No one drinks

I suppose this is where I should have started this whole website business to begin with, but such is life. In my next lifetime I will try to actually do things in an organized way. But anyway, here we are for now, and again, a digression within a digression before we really get to the meat of this whole thing.

The I Ching has a complaint against us, and it is not going well for us. (Pun intended, as we will be talking about hexagram forty eight, The Well.) Hexagram forty eight line three says, "The well is (has been) cleaned, but no one drinks from it. This is my heart's sorrow, for one might draw from it. If the king were clear minded, good fortune might be enjoyed in common."

Of course, no one would even hear those words unless they were consulting the I Ching in the first place. So why does the I Ching chide with us so harshly? It is because we only look at the surface material. And especially with the use of the I Ching as a mere divination tool, we might get an answer to our question, but never really look at what it is saying to us personally. Hexagram twenty one tells us we must bite through to the meat of the teaching. Sometimes we bite, and receive a poisoned arrow. In other words, we find something out about ourselves that we do not like, and we must bite through the ego that keeps us from our inner truth.

The well tells us that we must go deeper. It is not enough to get a view of the outside world as a world separate and independent of us. We must see our greater self as part of the cosmic whole. Hexagram twenty line one tells us that we still things from the standpoint, relatively speaking of a child, that we need to open up our eyes, and see what the master is doing. We need to come from a deeper understanding. The laws of the universe are simple, but they are not simple to comprehend, because our ego gets in the way. Hexagram one line one tells us that there is a "hidden dragon." Not out there, not in the outside world, separate from us, but actually within us. We must not act. Why? because a part of us, that we have kept in the darkness, that we have not allowed to come into conscious view, is betraying us. Our shadow self brings about the conditions where we "get caught" because we have unconscious hang ups, and complexes within us that keep us from our goal. This once again refers to the poison arrows of hecagram twenty one.

Sometimes, in our understanding of the I Ching, we fool ourselves, seeing only what we want to see. This is in a way delineated in hexagram twenty two, line three. We are under a spell. We see only the form and not the content. We must wake ourselves up, and see our true heritage. We must remain "constant in perseverance," until we get the deeper, underlying meaning. Much will be said about this at a later date.