Learning to ask the right Question

If i listen internally i can recall the sound of the voice of the late J. Krishnamurti, the dapper, demure, delight from India, responding to an inquiry in his inflected English, “The answer lies in the question.”

Also recallable is the day long ago when i was pondering food prejudices; for a long time i was aware that there were foods i liked and those i did not. But on this day i realized that all of my food prejudices, my dislikes had something in common. It was a key moment, as it meant that my prejudices were not random; rather their commonality meant that some underlying principle or phenomena was at stake.

This helped me to pose a question, “What is the significance of the fact that all of my food prejudices are linked by this commonality, they are all white, creamy, and warm?” Innocently i picked up three coins and performed an I Ching divination ritual. Six times the coins were dropped and six times the relative appearances of heads and/or tails were noted, and converted into yin and/or yang lines; these lines are ladder-like building blocks, starting at the bottom, they make a six-lined symbol or hexagram –like this:


6. One head, two tails = _________
5. Three tails ------------ = ____o____
4. One head, two tails = _________
3. One head, two tails = _________
2. Three heads --------- = ____x____
1. One head, two tails = _________

This hexagram symbol is one of 64 main possible divisors, or chapters in the I Ching. It is number 13, sometimes called Tong Ren, (as seen in the accompanying ideograph) Fellowship in the Open, Friends or Lovers, or Seeking Harmony. Of special import to my food prejudice question are lines 2 and 5.

The text in Blofeld’s translation for line two holds, “His beloved (betrothed) is of the same clan as himself –trouble!” The effect on me on reading this line was immediate and profound. Yikes! I was very typically Freudian! Indeed Oedipal! I had a thing for my Mom! The warm, white, creamy foods were representative of mother’s milk! And good little ‘Christian’ boys, as she had raised me to be, were not supposed to have a feel for this sort of intimacy with their mothers. It is taboo! And a damnably strong one, complete with it’s own nasty epithet! This notion was so contrary to common acceptability that to me as a youngster coming of age i dutifully repressed any conscious knowledge of it; refused to acknowledge such a possibility, and swept it under the rug of my psyche, leaving an undigested lump that later manifested in the white creamy food prejudice syndrome.

Beyond being immediate and profound this realization released great energy and excitement in me, a release so monumental that i could not sit still. Up i jumped attempting to walk off this release of tension. At stake was nothing less than coming to grips with an emergent more all-inclusive picture of myself, one that held both light and shadow.

It took the better part of an hour for me to calm down enough to return to the uncompleted reading of the divinatory text. Blofeld for line five holds, “The lovers begin by weeping and wailing, but they finish by laughing, for the crowd succeeds in bringing them together.” Unlike the clarity of line two, this cryptic text needs unpacking.

We humans are complex creatures, consisting of all sorts of types, replete with lines of development, as well as states and stages of being. In this mix we have possibility to be present both as individual and as collective: as personal and as archetype.

The personal side of mother and son needs little explication; i was her child; she was my mom, one of the closest of all possible forms of human relationship. But archetype embraces a much wider, deeper context, where Mother is an expression of the Great Mother, or Mother Nature; replete with wonderful qualities such as responsiveness, love of the good, compassion, inspiration, and the descent of grace.

The male counter part of Mother Nature is Father Spirit. It (or he) is endowed with complementary qualities such as, audacious assertion, wisdom, focused attention, aspiration, and right action or skillful means.

The problem arises when individual and archetypal forms are confused. ‘The crowd’ in this case is a collective tested awareness that knows of these troubles and avoids doing harm due to such category errors.

In psychological terms this means, as we work on ourselves, as our awareness of our inner workings grows, we need to recall our projections from the other. These projections return to us as distorted impressions; a disaster compounded by the false assumption that our projections are real! There is a great freedom in their recall, as now each individual is allowed their own space to be as they need to be and importantly the transcendent, non-dual, archetypal side of being is similarly freed, unleashing it’s marvelous qualities, so very needed in our troubled world, a world that calls for succor.

The Wonders of Psychotherapy

Understanding, love,
Right action, are linked in
Divine Dispersion!