Hexigram 34 – Great Power – to 38 Opposition

I have had an intense couple of days and the only way to begin to describe them would be to do an iching reading.

Just as a background, I had my little encounter-with-elohim experience a while back as well as my yellow sash test. I’m learning that my yellow sash test was an extreme case. I was tested one-on-one and I wasn’t given much warning about when I would test. So I came into the dojo and WHAM!

A yellow sash test has about 30 different techniques repeated 20 – 30 times on the right side and left side, as well as from the front and from the reverse footing. In total that meant I was performing thousands of repetitions and then had to deliver a speech at the end to my class. I guess I didn’t even recognize at the time how difficult this was and so I kept beating myself up, thinking I wasn’t performing well enough.

I went to class yesterday and there was a record number of attendees. He presented my certificate in front of everyone and gave a big lecture to them about how he really did consider me a yellow sash but how it was just difficult to find time to test me. He emphasized how hard I work and how he knew I was in it for the long run. I was becoming a kind of lesson to the other students, because I do treat martial arts as a form of self-development, internal work. Some people don’t. That blows my mind.

What he didn’t know what that after I got home from the test I started to cry hysterically. It was the kind of cry that made my cat come up to me and try and comfort me. No joke. She was meowing all funny and then sat on my tummy until I was still. I had to keep recalling the encounter with Elohim and remembering that I was getting closer and closer to the Truth. Afterwords, I went to the roof to look at the stars and I saw my own star, Mira (a star located in the constellation Cetus). A shooting star flew past my name-star.

Since then, I have decided not to go so hard on myself. The problem is that I don’t really know what else to do. The other day, I decided to read Emma Jung’s article on Animus and realized how active the animus complex must be in me. It’s a common cause of anxiety and inertia in women. It’s funny how I get so obsessive about how I’m in this state of lethargy / inertia, but internally am facing forces that are cosmic in size.

The next day, after I realized how the animus’ voice was most active in me and really felt I could see it for what it was in my imagination, I was moving on an energy that wasn’t really my own. (Or at least it didn’t belong to my smaller ego.) In the early morning, I was in a receptive state and as I called the EDD to confirm some numbers they had on file, the person on the phone bonded with me and let me know I could apply for an additional year of unemployment. We did it on the spot and I was granted an $8,000 award. I just got the check from the period I was reporting from – an additional $350. Fortune!

While on the phone, I got an email from a Jewish organization in L.A. that does hunger advocacy from a community development standpoint. It feels very aligned with my history – from my childhood doing non-profit work in Pomona to my education at Georgetown. They wanted to do an interview with me for a Youth Coordinator role. So that was a second success.

Then finally, I go to the store later in the day and carrying that same feminine kindness to the cashier, I started to talk to the person at the register. She absent-mindedly gave me a $150 watch for free. My mind was blown!

On Wednesday, I spent the morning interviewing with the non-profit. The initial interview was very positive and when I learned what numbers they were offering me – more than double what I was making at my old job along with a fantastic benefits package – I was blown away. I went to my Alexander lesson and did such great work that my teacher was raving and complimenting everything I was doing.

Finally, today I started to read a book and was completely amazed at what I was reading. So much of it described aspects of my sole conflict – feelings of powerlessness masked by a sense of relentless martyrdom. It feels as if I knew, intuitively, last year that I had hit the wall with my Amazon complex and just spent a year recovering this lost puella who feels despair and inadequacy. Now that she has been recovered, she can be healed with power. And power is all around me.

There is an aspect of me that has a hard time believing that this is all what it looks like. I feel like Luke undergoing his training to be a great Jedi Knight. There used to be an awesome post about this somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.

I decided to make a little more sense of all that’s going on, I consulted the I Ching. Let me just say here and now that I love my I Ching Oracle. I don’t understand its nature and I admit I’m playing into what could be metaphorical language, but man o man, the Oracle gets me and always tells me helpful information. I am writing this because of the surging gratitude I feel whenever I think about how it has impacted me.

It told me that I’m in the middle of Hexigram 34, The Power of the Great, with 3 and 6 as changing lines. I can’t believe how well that captures what I’m going through. I feel like I’m dealing with forces beyond my comprehension and so I keep falling back on old impatience for external change. It during the moments when I actively try to relax or be responsive that I move forward the best. Yet as this reading describes, that just isn’t my default. I’m “inferior” in the sense that I’m just starting to live a life by the rules of synchronicity. I don’t know how to totally free myself yet from my animus and instead forge transcendance. But when I do, I will do it well.

“Advancing impetuously, without a care, not inwardly strong but out- wardly vigorous—inferior people may hope for fame and gain in this way, but if superior people who practice the Tao persist in using outward power when it is appropriate to realize all is empty, that power is useless. It is not just that the power is not correct—evén if it were, it would injure oneself before getting anything from another. This too is a dangerous path. It is like a ram butting a fence—it will surely get its horns stuck. This is power that adamantly strives for externals.”

I’m not to the point yet where I can just let go and accept that there is a bigger path of change happening.

An Encounter with Elohim – Integrity Games

Times are turning around now that I’m seriously undertaking Active Imagination work. I find that I can’t follow too many guidelines when it comes to doing this because it automatically puts me in the wrong state of mind. However, when I just follow where my mind goes automatically, extremely interesting things happen.

I felt my age-old anxiety one day (the very epic, cosmic anxiety) so I started to lie down and see what images came up when I focused on it. I saw myself standing at the edge of a cliff looking every which way and felt totally dizzied by the multiplicity of options and my lack of secure confidence in my own guidance. For a minute I remembered what it was like to be a child; when someone else was in charge, I wasn’t that anxious because I could just put my faith in the choices of another.

Then I remembered another memory from my adolescence. I had an exam that I was really nervous about the next day and I prayed to God that I would do well. I remember that I felt childish and silly talking to this voice, but nevertheless gave in and spoke to it, asking for help. At the time I was calling myself an atheist in order to differentiate myself as a teen. During my session, I looked more closely at this feeling of being naive and silly. I realized that I have a fear of not coming off rational or empirical enough to be functional in our world.

It’s true that I was very new-age-religion-ish and extremely imaginative as a kid, mainly around my hippy-dippy mother. Going into school, I felt this sense of coming up against this new “logic” style of thinking and became determined to sacrifice silly things like my active relationship with God. I find myself belittling this whimsical side of me all the time. At that moment, during this session of Active Imagination. I saw plainly that in doing this I was in fact sacrificing a deeper sense of stillness and security within me. Clearly the drive to have a relationship with God was still in me since during times of distress I’d still find myself “falling back” on old habits and praying.

I tried to personify this critical voice inside me. It truly felt witch-y in its character, but it was its very own nature to resist being named, since it was pushing me to be so rational. It really didn’t feel like nun like I used to suspect: it was derailing any kind of religiosity in me. It was primarily concerned with my integrity. I told the voice that I wanted to just feel what this would be like for a second and that no one would see me or ever be aware of this session of Active Imagination. I reasoned with it; it’s obvious that I didn’t gain anything from taking away this sense of divinity in me. In fact I was left with this massive vacuum inside of me that was filled with anxiety instead of “empirical intelligence”. It didn’t seem like a very “rational” substitution considering it had caused me to be so dysfunctional. I asked for permission to feel this same trust in God that I felt as a kid just as an experiment. I guess I was granted hesitant permission: I felt a very deep sense of happiness once I could connect/merge with this “inner voice” of God. The name “Elohim” kept coming up to mind.

What happened next was really interesting. When I did allow myself to merge I was flittering back and forth from this same state of bliss because it was very hard to maintain. It was particularly difficult when Mischa came in the room because I could feel my own witch introjecting onto him, assuming that he would be critical of me and look down on my spirituality. Just his presence felt like criticism.

I was actively struggling with God through another person’s presence. Later on (way after the Active Imagination session) I learned that “Elohim” was actually the name of the angel who fought with Jacob in the Bible, and that it was supposed to be Esau’s guardian angel. Elohim is also the name to describe the One God that overcomes all the other gods in the very polytheistic world that Judaism had to fight through. It seemed appropriate, because I was actively wrestling with myself to maintain this sense of safety in the face of another person’s approval. This isn’t exactly what I imagined but I rationalized to myself that I would rather have a parachute or some kind of tool to help me move forward from this massive cliff rather than being fearful and simply shutting my eyes as I fell. Still, it took active work to get back into the state of security / divine union.

What’s crazy is that I didn’t even see the connection to the Jacob and Esau struggle until one night, when I dreamed that I was writing a thank you letter to my very-Jungian uncle for recommending me an Active Imagination text by Barbara Hannah. It had a certain aura of importance to it, so the next day I sat down to write him an email and all the imagery seemed to connect itself while I was writing this email. I went back to read his original email and he had mentioned that he was working on a project about Jacob and Esau. It was then that I went and researched “Elohim” online and found that all these weird aspects of my Active Imagination session had links to the story of Jacob and the angel. It was cool, but something in me (perhaps the witch) was a little uncomfortable and distrusted the psychic aura of the whole thing.

I had another image later on that reminded me of a similar struggle. I couldn’t go into martial arts practice one day and I felt terrible about it. Then when I practiced Active Imagination, I saw my sifu’s head on a pedestal in the middle of a golden room. I realized that I was letting him take up so much space spiritually it was as if I was worshiping an idol. All that energy and effort could be spent instead praying to the real divinity inside of me. Whenever the images take on a kind of logical argument to them, the witch feels less weird about it. If I can get something out of it that’s inherently practical in furthering this internal drive for reason-based integrity, she’s cool with it.

She was totally cool with me using Active Imagination in order to be more empathic, on the other hand. I attended a big-girl professional conference this weekend and had this amazing opportunity to participate in an intensive on conflict mediation strategies for Israeli-Palestinian dialogues. We had to listen to people talk about an issue that was really difficult for them and make comments that made them feel really “heard”. My head so easily made these images for other people; I really did feel like the group oracle.

Here I became Cassandra, a complete mind reader who was stunning the grown ups in the room. At one point this woman was talking about a family fight that she found herself in the middle of. The image of someone in one of those medieval torture machines where the arms and legs are stretched out of their sockets spontaneously popped into mind and I saw her trying to navigate through what looked like a big scary cavern. I said, “You keep mentioning being neutral here, but this space of “neutrality” in you doesn’t seem to be very neutral. Can you describe for me what this inner space of “neutrality” is like for you?” She said that I really got right to the heart of it; she felt totally pulled in two directions and frustrated that she was expected not to feel emotional about it.

Coming out of that conference, I feel like a totally different person now. I feel like I can see clearly like I’ve never seen before. Once the images could help other people in fundamental ways, I felt like I could trust them. But it’s still hard for me to go into myself, because I feel that from a rational perspective this approach is out there and new age and somehow conceited.

I feel like the key to this witch’s heart is a simple bit of logically sound truth. We are both being played right now by a trickster function. When I do the Active Imagination work with the trickster function, I feel like I’m being blinded by sand or something. It helps me to avoid confronting things and my sense of time gets totally distorted so that I can’t even take control of the trickster. I don’t even realize when I’m doing it half the time. In the end, however, I realize that there is this fundamental relationship with the witch’s underlying motives and my values. We both want to help people. We both want to have integrity. But if I can’t think clearly, other people won’t trust my vision. In the long run, I’ll help people much, much more effectively if I come in feeling whole and balanced. That means I need to cross some boundaries regarding empiricism, rationality, etc.

In the end, empiricism feels like it will give me a kind of security that really only deep faith can bring. I think I can predict other people’s arguments and behaviors and if we disagree, there will be a fundamental truth that I can use to beat them. When other people use logic that way to trump me, I feel like a stupid child.

Each time I undermine myself in my dealings with others, I grow more alienated from concepts like willpower and discipline. I had given so much of my time and energy to others to such an extreme degree that I can be quite unhelpful, confusing, out there, unable to communicate well. By failing to care for myself, I don’t have control over the quality of energy behind my cooperative instincts.

I’m playing internally with an image a monk gave me once at a silent meditation retreat:

During the Vietnam War, thousands of refugees fled violence and the destruction of their homes by sailing a 1000-mile route from North Vietnam to Thailand. They boarded small rafts, cramming as many bodies as they could despite the volatile weather conditions, pirates, invading military fleets and a lack of provisions. If at any point during the journey a disagreement broke out amongst the members of the raft, the vessel’s balance would break and everyone could be thrown into the sea.

The welfare of the group depended on just one person. If one person could consistently maintain a sense of calm, direction and balance in the face of all threats, he could become a kind of human compass, grounding and settling the refugees in the face of death.  It was this one point of balance on the raft — on both a spiritual and physical plane — that allowed all the sources of imbalance, all the arguments, all the enemies, all the storms, to continue to exist around the vessel while preserving the lives of every traveller aboard.

Right now I’m experimenting with a new approach to things. Instead of setting in-the-future concrete goals, I have a process-oriented goal to stop multitasking, keep things simple, and set small limits on things that take up too much of my focus. My goal is to try and just focus on one thing at a time so that I can solicit that really pure, deep level of focus that comes when I’m meditating. I’m trying to get rid of unnecessary clutter around me, just in general have been finding ways to shave down on my own expectations and attachments. By settling limits, I have to play with my options, soliciting creativity that comes from confronting boundaries. For example, when I think I’m out of food, I don’t order out — I try to see if there are in fact cans of food in my pantry that are being ignored.

Part of the problem with me is that at any given time I have 30 massive goals floating around in my head and all of them feel critical. Instead of working towards those goals, I end up passively fantasizing about accomplishing the goals, creating more pressure inside to achieve them but also more resistance to go take them on. So right now I have three areas that I’m focusing on – doing Active Imagination work, creating more financial stability for myself, and improving my physical health. If I just do one small act per day in each of these categories, I’m doing well.

Some Buddhist monks have the power of calming an entire room just by sitting down and being quiet. That’s the impact I want to have on people.

Clearly it won’t start in the realm of writing more concisely. 🙂