Oh dear ... I'm stuck. (Hexagram 60, LIMITATION)

Three days ago, I chose a hexagram for meditation ... The oracle revealed Hexagram 60, LIMITATION. I'm squirmin'!

LIMITATION encompasses self-discipline ... the cultivation of patience and realistic vision ... the maturity to realize that we can't have it all. (Who'd want it anyway ... where would we put it?!) I am not a very disciplined person; in fact, I'm often daffy, forgetful, and pathetically distractible. I think the longest stretch I've ever gone with an exercise routine is three days; I've given into, up on, and back into various nasty habits a zillion times. Oh, me.

And in the centre of my self-created chaos rests a Buddha ... always. Reminding me of what's at the core of things, if I would only look, see, still myself, and breathe ...

We tend to equate discipline with punishment. Punishment only knocks fear and rage into and out of our bodies and souls. Discipline teaches, guiding us safely along the razor's edge between choice and consequence. We are led to see how past and present choices, circumstances and congruences have conspired (conspire = from the Latin "to breathe together") to land us on a pivot point of change, while ethical mentoring allows us to see what we might evoke from here, given our actions now. Moderate, age- and situation-appropriate discipline evolves character, adding another ring to the tree of wisdom ...

Interesting, too, that LIMITATION comes right before INNER TRUTH in the King Wen sequence of hexagrams. David Spangler, in his marvelous book Everyday Miracles: the Inner Art of Manifestation, provides a brisk antidote to the YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL!! mindset; he writes that "Manifestation is the practice of a creative spirit, not of indulging unlimited desire. It is the practice of being a source, not a sponge."

Of limitation, he says,

Physical reality is based on limits and boundaries ... We live in a finite universe whose individual parts are defined by boundaries ... Everything manifests through taking on limits. That new car you may desire is not a smear of quantum possibilities; it is a specific particular automobile different and discernible from every other automobile. It is blue, not red or yellow. It has four doors, not two ... It has a specific range of characteristics, each of which is a limit upon the full range of possible characteristics. Without those limits, it would not exist.

There is an important distinction here. To acknowledge limits is not the same as acknowledging limitation. Rather it is honouring those boundaries that make specificity possible. Limits permit diversity to exist. Limits make me different from you, and in that difference, creativity is possible between us.

Also the reality of the ecological age is that we need to act in recognition of the finite limits of our world system. We cannot act as of those limits did not exist. We cannot manifest an infinite world within a finite planet, with infinite numbers of people buying and consuming infinite numbers of goods and services. We cannot embrace a philosophy of limitlessness that has no sense of enough ...

(I'm not stuck anymore.)

(Photographic artist unknown.)