# [D1:7M]
Vision: [[The Clear Water is Mirroring the Clear Sky]]
Hexagram: [[First Hexagram]]
Trials: [[First Trial]]
Symbols: #sea #mirror #sky #sun #moon #bodyadrift #ocean-sky #sky-earth #river #dreamer #game #six #pairofbrothers #daughter #four #fourty-four #three #one #two #bead #ears #hands #eye
August 20th, 1934
I.
A dark shape beneath the steadfast constellations is moving out toward the open sea. The clear water is mirroring the clear sky. Somewhere over the darkened world the sun and moon are pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet is held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turns. It is always beginning in this way, one last body adrift in space.
Or let’s say the body only appears to drift. Rather, it is everything else turning beneath the body which gives the impression of movement. The body is still. In the beginning, and also at what is called the end, the body remains the body.
If the body should be eaten by the fiery-eyed crabs and creatures below, it is still the body. If it should be excreted and dissolved, it is the body. Everything around it is always transforming, causing the appearance of mutability. The body, however, is unmovable. Just watch. The body is only resting in the same dark ocean-sky. It is always awaited and, without moving, is always arriving. The selfsame drift-still body is always just beginning.
II.
Light is emerging in the darkness, a primordial glimmer and then a brilliant dawn. There are totalitarian rainstorms, too, as black as holes, just as there are certain rare days so clear the very ends of the earth planet can be seen. It is always beginning in this way, on the earth and in the body. The lighting of all the sky-earth begins with the body’s blood sacrifice. Thus the body is every river spilling again into the sea. Or so it seems. For we know it is only the planet that shapes itself, only the planet that travels.
Towering over the rivers are the great mountains, and, at the peak of every one, a Dreamer of the Unborn. Though each knows little of the body adrift or the ocean that holds it, a dreamer can usually describe the rivers in exquisite detail. Together, the dreamers weave their dreams into elaborate shapes and patterns. The weaving constitutes and infinite game, which is also called The Glass Dream Game.
III.
A dream is a tubelet comprised of cytoskeletal microtubules which produce, in each one, a super radiant quantum optical coherence. The tubelet is set down into mountain-, river-, and alluvial systems collecting information beneath even as it transmits the dream deep into the earth. This is what is sometimes called interferometry, a method of measuring the space around the body. What the body is not, reveals a little about what the body is.
Each new dream is like a seed and each new growth—cottonwood, aspen, juniper, corkbark—transmits its radiance out onto the deserts and scurries up the mountains, again to the dreamer, whose ear cups the soil.
The dreamer cannot actually speak the language of the earth, for language itself divides earth from body. The dreamer can only translate as well as possible, and therefore description is always invention. But this is all part of the Game, and for each translation-invention, the dreamer places a single glass bead the size of a small seed, into a vessel that can never be filled. Each vessel, at the end of each day, is placed into a labyrinth with no end, as old as the earth planet itself, in a game which can never be mastered.
And here, then, we must see, this very dream as a bead. In its reflection is the Dreamer, the player of the Game whose object is never to cease.
IV.
But if a player can dream: “once there was a body,” couldn’t it just as easily be dreamt, “once there were two bodies, and they were siblings, and one was living and one was dead?”
Couldn’t it be dreamt that in the beginning there were six gods, three of creation and three of death?
What if it goes like this:
The six gods were in fellowship and loved each other without reservation and encouraged the activities of each with genuine interest and enthusiasm. The six comprised the particular tubelet passing through the naval of the body. Each was a node in a nebula of information passing in and out of the body at every moment. Each node holds a secret that tells part of the Truth.
V.
It is dreamt: A god of creation is bringing into the world a pair of brothers and is pleased. A god of death is taking one brother away and now puts him in the center of a great dark ocean where he soon freezes and drowns, then rises, dead dead dead, to the surface. The gods are pleased with their tasks and with each other.
Another creator god, who is working not at the scale of matter but of mind, is sneaking knowledge into the living brother’s soul and a death god is scooping most of it right out again, leaving only a few dribbles and crumbs behind in the soul cavity of the living brother. The living brother feels something has been extracted, but can’t seem to remember what.
The living brother begins to search the mountain for something he might have lost. The gods are pleased. The third creator god is working at the scale of time, and is leaving the living brother kernels of the missing Truth beneath rocks, inside places of dense growth, in fox- and squirrel holes, bird nests, and in shallow-water tributaries leading from the river. The creator god is lighting small smokeless fires above the hiding places so that the living brother might find them within his own lifetime.
The death god is flooding the river and spreading wildfire throughout the forest so that the living brother despairs of the devastation. At the moment the living brother feels he can’t go on, he uncovers, from cracks between rocks of a great vertical granite escarpment, two clues about the lost brother who is also himself, though the living brother doesn’t know this yet. The vague clues give him courage to continue a search he can never conclude.
The gods are pleased.
VI.
The living brother finds a dreamer like himself. She is striding naked and elegant in the forest, song-sung and long-limbed, from a neighboring mountain, and soon she gives birth to a daughter.
Already the daughter’s dreams shine from her glass beads. Seeing this, he begins to remember something, if only barely. He notices his own body beginning to wither. His skin begins to wrinkle as though he’d bathed in water a long time. He feels cold in his lungs and his abdomen bloats. His shoulders shrink and his beard whitens. His life begins to leave him as his daughter cups her hands and drinks it from the river. Is she four years old or forty-four? How has she grown so tall in so short a time, glowing brighter and seeing more fiercely into her own heart than he ever knew how?
She is soon becoming a creator god and they of death.
The three are pleased.
VII.
He dies the death the daughter someday dreams.
I am she.
All along, there is only one body. Yet for anyone to know it, the body must be split in two. One must yearn for the missing other. It is the yearning that moves the earth, that holds the other in its stillness.
This is how it is all beginning. For every life is a dream, and each dream a bead, and in its glass, the reflection of the one who dreams it.