# [D16:7M] Vision: [[What the Dancing Seer Sees from the Crotch of Indra’s Web (88 Eyes Stare Back)]] Hexagram: [[Sixteenth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Sixteenth Trial]] Symbols: #ocean #fire #ears #hands #mouth #dreamer #hair #cave #water #night #yellow #eightyeight #eye #twentynine #legs #child #smile 400 BCE I. Ocean of dust, who am I now  and where?  Is this the desert country  I feared even to name?  What strange music  this is, like a once-distant wildfire  finally closing in.  Not like fire, but fire.   Not songs but silences between silenter  notes.  Ears in hands, and mouths  flung open in the smoke-filled dark.   That’s what the music is.   That’s what I smell burning.  II. You did not die.  You can only dream. In dreaming, you have endured the long passage and washed ashore. There is nothing to protest anymore, nobody to hear your appeal.  There are no gods.   Or you are the gods.  Or God  is the Dream.  Or the Dreamer.  What possible difference could any of the giggly old pronouncements  make in the Nostos?  You are going down  into the tall grass which is also the hair  of the earth animal.  You crawl  toward the cave you’ve long feared.  There was never any choice in the matter.  Did you never notice that what you fear  is what you crave?  You crawl  through the hot stench of hair.  The thickets  sting and abrade your hands and knees,  and the rags you ripped off corpses  have made you sick. You shit and piss and puke all along the way.  Long you grow and drench yourself and the earth  hair with your godawful sourness. All the vessels of your body are drained and almost nothing  is left of you now. You are like a sticky  little paper sack.  Emptiness  is your only content.  It will help  to drink water. III. Having survived in the cave through the night,  a silhouette appears in the wands of morning  light stretching inward from beyond  the arched cave entrance.  In the arms  of the black king shines a bundle of red robes.  They are for you to wear For protection from future sickness. At first, you will think it a trick or temptation. You have always been such a good skeptic but not so great that you grew skeptical of your own skepticism.  Seeking only  to separate illusion from reality, you liked singling out  the false object from among the objects of the field.   The inverse never occurred to you, the possibility  of a true object in a false field.  The outward face  of vanity well you saw, yet never the inward.   Failing to see what is right in front of you,   this is called negative illusion. Unable  to bear the risk of deep humiliation, vanity    obsesses over vanity. You who preached against pleasure,  you thought God gave you a name,  that you had laid it up among his  ledgers. You preached “meditate deeply  on the vanity of earthly things.” Perhaps you did not meditate deeply enough. If you had, there would be no meditation to preach on.  How do you suppose you became sick and traveled here? You are like everyone: desperately ironic. If you must be skeptical, then learn to be truly skeptical.  Listen: Where does your skepticism come from? You cling to the false field, blind  to the true object of yourself. One true object dispersed  among the yellow wildflowers of one  true field. IV. Let the cave make  of you a dancing seer.  88 eyes gleam in the dark and the rags  fall from you at the end  of 29 days.  Look how the eyes look  between your legs. Were you deep or long  back then, back when you had a name? You cannot remember. You do not know  what eddies and glistens there now. Is it both or is it neither?  Awakened one, move toward the innermost room of the cave.  Let all eyes feast on you.  This new sex is like a spiraling seashell, and a bright hush spirals out from within.  O, genitalium spiralis! O, complicated simplicity!  Plucked  fruit!  Pot bellied ornament!  The dark chair of the inner chamber waits at the end  of the dance!  V. Look at the fat little child  you’ve become.  A smile spreads out  beneath your nose, archaic and mischievous  as a lost otter in moonlight.  A smile  which smiles back.  Your movement is easy  and roguish.  It is the source of all realism and innocence, two words  for the same thing.  To be outwardly shaped from the inner sound, there is no difference between discovery and invention. To sit is to discover the chair. Discovering the chair, it is natural to invent it.  Hollowed-Out Pot, it is your own emptiness which contains  you.  It is the time for invention. VI. In your vanity, you once insisted on meaning, but now you have forgotten it.  If you know the meaning, you cannot love the mystery. So you lived as if there was no mystery.  What is large or small, far or near, inside or out?  What difference is there now? Emptiness contains the empty. What was emptied? Everything  there is.  Mystery’s private meanings.  The secret  work done as you did it.  In this cave,  all that’s left of you is a single particle  of human flesh, one little fat kid dancing, the last  living thing.  Hair and nails  float about like dust at dawn. Lightswept words of the mouth issue out  of the mouth of the cave.  Breathing  is a miracle.   Who is breathing?  The 88 eyes are all inside you, but where is the you to be inside of?  There is only the odor and sound of the Nostos, this voyage with no voyagers.  Ocean of dust. VII. Ocean of dust, where am I now  and who?  Is this the name I feared  to desert?  What strange silence  it is, like a desert after the rain.  Silence of just after. The quiet  fugue in the ears and hands  and mouths let open in the dust- cleared dawn, the fugue-soaked earth.