I Ching for activists at GreatVessel.com

The fourth ‘Readings Panel’ reading at GreatVessel.com is one Stephen Karcher cast on behalf of a group in June 2002:

“What about President Bush and his plans for a war on Iraq? What attitude or stance can we take towards this?”

Yi said “Keep Still”. (Gen, hexagram 52)

It’s a beautifully simple answer, especially to a room full of ‘therapists and activists’, people who are committed, one way or another, to doing something when things go wrong. Stephen says the question “related to a shift in the “war on terrorism” that we felt as a real kairos, a critical moment that seemed to demand we take a stance. There was much heated discussion and about what sort of action was possible or desirable. Opinions ranged from staunch patriotism to angry demands to mobilize resistance and take to the streets.”

So here is an answer to the impulse and urge to do something, to take a stand. Yi even responds directly to the phrasing of the question – what attitude or stance are they to take? The character Gen is a human figure –

– originally, says the Wenlin dictionary, simply a mirror image of the character ‘jian’, to look. This one is turning his back on events, looking inward instead of outward. This gives a model of how to be that you could feel and enact physically.

Yi’s response is so direct that the interpretation could well stop here – and whatever follows, the interpreter needs to take great care not to dilute that viscerally simple message.

Here’s the definition of gen from LiSe’s website:
“GÈN: The character represents a person turned backwards (2) with a big eye (1): not moving along with others, but resisting every influence: being an individual.
GÈN: arrogant, stubborn, resist, anger, obstinate, stop, stand still, defiance, haughtily, to glare. In the Mawangdui: root or base, cause, beginning.”
The key idea is resisting influence and being an individual – when one’s instinct is to identify with and enlist in one group or another.

More associations come together here because, of course, gen is also the name of the trigram that is doubled in this hexagram – the Mountain. It’s solid and unmoving; it’s also a place of retreat, and a sacred place to connect with Heaven. The querents are advised to keep still and reflect:

‘Joined mountains. Keeping still.
The noble one reflects, and does not come forth from his situation.’

The ‘joined mountains’ express the idea of holding things together, like the mental state of hexagram 15 ‘unites with’ truth. There’s no logical process to this, no talking it over or thinking it through – only holding things together in mind. The noble one doesn’t come forth from his situation – and ‘coming forth’ is the action of thunder, the trigram of decision and initiative. The Image somehow manages to make it sound as though leaping into action is a kind of escapism.

Whatever you make of the ‘modern’ view that this hexagram is about dismemberment (and there is good stuff on this from Scott Davis and Stephen at the Great Vessel forum thread discussing this reading), it is certainly true that stilling one movement creates an opening for another. This idea is associated with gen in the Shuogua, the enigmatic Wing of the Yijing that describes the nature and associations of the trigrams. It says that ‘all things find their ending and their beginning’ in gen, and that

“Gen is
mountains, byways and small stones;
doorways;
fruits and seeds;
gatekeepers, eunuchs;
fingers;
dogs, rodents and panthers;
trees that are strong, with many joints.”
(Translation from Richard Rutt’s Zhouyi)

I don’t understand all of this – in very much the same way that I don’t ‘understand’ Rilke when he says that angels are

“mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,–
pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light,
corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,
shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:
mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face
and gather it back, into themselves, entire.”
(Mitchell’s translation)

But at least it is clear that the fruit has to end for there to be a seed, that there has to be a joint between phalanges for the finger to bend, and that the mountain is like a gate, a place to stop and start. Only if you still the automatic reaction will there be a chance for a different kind of beginning.

And so Yi advised that group of people in 2002 –

‘Keeping your back still,
Not grasping your personality.
Moving in your rooms,
Not seeing your people.
Not a mistake.’

Your back is the part of yourself you cannot see, no matter how much you twist and chase your tail. You cannot really grasp your whole self – the image here is of hunting with dogs, and you cannot ‘catch’ your present self, because then who’d be left to do the catching? So since there will always be parts of yourself that you cannot see and cannot define with your inner dialogue (this is the opposite/complement of Hexagram 58), keep still and find a different way of knowing. You do not have to pin yourself down to a political position, identifying an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. And in parallel, you do not have to pay attention to the other people and their position. If you are self-possessed enough, you might not even see them. What could possibly be further from the idea of a group of people getting together to discuss their response?

This idea of not seeking to catch yourself and not seeing other people can seem extreme to us – unreasonable, almost. Don’t we have to observe and respond to others? Isn’t it good to talk things through? Yi, reassuring us that not to do so is ‘no mistake’, seems to have anticipated this. I think Hexagram 52 is a corrective – a counter-balance to the upheaval of Hexagram 51, Shock, an antidote to reactivity.

Hexagram 51 begins things; Hexagram 52 stops them. In the midst of the upheaval, panic and mass headless chicken syndrome of Hexagram 51’s Judgement, someone does not lose the sacred ladle and libation. The commentary tradition explains that this is the eldest son, naturally fitted to handle the sacred Vessel (Hexagram 50), and inheriting the charge of the ancestral temple and the altars of soil and grain. The Sequence itself suggests that this one who can keep a steady hand while the quake rages is also the one who Keeps Still.

Together, Shock and Keeping Still seem to ‘process’ the changes of hexagrams 49 to 50, the Revolution when old ways of relating are skinned away, and the inauguration of a new age. I’d need to be American to understand this from the inside, but it seems to me that something of this nature happened to the US in the aftermath of 911. Hexagram 51 feels the change, suffers the shock of finding the ground is no longer solid underfoot, and looks to understand how there is continuity in the change. Hexagram 52 damps down the reverberations, blocks out at least some of the reaction, gives people space to recover their balance. (It’s been discovered that counselling for post-traumatic stress that encourages people to talk over their experience immediately after the event can make matters worse, not better. Not seeing people is not a mistake.)

At the core of Keeping Still is Release. That is, the nuclear hexagram of 52 is 40. Keeping Still, not reacting, being aware rather than acting, not leaping to respond and join a group – all this opens the possibility of being able to choose your own path without being ‘pulled’, as if on strings, in one direction or another. In the Great Vessel discussion, Rodrigo actually describes this relationship perfectly without ever mentioning nuclear hexagrams:
“How can one react properly to any external act? It can be achieved when acting or resting are decided since the Non-Action. How can one decide since the Non-Action? with meditation, achieving the Natural Mind. With the Natural Mind, the conflictiveness of the world vanishes and one knows what is the best to do.”

Further reading:
Stephen’s interpretation – a remarkable insight into how a very different diviner works
the GreatVessel forum thread to discuss the reading
and also the Wandering Sages blog entry about this – which says there is another, more recent reading that they’re hesitant to publish.