Daily Practice

Daily Practice

One morning, like most every day, i performed a divination ritual that directs attention to a specific portion of the Book of Change(s). My daily question is the same, “What furthers for today?” (Furtherance in this sense means evolving or moving along the path -The High Way.)

I was directed to the chapter of the text called Watching or Contemplation or View. Each chapter holds the possibility of reference to any other chapter, via one to six referents called lines. In this chapter the referents are progressive in meaning, i.e. improving from bottom to top. The specific reference here was the lowest form of Watching. Here is the text of the line according to the Alfred Huang translation:

With a lad’s view, watching.
Inferior person:
No Fault.
Superior person:
Humiliation.

Need i say that part of me would much rather have obtained a reading from the top place rather than the bottom?

Yet this is what unfolded during the day. I was out on the side of my house on a hill that looks down through the woods to the charming, grandmotherly Fox River. My task was chopping wood so that it might be added to the pile to be used in the wood stove for additional heat in the coming winter. Carrying several staves from chopping block to stack i noticed that i was counting them, rather mindlessly.

I was sent to pondering about doing so; as such counting is borderline obsessive-compulsive behavior. I flashed back to my youth and the 22 steps from ground level to the 2nd floor business where i had my first employment –as a messenger, and the many times i counted their treads. My understanding of OCB is that it is a response, a coping device, used by under developed ego, which seeks some sense of permanence in a world subject to unpredictable change. Part of me had continued to carry that bit of un-development right along with the chopped wood.
Then i glanced down at the grandmotherly flow, and some other voice within me asked a question that has since been put in haiku form:

Obsessive-Compulsive?

Mindlessly counting…
Does the river keep coup as
It flows to the sea?

And as Krishnamurti, the famous sage, used to say, “The answer lies within the question!”

The lad’s view and the more mature view, sometimes called the young fox and the old fox had in effect a conversation –a sort of reconciliation. So now when ever i catch myself in one of the many forms of OCB i’ll flashback on the river and remember the wisdom in going with the flow.

All that remained was to complete the reading. Contemplation or View had changed to the chapter called Increase, which holds in part this quote from Huang, “The superior person follows the good when he sees it, and corrects his faults when he finds it.”