Keeping One's Stopping Still

I've only remembered to place a hyphenation mark between the "t" and the "i" in the term "question" recently. Quest-ion. Does a person go on a quest to get an answer or to find the right question? I'm thinking it's maybe the latter. In the past, when I've somehow managed to ask the right question about some topic or subject that confuses me, the answer I received resolved my doubts, and allowed me to move on in innocence to some other aspect of my life.

This predicament come to the fore when I started using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle. I didn't think about using the Book of Changes (I Ching) as an oracle when I first acquired it serendipitously. I only meant to look it over and maybe read some of the fascinating pages that I'd briefly scanned over upon my first encounter with it at a stranger's house.

I asked for this book to be mine, and it was freely given to me. I write that now, but I couldn't imagine me in a similar situation not giving the book to anyone who asked for it with the intensity I displayed at the time. My host was just a boy in his twenties whose trust funds allowed him to rent houses for him and his friends in exotic places to do sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Key West was, is, and always will be an exotic place. Location. Location. Location.

When I write about stuff like this I have to look about me to see the trophies of my quests before I recommend others do likewise. I live like a dog. I'm barely scraping by. Follow my advise and you'll only get sackcloth, ashes, and earn the hatred of your children for your reward. One little mistake and I'll be thrown into the institutionalized meat-grinder of The State and die alone. If I don't get thrown into the institutions of the State, I'll still die alone... "and the men will cheer, and the boys will shout, and the ladies they will all cry out, and they'll all feel gay, when felix comes marching home."

The thing about using any oracle comes down to asking the right question persistently. Anybody can stumble across the right question occasionally, with the question being: How do they know what happened after they did ask the right question was due to asking the right question?

It took nearly thirty years of daily use of the I Ching as an oracle for me to realize that the whole deal was about learning to ask the right question. What is simple is easy, but what is realized as simple and easy is not so simple or easy.

For me, I had to ask, and ask, and ask again or many more times before I got it right. The trick with the I Ching, at least the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of it would not answer my questions unless I did ask the right question, and it wouldn't answer if I just rephrased it again and again.

It didn't take me that long to realize what happened if I did ask the right question. Ecstagony. That's a word I figured I'd coined by combining ecstasy and agony, and I coined it as a shortcut because if I asked the right question, it became more and more lucid that I was gonna get dished up one or the other as my just deserts.

Of course if I was rewarded with ecstasy I was an extremely happy camper, but if I didn't I was gonna suffer agony, and for much longer than I was gonna suffer ecstasy. Why would I ask questions that at best was gonna bring one or the other? You might notice that the reward of either brought suffering.

Maybe what kept me consulting an oracle whose only reward was suffering was that my previous suffering could only be unwoven by more suffering. My asking the other the right question also brings suffering as a reward. The more I learned about how to ask the right question at the right time, the quicker I could posit suffering in the other as misdirection, slip out the door like a thief in the night, and get outta town while the gitting wuz good.

In other words, knowing that I could ask the right question as misdirection allowed me to stay in one place, and stop going on the road as misdirection. Asking the other the right question cause them to take to the highway, not me.

Then, I had to be able to do it in my home town where nary a soul recognized that I wasn't who they thought I was. I had to prove to myself that I could be here and still be a healer and prophet, because everybody whose anybody in the biz gnows that's impossible.

I'm prejudiced, of course, because my path with heart is nearly over, and if it takes me another thirty years to process a nearly chosen ritual to explore I'd be 99 years old by then. I'm pretty sure I'll keep riding the horse I came to town on and kept the faith with.