The Steps of Human Consciousness

 There's a teaching in Chinese mysticism that there are two levels of our consciousness. They're associated with the concepts in the I Ching of the "inferior person" and "superior individual". 

At every moment in space and time we have a choice of which of the two we associate with in our active consciousness, but most people in general associate with the inferior person. The inferior person is a collection of influences and conditionings based on your physical nature, your environment, and the influences of your past and present choices and people in your life.

The Superior Individual is your true nature, what is real about you behind all those things. But in point of fact most people are so disconnected from their true and essential nature that it feels like it is another person. In many rituals used to "communicate" with the Superior Individual, that division is so notable that it feels like the Superior individual is some totally different entity from "ourselves", which is why in western symbolism its called the "Holy Guardian Angel". 

This is also why when one is trying to shift the association of their consciousness from the inferior person to the Superior Individual it feels like dying, like the very essence of who were until now (or rather, who you thought you were) has to be destroyed for you to get to that true self. In a lot of cases, people's motives for getting to that true state involve desires OF the inferior person, so they realize that to get to what's real, they'll have to give up the fantasies of the false person they were, and that's very hard.

This internal conflict is mirrored externally by the struggle between (the inferior person) wanting to imagine one's self the center of the universe, and wanting to have a power that acts on the universe and get to impose its desires on the universe, and the (Superior Individual's) understanding that we are one non-divisible part of reality and are not the central actor but one small part of a very big picture in the vastness of Space and Time, and how this is not something that can just be reasoned out, but has to be experienced through meditative practice and the application of virtue to restore that Union with the Taiji (what in modern English we could call the "Singularity").


So in fact while most of these sorts of studies and articles and ordinary perceptions on the subject of "enlightenment" talk about a two-option process (unconsciousness / enlightenment), the work of spiritual Cultivation is actually a multi-step process of initial glimpses of waking up, initiation, developing discipline, achieving communication with the Superior Individual (in western magick called the "True Will"), working to change one's life and environment to better fit one's efforts at attainment and union, making the shift from general association with the inferior person to general association with the Superior Individual, engaging in teaching or other forms of applying Virtue in the world, attaining states of Union to reality, and finally manifesting that Union fully and becoming the Sage (Enlightenment). There are steps Beyond Enlightenment as well but these are generally not spoken of in lay contexts.

Of the above stages, the big three are:

- Initiation: the beginning of awareness of one's Enlightenment quality, and the start of serious spiritual cultivation.

-Adepthood: the shift into association with the Superior Individual

-Enlightenment: uniting to nature or space-time as a whole (which is to say, overcoming this false notion of separation between self and other, and the self-referencing nature of "thinking you're in the middle of the picture").

 

Finally, I'll note that the very notion that Enlightenment is some kind of separation from the World or one's humanity is ridiculous and disgusting. That's essentially either nihilism or solipsism, the heresies of the gnostics. You can't become "one with everything" by being less human, or less engaged. 

Anyone claiming to be Enlightened while pretending that they don't care about things, or feel things, or that there are certain normal human things that they just don't experience (be it anger, sadness, physical pain, or basic physical needs) are both arguing for Enlightenment being a kind of sub-humanity, and blatant liars.

Enlightenment requires, as my own teacher once said, that you Be More Human.

It's not about separating yourself, it's about Showing Up, being present in the active consciousness.
It's not about feeling less or caring less, it's about Totality. Becoming one part of the big picture, without trying to run away from that big picture, or trying to be right in the middle of that big picture, or trying to control that big picture. It's about being 100% of yourself in the here and now.

Time and the I Ching

What is the nature of Time? The I Ching seeks to explain that.

This is important for understanding your own spiritual cultivation, as well as to understanding how Divination works, and why!

The Greatest Changes You Make are the Ones You'll Never See

One of the things that the I Ching teaches you, when you get really deep into it, is to see certain things in really big scales of time.

This also brings with it the realization that all the truly big things, the really meaningful things you can do with your life, are things you will never live to see the end results of.

The key to making intentional change in something, according to the I Ching, is to do it before it starts.

To have a vision of the future, to know how to make change in something before it even starts, requires that you must be able to very clearly observe the present.

So if the future is really Incipiencies existing as 'seeds' in the present, changing the future is all about planting the right seeds. 

The Time Travel of the I Ching

Enter the stream of the I Ching through its symbols.

The I Ching shows that time is like a forest, full of change.

The present is just the place you are at in the forest.

All the steps you took through this forest up until now have put you on this point in the path.

The direction they lead you in points toward where on the path you are heading; this is the future.

If you want to change the future, change it before it happens.

If you want to change the past, change your response to the choices you made in the past.

Unfolding the Nature of Truth

Truth is a more complicated concept than we tend to understand it to be. It is also a fundamental pillar of the practice of Cultivation and the development of Virtue.  In particular, in the western world, there has been a kind of crisis over the nature of truth that has developed over the last several decades; in our society, certain philosophies have tried to advocate the idea that there is really no such thing as truth, or that truth is an entirely subjective personal affair (which is effectively the same as suggesting there's no such thing as truth), or that "truth" is really just some kind of collective notion where if enough people believe in something that makes it true (which is just a delusion of collective solipsism rather than individual solipsism).

This is in stark contrast to certain other paradigms that suggest that truth is starkly and plainly absolute, a thing is either true or it isn't.  This latter concept may be more accurate in the sense that Truth is an absolute feature of reality, but it is not really much more productive because it fails to consider the human element of how we relate to Truth, of the process of understanding Truth.

There is absolute and objective Truth. However, what is true at any given time is not immune to the nature of Change, which the I Ching clearly demonstrates is the fundamental nature of all of reality, to which Truth is not immune. The most absolute Truth is change itself. In all other levels, Truth is only absolute in the context of Space-Time. That is, in certain places or in certain times, something can be true.

If, for example, it is raining where you are right now, that it rains is Truth, when and where you are. There's no relativity to that Truth, no amount of believing differently changes the fact that it is raining, and thus we see that it is objectively true; but we also know that it was not raining before, nor will it be raining later, so it is also a truth that is affected by Change.  Saying "it is raining" is true only while it rains.  With other, much vaster things, the time-span of how long something is true can be orders of magnitude greater, but it is just as affected by Change.

Our awareness as a whole, which includes elements like senses, our ability to reason, and our conscience, allow us to process and attempt to determine Truth. Because we are imperfect, and because the nature of what is true can change over time and place, the process of understanding Truth is a constant and ongoing process. We must continually unfold truth from our inner awareness and our observation of reality.

How do we do this, in practical Cultivation terms?  As always, the process must begin within ourselves.

The first step to unfolding truth is found in our own choice to make the attempt to pursue truth, over what is not true. This can be defined as "sincerity".  It also requires Discipline, to have not only a sincere dedication to seeking truth within and without your own being but to do what is necessary to embody this process in the world. Sincerity is important on a rational basis because if you are deluding yourself it is bound to impede your ability to see what is true about nature and reality; in a more esoteric sense, one could say that it is the nurturing of Truth within your own being that can allow you to connect to Truth in the macrocosm beyond you.

This leads you to the second step, of being able to examine the nature of Reality on a regular basis; through both rational study and the development of learning, and meditation and the development of consciousness.

This observation allows the third step, where you can determine what are right actions, truthful actions, within reality at any given place and time. This allows you to operate in Harmony within yourself, and with your surroundings.

Finally, there is a fourth element to this process, which is the question of how you relate Truth to your responsibility for humanity, how to apply truth to benefit humanity through contributing to its spiritual evolution (what can be called the Great Work). Being sincere and harmonious within ourselves develops within us a quality of fairness, where we wish for the world to be a fair place, for ourselves to be treated justly and for others to be treated justly. Our observation of the interconnection between all things in the tapestry of Space-Time makes it clear to us that this is necessary, because our well-being depends on the well being of others, and vice-versa. Similarly, any claim we have over any natural rights depends on others having the same natural rights.
At the same time, it is only through observation of Truth, and the degree to which we are able to accurately observe Truth, that we can consciously apply this sense of justice. We must be capable of being able to pragmatically manifest concepts like justice, rights, and well-being, in the degree to which is possible in the time and place we are located.

It is only through that degree of understanding what is true that we can manage to enact beneficial change (for ourselves and others, in the short term and building up into the long-term) that can actually work as intended, harmoniously with the reality of what is functional.

You Don't Matter and That's The Only Way To Matter

A video today, explaining our relationship to the universe, and the path to Union.

Cultivation Starts With the Body

All spiritual cultivation starts with the body.

It's very important to find your center in the body.

But then, when you are seeking to unite to the rest of the universe, you can't achieve that if you are looking at your own being as the 'center' of the universe.

The universe is vast and if you try to push your own being into the center place of it, you won't be able to Unite; you will still be trying to have your own separate being at the middle, you're essentially trying to demand that the Universe unite with you (or "around" you).

When connecting to the Universe, you have to realize that you are United to it as an inseparable part of it, but not the center around which all other things orbit.

It is like the pictures in Chinese art. You see this style where there are great landscapes, symbolic of Nature and the Universe, and then somewhere in some little edge or corner, there is a person.

(note the tiny human figures, crossing the bridge, over the waters between the mountains)





When you try to put yourself at the center of the Universe, this naturally alienates you from reality, and from the physical, and from association with your body. Conversely, when you return your meditation to the body, you go within, and step out of the illusion of your own centrality. Paradoxically, only by doing so can you experience the vastness of the universal in a truthful way.

You do not need to be in the middle of this vastness; in fact, you can't be. You can't achieve that and create the appropriate place for the universe.

To Unite, you need to see your place in the enormous vastness of space/time that came before you and comes after you, that is beyond you and behind you.
That is to say, of your notion of you.

When you can be comfortable and fulfilled with just being a part of the big picture, even as a small figure on one edge of the canvas, then you can achieve Union.

Just "Being In The Moment" is Useless

"In the moment" is kind of a tricky term. Because in fact no matter what, we're ALWAYS 'in the moment'. The real question is whether we're Conscious in the moment, and what that means. Just 'living in the moment' is nothing special, and it's actually useless.

 

 

Fundamentally, being Conscious in the Moment is about bringing the Future INTO the moment. It means being sufficiently aware of one's own self that you expand through Space/Time in this very moment to be able to INCLUDE where you've already been and where you're likely to be into this moment.

So what does this do? It gives you free Will. Without this Active Consciousness, you are still here, in the moment but the moment is actually very small, so small that you don't really have the power to really control what happens to you. You are a prisoner of the past and doomed toward a given future because you're not Aware enough to Change anything.

If you are Conscious in the Moment, then Space/Time is all existing right there, in that moment. The gives us the power to move; to change. What has led us to here, and where here can lead to, is part of our Awareness, and we can alter it.

Just being 'in the moment' without any Consciousness is basically being an animal or a robot.

On the other hand, being Conscious in the Moment means that you have the power to transform reality itself.

"Synchronicity" and the I Ching

Many people in the west try to claim, in answer to the question of how the I Ching works, that it is through "synchronicity".  This was a term used by the psychologist C.G. Jung (who was a great admirer of the I Ching, and tried to explain its function through the lens of his psychological theories), and was later bastardized for common use by the new-age movement.

(Jung, giving a questioning glance at New Age woo)

Synchronicity, as it is most often used by people involved in applying the term to the I Ching, supposes that "random" events, random convergence, random meaning, all just comes together as little more than some sort of "coincidence on steroids" (as one of my Yi Fa Society students put it).

It is a way you can feel like something has meaning, but you still don't have to really challenge your ideas beyond the assumption it's all just random chance.

It allows you to 'cop out' in various ways:

-to chicken out of needing to take a casting seriously if you decide you don't like what it's saying

-to chicken out of considering your own deeper consciousness ("I just look for synchronicity and let the universe guide me!!")

-to chicken out of exploring the vaster significance of the I Ching's expression of space-time

-to chicken-out of having to move beyond our 20th/21st century post-modern Baby-Boomer western paradigm

This Western Paradigm is the one that says things like "spirituality is just some kind of primitive superstitious psychology", or "you are the center of the universe so of course the universe will send you personally unique personal messages when you toss some coins around, because of how special you are", or "there is no actual reality, all that matters is what you're feeling and what you imagine"!

But in fact, profound study of the I Ching shows that nothing at all is really "random".  All events are caused by Incipiencies: the quality of previous events in space-time synthesizing to plant the seed of future events in space-time. As a certain Canadian philosopher once said: "Fate is just the weight of circumstances".   Every event consists of a moment (represented by the Hexagram) that is the product of literally TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS of previous choices made, that weigh down on that moment to make it THAT moment and no other possible moment.

Within that moment, there are only a certain number of malleable points, where one can act to create a new Incipiency that will work to shift the movement of time in the future. These are represented in an I Ching hexagram by the Changing Lines.

So Incipiency is like the "Gravity" of Time.

If you understand this, then you'd get that "synchronicity" as a notion has nothing to do with the structure of the I Ching.  Or, for that matter, with reality, except in the sense that you can take any coincidence and apply meaning to it, sometimes to good purpose.

Understanding Incipiencies

Sometimes great change, disaster or windfall, appears to happen suddenly.

This is an illusion of perception.

The moment where change seems to be happening with great speed is in fact long after the seeds of that change were planted.

The sage can look back and see many conditions, little developments, without which that great change could never have taken place.

All change actually starts with a series of smaller incipient events; often these will not even resemble or seem to have anything to do with the great change they can lead to.

Thus, the skilled practitioner can learn how to observe these earlier conditions, and make great changes eventually happen (or prevent them) with very little effort.

This is the power that a profound study of the I Ching grants: to be able to see the process of time, and how to change things before they happen.

Video: The Power of the I Ching

Today's video takes a look at the underlying structure of the I Ching, and why it works.

If you are interested in more teachings and receiving information that goes deeper into the structure of the I Ching, the nature of space-time, and personal cultivation, please don't hesitate to contact me about joining the Yi Fa Society.

Another way of Looking at How the I Ching Hexagrams Explain Space & Time

Hexagram #1 and Hexagram #2 are the two extremes of Reality.  Hexagrams #63 and #64 are where those extremes meet.

Hexagram #1:

All other hexagrams have one of these four as their nuclear; or as the nuclear of their nuclear. #1 and #2 are both nuclears of themselves; hence they are two polar extremes. #63 and #64 are nuclears of each other; hence, they are the center-point where Time and Space collide.

Hexagram #2:

To understand the King Wen sequence (the regular sequence of Hexagrams as they appear in the I Ching) you must think of it as a U-shaped track. On one side are all the odd-numbered hexagrams, starting with Hexagram #1; on the other the even-numbered hexagrams, starting with Hexagram #2. The curve where the two lines meet is #63 and #64. So if you unfolded that track and made it into a straight line, you'd have #1 and #2 at opposite ends of each other, and #63 and #64 right in the middle of the line.

Otherwise you could also envision it as taking the form of a square angle (of 90 degrees, that is, one-fourth of a circle).  The Odd numbers would be the vertical and the Even numbers the horizontal. And #63 and #64 would be where they meet, in the center.

Hexagram #63:

Look at Hexagram #1 ("Creation"), and you will see that it is all about time.  Look at Hexagram #2 ("Passive") and you will see it is all about space. Where they intersect is the Now, but the now is eternal, and instant. It is so fast it cannot be depicted. The moment you say "it is now" you are no longer in the Now.

So instead, there is the flickering interplay between that vertical Time and horizontal Space, and it finds itself in the connection between Hexagram #63 ("After Ending") and Hexagram #64 ("Before Ending"): Before Ending, After Ending, Before Ending, After Ending.  Everything is a series of immediate flickering moments between what Is Changing and what has Not Yet Changed.

Hexagram #64:

Just like Hexagrams #1 and #2 are completely pure in their respective Yang and Yin, as ideal extremes, #63 and #64 are completely mixed; in that messiness of the incipient moment of the Now's explosive crash between Space and Time. #63 has everything in the proper place, #64 has nothing in its proper place. That's Reality.


Between Space, Time, and Now there is Space-Time, all the other situations that are represented by all those hexagrams that are in some way derived from these four hexagrams. They each and all have effects on how we can approach Reality and what we must do to manifest Virtue (which also has four aspects). The Superior Individual is he who chooses to take note of each situation as it is really happening in the Now, and manifest the right Virtue accordingly.  The Sage is someone who has been able to experience all of Space-Time and how it is both happening at once and not happening at all.
The Superior Individual has found the axis which forms a square; the Sage has found the Center-point.