The spiritual truth as told by a cat...

I just thought I would share this with you (I got it from a good friend by e-mail) as it corresponds quite well to my situation, not because it is exactly the same situation but because it describe a similar sentiment: I find that I can go from feeling 'in tune with higher feelings' one second and can lose it with someone for something silly the next... a humbling reality check (i.e. a reminder that there is still a lot of work to do).

I think I am a karmic wimp...

For anyone interested in spirituality (especially the Hindu and Buddhist varieties), in 'spiritual light' literature ("spirit-light-lit"?), or even (gasp, dare we say it) mainstream hip lit, we hear a lot about karma, karmic destiny, karmic cleansing, karma this and karma that...

Most of the reading and thinking I have seen on karma has been something like if you had your karmic act together in the past you get a better karmic deal in the present and future... or something to that effect. My very personal theory, it is personal at least because I have never seen it expounded elsewhere, is that karma works backwards as to how most of us understand it.

Let me explain.

But before I do, I would like to make an admission, according to this theory, I am most probably a karmic wimp! And the bad news is that most of you who are reading this are in the same situation, as are most of the people you know...

Basically my idea is this. If we believe in reincarnation, which is more or less a prerequisite for believing in karma, we probably also believe that we have something to learn in our lifetime(s) here on Earth. So my thinking is quite simple in this regard, learning is positively correlated with challenges, i.e. the more difficult the material and existential details of our lives the more we learn. Which also means that the opposite probably holds true. So for those of us, like me, who were born in houses with rooms, heat, electricity, running water, a full fridge, car pools, after school activities that don't involve survival, probably have thinner karmic skins than those who were born without... Or to say it differently yet again, Maslow's pyramid is a karmic map, it's just upside down.


Furthermore, many traditions who believe in karma also believe that we choose the conditions of our birth, including material comfort, existential challenges, who our parents are, geography, etc. And since we are here to learn (and/or to remember our divinity, which we could semantically or philosophically argue is quite similar), my intuition is that we learn a lot more about humanity, divinity, grace in the face of difficulty, generosity and love when life is short, difficult and very little can be taken for granted. Granted, some lessons are probably easier or more difficult to learn depending on circumstance, but it just feels like spiritual learning must be accelerated when comfort is not part of the equation...

Personally, I don't know if I would last long in an existence that many denizens of the third-world must face daily and just don't know how much humanity would shine through. I have a hard enough time expressing my humanity in my cushy little existence.

Maybe this approach to karma helps explain why the Psalmist announced that "the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace."

If anyone knows about someone who has written about this or attempted to explain it differently, please let me know.

Any other thoughts/comments/ideas?

[Notes on] I-Ching (the Book of Changes)

A good friend recently gave me a copy of the I-Ching, also called the Book of Changes or Zhouyi. Apparently it is not that easy to attribute the date of the origin of I-Ching, which has probably been modified over the ages, but the debate goes from approximately 3000 years BCE to 300 years BCE, with recent research preferring 9th century BCE. Regardless of the date and the person/s behind the I-Ching, in any case it has been around for quite some time and has had quite an influence on Chinese and Asian philosophy and thinking.

According to wikipedia, "The text describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs. The cosmology centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change."

I have now been trying it out for a couple of days and it does seem interesting. While I am only discovering the book and its wisdom, my early impressions is that it feels like an intelligent daily horoscope which not only guides you but also makes you think and ponder over personal issues. Kind of like an active meditation (meditation in the sense contemplating or turning something over in one's mind). Interesting in any case and I look forward to discovering more about it.

I won't even try to explain what it is for those who are not familiar with it but once again allow Wikipedia's anonymous authors to attempt an explanation:

The text of the I Ching is a set of oracular statements represented by a set of 64 abstract line arrangements called hexagrams. Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines, where each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 2⁶ or 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.
The hexagram diagram is conceptually subdivided into two three-line arrangements called trigrams. There are 2³, hence 8, possible trigrams. The traditional view was that the hexagrams were a later development and resulted from combining the two trigrams. However, in the earliest relevant archaeological evidence, groups of numerical symbols on many Western Zhou bronzes and a very few Shang oracle bones, such groups already usually appear in sets of six. A few have been found in sets of three numbers, but these are somewhat later. Note also that these numerical sets greatly predate the groups of broken and unbroken lines, leading modern scholars to doubt the mythical early attributions of the hexagram system.

While that is not the easiest explanation, maybe a visual one of the trigrams could help:

Basically, to use the I-Ching the 8 trigrams are organized in an 8 by 8 matrix and there is a simple method to find the appropriate square on the I-Ching 'checkerboard' (my personal expression).


Anyway, I have the Brian Browne Walker translation. If anyone has a good book to recommend so that I can learn more on the subject please let me know.