Restrain your speech.
An active tongue betrays a restless
mind. Tranquility on every
level is advised.
5th changing line,
from The I Ching, or Book of Changes
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It is
an unavoidable fact
of life that inferior influences
sometimes prevail: improperly motivated
people ascend to power, there is injustice and conflict
and poverty, and spiritual life in general descends into darkness
and decay. While these difficult times are inevitable — and the arrival
of this hexagram indicates that this is such a time — this does
not mean that we have to stagnate personally as well.
By turning inward and realigning ourselves
with proper principles, we initiate
the return to light, truth
and progress.
The image
of P’i is of heaven
moving away from the earth.
When this happens, the inferior qualities
in ourselves and in others come to the surface and
seek expression. It is unlikely now that you can affect what
others do and say or that your activities will bear much fruit. While
it is natural to feel anxious and disappointed about this state of
affairs, it is essential to disengage from these inferior
emotions now. To indulge in them is to
abandon your superior self and
plunge into a state of
disintegration.
What is
wise now is to accept
that external progress is unlikely.
Turn your attention inward and examine your
own thoughts and attitudes for inferior influences
and departures from the principles of the Sage.
By withdrawing into solitude and refining
your higher nature, you continue
to grow while all else around
you stagnates.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Hexagram 12, P’i Standstill (Stagnation)
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Once you
merge your tracks
into the stream of zen,
you spend your days silencing
your mind and studying with your
whole being. You realize that this Great Cause
is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter
of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant
progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you
enhance your clarity of mind. Your potential for enlightened perception
is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times.
What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for
helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate
through freely in all directions and arrive at
peace and security free from doubt and
attain the stage of great
potential and great
function.
This work
is located precisely in
your own inner actions. It is just
a matter of being in the midst of the interplay
of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion
of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and
gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst,
without being affected and turned around by
them, but on the contrary, being able
to transform them and turn
them around.
…When you
go on grinding and polishing
like this for a long time, you are liberated
right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon
the world’s useless reputation and ruinous projects as mere dust
in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an
optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the
world. Isn’t this what it means to be a
great saint who has emerged from
the dusts of sensory
attachments?
One learns to understand
that there is a world in one’s self,
that in one’s mind there is a source of
happiness and unhappiness, the source of
health and illness, the source of light and darkness,
and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will,
if only one knew how to do it. Then one does not blame his
ill fortune nor complain of his fellow man. He becomes
more tolerant, more joyful, and more loving toward
his neighbor, because he knows the cause of
every thought and action, and he sees
it all as the effect of a
certain cause.
…Therefore, the work
of the mystic is to be able to read
the language of the mind. As the clerk
in the telegraph office reads letters from the
ticks, so the Sufi gets behind every word spoken to
him and discovers what has prompted the word to come out.
He therefore reads the lines which are behind man’s thought,
speech, and action. He also understands that every kind of
longing and craving in life, good or bad, has its source
in deep impression. By knowing this root of the
disease he is easily able to find out its cure.
No impression is such that it
cannot be erased.
