought immense benefits to mankind.

I was comfortable with divination because I could always see a bigger picture… Let me try to describe the basis of this:

What happens ‘inside me’, in terms of consciousness, is not really separated from the ‘out there’ of the world and its constant changes. I felt this long before I could offer any explanation for it. I knew that if I changed how I felt about someone, their behaviour to me would miraculously change, too. This doesn’t mean that I always did this, far from it…. our emotions are very strong with those we dislike and often override the still small voice of inner guidance.

We began this consideration of ancient Chinese wisdom by looking at the work of Lao Tzu (The Book of the Way – Dao Je Jing); (see The Old One and the Gatekeeper series).

The other great ‘book’, older than the Dao Je Jing, is the Book of Changes, otherwise known as the I Ching. Adopted by pop culture in the 1960s, the Yin Yang symbol was seen on everything from notebooks to tee-shirts. The Yin-Yang symbol is a later development, and has been associated with I Ching because its elements representing Yin – black, and Yang – White, are found in the broken and unbroken lines of the Hexagrams that are the ‘divined’ basis of the reading.

The Yin Yang symbol illustrates an idea from ancient times that the ‘whole’ is in constant motion – change. And that change, itself, is the real nature of the world. Things can be opposite yet still exist harmoniously. Each thing contains its opposite. Each thing becomes its opposite when it has reached its fullness and begins to decline.

We must learn to ride that constant change and be at peace with this. This is quite a statement. We are used to reality being the solidity of what is – and endures. Within the I Ching, the reality is shifted ‘upstairs’ to that process of change from which we take snapshots of our reality, much like, in quantum physics, how an electron in an atom obligingly reveals itself under quantum measurement, but is otherwise indeterminate in velocity and position.

Evolved and educated to seek stability as a basis for survival and prosperity, human nature finds this idea of harmony through change a difficult concept to embrace. Without stability, we reason, ‘fortune’ may be a fickle companion.

This idea has its parallel in Newton’s older and simpler non-quantum physics. Objects that move seldom do so with constant speed (velocity) – unless they are spacecraft. Newton showed, through a maths process called differentiation, that the derivative of a formula for velocity (speed) would produce a formula for acceleration. The latter is far more revealing, since it is linked to the real world of force. Force gives rise to motion, in the first place.

To slow an object requires force – imagine the sting of catching a well-struck cricket ball! Equally, to make an object move away from you with a throw requires the force of an uncurling arm. The ‘speeding up’ – acceleration, is equal to the force divided by its mass: the amount of substance it possesses.

Driving a car is, for example, a continuous process of acceleration and deceleration; controlled through exploding petrol in an engine moderated by the right foot. No wonder driving takes a while to grasp… Perhaps the difference between a driver and a watcher of fortune is that the driver is following a short-term goal of getting somewhere, whereas the ‘fortune hunter’ just wants to feel secure.

It’s a dramatic conclusion, but the universal Sea of Being does not offer security. Instead, it offers a science of personal change and an opportunity to learn how to sail.

All this may seem academic. However, in order to see that there is a ‘higher science’ of existence that lives happily in a dimension of ‘change’, we need to have these proven models to align us, correctly, with the potential to see differently.

This is the goal of the I Ching…

If we see the ‘out there’ as divided, we are not in harmony with the inevitable currents of change. If we see it as a fluid medium which must change, we begin to bring our consciousness into the ‘now’, taking new nourishment from the fact that its sparkling presence is the result of that constant ‘replenishment’. The present state cannot do anything put ‘perish’ to make way for the next packet of the new…

Science has shown us that both matter and energy cannot be destroyed. We can only change the form – the organisation – of its substance. Nor can we know that substance as something separate from our own consciousness.

The I Ching is a ‘book’ of collective wisdom, drawn from truly ancient times, and refined over the centuries. One of the most insightful teachers I know refers to it as a ‘Solar Work’ and uses it, herself, to describe the inner detail of a pattern of events. She has done this for many decades and views the I Ching as a constant and reliable companion.

This ‘book’ has been condensed into 64 ‘cores’ of wisdom, rendered as hexagrams, as in the image, below. The process of consulting the I Ching is one of ‘drawing’ a randomised reference to these hexagrams and reading the wisdom it offers, at various levels of detail.

(Above: A hexagram as used by the I Ching)

You can even buy an App for your mobile phone…. good ones, too. The best give you a choice of having random numbers generated for you or letting you throw three coins and entering the results to get the reading.

We will look at this, the consulting process, in the next post. For now, it is important to consider the idea of divination, itself…

The elements of effective divination are:

  1. To have a repeatable process of consultation – ‘looking up’ a guiding text or picture in response to a question, a feeling, or just to set a reflective theme for the day.
  2. To actively feel a connection to the external actions. In the sense of my explanation, above, to know that there is no real separation from in-here and out-there, other than what we are taught about the pre-eminence of reason over everything else.
  3. To loosen the faculty of reason and let something else speak, by way of inspiration.
  4. To open and close the process with respect… and a certain feeling of love for something that is letting us ‘touch’ another reality.

Next week, I will consult the I Ching before writing the Thursday blog. We shall see what it has to offer us in terms of describing itself!

©Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.

Growing…

| Sue Vincent

“Oh wow!” said the delivery driver. “It’s like walking into paradise!”

We get that sort of thing a lot. The narrow and faded street is lined with parked cars. The car-park you have to cross to access my son’s home is scruffy and overgrown. There is nothing that leads you to expect what you find behind his gates. Clean, geometric lines contrast with the encircling green of trees, bright spots of colour from the young plants, the tranquillity of running water and the harmony of the pentatonic wind chimes. There is usually a red kite wheeling overhead, sometimes the occasional squirrel and always a symphony of birdsong.

So far, Nick must have heard just about every complimentary phrase possible as people walk into his garden. They will lean over the pond to admire the huge and colourful fish and comment on how quiet and unexpected the space is, just five minutes from the town centre. To be fair, the whole things works rather well.

While I love my son’s garden, especially its relative ease of maintenance, my own tastes run to semi-wild cottage gardens. Give me a flower bed of my own to fill and it will soon be overflowing. Nick prefers order, space and neatness. I like chaos. Our vision of beauty is subjective, but here I work to his…and sneak in the odd bits of chaos where appropriate.

It struck me today, though, that although people see the beauty of the ‘finished product’… not that any garden is ever finished… they do not see what has and still goes into creating beauty. Nick’s garden took months to build… and that was just the bare bones, before we started planting; then we dug in the manure. Every day, I spend a couple of hours outside, either watering, deadheading, weeding, feeding, sweeping and scrubbing, or cleaning out the two pond pumps and filter… and that is without the big jobs like jet washing. And, much as I complain about some of the things I have to do, the results are worth it.

Another thing that people do not see is the true nature of this garden. It is designed to be accessible. From the discrete placement of handrails as part of the design, to the carefully measured distances between handholds… even the sculptures, securely concreted into the ground, serve as extra grab rails… every detail is designed to allow my son to get around his garden on his own two feet, while still allowing wheelchair access. Colour, sound and fragrance compensate for damaged sight and plants are positioned so that he can enjoy their scent without needing to be close.

As Nature is always a good teacher, there are inevitably parallels between the beauty of a garden and the people who enjoy it. Many spend a good deal of time, effort and attention on creating an image of beauty for themselves too, from hair to face to clothing. The face presented to the world may look effortlessly attractive to its ‘owner’, but it will not be to everyone’s taste. Some admire the well-groomed look, others prefer a more natural appearance… but most will not look at what has gone into creating that image. Not in terms of the hours in front of the mirror, but the life experiences, the laughter, tears, joy and pain that shapes every face.

We unconsciously create an image of ourselves, for ourselves. Sometimes the mask is just to please ourselves… more often it is shaped by what we think others want or need us to be, whether it is the corporate look for work or something designed to attract a mate. Many will react to our masks in the way we hope… few, until and unless they get to know us as individuals, will look beyond it.

But we are complicated creatures. Just like Nick’s garden, the ‘clean lines’ of our outer appearance show to their best advantage when we allow ourselves to be ourselves, letting the chaotic colour of character soften the edges, showing that unique beauty that goes deeper than the surface. A beauty only created by living.

A gardener loves gardens and growing things. It doesn’t really matter whether that garden is modern and minimalist or a riot of colour. It is the flowers and fruits of the earth that warm the heart. A person who has learned to grow in both life’s sunshine and rain has that same beauty, no matter what their illusive mirror might tell them, and they too will be looked upon with love.

Where the wildflowers grow

| Sue Vincent

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Locus iste a Deo factus est,
Inaestimabile sacramentum,
irreprehensibilis est.

This place was made by God.
A priceless mystery,
it is without reproach.

Anton Bruckner.

I was talking this morning with a friend about the different directions that the spiritual journey may lead us and the effects that can have on a life… your life or mine. There is no way of knowing or predicting when, or indeed if, that journey will change gear and lead you to a place unknown, changing your expected destination for another as you enter a new phase of a life suddenly unfamiliar. It is like stepping through a doorway to another world, one where the demands are unknown, different and beyond the norm.

There are degrees, of course, from the ‘turning point’ we speak of in the Silent Eye, that point where the world dims and the eyes of the heart seek another Light, through the whole gamut of our differing experience to those moments of personal, spiritual revelation that are impossible to communicate.

It is easy to write of the details of daily life, less easy to describe the momentous yet invisible shifts by which that life can be pulled from under our feet by inner events. It is especially difficult to write of these things without sounding deluded, pretentious or both. And some things are simply better left unsaid and unwritten.

There are many who seek that moment of union, fighting their way toward it, as if by study, dedication or the application of intellect or faith it can be earned. I’m not so sure that it can. I think it has to be lived; the house prepared, the vessel clean and empty and held up for the wine to be poured by which it can be filled with something other than self.

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The vessel is what gives form in the world to what it contains, and to empty the vessel of self can be a painful process. We make of ourselves a container fit for purpose and, to use an ancient metaphor, the base metal must be shaped and formed, heated in the fires of life, impurities purged … and as the iron in the heat of the forge could attest, that is no sinecure.

We are such a tangled mass of illusions about ourselves and they have to be unravelled… a tapestry of self-images that must be unpicked and it can seem a fearsome thing when what has to be unpicked is you… every last stitch until you are naked in the mirror of Being and you can see, accept and know yourself for who you truly are and not what the ego has been trying desperately to believe in all those years. From the human perspective that is, for most of us, not a pretty sight! Yet, there is a freedom in it, a freedom from the weight of the masks and screens behind which we have hidden.

Knowing yourself for who you truly are, warts, blemishes and all, might not sound the most attractive of propositions. Most of us are aware of our deeper flaws, even when our conscious mind hastily glosses over them, or finds excuses, we still know, somewhere deep inside, what it is that drives us. We call it by many names but mostly it comes down to fear… the fear of rejection or being seen to fail, of being less than good enough or of being unloved, of being different…or of being the same… There are many facets to the gem of humanity.

Yet to know yourself for who you truly are carries another aspect, for there is within each of us a spark of divinity… a cosmic beauty and a light that burns whether we will or no. To turn to the source of that light and, in full awareness offer your self as a vessel can seem a terrifying prospect. What of you will be left? The old saying in the Mysteries is that he ‘who looks upon the face of God comes not again’… and we, as human beings, are programmed to preserve life and identity.

Yet you do not lose who you are… there is no miraculous wand waving change, no automatic sainthood; the faults, fears and problems remain and you continue to make the mistakes and live the life that makes you human. Yet, many things do change, priorities shift as the focus shifts from your outer self…you become more of what you really are… and aware of what you truly are. The crumbling mansions of the ego are well and truly cemented in, but if you can pull them down and see the ruins as they lie about your feet, it is then that the wildflowers come in.

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Graven Image…

| Stuart France

10 Top Pictures Of Saint Michael The Archangel Full - Archangel Michael Wallpaper Hd, HD Wallpaper Download #1990668

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‘ … And look! A man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold… His body also was like beryl and his face had the appearance of lightning. His eyes were as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to burnished brass. The voice of his words was as the voice of a multitude… and he said, “… To you am I now sent. Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, your prayers were heard and I am come for your prayers… I am come to make you understand what will befall your people in the latter days. I will show you the literal truth of these things. There is no other that can do this.”‘

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It is very difficult to find any illustrations for this piece.

Perhaps that is linked to the Hebraic injunction against graven images.

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In the current climate of image saturation it might be worthwhile

 considering the possible reasons for such an injunction…

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Speaking of his encounter with the ‘man clothed in linen’ Daniel says, “I alone saw the vision and the men that were with me saw it not but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled and hid themselves… I was left alone and threw myself to the ground. When he spoke I stood, trembling, and when he had finished speaking I was strengthened.”

Elsewhere in the text Daniel is less sure of this being’s precise nature:

“… And look! One like the similitude of the sons of men touched my lips. I opened my mouth and spoke… Then there came again, and touched me, one like the appearance of a man…”

Michael is described both as a ‘Chief Prince’, and as ‘Daniel’s Prince’ by the narrator.

And later, as a ‘Great Prince’… “How long until the end of these awful things?”

Then I heard the man dressed in linen, who was above the water of the river, swear by the Ever-Living One as he lifted his right hand and his left hand to heaven, “For a time, times, and half a time and when the breaking of the power of the holy people comes to an end, then shall all these things be fulfilled.”

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Already, after this brief overview we can glimpse some of Michael’s traditional attributions.

He is concerned with ‘end times’.

He strengthens and protects the individual and can be petitioned on behalf of nations or ‘a people’.

He acts as a bridge and can communicate, high to low, and low to high.

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In times of hardship and stuggle he may well be worth invoking…

 

The Old One and the Gatekeeper (3) non-action

| Steve Tanham

37

The Dao abides in non-action but there is nothing it does not do.
When the leaders abide,
The myriad of things transform by itself;
Transformed yet desire to act,
I lead the community by not naming the simplicity of things;
Without naming the simplicity of things, thus lead to no desire;
Without desire, with tranquility,
The world correct by itself.

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The above is chapter 37 of Lao Tzu’s Book of the Way (Dao Je Jing) quoted from the Wikipedia Opensource project Wikisource.org. Further extracts are quoted below from the same source.

In Part One and Part Two we set the scene for the Lao Tzu’s approach to life and how to live it using the Dao (The Way). It’s a method which seems alien to the west in our so-called modern age. Perhaps the great thoughts of the world simply cycle round from age to age? One of Lao Tzu’s principle tenets is the noble art of ‘not-doing’, a concept very difficult for the western mind to grasp.

It could be said that technology’s advancement merely gives us the idea of progress. Perhaps in the heart and mind of mankind there remains the same hunger for a different truth as when the New Testament quoted Jesus as saying people should ‘turn the other cheek’.

Resistance is something we live with daily. Something happens – arises in our lives, for it has no meaning unless it affects us – and we either like or dislike it. If I like something I will want more of it; I will want to be closer to the source of it.

If I dislike something, I will want to oppose it – to arrest its motion or progress. The spectrum of my response will vary all the way to outright hatred; something currently felt by millions of people with respect to the polarised state of world politics. Such polarisation is fed by a new generation of vastly wealthy ‘disruptors’, who have seen how easily the intelligence of the public can be misfed and misled, particularly with complex economic and social topics. Fear is a reliable ally for those who have the power to manipulate…

The Book of the Way does not advocate us being passive for its own sake. Nor does it really advocate doing nothing. But it does propose a response that seems utterly radical and revolutionary: It says we should be conscious of the whole and protect the whole, while not taking a side and injecting our energies; energies that may disrupt the whole, which knows how to change its shape with the changes – no matter how powerful the villains.

(Above: Figure 2 – The wholeness of the Dao and its origination and place in the perceived world of mankind)

Consider Figure 2, above. It shows the origin of our world – really the origin of the consciousness of our world. If ‘I’ am not here then this world is not here, either. ‘A world’ may be present, but it is not the world I know, nor would I be part of it… The greater question might be: would there be an I without the world to externalise?

If ‘I’ have power to do, then I can push the pendulum towards what I consider to be evil or good. Usually, people believe they are doing good despite the opposite opinions of others. The creation is the whole cone within the diagram.

When I push the pendulum, part of the creation with a sense of ‘I’ (separateness) is altering the internal balance of the creation, but not altering the container of the whole creation. The part of the creation with a sense of ‘I’ may think it knows better than the whole of the creation, but its real duty is to be a fully conscious part of the whole – the Dao – the ‘flowing way of rightness’.

34

Implications of the Tao are broad and extensive. Ubiquitous!
Capable of contravening and swaying anything left or right.
The myriad things depend on it yet it never turns its back away,
Fulfilling without recognitions.
Submitting to the myriad things without assuming ownership,
Always undesirable,
Thus be called modest;
Submerged by the myriad things without accepting ownership,
Thus be called great.
Hence the master foregoes greatness,
Therefore is capable of accomplishing great deeds.

(source)

Lao Tzu says that there is a loving intelligence flowing in the world – in creation. This loving intelligence is always in contact with the whole of the creation. It is like saying that there is a flowing medium that is the substance of the world – a very alchemical notion – and our ‘right’ relationship to it will only be shown us when we learn to SEE it as it IS, not as an abstract and habitual picture to react to.

In the Wilhelm translation, the person who achieves that seeing is named ‘The Man/Woman of Calling”, who ‘never makes himself look great’ and thus achieves a noble goal by being in harmony with the Dao.

This philosophy has caused great confusion over the ages since it was written (six hundred years BCE). Comprehension of it is based upon an understanding that ‘not-doing’ is not doing nothing. Not-doing might be re-termed not-reacting; or waiting to see what the world does with it without our intervention – yet remaining fully aware and empathetic to what is happening.

As though we were an (as yet unconscious) intrinsic part of this intelligent and loving energy. Which just might be the truth…

There are no definitive opinions, here. We are all free to decide that the Book of the Way means for us. These are my personal views. Like the I Ching, the Book of the Way (Dao Je Jing) makes for a wonderful daily dose of radical wisdom in what seems to be a tired world… or is it?

In the next post, we will consider the nature of the I Ching and its remarkable powers of divination.

13 May 2020

©Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.