The IChing Cure

for Peter Shea and Richard Rudd

If you sat down next to a river and fell into a contemplative mood, a turtle just might haul itself onto the bank to join you. And your eyes might land on its shell, inscribed quite naturally with a hexagonal pattern.

It might easily follow, as you continued to rest your eyes on such an organized and tidy expression of mathematical principles, that the hexagons would seem to be expressing the deeper truths about itself and all the world around you.

It is said that the I Ching grew out of the contemplation of a turtle shell.

The hexagons might dissolve into shapes until only the sacred, geometrical structure of the world remained, a pattern of six surrounding one, of threes making up a whole. And as you fell in even deeper, you could realize that each triad could also shed more. It would bare its underlying secrets, its combinations of yin and yang, its fundamental pulses of yes and no.

Within the realization of these basic elements you might feel that time stops, a balance point in which you have access to all knowledge. But then it would cease stopping and only a moment would have passed and the next moment would tumble on, sweeping you along with it.

The yeses and nos would build back up—yes-yes-yes; no-yes-no; no-yes-yes—stacking up in threes and sixes and building the world around it like a flower blooming in fast-motion unstoppability, the living exuberance of God’s Gaian creation, of which you are a part, yes-no-yeses and no-yes-nos and no-no-nos and on and on…

But now the information would be not only held within the back of your chelonian teacher, but within you too, because you would have seen how the blinkings of consciousness create you both and everything else, too.

Knowing yourself in this way would begin to unfold you. The clarity would activate the 64 codons of your DNA, no more, no less, all collected in the Chinese classic, the Book of Change, orI Ching and, more recently, in the Gene Keys. Now anything holding back their fullest expression would start to feel uncomfortable.

In your life, this might look like themes that grow into questions. Why do you keep banging your head against boys (or girls) with muscles? Why do you keep stepping in snake pits? Why do you have cancer?

This sleeping suspicions start to wake you and shift your behavior. As your choices change, the clarity grows, expressing you more, reforming you more, epigenetically transforming you. You are on a path and you know it. You are revealing God’s light in the world through yourself. You are healing.

Eventually, your wings become obvious to everyone around you.

artwork by Cary Eisenstein

Love,

Stella