Today: Perform your duty as it comes, selfless and with humility.  – from the I Ching

Perform your duty as it comes, selfless and with humility.

Meditation: NM0390-20010320 – Provoke Your Higher Self

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Tao Te Ching – Verse 41 – When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it

Read the text from Richard Wilhelm's, Thomas Cleary's, Brian Arnold's and other translations of the I Ching
25 – Twenty-Five  Wu Wang / Remaining Blameless

Thunder rolls beneath Heaven, as is its nature and place:
Sage rulers aligned themselves with the changing seasons, nurturing and guiding their subjects to do the same.

Exceptional Progress if you are mindful to keep out of the way of the natural Flow.
It would be a fatal error to try to alter its course.
This is a time of Being, not Doing.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

This is thoroughly a matter of the heart.
If everything you attempt, no matter how carefully planned, ends in disarray, then examine your motives.
They are the cause of your predicament.
It isn’t that your motives aren’t pure — even the best intentions will fail under these circumstances.
What stymies you in this situation is that you have a motive at all.
Free yourself of all expectations, release any tenuous grip you may have, and roll with it.
This is totally out of your control.
There are higher powers and more elements affecting the outcome of this situation than you can imagine.
Get out of their way.

Ch’ien, heaven is above; Chên, movement, is below. The lower trigram Chên is under the influence of the strong line it has received from above, from heaven. When, in accord with this, movement follows the law of heaven, man is innocent and without guile. His mind is natural and true, unshadowed by reflection or ulterior designs. For wherever conscious purpose is to be seen, there the truth and innocence of nature have been lost. Nature that is not directed by the spirit is not true but degenerate nature. Starting out with the idea of the natural, the train of thought in part goes somewhat further and thus the hexagram includes also the idea of the fundamental or unexpected.

THE JUDGEMENT

INNOCENCE. Supreme success.
Perseverance furthers.
If someone is not as he should be,
He has misfortune,
And it does not further him
To undertake anything.

Man has received from heaven a nature innately good, to guide him in all his movements. By devotion to this divine spirit within himself, he attains an unsullied innocence that leads him to do right with instinctive sureness and without any ulterior thought of reward and personal advantage. This instinctive certainty brings about supreme success and “furthers through perseverance”. However, not everything instinctive is nature in this higher sense of the word, but only that which is right and in accord with the will of heaven. Without this quality of rightness, an unreflecting, instinctive way of acting brings only misfortune. Confucius says about this:
“He who departs from innocence, what does he come to? Heaven’s will and blessing do not go with his deeds.”

THE IMAGE

Under heaven thunder rolls:
All things attain the natural state of innocence.
Thus the kings of old,
Rich in virtue, and in harmony with the time,
Fostered and nourished all beings.

In springtime when thunder, life energy, begins to move again under the heavens, everything sprouts and grows, and all beings receive for the creative activity of nature the childlike innocence of their original state. So it is with the good rulers of mankind: drawing on the spiritual wealth at their command, they take care of all forms of life and all forms of culture and do everything to further them, and at the proper time.

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