Khigh Dhiegh

We are all familiar with experiences that we cannot at the time account for and only later in retrospect do we come to understand how important they are for ourselves. Some of the qualities that we find occurring in ourselves now, late in the 20th century, in this kind of polyglot cosmopolitan situation like Los Angeles, is we discover that there are aspects of our personality and our minds which are different from what we were led to expect. And one of the qualities that seems to be coming out in Americans now - and especially in Los Angeles - is a Chinese quality of apperception. And this Chinese quality has been coming into the Western mind now for close on to three hundred years. The first Western mind to appreciate the penetrative affinities between the Chinese mind and the Western mind was the great philosopher Leibniz. G. W. Leibniz as early as the 1680s came into contact in Rome with returning Jesuits who had spent time in China - a lot of time - had learned the Chinese language and had brought back with them various texts and translations made. And Leibniz was the first Western mind to understand that the Chinese I Ching was based upon a binary number system which was superior to the Western numerical system based on ten. That the expressive accuracy of a binary system mathematically is near perfect.

A binary system works on zero and one, just those two values. And from just those two values one can build an entire mathematic which is extraordinarily accurate and its detailing capacities exceed those of a number system based on ten. As you might know, or perhaps you don't, but there are many mathematics. You can use a number system say with base-four, or base-twelve, or base-sixteen. The structure that one gets has similarities depending on the number base, but with the binary system one finally comes to understand what we would now call pure logic. And it's from his exposure to the I Ching binary mind that Leibniz wrote a Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese. He wrote it in the 17th century. It's been translated and published by the University of Hawaii Press, and is available in their monograph series for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. I think it came out in 1977. These items hardly ever sell and so it's still available.

Leibniz, in his work, towards the end, has a section which is entitled, Concerning the Characters Which Fohi, Founder of the Chinese Empire, Used in his Writings, and Binary Arithmetic. Now Fohi is Fuxi who is not so much the founder of the Chinese Empire, but the legendary First Emperor. Before the First Dynasty – the Xia dynasty was founded about 2100 BC – there were legendary emperors, five of them, and the first of them, Fuxi, became the ur individual, the taproot, for Chinese civilization. He is always pictured as part dragon, part man - long hair, long fingernails, wearing leopard skin - and he is always pictured sitting royally like a king and he is watching two items: one a tortoise, and the other a series of drawings made by a finger in the sand. And these drawings are familiar - trigrams of the I Ching. Because Fuxi is credited with discovering that the binary mathematical application to triadic structures yields a series of eight basic emblems. And that these emblems in their correlative patterning make possible a transformational leap from nature to consciousness. And Chinese civilization, for the last five thousand years, has been busy developing this insight. And China, of course, is the center of the whole East Asian civilization, not Japan, China.

Leibniz wrote, “It is indeed apparent that if we Europeans were [well informed] well enough informed concerning Chinese Literature, then, with the aid of logic, critical thinking, mathematics and our manner of expressing thought – perhaps more exacting than theirs – we could uncover in the Chinese writings of the remotest antiquity many things unknown to modern Chinese and even to other commentators thought to be classical.”

And with this tone Leibniz sets a direction which was only picked up three hundred years later in the United States. And one of the individuals who picked this up is named Khigh Dhiegh and he is the subject of our lecture tonight. In Khigh’s major work - and he's still alive; he lives in Chandler, Arizona. In Khigh’s major work, entitled The Eleventh Wing, it's sub-entitled, An Exposition of the Dynamics of I-Ching for Now. And it is the product of late 20th century American ingenuity. Applied this time, not so much to a quest like Thomas Merton of going to Asia personally towards the end of a long life, or not so much like Black Elk seeking to reestablish somehow in a new mode the old traditions of transformation in America. Khigh Dhiegh sought to bring out from ancient Chinese wisdom by applying new American techniques to it, aspects and facets which have never been brought out, never were a part of it. And thus it is a movement by this individual to see what American ingenuity can do with ancient Chinese wisdom.

In The Book of Changes, there was in classical antiquity in China, at least by the Han dynasty, a series of ten commentaries on the I Ching. They were called wings. And most of the writings in the Ten Commentaries were paired so that the first two wings were about the trigrams. The next two about the character of the psychology of them. The next two are about the cultural background, and so forth. The Eleventh Wing was an attempt, here in Los Angeles, to make a new kind of commentary; one which related the entire structure of an ancient text to the emerging American synchronistic life in the late 20th century. And so he writes in his preface,

“The number of Western persons who are turning to the Book of Changes as a source of inspiration, divination, guidance, wisdom, and enlightenment is increasing.” In fact the sales figure on just the edition that the Princeton University Press has put out has topped over 2 million copies. There was never a sale like this. There was never an exposure like this at any time in Chinese history. There are more Americans reading the I Ching today than there ever were Chinese reading it at any time, even though it was used in the imperial examinations it was never looked at as a phenomenon like we are looking at it today. Khigh Dhiegh will try to bring out, in The Eleventh Wing: Why is this so; is this not a psychological event of the first importance; what is it about us, as Americans, having gone through all of these changes since Benjamin Franklin - that we have been following - that we now find ourselves capable or perhaps just having the effrontery to think that we are capable of taking one of the most obscure classics of an ancient civilization and making practical use of it? And this is exactly the tone that Khigh Dhiegh will take that we are not concerned with it as a mystical Doctrine. We are not even concerned with it as some kind of esoteric wisdom. We seem to be concerned with it in a practical mode. That the confidence in our capability to apply unfolding techniques psychological perspectives which are new combinations never before seen in human history. That we can take a classic five thousand years old and open it up anew for ourselves. This is an extraordinary event psychologically.

He writes, “This commentary will suggest to the student reader methods which when applied will help in the development of heightened awareness, in awakened consciousness to the intuitive nature, and in attaining a release from the restrictions of words, images and symbols.” “Words, images and symbols.” And he will stress that what fascinates us is that we now are capable apparently of applying rational techniques to investigate the opening up of what used to be considered irrational capacities; or as he will prefer to say not so much that they are irrational capacities but taking a cue from the Chinese mind that they are the interstices, the spaces between, what we usually carve out in the use of the rational mind that the spaces will become as valuable as any of the intellectual forms or formings. And the fact that we are sensitive to this, and sensitive not in a mystical way but in a very pragmatic practical way, reveals something extraordinary about late 20th century American psychology. We have in fact completely left the frame of reference of European civilization. We have not realized this; the significance of this fully yet. We are ambidextrous. We are still at home in Western civilization but we have a capacity which is outside that frame of reference. We are finally really a people which have become hybrid. And for us the whole world is now home.

So Khigh’s work will be extraordinary in this effect. He writes, “that the I Ching seems to us to be a philosophical psychology,” or to turn it around a psychological philosophy. We do not see it as doctrinaire. We do not have a Confucian overtone to it. We do not see it as some integral part of an educational system just to be mastered as another building block. We seem to regard it as a philosophical psychology or a psychological philosophy. That those who use these terms mean to emphasize that this ancient wisdom is an expression of man's concern with the application of values and how they affect his behavior as experiences. This is where the practical comes in, the application, and the psychological comes in. And that as we apply, our experience is not only of something distant or just of ourselves - self-centered - but that the interchange between our supposed self-centeredness and something distant is now the focus of concern. He will say that this is in fact the underside of the development of what was called at one time, “cybernetics” - the interplay between man and machine. That this is the interplay between man and a universe. And this becomes, then, interesting - interesting to Americans.

He then in his first chapter which he entitles “Images of Wisdom” brings our attention to a diagram. It's a diagram of cosmic evolution and if I can just take a second to put on the board there is a single rectangle which is numbered zero on the side, which has no divisions whatsoever. The next rectangle has the same size but has two divisions one dark and one left blank, numbered one. The next, same size but now having four divisions, two of which are dark two which are blank numbered two, and this progression goes on up until one has six levels six numbered levels seven levels but the first level is unnumbered is zero.

Now the educated person, when they see a diagram like this, is astounded because we recognize that this structure was used once before in ancient Alexandria - in Ptolemaic Alexandria. It was used by the great philosopher scientist Eratosthenes who was a contemporary of the second Ptolemy, Philadelphus. In fact the Sieve of Eratosthenes was a way of finding prime numbers. It was a way of finding the irreducible. And the rediscovery of the Sieve of Eratosthenes in the early Renaissance by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers - Kepler and so forth - led to the development of reassessing, mentally, the capacity for man to discover objective reality. In the terms of one 20th century philosopher who wrote a book called The Edge of Objectivity. The edge of man's objectivity is able to expand, able to throw itself out when he increases his confidence and his capacity to discover the real and to discover a capacity to experience an interplay with the real on a larger scale.

This diagram of cosmic evolution is a basic diagram which was first promulgated as a diagram by a Chinese philosopher named Shang Yang, who lived somewhere in the Song dynasty probably in the ten hundreds, middle to late ten hundreds. In his first chapter, “Images of Wisdom,” Khigh Dhiegh, a contemporary Los Angeles American, goes back to this diagram and he begins to look at it in terms of a philosophical psychology. He brings out what is basically known from Chinese thought. He quotes extensively from Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy. In the second volume one can find a discussion of Xiao Jung and the diagram of cosmic evolution, and one can look at this and read and hear all kinds of scholarly material. And Khigh brings out the fact that, yes, indeed this seems to be of interest to us. But there's something else here.

The first diagram is called Wu Qi in Chinese. Qi as in vital energy. Wu as in nothing. Undifferentiate, would be a good English translation of it. And he notes that we are able to take cognizance of a zero base in intelligence just like the ancient Chinese to give it credibility, to not ignore it as something which because it is zero because it is undifferentiate does not count that it in fact does count. It counts as the basic horizon unnumbered from which a whole numbered sequence can be based confidently. And with this capacity then at the first juncture of differentiation, at the first level, where there is a basic bifurcation, the bifurcation has a different psychological quality from what it would have were there no zero base. How is this so? How is this so?

If there were no zero base at all, the first differentiation on the first level would be a polarity - black and white; yes or no. And the binary system on which the whole I Ching would be based would be a polarized cosmos - zero opposed to one. But because the zero level is included the first level is not a polarity, but a complementarity. And that makes all the difference in the world because one is not dealing then with an intellectual structure based on equivocation and identification, but one is dealing with reality based upon a confirmation experientially. That there is in fact an implicit unity always in every operation no matter how complex or how basic. There is an implicit unity which includes oneself so that the problem, the aching problem of modern 20th century physics - how can you be determinate when the observer is part of the problem of indeterminacy - is solved neatly, completely by the I-Ching by the inclusion of a zero level in the binary computation. Changing the polarity to a complementarity.

So Khigh Dhiegh says, the fact that we are able to appreciate this not only intellectually but psychologically we feel at home with this, indicates to us a level of maturity which was rare if ever there in the West before. He goes on to cite not only Leibniz, but Hegel also concerned himself with the I Ching. But then there was a great hiatus and it wasn't until the late 1800s that anyone else in the West even looked at this. And it wasn't until, in the 1920s in the West, that Carl Jung and Richard Wilhelm began to understand that in the operations of the I Ching, because of its emphasis upon complementarity - which means then that the emphasis is not so much based on identity but on transformation - it was a mentality which was able to comprehend a transformational investigation which they were undertaking at the time.

For Jung it was the problem of consciousness and unconsciousness. How does human consciousness have an inter-reaction with the unconscious? If the unconscious is unconscious how do we ever have an inter-reaction with it? Is it not by definition an impossibility? Are we not intellectually at loggerheads immediately upon formulating the issue? Yes! As long as we understand it as a polarity, there can be no contact there can be no interchange, but as soon as we bring in the I Ching, zero-base, undifferentiate, with its implicit unity and its functional complementarity, the problem ceases to exist as a loggerhead and becomes one then of an area of discovery able to be investigated assiduously, patiently. And Jung with his great background recognized that in the West there was an esoteric tradition which took advantage of just such an application. It was called alchemy. That the alchemists were exactly concerned with the transmutation of supposed fixed reality on the basis of an undifferentiated, uncreated, prima materia which was not formally fixed in any way in the universe, and that the transformation of form follows the old alchemical formula - so they dissolve it, and re-precipitate it - coagulate. That you have to dissolve this form back into the undifferentiate and then precipitate a new form out. You don't change lead into gold. Lead has to go back into the uncreate and then comes back out in whatever form you want. It isn't a question of making gold out of lead, it's a question of transmuting form.

And this becomes a paradigm for man's consciousness especially when one gets into the medical aspect of how do you ever heal a damaged consciousness? Because man does get bruised, he gets crippled. His mind does get bent out of shape. How do you heal such an individual? Not adjusting them. We're talking about cure of souls. How is one cured? How is one healed? Because the form of that consciousness must be transformed. If one plays around with permutations of the injury one gets exotic forms of injury - but no cure. The cure comes through understanding transformation.

And so the I Ching became for Jung an extraordinary revelation, that reality makes sense in a way which had not been fully accredited before. And so Jung said, there is not only a causal connectedness there is an acausal connectedness also operating and man is ambidextrous. Left hand and right hand. He can work causally and he can work acausally, or synchronistically. And there is no difficulty whatsoever of moving from one to the other. Now the difficulty is that the Western mind habituated itself to thinking that substance, objectively, was real, and that it is a fantasy to think that it could be otherwise. That being and substance were equated so long that it became a theological doctrine and embedded over 1700 years in the psychology it has become as it were, a bedrock character of man's mind. And a contemporary European-based mind assumes on such a deep level that even the subconscious of modern European-based man's mind assumes that this is what is real and its reality is dependent upon it remaining this. But extraordinarily the American psyche beginning with Benjamin Franklin as we have seen refuse to be solidified in this tradition, opened itself up, transformed itself from a pilgrim seeking to find new ways of living - freedom of thought - into transformed itself into a pioneer willing to live a life of discovery completely. Of being able to live a life where one is never going to find the end of the rainbow but is willing to go and explore indefinitely. That the American quality was this kind of open-ended pioneering.

This mind, after two hundred years, began to produce individuals who were able to think without substance. And one of the greatest of them as we saw was William James. And it was William James in his writings, A Pluralistic Universe, The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James’ writings transformed psychology in its early phase - around the 1880s, 1890s - from a psychology which was based upon philosophy to a psychology which was based upon empirical investigation which was open-ended. And by putting psychology on an empirical basis one then went by nature, by experience which needed to be open-ended and was therefore in the discovery mode. And because of James' work, psychology by the early 20th century became the kind of free wheeling discipline that it was, and Freud and Jung and all the others were not the founders of psychology but they in turn look back to William James and his great intellectual formulation. If you read the two large tomes, The Principles of Psychology - which is still in print after one hundred years. Can you imagine a psychological textbook in print for 100 years? It's because the shape of the science was opened. It was not stamped out, cookie cutter style, so that it was a fragile structure. It was the American mind turned into an exploring discipline. We don't know, but let's try and find out. That's the tack to take. And of course this kind of empiricism is just what James would say is on the surface, the exact antithesis of mysticism. But if you get to experiencing in this way over a lifetime you realize this is exactly what the mystics used to do, that there's no difference at all.

It was this approach early in the 20th century, pioneered by the American mind expressed into an intellectual purview by William James developed and amplified by Jung especially that led to the appreciation of the I Ching and came back full circle when an American like Khigh Dhiegh said let's see if we can't find more here. What else is there here that we haven't understood and might be able to understand? And so, The Eleventh Wing is like this. He then gives us a quotation, a Taoist classic called the Huainanzi. Prince Liu An lived in the Han dynasty and the book attributed to him is a cosmological book, a taoist book. It was used as the basis for developing religious Taoism in the late Han dynasty. Here is a quotation which Khigh Dhiegh puts in in the chapter “Images of Wisdom.” What we're interested in here is the progression of definitions and in fact Khigh Dhiegh, in order to emphasize the progression, numbers every sentence. And there are seven sentences. So let's go with him. And he writes in here, we read the following:

1. There was a beginning.
2. There was a beginning of an anteriority to this beginning.
3. There was a beginning of an anteriority even before the beginning of this anteriority.
Okay one is going in a regression.
4. There was being.

A change in mode.All right. We've set up, 1, 2, 3. And of course this intellectual formulation, 1, 2, 3, infinity. Once you set up a regression of three points one puts dot dot dot to the nth. But Prince Liu An - eighteen, nineteen hundred years ago - says in the fourth sentence, interrupting the infinite regression:

4. There was being.
5. There was non-being.

Which means instead of the ellipsis, one has, what could be called, an ultimate problematic. There was being; there was non-being. But they occur after the establishment of this three-/part infinite regression series starting. the sixth sentence in a row:

6. There was not yet a beginning of the non-being.

And the seventh sentence.

7. There was not yet a beginning of the not yet beginning of non-being.

Now when we put the seven sentences together what we have is the beginning of an infinite regression about beginnings. Then in the middle we have a fulcrum - there was being. And then we have three more regressions back establishing that there was non-being and not yet beginnings and not yet beginnings of that.

He writes, “These somewhat cryptic phrases become understandable when we read the explanations which follow.” And then he gives a quotation in extenso here from Fung Yu-Lan’s analysis of this which appears in the A History of Chinese Philosophy, and I'll excerpt just one paragraph from this.

“The state of Non-being was so called because when it was gazed on, no form was seen;” - No form was seen - “when the ear listened, there was no sound; when the hand grasped, there was nothing tangible; when [first] gazed at afar, it was illimitable. It was limitless space, profound and a vast void, a quiescent subtle mass of immeasurable translucency.”

The state of Non-being was not a negative. And we right away come into a surprise of discovery that non-being does not connotate a negative necessarily at all - it’s a very pleasant surprise. It's like velvet cushions suddenly on a bare intellectual plane where you can sit down and get comfortable. Or was that so? That non-being is not necessarily a negation or even an ultimate negation. Could be something like a subtle mass of immeasurable translucency which in its undifferentiate-ness couldn't be grasped, couldn't be heard, couldn't be seen, but could be experienced. That the capacity of human experience transcends all of the limited approaches individually, but that one can in maneuvering sensibility extend consciousness beyond those limited means and come into contact then as Fung Yu-Lan says,

“The state of ‘there was not yet a beginning of Non-being’ wrapped up Heaven and Earth, shaping and forging the myriad things of creation. There was an all-penetrating impalpable complexity, profoundly vast and all extending. Nothing extended beyond it, yet even the minutest hair and sharpest point could not be within it. It was a space uncompassed by any wall, and it produced the basis of Being and Non-being.”

From this Khigh Dhiegh then tells us in his discussion that this gives us a very interesting ambidextrousness that both cosmos and chaos - both cosmos and chaos - have a single origin. So that chaos is not something to be avoided and cosmos is not something to be leapt for. But the carrot and stick of psychological motive have been taken away in their carrot and stick quality and instead the possibilities of a balance and a harmonia from the beginning have been established, and been established on the basis of human experience. And because human experience is able to confirm this, and able to engender this before the mind begins its structuring, one can then delegate to mental structuring and forms this balance this harmony. So that the possibilities of having a rational person based upon a natural unity which is cosmic. Is a definite possibility. And this of course is what the Chinese civilization is founded upon. Not the thought that this is so, but the experience that indeed one can discover that it is so. This is a whole different tone.

And in The Eleventh Wing, Khigh Dhiegh says, somehow Americans in the late 20th century have come to also experience this not intellectually as an idea but in themselves humanly, in their experience. It's not university professors who are buying all these books on the I Ching. It's people working at jobs, it’s mothers, it’s older people, it’s younger people, all walks of life. It isn't a fad. It doesn't go on for a quarter of a century and millions of copies if it's a fad. It's an indication of a maturation of an evolution of consciousness which is now almost three hundred years into its making and is coming to the surface now and maturing despite all official attempts to stamp it out and keep it down.

The school systems have been preparing clerks for the corporations now since the nineteen-teens. But in spite of that the American people are learning to experience freedom. Not freedom in a political sense, but freedom and a psychological openness; a willingness to live life and discover what can be. Who knows by next year what one might be able to actually experience and with whom one might find companionship on interesting levels. It's this kind of openness that Khigh Dhiegh is saying that the I Ching is showing to us. Then he brings in the fact that one of the most poignant of American philosophers John Dewey, who we've talked about here and had three lectures on him. John Dewey writes in his book Experience and Nature as Khigh Dhiegh writes, “About the concept that being and non-being seem to both be humanly experiential. We can experience both quite adequately. This concept is not singularly peculiar to Oriental mysticism as some may think. We find recognition of this thought in the writings of various Western philosophers. A case in point may be found in the writings of the distinguished American educator and philosopher John Dewey. In one of his books, Experience and Nature, he observed Lao Tzu like,” and then he gives a quotation.

Now remember that Experience and Nature was written in 1925 and it was written a couple of years after John Dewey came back from being in China for two years. He lectured all over China in the early 1920s. And I think we said at the time that John Dewey's thought was the most influential thought in China up to the Chinese communist takeover. Here's the quotation that Khigh Dhiegh selects out of Experience and Nature. Notice the title, Experience and Nature - Dewey was understanding. And he says, and Khigh Dhiegh says, it's Lao Tzu like talking this way: “The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped.”

It's not a quotation from Lao Tzu, it's a quotation from John Dewey. He further excerpts another quotation: “A ‘cause’ is not merely an antecedent; it is that antecedent which if manipulated regulates the occurrence of the consequent. This is why the sun rather than night is the causal condition of the day.”

It is rational to understand that the movement of the sun causes both night and day. To think that night and day are a polarity in opposition to each other is to misunderstand reality. That when we understand that night and day are complementarity, given to us by sun and earth and their movements, then we come into possession of actual experience of the truth. And from this then one can know. One can actually find out many things. It's unlimited then. So that Khigh Dhiegh is showing us that the accessibility of the I Ching to late 20th century Americans especially, more than any other place on the globe, indicates to us a maturation of consciousness which is indicative now of a return to reality. That we are in fact waking up from the nightmare image-base of a false history which was the legacy for almost two millennia and are coming back to that kind of a practical natural openness which yields the possibility of real human life intelligently-based and humanly livable.

Well let's take a break and then we'll come back to this.

One thing that Khigh points out, and something that I guess is indicative of the flatted-out-ness of Westerners - the exposition of the I Ching, classically Chinese thought, based upon not only yin-yang but upon the five elements. But the five elements do not include air. Air is not one of the elements in China. You have wood or sometimes it's called windwood, but wood. You have Earth. You have metal. You have water. You have fire. No air. Is not an element. The aspiration is something other than an elephant even when taken quintessentially. And this is interesting that this should be so. The Western mind that understands yin-yang as a polarity cannot understand why air is not an element. But the modern American sensibility that understands complementarity - it’s not exclusively an American property but it's characteristic of us now. It's almost like in our grain.

You know the great South American poet Juan Ramon Jiménez said once if they give you ruled paper write the other way. Americans are contrary like that. They got something in mind for us and we're not going to sign on the line. If we have to write our name it'll be an alias and it'll be on the back. We've got that kind of chutzpah, that everything that is formed for us can't be for our good, there must be some unformedness that we better save for an emergency. And it's this kind of an approach that's very Chinese.

I'll tell you a little story. This is a true story to illustrate the Chinese character. When the Ching dynasty fell in 1912 the first thing the crowds did was put ladders up on Tiananmen Gate to take down the sign which read Ching Dynasty because the dynasties always put the sign up. So the workmen and the ferocity of the revolution are taking down the sign and they get about half way down the ladders and there's a sudden silence and they think to themselves, and they start muttering to themselves, you know these guys were really tough and they were around for a couple hundred years. What if they come back? Well, maybe we won't burn the sign. We'll save it. So they see a space up in Tiananmen Gate so they go to put the Ching dynasty sign in there and it won't fit in. It won't fit. So they bring it down and the workmen go in there and they feel around in there and they bring it out and it's a sign from the Ming dynasty when they fell. The workmen then had the same idea. These guys may be back. Just in case let's save their sign. That's China. That's China. And that's the kind of Yankee. Yeah that's understanding that it isn't all cut and dried. It isn't all black and white. And save something for a rainy day.

This quality, when you understand yin-yang as a complementarity, then what is attentively sensed is not the yin-yang but the unity, the Tao - it is the Tao. That one becomes attuned to that and not to the hands. But the attunement to the Tao is kinesthetic rather than intellectual. It's a keeping a sense of a balance in motion, and it's easy to keep a sense of balance when one is kept in motion because it's very difficult when you're still to keep the sense of balance. So that the dynamic aspect of complementarity is keeping the unity kinesthetically in view, so to speak. So the I Ching is like that. It's like that. And Khigh Dhiegh says it's very interesting, very, very interesting. Because this is the dynamic quality of modern American life. We are constantly in motion not from the freneticness that's usually impugned to us. It isn't that kind of a motion, that kind of a dynamic, that American life is dynamic in the sense of Tao. We're doing things because that's how we establish what we're doing - by doing it. And it doesn't quite fit the European mold. It doesn't quite fit the Roman mind.

The Roman mind loved to put stone upon stone and say it's there. The American mind loves to say well it was there last week, but we want it over here now, so let's take it down. And we don't have any guilt feelings whatsoever about shifting and changing and redoing and making it provisional. And by now we're used to a skyline in every city in the country that's half built. And it doesn't bother us. And we hope that the next generation will keep it half built because that'll be good for everybody. We're not busy to establish substance as reality. We're willing to live and flow with it and it doesn't bother us at all. This is very peculiar. No civilization had this except the classical Taoist tradition in China had this sense and feeling, and the American Indian had this sense and feeling, and we have it too. We're at home in a universe at play, that's being built and maybe being unbuilt. And we really are not too concerned whether it's being built or unbuilt. We like the action. That's what's pragmatic about it. Because we know that if you unbuild so far then you're going to build. And if you build so far then you're going to unbuild. And it seems to be the way that we do things around here. And so we take our own Western time about getting it done psychologically but we hurry up and try to do it in a physical sense.

This vitality is sometimes called Qi - vital energy, Qi, qi. But qi, if translated as material force, which is peculiar because in the best translation it would be something like matter energy together. But we tend to think polarized - matter versus energy. But qi is a unity - matter energy. Like blood. Yeah, it's matter but it's always in motion. It has a kind of vitality and it's like that. But qi has underneath it, as a substrate, that zero-base, which differentiably called qi which is a subtle incipient activating force, very subtle.

In the Taoist tradition one who keeps the circulation of qi in harmony and balance achieves a state of shen spirit. One doesn't become a black belt hall of fame bullying. One becomes a man at home in the universe. Not only does he live there but he occurs there. His reality is here. He doesn't have to step outside of himself to become. In fact, the whole idea of stepping outside to become, becomes kind of like very strange. So he's not concerned with becoming at all. So that quotation from the Huainanzi of the infinite regressions of beginnings and the infinite progressions of becomings has at a fulcrum midway between those two regressions being. And it isn't bothered by a negativity of the mind imputed to it by Non-being; isn't bothered by any kind of becomingness at all. And this is very, very difficult for the Western mind to understand.

We tend if we are going to understand it, Khigh Dhiegh says, we tend to think of it symbolically. We tend to conjure up in our mind symbol. He writes in here, giving another quotation from Fung Yu-Lan, “‘Water is something spiritual.’ Man is water and when the producing elements of male and female unite liquid flows into forms. Thus water becomes accumulated in jade. The nine virtues appear. It congeals to form man and his nine openings and five viscera appear. This is its refined essence. What is it then that has complete faculties? It is water. There is not one of the various things which is not produced through it. It is only he who knows how to rely on its principles who can act correctly. Hence the solution for the sage who would transform the world lies in water. Therefore when water is uncontaminated men's hearts are upright. When water is pure the people's hearts are at ease. Men's hearts being upright, their desires do not become dissolute. The people's hearts being upright, their conduct is without evil. Hence the sage, when he rules the world, does not teach men one by one or house by house but takes water as his key.”

The transformation by a sage of a civilization isn't piecemeal. It's all at once like an alchemical precipitation. It doesn't take years. It doesn't take months. It doesn't take decades or centuries. There's only the right preparation and then it's there. So that the quality of the consciousness of openness and freedom that Americans have late in the 20th century is not foreboding of dissolution so much as a real transformation. Getting due, getting due.

In that diagram of cosmic evolution, Khigh Dhiegh goes on in his book and develops an interesting statement that when one gets beyond the next stage the second stage to the third the one that has the eight trigrams. The fourth and fifth stage become more and more complex, and the sixth stage is the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. All of the classic commentaries on the I Ching and Chinese history apply themselves to the zero, first, second, third, and sixth stage. There is not a single word about the fourth and fifth stage.

He says, “Yet nothing is written about the significance or indications of strata four and five. That there was no importance attached to these strata is exceedingly unlikely. One of the complaints of many Western scholars is the excessive attention and emphasis given to minutiae by the Chinese sages in their studies and treatments of these classical diagrams. We sometimes hear of the oral tradition as synergetic to the Oriental learning process. This tradition of orally passing insights on from master to merited disciple may have had its origin in necessity due to the absence of the invention of writing. But whatever the case, it was in time hallowed as a means of protecting treasured information and keeping it from falling into use by unqualified or undesirable persons. It will serve no useful purpose to argue the pros and cons of the oral tradition. We shall be content with the observation that there is a singularly unique absence of explication concerning two strata in the diagram of cosmic evolution. Let us accept these silent strata as a challenge designed to encourage us to search them thoroughly for keys of new understanding and enlightenment.”

Right away the American pioneering psyche. All right, we don't have the esoteric oral tradition but we do have ourselves. We have our freedom. We have our capacity to discover. We have some of it. Why can't we find out for ourselves? Let's talk to each other then. This is the way. This is the way.

And because of time I'm having to skip over everything.

So we move away from chance into change. We move away from permutation, which is limited, to transformation, which is unlimited. There is no limitation on transformation. Form, any form is finite and the forms that are are finite, but the possibilities of form are infinite. We can have new forms. There can be something new under the sun. The statement that “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” - we can have something that is not vain. We can transform. We are not limited by a prosaic matrix which is untransformable. It is not the only choice horizon that we have. And this yields then a very peculiar psychology. We can, in fact, become who we really are or who we would like to be. We can change consciously.

That the I Ching has been described as an instrument of transformation but it would be constructively more accurate to define the I Ching as an instrument that both registers and indicates the nature or processes of transformation. That there are techniques, not so much laws, but techniques and processes which can be made conscious so that we can learn to transform. Not just a subject of accidental operation; not just a buck shot hopeful approach, but planned and planned conscientiously in terms of both the seen and the unseen. This is extraordinary. This is very extraordinary.

So in his exposition, Khigh constantly is giving us experiments that we can take. And he, for instance, in one of his experiments in chapter three, says that “In inquiring of the I Ching it's best to try and limit our inquiry to some terse form.” He chooses an eight word form. And he says Let's experiment. Let's take a basic eight-word formulation: what is situation with me at this time? And then characteristic of Khigh Dhiegh’s American pioneering open discovery method, he writes this sentence out eight times in a row - eight words, eight times in a row - and each time then he emphasizes a different word and the first time the first word ‘What’, what is situation with me at this time? Then he'll emphasize every other word as you go down. Emphasizes emphasize ‘situation’. Emphasize ‘with’. So that the poignancy of this begins to become resonant. That this kind of experimenting with consciousness opens up and shows us that we have in fact become habituated to using a kind of a parenthesis balancing instead of freedom of thought. That we've been limiting ourselves quite a bit. In fact Khigh goes on in one of his chapters talking about two languages of knowing. And he goes very much into the kind of general semantics that was made popular by Korzybski and some of the other writers earlier in the United States in the 1940s. And we're going to talk about that next week a little bit with van Vogt's work also influenced by this.

He says, he writes, “The intellectual approach to the I-Ching is necessarily restrictive. It does not stimulate the development of one's intuition. It demonstrates how very much we are creatures of conditioning. We have been conditioned to experience a photograph almost as though it were the person or thing pictured. We seldom, if ever, think that a newspaper photograph is merely an arrangement of dots in varying densities on a white sheet of paper. On the other hand we have not been conditioned to think of a dark unbroken line as being a yang-force: strength, light principle, hard, assertive, projective. Nor of a dark broken line as being a yin-force: weak, dark principle, soft, receptive, yielding. The true miracle is that in spite of these differences of approach the I Ching still activates an intuitive something within and so becomes very meaningful to us. For this reason the Gua” - the hexagrams - “the Gua is experienced as being equivalent with the external condition into which we have projected it. Knowing is intuition and knowing is also memory. We have to those who embrace the philosophy of I Ching and its long extension back into the past enjoy an identity of comfortable continuity with the great antiquity because it is continuous to the present day. Chinese antiquity perhaps gives one a stronger sense of being in close proximity to infinity than any other cultural tradition.”

Why? Because it really doesn't have a definite beginning. We say it begins with Fuxi, 2950 BC. It's legendary. It's approximate. But even then it's only a convenient image and codification. The I Ching acquaints us with the use of what is and the use of what is not. But the ambidextrousness of that is not problematic for us as long as we have a zero-base unity implicitly there all the time. And the way to guarantee that that is there is for our experience to be constantly dynamically involved in the application. This is where the individual becomes not so much an individualism but a personage in the universe; that we don't achieve so much an identity as a dignity of participation in reality. And that in a selfless way we become, quite really, ourselves.

I'm having to skip over almost everything in his book that I had down.

After The Eleventh Wing was written, Khigh Dhiegh made an experiment which went on for nine years. In order to experiment and play with the development of the I Ching for the American mind he began publishing every year for a while, the I Ching Taoist’s Book of Days began in 1975 published by Shambhala in Berkeley. And the next year was taken up by Ballantine Books, Random House, and was published until 1983. Thereafter and every year new material was added and the basic formulation of day by day occurrence taking it out of clock time and putting it into cyclic unified temporality so that over nine years ,illions of people bought and used these I Ching diaries from 1975 to 1983. They stopped. They didn't put one out in 1984 because the publisher was becoming very difficult. They were not sending royalty checks to Khigh Dhiegh and he wouldn't send the new material until the royalty checks came - as a writer usually will do.

It's interesting because 1983 is exceedingly symbolic year in Chinese history. 1983 is the end of a sixty-year cycle - a sexagenary cycle. 1984 was the beginning of a new cycle. But 1983 was also the end of a very long Chinese cycle that began in 1804 and ended in 1983. In very large Taoist computations 1984 was the beginning of several concentric cycles of time and cyclic meaningfulness. Khigh himself was quite astounded that the event should turn out in this way.

I was going to read you excerpts from several of these. Constantly trying his American pioneering spirit, he published just this last year a book called The Golden Oracle: The Ancient Chinese Way to Prosperity using a color-coded kind of divination based on another old esoteric Taoist classic and structured by Khigh Dhiegh for the pioneering American style of discovery.

I'm sorry I just have time to mention these items to you but you can see, here again, the quality of inquiry that we live with daily now is an extraordinary tone of freedom. Anywhere in history, any place on the planet, we are extraordinary human beings. We are not so few as you might imagine. And the fact that we have a communicable structure between us - not only of what is seen but what is unseen - and that this is available to us intelligently and cooperatively doesn't just bode well for the future but it makes a future. One doesn't need a prophecy - it's assured. The seed is already growing, we are here.

Next week we'll take the last in this series of the American psyche. And we'll see that on the very edge of objectivity the American mind more than any other mind in history looks to the future and looks to the universe as a home. And we'll look at the great science fiction of A. E. van Vogt and we'll see the American mind at home, really at home, in the cosmos. Maybe van will be here. I hope so.