A Change of Heart

The Hidden Culture of Jealousy

Stephen Karcher, Ph.D.
Myth and Theatre Festival On Jealousy
New Orleans, 2002

Jealousy is significant, a big or initiating experience with great destructive and, possibly,
transformative power. The experience of jealousy touches a very deep or primal realm of the
imagination. To venture into this world I would like to call on an Ancestor, C.G. Jung. I would like
to invoke both his sense of depth psychology and his concern with mantike, divination, and the
eastern oracle book or system of wisdom divination he loved and used: Yijing or the Classic of
Change. I want to reflect the experience of jealousy through both Jungs theory and practice and the
Way or Dao of Yi or Change.
This process of opening the Book of Fates doubles the kind of theatre process we have
been working with during this festival. It offers a space that might give the unknown or hidden
gods of Jealousy a voice in our imaginations.
Here I would like to introduce Sun, Subtle Penetration, the Lady of Fates who lays out the
offerings, finds the hidden sickness, distributes the fates and couples the beings.

57 Subtle Penetration SUN

Success through the Small. Advantageous to have a direction to go.

Advantageous to see the Great People.
Let what you confront shape you and subtly penetrate to the core of the problem. Enter from below. Be
humble and adapt to crosses your path. Seek those who can advise you about what is great in the situation
and in yourself. Find the hidden disorders and awaken inner wisdom.

57 Subtle Penetration

The old character shows an altar with wrapped meat offerings on it representing the myriad creatures.
This energy renews itself repeatedly.

Myths for Change: The Story of the Time

Sun, Subtle Penetration, is the Lady of Fates who lays out the offerings on the low altar and binds the
Myriad Beings to their fates. She crosses thresholds and transmits orders from Heaven. Her wrapped food
offerings are an image of the Myriad Creatures toiling and laboring on the field of earth, for life is brought
and carried by her winds. She is connected to the Central Palace where fates are consigned and represents a
profound penetration of the above into the below which can lead to the awakening of wisdom. She prepares
the food and drink for the great meal shared by humans and spirits and nourishes the people on ancient
virtue. A spirit-worker and healer, she offers the virtue or de that actualizes an individual being. She finds the
hidden sickness through subtle influences, the silent power of wind and wood. She controls the omens that
regulate power and virtue, plans from hiding and knows the right moment to act. She matches and couples
the beings, leading each thing to its destiny. She is imaged as a bright strutting cock, strong scented, that
stimulates everything that moves or moves in the body, purifies the blood, links eyes and sexual organs,
controls desire and anger. She gives vision, motivation and the capacity to act decisively at the key moment.
This is an Inspiring Figure and spirit helper. It empowers the Sacred Sickness Pathway that connects
personal disorders with cultural change and acts as a Mission of the stage of the Symbolic Life when
we must deal with power and our responsibilities to the human community.

Sun is the symbol and the spirit that Change offers to us as we journey into the hidden culture of
Jealousy and she has a message:

Step 2 Inner Center: This inner re-organization leads to harmony with others.
Subtle Penetration beneath the bed.

Use diviners and intermediaries in great number.

Wise Words! The Way opens. This is not a mistake.
This means acquiring the center. Penetrate to the core of this old story, full of sexual intrigue and dark
ancestors. Use those who can see the spirits and sense past and future potentials. Get to the bottom of this
and free yourself from its grasp.
Guideway (57.2 [53.2 : 54.5] 58.5): Think of the feast times when the soul rejoices on its long
journey. Changes are coming. The great ancestor is giving the maidens in marriage, an omen of great future
happiness. You must strip away the outmoded. Have no fear. You have a connection to the spirits that will
carry you through. Step out to meet the new destiny. Gather energy for the decisive new move. Inner self
cultivation now lets you see the patterns that mark real ends and beginnings.

The journey this omen suggests will take us into to the Demon Country, the world of the Outcasts,
a wilderness at the Edge.
It involves the great rituals that unite people in common purpose, calling down the spirits to dwell
with us, the Spring and Autumn Festivals full of chant, drinking and copulation.
It involves lonely, silent sacrifices at the River of Ghosts to feed the Dead.
It establishes a solid base for these imaginal operations through an act called stopping, slowing
speed, enactment of desire and will, ego-identification in order to free another intermediary, the
Joyous Dancer who gives the spirits voice and place in our lives.
It sets off a process of gradual transformation, a stage by stage process, imaged as the flight of the
Wild Geese, at once symbols of the Couple and of the Journey of the Soul. It will move us from the
emergence or birth of a new soul, the Small Son at the edge of the River of Ghosts, to the formal
rites and rituals at the Ancestral Temple that enshrine an Ancestor, an imaginal figure through
which blessings flow for all.

q 53 Gradual Advance JIAN q

The marrying woman opens the Way.

Advantageous to put your ideas to the Trial.
Advance step by step through subtle penetration. Act through the receptive and the feminine. Do not try to
dominate the situation. You will achieve mastery and find the place where you belong.

53 Gradual Advance

The old character shows the sign for a river, a waterwheel that brings the water up and a channel
through which it flows. This slow and sure advance is enabled by renovating inner corruption (18).

Myths for Change: The Story of the Time

Jian, Gradual Advance is a model of a particular kind of change, a formal ritual progression that leads to
union and establishment in the symbolic world. This change occurs step by step, a subtle, gradual and sure
advance crossing thresholds in the advance to union and its celebration in dance and festival. The root is
water and the term suggests leading water in channels, the course of a river and the watercourse way. This
figure portrays a gradual advance to marriage as image for the souls journey and its goal: the sacred dances
that connect the couple, their feelings, and their lineage to the spirit or symbolic world. The Wild Goose
presented at the marriage ceremony is a symbol of this journey that includes the melancholy of separation,
the risks that surround love and the vow or bond that founds an enduring union. The migrations of the wild
geese imaged great movements of the soul: The Spring and Autumn festivals; the Wu or spirit-mediums
dancing with feathers in front of the Ancestral Temple; the men taken away to war following King Wu into
the Mu wilderness; the bird dances that invoke spirit energies; and the Hidden Temple where unions are
made, symbolized as red threads that bind a man and woman in a fated relation. Here we see souls
transformed to birds and life as their flight, skimming, gliding and settling at each stage in their journey.

As our first entry into the Demon Country of the Jealous Gods, I would like to invoke the shadow
of one of psychologys great triangles, Freud, Jung and, I would suggest, Lady Soul herself. It occurs
in an atmosphere of sex versus spirit and the black mud of the occult that Freud so assiduously
tried to keep at bay. Jung, however, did not. Here I want to further suggest that his great move
from the jealous polarities of a father-son struggle for power into the realm of the soul led him on a
journey, a Journey to the East that was, at the same time, a descent into that black, occult and
occulted mud.

J ung, the Dao and the Classic of Change

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Now, at first glance Jung's contact with the East seems quite ambivalent. On the one hand, the
dialogue with Eastern thought and practice help to shape his main ideas: the self and individuation,
the function of the archetypes, the dynamics of the psyche and the autonomous complex all were
influenced by Eastern thought. Jung's orientation helped him to imagine the way the psyche
worked and mobilized his great creative and daimonic energy. On the other hand, Jung constantly
railed against Europeans who too facilely took up eastern ways and shirked their cultural duty. This
very harsh criticism was aimed specifically at Theosophists and yoga enthusiasts who, in his
opinion, were simply pretending to be something they were not (CW 9i, 21-29, 1934). For Jung's
orientation also made him painfully aware of the West's cultural ills: our greedy materialism, our
worship of scientific rationalism and our adoration of the heroic ego. We are spiritual beggars, he
maintained, and we have no business putting on borrowed riches.
But more than anything else, Jung's orientation is reflected in his involvement with Dao, the central
term in eastern thought that he saw as the true "spirit of the East" (CW8, 78/90, 1930). This
involvement was not just professional; it was a crucial part of his individuation. "The East is our
philosopher's stone," he said, "the catalyst through which change takes place. It is at the bottom of
the spiritual change we are passing through and out of its depths new spiritual forms will arise. The
growing familiarity with the spirit of the East should be taken as a sign we are beginning to relate to
the alien elements in ourselves" (CW13, 72, 1929).
The first time we meet Dao in Jung's writing in is Psychological Types. It is described through a series
of quotations from Daodejing, the classic of philosophical Taoism (CW6, 358-369, 1921; see also
916-924, 1952). Dao, according to Jung, is elusive. Westerners have translated it as way, method,
principle, life force, process of nature, idea of the world, primal cause, the right, the good, the moral
order or God. It is an image without substance, formless yet complete, depending on nothing, the
mother of all things. If you can be without compulsive desire, you can see it. The soul can be
emptied of the worlds busy greed and it is Tao that fills the emptiness. You have insight and have
no need of intellectual knowledge (CW8, 917ff, 1952).

Jung saw this Tao as an irrational union of opposites, a psychological attitude that frees you from
literally acting out their conflict. Dao tames all that is wild without purifying or transforming it
into something higher," he said. Our Western mind, lacking all culture in this respect, has never
devised a concept for the union of opposites that compared to the Chinese Tao. Tao is the most
legitimate fulfillment of the meaning of the individual's life. It signifies the emergence of a new
center of the personality that no longer coincides with the ego, a point midway between conscious
and unconscious. It is a new equilibrium, a new centering of the whole personality on a new and
more solid foundation. In the last resort, this is man's individual fate. Submission to this inner
guidance and its quieting effect is of primary importance in human life (CW7, 327/365, 1945).
According to Jung, what the Chinese sages call Tao is a method to unite what is separated, the
separation of consciousness and life. It is the realization of the opposite hidden in the unconscious,
the reversal or reunion with the unconscious laws of our own being. Tao grows out of the
individual, he maintained (CW13, 30/80, 1929). The restoration of the world, the union of yin
and yang, we can call this Tao. It is the unio mentalis, the substance of Heaven (CW14, 711,
1954). This undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche, a flow of living water that
moves irresistibly toward its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, mission done, the
perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in things. To fulfill your destiny is Tao.
Personality is Tao (CW17, 323, 1934).
Tao and Synchonicity
Thus Jung used Tao to describe both the process and the goal of his psychology, the emergence of a
new center in the personality. He had another, more western term that he used interchangeably
with Tao. The eastern word for non-causality is Tao, he said, and we know that Tao can be
anything; I call it synchronicity. I first used this word in my tribute to Richard Wilhelm in 1930.
Here is an example of synchronicity. Say you are standing on the seashore at a certain hour of the
morning and the waves wash in an old hat, a box, a shoe and a dead fish. You, like a good
westerner, say Nonsense! The old Chinese gentleman beside you, however, says, What does it mean
that these things occur together? And what about your dream last night, of a hat, a box and a dead
fish? You see, he is using a method of forecasting possibilities and recognizing meaning that I call
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Tao or synchronicity (CW18, 143-144, 1935). It is a kind of creatio ex nihilo that we cannot really
explain (CW8, 863/912, 1952), the continuous creation of a pattern that, paradoxically, exists
from all eternity (CW8, 921, 1952). This points at a kind of gnosis, a knowing that forms a way
out of the jealous world of cause and effect.
The Ominous World of the Unus Mundus
Marie-Louise von Franz once remarked that Jungs attitude towards the unconscious was the
attitude of the archaic religions and traditions that valued and followed omens, dreams and
divinations as signs from the spirit and the spirits. In his psychology he, in essence, re-constituted
those old religious rituals based on a living world that spoke in omens and symbols. Among other
things, Jung called this living world the unus mundus, a ground of what he called direct religious
experience. Our deep need for this experience and the challenge it posed to our estranged mentality
were key qualities of what he saw as the kairos of our times. The gods are our diseases, he said. We
must re-experience them, let them impress us with the reality of the psyche. There is a tremendous
charge building in the human unconscious, he said, and what we will not confront in imagination
we will experience as fate.
As the matrix of religious experience, the unus mundus, archetypal or psychoid unconscious seems to
project symbolic fields that unite both images and events in a particular kind of imaginal awareness,
what the Buddhists call putting on the body of dreams and visions. Leading the events of our lives
back to these fields, which a traditional society called spirits or gods, is a profoundly religious act,
one that a thinker like Corbin called epistrophe or tawil. It was the heart of the archaic religions and
the various Mystery Cults in which you did not so much learn something, as experience something
and be set right. For Jung, the re-constituted ritual associated with the Classic of Change is a engine
for understanding the dialogue with the unus mundus, the Dao or Way, the experience of meaning.
It points at a realization of fate that takes the whole of the world as its stage.
I feel that what Jung was pointing at, what he was reaching out into the occult darkness to feel and
touch, is a very powerful archetype hidden deep in the black mud of the European occult tradition,
a way or style of mantike or divination that had been subsumed and repressed in the west in a series

of moves beginning when the priests of Apollo captured the shrines, oracle sites and mysteries
throughout Greece, marginalizing and swallowing what I have called a metic method of divination
based on the sortes or lots. This mantic way was carried largely by the numphe or nymphs, the wise
women who used the lots at shrines throughout the ancient world.
The images for Unus Mundus release an immediate perception of the flow of fate and a flood of
animal energy. Acting and perceiving become one, a psychic surety, a thrust not into the literalizing
world but into a living darkness. It is precisely this experience that connects us with the Way, the
on-going process of the Real, through our individual fate.
The East did not suppress this mantic methodology, as did the Greeks, Romans and Christians, but
developed and refined it into one of the worlds most sophistication systems of imaginal navigation,
Yijing or the Classic of Change. I want to suggest that it was just this hidden culture of mantike that
Jung was sensing and touching in the black mud of the occult. For Yijing carries our cultural
shadow. It points out our lacunae quite precisely, and this was one of the reasons Jung valued it. It
also explains the fear and hostility often directed at the book and at mantike in general. At bottom,
this is the fear of Hell and the first step on the night-sea journey.
Zeus, Zelos and Tim
The OED defines our topic jealousy first and foremost as being solicitous for ones position, for
the preservation of ones right; resentful towards another on account of rivalry; envious of a persons
advantages; and, speaking of The God, in this case J*W*H, intolerant of unfaithfulness,
suspicious and vigilant. The word, as in almost all western languages, traces back to Latin zelosus
and, ultimately to Greek zlos from which zelotes or zealots, the fanatic Jawhist revolutionary
group, followers of the Jealous God who opposed the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. Barrabas,
freed when Jesus took his place on the cross, was probably a zelote. So - at the root of jealousy is
zealousy. Perhaps we should call a jealous person (or a jealous god) a jealote.
Zelos is not just a word, however, but a deathless god in his own right, a so-called Titan. Here is the
story as told by Hesiod (Theogony, 385-406).

Styx, daughter of Ocean, was joined to Pallas, the Striker, and bore Zelos and trim-ankled
Nike (Victory) in the house. And she also brought forth Kratos (Power) and Bia (Violence),
wonderful children. These have no house apart from Zeus, nor any dwelling nor path
except that where The God leads them, but they dwell always with Zeus the LoudThunderer. For Styx the deathless daughter of Ocean wove a metis that day when the
Olympian Lightning God called all the deathless gods to great Olympos. That day, he said
that whosoever of the gods would fight with him against the Titans, he would not cast them
out from their place and honor, their Tim, but each should have his own Tim, the one
they had before among the deathless ones. And he declared that anyone who had been
without Tim under Kronos rule, should be raised into Tim. So deathless Styx, cold river
of death, came first to Olympos with her children through the cunning metis of her dear
father Ocean. And Zeus honored her Tim and gave her very great gifts. He
appointed her to be the great oath of the gods and her children to live with him always. And
as he promised, so he performed.
Zealousy does not exist apart from Zeus and the other titanic siblings: Power, Violence and Victory.
It is mothered by the deathly waters of Styx, who makes words into bonds, and fathered by titanic
blows and batterings. It is also a matter of Metis, the hidden power through which Zeus maintains
his rule, a hidden connection to that old divinatory Way of Water, cunning and feminine, that
Zeus would rape and swallow and who was to mother Athena.
Central to the experience of Zealousy is tim: portion, place, honor, recognition. So the central
problem of zealousy, at least for humans and gods, is not sex as such, but having or not having a
place, a recognized fate, a position in which one is honored as a deathless god. In the world of
Zealousy, you are in the center or you are cast out, honored or pushed over the edge of the world.
This is a titanic question indeed, for the opposite of tim is lack, a panic lack of soul or place that
fills the being with wildly alternating despair and violent aggression. Without tim, we fall into the
realm of the Hungry Ghosts, the outcasts, imaged in Buddhist theology as once-living beings with a
huge stomach and a tiny mouth, incapable of ever satisfying their driving hunger and desperately
jealous of the living. Experienced occultists often say the most frequently channeled spirits are
these hungry ghosts who are driven to intrude on and overpower the living, attempting to live out
their unlived lives.

In traditional Chinese ritual these hungry ghosts are differentiated from the dead who become
Ancestors, figures through whom blessings (fu) flow from Heaven or Way. When a person realizes
his or her destiny and lives out life as a human, their spirit soul or Hun is enshrined in the
Ancestral Temple in a spirit-tablet while their bones (Bo), buried with proper rites, become an
underworld source of riches to their offspring. The spirit and soul of these dead are the treasure of
the living, vital spirits that make up a sort of charisma familiars.
A being who has not lived out his destiny, however, who has been cast out through violent death
and an unfulfilled fate cannot become an ancestor. Rather, they become disinherited, wandering
spirits, ku-hun, festering daimones that exude malignant vapors. Their trapped vitality freezes them
in a miserable existence like the unburied spirit of a Greek. They are full of rage and resentment
directed at the society and people who have denied them place and destiny. Unless there is religious
intervention, the only way out for the Ku-Hun is to inflict the same fate they have suffered on the
living. They lead others to death so they might be saved. This, I suggest, images the rage and panic
of the excluded one in a jealous triangle, a desperate and panic sense not only of loss but of Unbeing, dead before your time is through.
In the Realm of the Jealous Gods
I think it is here that we really pass from a personal sense of Zealousy into a cultural one. As Cliff
Bostock pointed out, we live (and love) in a time when jealousy has become a meta-narrative of
community life. So let us enter the realm of the Jealous Gods and see what we can find. I propose
we do this through an eastern gate connected with our divination, the Bardo Worlds, the worlds
that open between death and rebirth, in crisis and breakdown, a realm where our experiences and
our emotions, our complexes and our karma present themselves as ghosts, gods and ancestors. We
must learn to navigate the Bardo Worlds or be frozen in a fixation or tumbled into a disastrous
birth in the Hell Realms.
The place we meet jealousy/zealousy here is at the edge of the manifest world, as we hurtle through
the last Bardo states consumed by fear and driven by the great tornado of karma, blown to and fro
like dandelion seeds in the wind towards birth. Swept along by the wind of karma, we arrive at a

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place where our future parents are about to make love. We are emotionally drawn in because of past
karmic connections and begin spontaneously to feel strong attraction and desire for one parent, and
intense jealousy of the other. We see and are pulled into the oedipal triangle. As we succumb to
these passions, we enter the womb. We are now in the Bardo of Birth.
The Kye-Ne Bardo, the state in which and through which birth occurs, is directly linked to what is
called the Asuras, the Jealous and Zealous Gods - literally the non-gods, a-suras or demons,. It is the
Birth-Dwelling world, violent change and desperate need for security. The entire Bardo is based on
a trust in speed, in zeal, in aggression and that which zeal brings: the driving ambition to achieve. It
is a metis, a trap. Caught in this metis, we spin faster and faster until we are not sure if we are
spinning or not. It is absolute speed and absolute stillness.
This Zealousy breaks absorption in the paradise of the dyad, the union of Mother-Father, the
couple absorbed in each other. It is driving, grasping, high energetic, very busy. It reaches out to
grasp, to taste, to have, to swallow, a push to peak experience. It combines a drive to amass security
with the desperation of looking for an alternative to paradise lost. It is the Bardo of Lucifer. In this
respect it is often described as a person trying to give birth and keep the baby in at the same time, a
person trying to give birth to themselves.
Here the experience of bliss turns around completely. We are filled with sudden envy, jealousy and
a desperate zeal. We have been lied to! Our faith is shattered and we react with speed, anger,
grasping, devouring and defending. The Asura mentality is called a heavy wind of karma. It creates
extreme paranoia. Everything becomes a comparison, a judgment and a defense.
The Jealous and Zealous God searches for and tries builds a style of being, an occupation, that fixes
him at the center of an illusory Bardo state. He wants to BE SOMEBODY, with style, dignity,
honor, and place. He wants Tim. He wants to be IN the One at the center. This is the polarization
of Having and Lacking, of the Ins and the Outs, of the Professionals constantly on guard, zealous to
protect boundaries. Skillful and professional, the Jealous God is secure without security.

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Of course we have to train ourselves to be such a Zealous Demon, but the training soon becomes
part of us. The Jealous and Zealous God becomes our character, along with a deaf and dumb
refusal to accept anything from the Other(s). The Zealousy becomes a sort of antenna or radar that
registers EVERYTHING, but everything is read in terms of the Enemy or the Object to be
Devoured. Extreme Method. Extreme Accuracy. Extreme Defense.
In terms of actual birth the Zealous Gods are associated with our experience of what is clinically
called Birth Stage 3, pushing out of the womb. This is the clinical stage of actual biological delivery,
propulsion through the birth canal after the cervix opens and the head descends into the pelvis.
Uterine contractions have already begun. The cervix is dilated and allows gradual propulsion of the
fetus through the birth canal. For the fetus this involves crushing mechanical pressures, intense pain
and often a high degree of anoxia and suffocation. It is a life threatening state of high anxiety, the
true beginning of the struggle for survival. Blood supply is interrupted, the umbilical cord can be
twisted around the neck, and the placenta can detach and actually obstruct the way. The fetus can
inhale blood, mucus and feces. The problems can be so extreme they require forceps birth or a
cesarean section. Nota Bene: in classical antiquity the rate of survival for a mother and child giving
birth was considerably less than 50%. This is the moment of potential death for both mother and
child.
We all carry this experience with us in one form or another, locked in our bodies and our
parasympathetic nervous systems and it is automatically activated when we enter the field of
jealousy. But we can re-live it imaginally in altered states of consciousness. When we do it becomes
a rich and complex experiential pattern rather than a compulsive enactment, an imaginal scenario
involving a wide range of imagery: the atmosphere of titanic fight; aggressive and sadomasochistic
sequences; experiences of deviant sexuality; demonic episodes; scatological episodes all leading to a
primary encounter with Fire and Ecstasy.
Streams of energy of overwhelming intensity rush through the body, building up to explosive
discharges, imaged as volcanoes, earthquakes, electric storms, tidal waves and tornadoes. There are
titanic battles of epic proportions, atom bombs, tanks, spaceships, lasers, the cosmic battle between

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Light and Darkness, or the Gods and the Titans. The biological fury of the organism whose survival
is threatened is reflected in cruelties of astonishing proportions - mutilation, massacres, wars and
bloody revolutions that involve torture, ritual sacrifice, and mortal combat. A sort of
sadomasochism translates this inhuman suffering into sexual arousal and ecstatic rapture, the
rapture of flagellants, the concentration camps and prisoners of war, men ejaculating as they die of
suffocation on the gallows or in the brothels. There are red light districts, the sexual underground,
incest, sexual abuse, rape, erotic murders and snuff films, cannibalism and necrophilia. All this
occurs in an atmosphere of the Black Sabbath, satanic orgies, a particular atmosphere of death,
deviant sex, pain, fear, aggression, shit and distorted spiritual impulse. We are crawling in offal or
through sewer systems, wallowing in excrement, drinking blood or urine.
As we draw near the fire in this experience, the prevailing atmosphere becomes extreme passion, a
driving energy of intoxicating intensity. Here we encounter gods and heroes of death and rebirth,
Jesus, Dionysos, Attis and Adonis and the purgatorial fire with all its burning bodies, radically
destroying what is corrupted and preparing us for rebirth. It is a fierce struggle for survival and
expansion, against all others, yearning for a sense of goal and meaning. We play out the whole
triangle of roles, aggressor, observer and victim, in rapid succession and the borderline of agony and
ecstasy, the volcanic Dionysian experience.
The Inner Radar
So how do we deal with the titanic energies of Zealousy, how do we avoid being consumed by the
fire or unleashing it literally in an orgy of destruction, as Medea, perhaps, a great heroine of
zealousy, driven mad through her own loss of Tim. One solution is the emergence and cultivation
of another kind of hunger, a hunger for and need of the experience of the imaginal that is equally
rooted in our nature. This inner radar points at the vital importance of the link between the
violence of the zealous and jealous birth experience and the transpersonal levels of the psyche, what
has been called the Thought of the Heart.
If the psycho-somatic memory of what transpersonal psychologists call BPMIII and Buddhist Bardo
travelers call the Realm of the Jealous Gods comes close to consciousness, it creates a strong
psychological pressure enact its elements in everyday life: enormous greed, violent sex, rape as
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perpetrator and victim, titanic power struggles, emotional or literal. But when we involve ourselves
with Zealousy and its titanic destructive powers as what they truly are, imaginal experiences, a
strange experiential switch seems to occur somewhere in the perinatal psyche, in the Bardo states:
what was up to that point a deep and desperate intrapsychic conflict and fixation opens to the
extrasensory experience of the universe itself transpersonal, psychoid, synchronistic and, usually,
deeply healing.
The key to this Change seems to be opening a field in which the change can be registered, a tragic
stage in which the play of the hidden gods finds a space in what the Chinese called the heart-mind,
the xin, and its great symbols. I suggest the Book of Changes, the archetypal Book of Fates, is such
a stage, as is the imaginal space opened by what Enrique calls choreographic theatre and the
discourse that is possible around and within that process. It may help us to feel fate on the level of
imagination, to wear the body of visions, the body of dreams, the imaginal body. This is, in the best
sense, what we do when we mythologize, when we use the hidden culture of mantike.
Just call me Trouble, Stranger: Giving Voice to Change
Yi, the active term in the name Yijing, describes a state in which things de-construct, when fixed
structures, social, psychological and physical, dissolve or go into solution. In this context,
zealousy, irritation, uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, fear, depression and fragmentation all indicate
that the doors to the underworld, what divinatory tradition would see as the River of Ghosts, is
open. The world, the psyche, the Other is drawing attention to itself. It then becomes our task to
give the spirits voice, both a language and a part in the way we lead our lives. By letting the voice
and language of the other change us (yi), we move and are moved by the world, learn the language
in which it speaks. In the mantic tradition, that language is called change (yi), and its words are the
xiang, the great symbols or figures that are activated or animated as we pose our problem to the
oracle as a question. The symbols turn our eyes to the shi, the situation and, hidden within it, the
efficacious action that can connect us with the Way, the on-going process of the Real. This is an
imaginative recognition, entertaining the images and allowing them to re-shape our heart. Our
zealous attention is arrested. There is a sudden and unpredictable influx of shen, spirit, which is a
quality of the image itself.
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This is magical thinking, the black mud of the occult, in which the things, the situations, the
configurations, the spirits of the world we live in project themselves onto us. They send us their
ideas and demands, their memories, their feeling lives, their sensory modes, their ways of moving.
They impress upon us the reality of the psyche. Our change (yi) resonates with the change of the
world (yi) through the change (yi) inherent in the symbols.
This perspective responds to our innate human need for contact with and experience of the
transpersonal world of the Way and the ghosts-and-spirits who animate it. It turns Change and the
mythology it carries into a kind of portable altar, a personal link to the world of the invisible, the
great river of time and space on which the symbols that unfold the way flow toward us. We learn
about fulfilling our fate, finding place in the world of imagination. Rather than a Jealous God or a
Hungry Ghost, we become sage or shen, an Ancestor through whom blessings can flow for all. In
the words of the culminating omen in the divination that began this journey through the Demon
Country:
Step 6 Culmination: This inner stripping leads to a breakthrough.
Wild geese glide over the high plateau and the ancient forest.
Their feathers can be used in the great spirit-dances.
Wise Words! The Way opens.
This does not allow disorder. The journey ends in the world of the spirit. Your love becomes a symbol that
activates fundamental energies. When you understand what these symbols can do the Way will always be
open to you.
Guideway (53.6 [39.6 : 40.1] 54.1): Difficulties are going, ripeness and abundance are coming. See
those who can put you in touch with the great in yourself and in the situation. You are in the right position
to free yourself from the past and enter the new city. Step outside the norms and re-imagine the situation.
Gather energy for a decisive new move. Inner self cultivation now lets you manage the flow and flux of life.

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