Lakshmi Narayan

Underneath the stories of pleasure and pain that we live, there is another movement happening—the journey of consciousness in time. A journey from blindness to vision. From ignorance to wisdom. From alienation to love. At some point in their life-time(s), individuals become aware of this process of awakening and the journey takes on momentum and critical mass. 

Keys are found and doors open —across time and culture. The person in quest-in begins to see that there are bridges to understanding that are fragmented and buried in the myths and stories of many cultures. Perhaps some of these associations resonate in the context of a past-life memory, or a feeling of inexplicable familiarity. One’s own “body of knowledge”—this very flesh— awakens to a celebration of the cosmic principles of life. Belief systems and values within the single lifetime collapse and are reintegrated over-and-over, leading to many rebirths in one life.

I’ve understood something about this as revealed through the sacramental journey, the I Ching, sacred geometry, the spelling of words, and the meaning of archetypes. This understanding is transformative. It has a consistent and demonstrable logic to it. It is a code. You could call it the awakening code.

Like DNA, it is a pattern which informs and enlightens. The inter-connections between apparently dissimilar things or people. The levels of spontaneous unfoldment in a process. The nature of divine Mind.

There are myths about individuals who have achieved enlightenment, but the stories usually focus on the personality and not the process. While the process itself has as many flavors as the personality, it is intrinsically timeless, and is happening to us even when we are ignorant of it. The process of awakening has relevance to our time because it is largely forgotten as a human evolutionary purpose.

I have been a student of the I Ching for 35 years, starting from when I was a young college student. My understanding of the I Ching took a quantum leap when I realized that the I Ching is built on the same ‘principle of bifurcation’ that Jack reveals in letters, and that fractal geometry reveals in patterns. The I Ching has been a huge but invisible part of my life, and has molded my character with the certainty of a ‘living’ system that is somehow synchronized with our DNA. The 64 hexagrams that form the I Ching are built of 4 binary pairs, just like the letter codons AT UC GT AG form the entire DNA sequence. If the DNA code is a blueprint for Life, could the I Ching be a blueprint for Consciousness? There is another fundamental a connection between our modern technological world and the I Ching. Wilhelm Liebnitz, the man who created the binary system understood the principles of 0 and 1 from the I Ching, which is also built on a fundamental pairing, the whole and divided line.

The I Ching was written as a tool for end-times. It can help one find the Middle Way again during a time when one’s own inner judgment isn’t good enough. One is distracted, abstracted or subtracted by the government, by the media, by pings, by employers, by family, by ill health, by the multiple demands for one’s attention. Finding the Middle Way is no small feat in such a time.

I have worked with entheogens aka psychedelics for 20 years, starting with my first journey with Ayahuasca in Peru in 1997. They have allowed me to delve deep into the mirror of myself, heal life traumas, and understand the nature of self and god and reality through my own experience, not books, not hearsay.

For those interested in a deeper dive into the iChing: I offer a one-on-one apprentice program called Change Your Character where we will study nine hexagrams that are a sequence for character development.