The caterpillar, sitting on a mushroom,
smoking a pipe, said," Who are you ? "
Alice responded, " I hardly know, sir, just at
the present. At least, I know who I was when
I got up in the morning, but I think I must
have changed several times since then."
" What do you mean by that ? " said the
caterpillar sternly." Explain yourself."
" I can't explain myself, I'm afraid sir,"
answered Alice, " I'm not myself, you see."
Changes, changes, changes, changes....
The creation of the eight trigrams of the
I Ching is attributed to a legendary sage,
Fu Shi, who is reputed to have lived about
five thousand years ago.
By studying the sky and land, animal tracks
and his own body, he devised the broken and
unbroken lines as symbols of the fundamental
nature of the universe.
From these, he constructed eight trigrams, each
of which stood for an aspect of nature, the
person themselves, and soceity.
The eight trigrams were later arranged into
the I Ching, or Book of Changes, by combining
pairs of them into sixty four hexagrams.
The yin-yang concept is at least as old as the
time of Fu Shi.
It is usually stated that the polarities of yin
and of yang exist everywhere, in everything.
A duality which penetrates all of nature.
However, at the ultimate meditative level of
union with the Tao, there is only unity, and
there are no polarised opposites.
Upon withdrawal from that unified condition
the initial distinction between the observer
and the observed, the subject and the object,
the self and all else, as ego re-emerges,
launches one back into the realm of
distinction and dichotomy. It is in this realm
that the interplay of yin and yang is said to
operate.
So, whether yin-yang is a polarity ' out there ',
or a binary opposition produced by the mind
or brain, is a question which rests already
upon the binary distinction between the
experiencer and the experience, between the
thinker and the thought.
From the perspective of unity with Tao, that
question cannot be posed, because there is no
questioner, no ' me ' to be distinguished in
opposition to a ' my experience '.
So Tao is the source, the origin, the ground,
from which yin and yang emanate.
Yin originally meant ' shady, dark, cold, secret,
mysterious '.
So, it would seem to have been conceived by
observing the north side, the surface of the
boulders, trees, and mountains which faces to
north, and where mosses and plants which
dislike direct sunlight grow. The side where
the frost and snow lingers longest.
That which lies hidden in shadow is
mysterious.
Yang meant ' clear, bright, the sun, heat ', so
the southern side of a mountain, or the
northern bank of a river or side of a ravine,
the aspect which catches the sun's rays.
When the light is bright one can see
everything clearly.
This primary opposition of qualities is then
extended to all else that exists.
Yin is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding,
cool, soft, feminine.
Yang is illuminated, visible, active, aggressive,
dominating, hot, hard, masculine.
Although these opposed qualities can be
precisely distinguished, as in black versus
white, everything that exists is actually a
mixture of the two. Shades of grey. This is
elicited in the yin-yang symbol, black and
white separated by a flowing S-shape, as
a black dot upon the white, and a white dot
upon the black.
The emblematic dot means that everything
contains within it, the seed, the potential, of
its opposite, its partnered quality.
Like the Greek philosophers Heraclitus and
Anaximander, the Taoist understanding of
change is by way of one opposite replacing
the other, just as day becomes night then
becomes day again, and the ocean tide ebbs
and flows.
So the flowing of Tao is an endless and
perpetual oscillation between the twin poles
of yin and yang, each moving toward and
then becoming its opposite before beginning
the inevitable return cycle.
As a pre-scientific experiential insight, I think
that this is a most profound understanding.
Some scientists will scoff, and sneer, because
their worldview is so very much more
' sophisticated ', but I would point out that
this extremely ancient wisdom has made its
mark upon the history of science. One of the
earliest champions of the binary system of
counting - the zeros and ones which allow
your computer and the internet - was
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
In 1666, aged 20, Leibniz wrote what he
called, ultra modestly, a schoolboy's essay,
titled ' De Arte Combinatoria ' , ' On the Art
of Combination '.
This work laid out a general method for
reducing all thinking - of any sort, on any
subject - to perfect exactitude, by transposition
from the verbal format, with all its scope for
ambiguity, into the mathematical format,
where the relationships involved in statements
can be defined precisely.
Leibniz's paper was ignored, and he himself
did not pursue the invention of the new
language, but a decade later he came upon
a version of the I Ching, which spurred his
work on refining the binary system, whose
' either / or ' propositions are familiar to every
computer programmer today.
Leibniz believed that the number one
represented God, and zero represented the
Void, that is, the universe before anything
other than God existed.
From one and zero, - God and the Void -,
springs everything, just as one and zero
can be used, via the binary system of
counting, to express all possible
mathematical ideas.
TOP. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NEXT.
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