The era of dominance by greed is coming to completion. This is the message I’m given as I consult the I Ching for a reflection on NOW: we are in the time of Before Completion.

The necessary changes have been prepared for. All that remains is to cross the river to new life. However, just at the point of crossing the I Ching posts a stern warning: STOP! DO NOT CROSS! The time is not right yet!

First, it says, we must visit the hexagram of The Cauldron where important work to ensure a successful crossing must be completed.

We find the cauldron stored in the sacred temple of the ancestors. It is a huge bronze vessel, forged to withstand the heat of a large fire, in which foods for nourishment are cooked and blessed by the ancestors.

The Cauldron is a sacred chalice that nourishes the true needs of mankind. To eat from the cauldron is to consume real nourishment from the divine—to consume what is truly needed.

The I Ching is showing us that the vessel we need to forge, to safely cross the river to new life, is the cauldron: We must consume from real need in order to free ourselves from being consumers of insatiable greed. If we can forge a self that consumes from true need, in alignment with spirit, we are freed forever from the domination of greed.

Corporate greed requires consumers to satisfy its insatiable appetite. United consumers, those who shift their consumption to that which is truly needed, to that which supports the life of the planet, move the world into the new balance that awaits.

This is the collective action the world awaits now, and that cauldron of change is but steps away from completion. However, as Jan states in her blog, we must all address the ruling 1% within ourselves to be fully available to this much needed concerted collective action without. If our individual consumer demands don’t change, how can we join the 99% in collective action to change the world?

Every one of us has a 1% within, a ruling, dominant part that demands the lion’s share of our energy. That energy can take the form of money. How much of what we consume is truly in alignment with what we need? How often are we aligning our personal consuming with the nurturance and guidance of our sacred inner cauldron? What is really controlling us?

Is our spending out of control? Do we deepen our debt to feel better? Do we eat too much of the wrong things? Do we drink too much to calm ourselves, to free ourselves? Do we drug ourselves to soothe and escape? Do we deny ourselves to a fault, under the hidden greed of deprivation and control? Do we satiate our senses with Facebook, the greed of self-importance? The list is endless. What we’re searching for in this questioning exercise is that which has control over our decisions and actions, that which is not derived from inner knowing of what we truly need, which is: food from our sacred cauldron.

Our inner 1% must become a steward now to the true needs of the 99% within us, versus being allowed to be a taker of the energy of it for its own separate greedy agenda. The same premise holds true for the new cycle of life we are entering in the world. The 1% must become stewards to that which is truly needed by the 99%. Those who resist will simply lose their funding through loss of consumer demand.

This is the I Ching’s guidance for NOW—the time Before Completion. Do not attempt to force a new order until you’ve forged the cauldron, an attitude of sacred acquiescence to true need. This is the vessel that can sustain a new era beyond the revolution, beyond completion, into a world of sustained balance, nourished by the sacred food in the cauldron, resting in the temple of the ancestors, in the temple of the body, deep within the sacred self.

It is indeed a time to remain calm,
Chuck