Hexagram 36

The darkening of the light

I wanted to report on a synchronicity I experienced last week, relevant to our painful historical moment and perhaps good advice for many of us right now. An acupuncturist I worked with a few years ago emailed me out of the blue. He said he had been appreciating my newsletter. He felt I needed to check out the I Ching, in particular Hexagram 36, “the darkening of the light.”

The acupuncturist is a black American man. He felt positive about the future when he was a kid in the 1960s. He wrote:

The options for a progressive life looked great, civil rights gains were kicking in…I felt equality was near by. I felt extremely hopeful that this world was awakening to a reality that would start to give more of us freedom, free white people from the box they were in as well as others.

Then the anti progressive forces kicked in the 70’s and things took a turn for the worse.

Mass incarceration, drug infestation, poor education, housing, job: all of that forced me into an existentialist crisis.

I turn to spirituality…explored Yogic and Daoist traditions, which eventually led to ancient Egyptian spiritual systems. However what turned me around was the introduction to the I Ching. This oracle system helped me weather the storm of apathy and depression. I have used it in my personal and professional life, it speaks to the Masses (ignorant), Followers of Wisdom, and Sages.

… I want you to remain curious and not give in to the madness surrounding us. There is a Hexagram 36, where we are instructed how to live in a time of darkening of the light.

I read my acupuncturist’s email and realized I hadn’t check in with the I Ching for a while. I find it to be the most uncannily accurate divination system. Some thinkers have related the 64 Hexagrams of the I Ching to the structure of the DNA code. It might reveal a mathematical order built into the process growth, development, and decay of any living system or of life itself.

Martin Schönberger, in The I Ching and the Genetic Code: The Hidden Key to Life (1973) theorizes that the structure of the genetic code — the 64 codons formed from nucleotide triplets in DNA — is mirrored by the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.