Drinking Cheap Wine

All the true masters of the world and the great mystics have told us that we are "like drunken sailors" adrift in the world. When true spiritual teaching is available, nobody wants it. Every master has had to struggle with this phenomenon, that the world wants only the exoteric message, and is only concerned about the physical. We want immediate answers to our life's problems, not mystical mumbo jumbo. But immediate answers will not work. When we try to come up with a quick fix from outside ourselves, we find we cannot change the situation. The reason is simple. We have not changed ourselves. Nothing in our world will change until we change ourselves on the inside. We will confront the same old problem over and over again, and nothing will change it.

Hexagram twenty two line three addresses this problem to a certain extent. The commentary says, "This represents a charming situation." One is under the spell of grace and the mellow mood induced by wine." This grace can adorn, but it can also swamp us. Hence the warning not to sink into convivial indolence but to remain constant in perseverance."

We remain constant in perseverance when we keep our mind fixed upon the spiritual world which is the real source of the material world anyway. The material world is but an illusion created by the mind which is under constant attack from the seeming reality of the physical world. As long as we are focused on the material world, and do not keep it in its place, we are "under the mellow mood induced by wine." We must remain constant in our meditation, we must "practice chariot driving daily, and we must persevere in the truth, remembering that the physical world is but a shadow of the real.

The "Gospel of Thomas" addresses this issue as well. In it Jesus says, "I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated..." The world was either of those who were looking for a physical Messiah as many Jewish groups were, or of those who like the Roman soldiers, played lots for Jesus garments, and mocked him, not having any concept of the seriousness of the situation. They were all drunk. They were foolish in their orientation and in their perception. They all were interested only in something physical. The church carried this on, not after the teachings of Jesus, but after the mental constructs that insist that there is only the physical saving that of a heaven in the far off, or a hell. They did not wake from their stupor. They did not understand the teachings of Jesus at all. It became a religion, not a way of life.

All teachers face this. They come to the world with a message, and find that they face only rejection and sorrow. It may be called sad that it is that way, but it is not sad, it is just the way it is. Only the most serious shakings, (hexagram fifty one) can break us from our stupor. When we look to the I Ching for guidance, we must allow the sage to offer to us the "secrets of the kingdom," (hexagram twenty line four) and not be satisfied with merely "a view through the crack of a door." We must allow the deeper truths in, or our lives will never truly be satisfactory, for we will be "oppressed by stone, (the physical) and "lean on thistles," (the material world cannot hold us up.) We must look for the "inner guidance," else we will stumble and fall, and not overcome the oppression of hexagrams thirty nine or forty seven. We must look deeper.