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Wednesday, January 6, 2021

I CHING TORTOISE SHELL MAGIC

The I Ching. Libraries bulge with writings about this ancient view of circumstance--and "life", the human mind, universal combined unseen forces. Decisions and crossroads. Major ones; seemingly insignificant ones. Millennia of analysis. Is there a way to understand (even in a small way) the flow of all things, as it applies to the part we occupy in the flow?


beliefs, feelings and time collide, a DECISION is made--and action is taken. Why there;why then?


Some I Ching students liken it to the dropping of a patterned, dried tortoise shell, which breaks, along the patterns of its bony joints. There are so many variables. The height, the temperature, the ground, the moisture, the size-- thousands, I suppose. But when it breaks, it breaks along the lines between the hard segments. In some line, here to there. Why does it break there, even though all the forces indicate, perhaps, otherwise? What makes each crack go this way,more that, to the end?


Maybe that is a bad example. 


Let me use an example of something most of us have experienced:


The purchase of an automobile from a car lot. 


Or the purchase of an automobile anywhere I guess would be better.


As time unfolds, whether you know it or not you were thinking about the purchase of a car. It may be that it is a planned purchase of a new replacement vehicle. You are dutifully researching consumer reports and your finances. 


But you may not even know you are looking for a new car. You may have just put new tires on your car and feel proud of the way it looks and drives. More deeply, inside, buying the tires is an act of dissatisfaction you feel. Or not. You may have turned the radio on and realized your radio antenna was ripped off in the car wash. Then you felt you don't care,because you don't listen to the radio. Maybe the car starts right away Every time and you are always waiting for that time when it does not. The very fact that it starts first time, every time, becomes a source of anxiety. After a couple years of it starting so reliably,Marist time, it now drives you mad with anxiety that THIS TIME it will hesitate-- and you are ground down, emotionally, just getting in the hateful machine. 


A friend, faraway, has just finished living for a year without a car, using a bicycle and public transport. You realize your car is one of the burdens you shoulder, so that you can shoulder the burden to work. You then realize your life itself is lived, endured, as a burden, so you can carry the burden of work, and support the insurance and wealth, so that it that burden cannot be met, your living burden can, and you realize all of this is futile, and much is wrapped up in your car, that starts every time, damn the fucking thing. 


Perhaps, Somewhere in your neighborhood, someone has parked her car out in front of their yard with a "for sale" sign on it. Deep inside, your inner, psychic meta cyclist hopeful,irrational,self knows that possibly, THAT CAR, might change things.


You may have just heard someone say, in a conversation, that they are planning on keeping their car another 10 years. While you feel some admiration for them and think you might do the same thing, and you feel how much better off you would be financially. 


Thus starts the seemingly random and inevitable fall of the tortoise shell. Along which lines will it break? 


Let us dispense with the thousand ways one might approach this and, to make my point, we will be driving down the street. It is a day when we have some time which is on committed to anything else. We drive by a car lot. Idly,we pull in, to "just look at a few"-- if we thought about it thoroughly, we would know we had become interested in that make and model because of an offhand comment in the months before this moment, from a coworker, who said they got almost 900 miles to a tank of fuel in the one they have. From our teenage girlfriends Volvo. From the darkly desperate futility of our life. 


At the moment, we don't remember what that person said but the chemical bombardment of neurons in our brain is toying with that to the extent we are pulling into the car lot that sells those kinds of cars. Much is in play. 


40 minutes later, we are signing the last of the registration paperwork and the car dealer porter is doing the last minute preparation for delivery, so we can drive away. How did that decision get made? Would there be a difference if we had studied consumer and engineering data for months? Or, DID WE research and consider, unknowingly? Did that comment, months ago, start the fall of the tortoise shell, it's cracking, and then all that was left was to see in which direction, between the bony squares, that the crack runs, to breakage? 


The answer is in The I Ching. Or some abstraction. Some variance. The prediction of events and actions yet to come.


Ten thousand imperceptible electric connections have twinkled, over time. But WHAT happened at the PRECISE MOMENT, when the decision was actually made?  That absolute INSTANT, of saying, "yes" or "no" internally-- or overtly, when the decision to act, or not, is made? Even if you were traveling in the opposite mental direction ("I will not buy today, no matter what") - or worse, you are not thinking about a car at all!


Sometimes it catches you totally out of the blue. Thinking about your meeting at 3 pm, then thinking about a particular person, and then getting your oil changed, sipping some coffee, a voice on the radio, a smile, clouds on the horizon, and you see a car, for sale, on the roadside, and you stop and decide to buy it. Then and there. You never even started it or drove it. But you know it. KNOW. Why?


Right now, it just came to mind how I resigned from a job like that. At 3 am. I was a policeman. On midnight shift. All was regular. The year before had been tumultuous , but not that night. I pulled up beside another officer, who had just gotten the first edition of the Miami Herald and was reading it. He mentioned a story, slightly connected to the things that had happened in that past year. In that flashing instant moment, all the conviction and psychic energy of the universe coursed through me. No thought or discussion. I reached down and started my patrol car. I went to the station, clocked out sick, and never went back. Using sick leave and annual leave, I never went back. It was the only thing possible at that moment. It didn't make sense in any respect at all. It was a financial disaster, a career derailment, a professional and family shock and created tidal waves of blowback and turmoil to "straighten out"- but I was always completely centered, unshakable, relaxed and peaceful with it. None of the blowback mattered at all. Christians would call this "giving it to the lord" Buddhists might attribute it to mysterious mindfulness. TAOists to the inevitability of a random flow, one moment to the next. All of that. None of that. The I Ching. The absolute point of total decision and commitment to a course, or to changing a course.


Then,in retrospect, you look back and try to dissect the various directions of the splits and cracks, after the moment the shell hits, to the traverse of the crack, randomly? Why did you act, or not act, or buy....at that precise moment? Through the patterns of the shell, to the inevitable breaking point. Every time the crack jutted one way or another, thousands of factors came into play, to guide the force of the separation. Gravity. Humidity, shell engineering tinsel strength, tiny molecular things, inside it...who knows what else? 


The guy mentions 900 miles to the tank, you are ashamed of how poorly you played softball at his picnic, you saw a gas station changing gas prices, your AMEX bill is paid off, you see a bird with a color you like, you remember using alcohol to change prices on bean cans in a grocery store where you worked, you calculate your lifespan, you think about a girlfriend you had in SanJose, you think about someone joining the Army and going to cook school, even though you know nothing about cooks school, the Army or the person, you think about how American Graffiti describes your teen years, and then realize you never saw American Graffiti, the car reminds you of the way 1960's era Volvos looked in the front, when Volvos were odd, you think about the San Jose girl, who had a Volvo and hiding in her closet when her dad came in her room at 3 am, a wave of disappointment flows over you because you are not a journalist, and the new year looms, with January 13 weeks away, and you see some holiday decorations somewhere, near the car, and the  salesman opens the door, and you sit down in it, and as you touch the steering wheel, the decision is made. Without reservation. Immovable. Unchangeable. It's done. Somewhere between your girlfriends closet and the holiday lights and the Volvo hood shape, the shell broke in pieces and it's done.










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