47: Oppression/Exhaustion
Prior to entering a hospital for a week-long treatment, I decided to consult the I-Ching. In facing a serious illness and all the uncertainty attending it, either radically or incrementally, we are forced to shift our outlook. A provocative tension arises between the meaning of life and the meaning of our confinement, and even death. That tension can become a driving force of great creativity and satisfying accomplishment as it has been for me. Yet also, we are called to rein in exuberance generated by that tension, not falling into despair or overextending ourselves. Continuously returning to our egoless zero-nature, remembering where our power comes from is that path. This is the Great Transition underway.
Hexagram 47 is an image of a tree growing within an enclosure. This is confinement, appearing to reach a point of exhaustion. The confinement feels restrictive. A crossing (or transition) must be made. We can’t push outward. We can’t talk our way out of our predicament. We can only look inward to find the equanimity to proceed. Our response can be one of excess, stagnation, straining against circumstances, or it can be a transcendence to a more holistic understanding. But either way, there’s no reasoning involved, no analysis. We can only sense our way forward.
This is not a time to push outward. With the passage of time, trees will eventually provide shade. There is something to learn here. Finding tranquility in disturbance, finding a center, is one of the Tao’s greatest lessons to overcome the extremes of responses. Whatever unfolds might simply be a lesson to cultivate patience and to become less reactive. Great frustration can mount when we feel hemmed in, when our options diminish. Being backed into a corner by a life-threatening illness becomes a time to ‘discover what is most important to us.’ At some point, we must peer through denial, anger, victimhood, and bargaining, stop railing about the unfairness of it all and take responsibility for our condition.
Nature demonstrates how adaptive mechanisms evolve to help species overcome adversity. These mechanisms are not external. They are inborn. In the same way, all that you will ever need to survive blossoms from within you. Life is about abundance, even when we are being stripped of non-essentials. Allow this time of Oppression to reveal the abundance within you.
Sometimes we must be backed into a corner by stress to discover our inner truth or real capabilities. As we peer into an increasingly uncertain future, new capacities are revealed. We might well wonder how we failed to recognize such capabilities earlier in life. The greatest thing Kùn presents is that while we may feel weakened within, it is exactly these oppressive situations that can reveal our inner strength in ways we never imagined. That strength cannot be exhausted because it is not dependent on external conditions.
Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window to look out and see who is there. --- Rumi
Life’s gentle prodding whittles away the unnecessary -until only what is necessary remains.
Even though the appearance of serious illness may have been a shock, deeply unsettling, bringing our worst fears to the surface, eventually, if we are fortunate, we will learn that beyond the shock is a new perspective about life altogether.
We can also take heart from Hexagram 18, The Penetrating Wind, which reminds us that a deeper force of life may not be apparent, but it continues beneath our control. It is the force that erodes mountains, changes the course of rivers, always in the background. It is uncontainable. In the I Ching, realizing the nature of the Penetrating Wind comes through Shock (Hexagram 51). We are no match for the perpetual erosion and reconfiguration of the Penetrating Wind, but we can be mindful of it and take heart in our adaptive capacities.
Kùn’s message is that while you tend to attach yourself to what can be held within the hand, you cannot know today what will fulfill you tomorrow. Like an ocean that cannot be depleted because all streams lead back to it, you access a source within that is inexhaustible. It is inexhaustible only when you do not try to contain it. To measure success only by outward accomplishment, we may fail to see how adversity pushes us to discover the abundance of our real capabilities. Success takes root when we access that abundance yet remain unreactive.
We are confronted with an opportunity to redefine success as a pathway to self-completion even in our confinement. We are compelled to descend into and discover our zero-nature. We become capable of seeing through illusion. The comforting boundaries of the past will no longer behave. We can peer through identity, beyond right and wrong, beyond conformity. The unnecessary is whittled away, Life is not a contest. When we do not contest, nothing contests with us: that is power.
When you turn yourself into zero, your power becomes invincible—Ghandi.
28: Critical Mass/The Great Transition
In my reading, Hexagram 47, a single line change (third) alters the picture to Hexagram 28 (Ta Kuo: Critical Mass/The Great Transition). A critical choice point is reached. Perhaps we’ve been able to settle out of reactivity. Perhaps our condition is not entirely opaque. We can sense some promise lying within it. But excess can also be at play. If the roof is bearing constant strain, if we habitually find refuge in conceptualization or persist in overly magnifying the creativity inherent in our situation, we can easily overextend ourselves. The great weight on the roof pressing on a foundation, sorely tested, is now revealed to be built to support the past.
To become too heady in the way we think about our circumstances will be like increasing the load on the roof and placing added strain on the foundations of our being. That way of interacting with adversity is counterproductive.
Ta Kuo demonstrates how protecting a weak foundation or outworn idea is no match for the power of nature to bring it down. A quantum leap into a new way of interacting is in the air. The old way of interacting is not sustainable; the old paradigm is crumbling. It is not expectation that we hold to; it is the certainty that everything is unfolding perfectly to create the necessary change.
There is an inexhaustible—even shamanic--creative force within the Penetrating Wind. But we may need to be brought to a critical mass before we can access it. While remaining mindful of our capacities, we continue to seek guidance from a direct encounter with the condition without being needlessly swept into fantasies about what is possible. Yes, we seek ways to defend ourselves from challenging circumstances. But a defense that regresses into putting ourselves in direct opposition to events, defying spiritual and martial traditions, will forestall the balance that nature is always seeking and set off a chain reaction of unintended consequences. Nature is unbiased. Following nature will return us to a pathway of healing.
Opening and yielding is required. We are always becoming, always on our way to wholeness. There is no fixed destination we can hold onto. The true nature of change is a continuous arrival at a non-existent destination.
The Great Transition is a conversation between the roof, the foundations and the lodgepoles of familiar social structures that support and constrains us, and the process of becoming a true individual, a great being with our truest identity free of social conventions. Authenticity and balance are the thrust of life. Critical illness represents an initiation like no other, through which we may grow into a ritual presence. It is a passage through liminal space in which structures dissolve, boundaries become gauzy. It is a letting go of the past, a time to stand up for what you know to be true, to find the power to exist independent of collective norms and awaken the person that has always lived within us.
Believe in what you are doing and don’t worry about support and acceptance because that is the message of this hexagram: be undaunted. Keep going.