Sometime in the last year, a group of mid-ranked government officials gathered for a dinner in a private room in a Beijing restaurant, all slightly nervous, but keen with anticipation.

The guest of honor – a Buddhist master who would predict their fortunes.

The master looked around the room and into the eyes of each of the dozen or so attendees, according to one of those present, who spoke on condition of anonymity as officials and Communist Party members are not supposed to believe in “superstition”.

“He picked people out depending on the shape of their eyes and told them whether they had been touched by luck or misfortune,” the source, a government official with ties to the leadership, told Reuters.

A few months later, one of the people present whose eyes told of misfortune to come was under investigation for abuse of power, the source added.

“At times like this with so much uncertainty, lots of us are looking for ways to foresee our fortunes,” the source said.

The source declined to name the master, citing a fear he may be arrested.

Chinese people, especially the country’s leaders, have a long tradition of putting their faith in soothsaying and geomancy, looking for answers in times of doubt, need and chaos.

Here’s a bit I found about China’s magical relationship with the past and the future…

The Chinese term for “occult arts”(數術shushu) refers to a number of systems for determining fate. Originating in ancient China, shushu has received much attention throughout Chinese history. In ancient times, “shu”數(“numbers”) were considered a part of nature, and shushu (literally “art of numbers”) was perceived as a system of natural laws governing the cosmos. Occult arts included both techniques and theories for understanding the relationship between human beings and the cosmos. In other words, shushu was both a traditional Chinese view of the universe and a variety of divination techniques based on this view. Thus,”shu”has the meaning of both “numbers” and “calculation.”Because of the significance attributed to numbers, shushu is not synonymous with mathematics and impiles more than numerology. For instance, in shushu, numbers were perceived as either ominous or auspicious, and can therefore represent fate. Hence, to master “numbers” was to both explicate the past and envision the future, as stated simply by Yan Shigu 顏師古(581-645), a scholar of the classics:”Occult arts are divination.”Further, in addition to numerology, shushu eventually came to include the study of various sorts of correspondences, including concepts related to time and space.

Of course, there’s no book of Chinese divination that I value more highly than the I Ching. I’ve gone through periods of my life beginning each day with a reading from the oracle — it can be a great mindfulness practice that might focus your mind on a new question or possibility each day, investing your attention with novel perspectives and unexpected expectations.

The I Ching can also be used as a tool for creativity. Here’s an insightful interview with Philip K. Dick exploring his interest in the I Ching and his use of the divination system in his fiction writing…

VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?

DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.

VERTEX: What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?

DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For instance: “The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised.” If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

VERTEX: Doesn’t Taoism fuse the ethical and the practical?

DICK: This is the greatest achievement of Taoism, over all other philosophies and religions.

VERTEX: But in our culture the two are pitted against one another.

DICK: This always shows up. Should I do the right thing or the expediate thing? I find a wallet on the street. Should I keep it? That’s the practical thing to do, right? Or should I give it back to the person? That’s the ethical thing. Taoism has a shrewdness. There’s no heaven in our sense of the word, no world besides this world. Practical conduct and ethical conduct do not conflict, but actually reinforce each other, which is almost impossible to think of in our society.

VERTEX: How does it work?

DICK: Well, in our society a person might frequently have to choose between what he thinks is practical and what is ethical. He might choose the practical, and as a result he disintegrates as a human being. Taoism combines the two so that these polarizations rarely occur, and if possible never occur. It is an attempt to teach you a way of behavior that will cause such tragic schisms not to come to the surface. I’ve been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for, to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person escapes the tragedy of matrydom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of conflict.

VERTEX: What if a person should come to a situation in which the ethical and the practical cannot be fused under any circumstances?

DICK: One thing that I have never gotten out of my head is that sometimes the effort of the whole Taoist thing to combine the two does not always work. At this point the line says, “Praise, no blame.” Those are code words to indicate what you should do and the commentary says that the highest thing for a person to do would be to lay down his life rather than to do something which was unethical. And I kinda think that this is right. There never can be a system of thought that can reconcile those two all the time. And Taoism takes that into account, in one line out of over three thousand.

If this Chinese magic, I Ching, PKD thread has captured your interest, check out this vid featuring the Philip K. Dick android talking about Chinese divination. Also I listened to Chinese Democracy when it was released and I enjoyed it.

If you’ve seen the Man in the High Castle pilot on Amazon please comment below. I’m late to that party but hope to screen it soon.

Stay Awake!

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This month we remember the late, great Terence McKenna. The author, lecturer, scientist and philosopher was the heir apparent to Timothy Leary, bringing more lucidity, humor and insight to spreading the gospel of the psychedelic experience than anyone has been able to muster since we lost McKenna to brain cancer in April, 2000.

While it’s always nice to recall our heroes in an online post, I mention McKenna to point to the remembrance created by his daughter. Klea McKenna’s The Butterfly Hunter is a gorgeous photography volume that documents her dad’s butterfly collection as she explains in the introduction of her book:

For four years, beginning in 1969, my father lived out an unlikely fantasy: he became a butterfly collector. (We use the term collector but that is just a euphemism for hunter.) Butterfly hunting is a conflicted activity, a desire for beauty and a small act of violence, both justified by science. Preserving something by taking its life. As a child he had idolized the Victorian era’s explorers and naturalists, in particular Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s forgotten partner in the discovery of Natural Selection. The ship carrying Wallace’s entire collection of Amazonian specimens (four years’ worth) caught fire and sank into the Atlantic before reaching Europe, and in turn history overlooked him. After my father’s death, more than three decades after they were collected, I inherited a large trunk full of butterflies, over 2000 of them. Unopened since they had been captured, each one was still meticulously labeled and wrapped in the papers he had available to him at the time: American magazines, local newspapers, letters and his own notebook pages.

I began to sift, slowly, through his collection, as though it were an archeological treasure or encoded messages from another time. Through the dates and place names I traced his course – Sumatra, Timor, Singapore, Colombia, Amazonas – and began to see how, as our parents’ children, we are each tied to the history of the events that we missed. I see him, each night returning to a small, sweaty, mosquito-netted room, sorting and labeling the day’s boon to the hum of an electric fan. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was raging, the Nixon administration was self-destructing, student revolts were flaring around the world and he was folding the headlines of these events into hundreds of origami-like envelopes to hold his Lepidoptera specimens.

McKenna’s book is full of thoughtful images that provoke contradictory responses: If we kill something to preserve it, what has actually been preserved? Do images from the past contain the energy of the events they document, and does making images of those images make that energy more immediate or even further removed?

Terence McKenna was educated as an art historian and an ethnobotanist who traveled the world as a young adult seeking art, plants, psychedelic experiences with indigenous shamans, and butterflies. This book invites us to walk in his footsteps by including images of Terrence McKenna’s actual field maps and previously unpublished snapshots of the author on his adventures — a passport photograph from the period is both haunting and hilarious.

The creatures he captured for his collection are exquisite, made even more beautiful and fragile-seeming by the headlines and photographs on the papers they were wrapped in. The book opens with a speckled, golden specimen wrapped in what looks like a Tarzan comic strip from Malaysia — one can imagine McKenna himself getting a chuckle out of the juxtaposition. A handful of butterflies fall out of another piece of paper featuring a photo of Vietnam War protesters in San Francisco carrying a sign that says “Not one more dead.” A gorgeous black and red butterfly is pictured alongside the ghostly stain it left on the plain white paper it was wrapped in and we are treated to yet another symbol of the persistence of memories.

The book is very spare with each butterfly and wrapper shot against a plain white background, but it’s full of complex conversations between cultures from around the world, between the present and the past, and — most importantly — between a daughter and her father. Here are some of Klea’s photographs:

The Butterfly Hunter also includes an unfinished, unpublished short story about butterfly hunting written by Terrence McKenna. The book originally appeared in 2008. Buy the new printing of The Butterfly Hunter directly from Klea McKenna here.

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