MEDITATIONS: I CHING; THE BOOK OF CHANGES, CANTO TWENTY-FIVE

Authentic—Truthful—Sincere
|or| No Error

Look for opportunities to be patient and circumspect. Listen for wisdom coming from your intuition. Perform tasks for the sheer joy of doing them and avoid speculating about outcomes. (Bright-Fey 79)

Making no error is very successful. It is beneficial to be correct. If one is not correct, there is fault. It is not beneficial to go anywhere.

Yang 1: To go with no error bodes well.

Yin 2: Do not plow for the harvest, and it is beneficial to go somewhere.

Yin 3: Disaster for no error. Even if the ox is tethered, it is a gain for a traveler, a disaster for the townspeople.

Yang 4: It is appropriate to be steadfast in rectitude, so there is no error.

Yang 5: Do not use medicine on illness where there is no error, and there will be joy.

Yang 6: When there is no error, there is fault in going. Nothing is gained. (Cleary 140-145)

Thunder under heaven represents the internal drive to act paired with positive, creative action. From within, there is a strong impulse to walk the Path—that is, to move in accordance with the Way. This impulse is the authentic voice of conscience whose call returned one to a state of harmony with the Great Course, what Cheng Yi calls the Celestial Way—the Way in accordance with heaven as opposed to earth: in western terms, the will of God as opposed to human will.

Performing tasks for the doing and not the fruit is the embodiment of according oneself with the Celestial Way. Like all the great Stoic sages—whether eastern or western—claim, human beings are not masters of fate. Outcomes are ultimately a matter of Course over which no man possesses power. He can only choose his direction and then select from what paths the Way makes available. A man is only responsible for his decisions.

This is why it is egregious to err: read to aim in the wrong direction, which means to miss the mark, which means to sin. For to sin is to act out of accordance with what is True; it is to act in opposition to reality, to will for what is to not be. This is Nihilism, the will-to-nothing resultant from pride born from the arrogance of the human intellect. Those exhibiting this pride will deny it, but it will show in their words and actions. It must. He who is out of accord with the Way is acting out of accord with reality itself. Objectivity makes subjects of us all, and a tower built upon lies and self-deceptions cannot stand for long. God will knock it down, and the further along one is in the construction, the farther there is to fall.

But to start from a true premise bodes well. The consequences might be out of human hands, but mankind’s best chances are in coming as close to a harmony with the Way as he can manage. And how does one harmonize with the ineffable? He cannot, at least not perfectly, but he who begins from a position of humility, like the lowly position of the first Yang, can aim upwards toward the heavenly and ascend through steps of yielding—that is, letting go of his errors. He ceases to say things he knows to be untrue and stops taking actions which he knows he should not.

Only then, once error has been abandoned, can the first Yang hope to go somewhere, meaning he can take action that does not deviate from the Way. Such action is by its nature uncontrived. It is rooted in the heavenly, in objective reality, in the Great Course, in God. It does not come from the earth, not from human design for human purposes. The one in this balanced position whose intention is in proper correspondence with right action keeps faith that the Way his provide for him so long as he does not err. The man in error, scared and bereft of faith, contrives to force security from the soil.

This drives from the second toward the third Yin. It is yielding to the impulse to act in correspondence with that which is excessive, the sixth Yang. This is falling into the temptation to err or sin, often because there is some short-term benefit. This is the reasoning of an itinerant sociopath. That is why the I Ching describes a tethered ox seeming a boon to the traveler and calamity to the towns people. The thief can easily steal the tethered ox, take off, and then prophet at the expense of many others who counted on the beast of burden for the production of much greater wealth than could possibly be got by the thieving traveler.

To err is often to sacrifice the transient present for the continuously becoming future.

That is why it the fourth Yang calls for rectitude. To avoid errors requires a strong back. One cannot do so while succumbing to fears of negative outcomes or yielding to the immediate gratification of the delusion of control.

But one must remain steadfast even in times of abundance and success. The fifth Yang echoes a common western adage, “don’t fix what isn’t broken.” If things are working, do not critique them for not working perfectly. Be grateful that the institutions are functioning at all, because all that is required to bring a whole enterprise tumbling down is one small error. The I Ching compares failing to embody this form of gratitude with a medicinal error. When one is sick, it is beneficial to take the right dosage of a particular drug for the right duration and at the right frequency. However, an error in any of the aforementioned categories or metrics can cause a sickness to worse—if it doesn’t outright kill the patient. And If someone isn’t sick, any intervention is likely to introduce illness that would not have become present had he been left well enough alone.

This culminates in the warning of the sixth yang. If one begins humbly, aiming heavenward, he will accord with the Way and not stray. He will not err. On the other hand, he who assumes his own will and his own interpretations are correct—he who aims down toward the earth and in opposition to being itself—will begin his journey in the wrong direction. Every action for him is one step further into the woods; it is one brick taller until his Tower of Babel, inauthentic, untruthful, and insincere as it is, collapses cataclysmically on his head.

Therefore, before we speak about that which is true, we should first let go of that which we hold in error.

I Ching; The Book of Changes, with commentaries by Cheng Yi, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Library, 2003.

I Ching: The Book of Changes; An authentic Taoist translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2006.