Watching TV gives you square eyes, so I’ve been told. Living with Yi gives you that much stranger phenomenon, hexagram eyes. You see little subtle reflections of ideas from the Yijing everywhere.
My reading for this year begins with Hexagram 5, so I’m especially attuned to anything that talks about qualities of waiting, expecting and attention. I just came across this in Elizabeth Gilbert’s gem of a book, Eat, Pray, Love:
“Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. So now I take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what I am truly asking for. I kneel there in the temple with my face on that cold marble for as long as it takes for me to formulate an authentic prayer. If I don’t feel sincere, then I will stay there on the floor until I do.”
‘Waiting, with sincerity and confidence.
Shining out, creating success: constancy brings good fortune.
Harvest in crossing the great river.’
I don’t understand that quote because it seems to me she is advising you treat prayer like a shopping list, a list of requests. I can’t see why you have to know what you want. I thought the point of prayer was not for going on about what you want but for receiving what you need and really want which is nameless, ie being in prescence of God or however you call it. So in prayer all you have to do is be open to it. Her version sounds exhausting and shes also limiting herself to what she knows she wants. Spiritual consumerism again maybe – I don’t know, perhaps i have wrong end of stick
My fault for quoting out of context. There’s definitely no spiritual consumerism here (at this point in the book she’s at an ashram and doing a tough regime of daily meditation in which she receives all kinds of things she didn’t ask for). But there’s an interesting section earlier on where she describes a conversation in which she argues that prayer mustn’t be about requests, and a wiser friend explains how it can be exactly that. Anyway, it’s a beautiful book – recommended reading.
In Herman Hesse’s masterpiece ‘Siddhartha’, the ascetic wanderer has a beautiful thing to say about the power of active waiting:
“Wen you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does
nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no
daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.”
That’s very apt for the hexagram – and just what I needed to hear today. Thank you.