The I Ching -- or Book of Changes -- is to those who do not know it, little more than a 'fortune-teller's manual' -- as typically vague and ambiguous as a newspaper horoscope. But to those who do know it, and are able to engage with its deeper nature, its pages contain no less than the measure of the universe -- the complex interactions of the innumerable processes that encompass the very origins of the cosmos, its development, and our co-creative role in it.
The I Ching as we know it today is a treatise of a wisdom so ancient its beginnings are shrouded by the layers of millennia. Go back in time so far that the mists of pre-history descend -- and keep going. In that mist you will find the men and women who first looked up to contemplate the signs of the heavens and looked down to examine the lines of the earth, and who intuited their structure and their nature.
The key figures from this time are dismissed by modern academics as myths and legends; but clearly what is handed down must be handed down from someone; and recent archaeological discoveries at least help solidify the ethereal image of no less than Fu Hsi, the shaman king who lived around 2,800 BCE and from whom, it is believed, the Taoist story begins. It was he who first laid out the underlying structure of the universe -- known as Earlier Heaven -- represented by the eight trigrams of broken and unbroken lines, arranged in opposition to each other. In this sequence of images, the ways of heaven, earth and man are established as dark and light, yielding and firm, and love and rectitude, respectively.
In 1,100 BCE, the King Wen arrangement of the trigrams -- Later Heaven -- was set. When the trigrams of the Earlier Heaven sequence are set in motion, they progress forwards: evolving and accumulating. In this way we gain knowledge of events as they unfold. But by a secondary motion -- a backwards movement -- we may trace events to their beginnings, following their progress from their seeds, thus enabling us to project their course into the future.
This Later Heaven sequence lays the trigrams, no longer in opposition, in such a way as to reveal the divine as it expresses itself through the yearly and daily cycle. In this fashion, all cycles in every plane of experience have light shed upon them.
The Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven sequences work together in that the former's opposing forces, by not cancelling each other out, set in motion the latter's movement; and it is from the tensions created by the forces in opposition and the resultant dynamic evolution that all in the seen universe comes into being.
In honour of the universal principle of duality, these lines are doubled to form hexagrams of six lines. In this simple way, the Chinese concept of the universe is elegantly and fully expressed. Therein lies the heart of the I Ching. And it is here that the work of understanding the unfolding of events becomes an ability to shape and guide them.
But the I Ching is more than just a book which explains the universe. It is a gateway to the processes themselves -- a method by which we may engage with them; and in doing so, transform ourselves into no less than co-creators of the universe and our destinies.
The western academic mind has difficulty in accepting that, once set into motion, a chain of events can be influenced by human intervention. But this takes account of only the physical world, which is itself determined by the laws of cause and effect. In the realm where time and space prevail, the march of events and their causal effects on each that follows may be seen as deterministic. But there exists a non-physical realm. An invisible universe which acts upon the visible in the way the wind causes ripples to form on the surface of otherwise still water. For the Chinese, this is the realm of the spirit. The spirit is confined to no fixed point in either time or space and so is utterly free of the effects of causality.
The concept of Taoist cosmogony outlines this still further. Chapter one of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching explains that the physical and non-physical realms arise together from a single source: an ancient mother, as it were, to the 'children' that are the seen and unseen universe. This source is described by Lao Tzu as the 'mystery of mysteries' and the 'gateway to all wonders'. In this 'zero point' of creation, in the absence of time and space, there is no past and future and so it follows there cannot exist even a present moment -- eternal or otherwise. And with no time and space there can be no before and no after -- no indefatigable march of events, the outcome of which we are inextricably tied to. Here exists all things in a kind of pregnant potential. And it is entirely consistent with Taoist cosmogony that the realm which exists beyond the bounds of time and space, and that which does not, exist together in a dynamic harmony.
It is because we perceive the universe through a set of filters that physical reality appears to us in the four dimensions of space and time. Far from being a filthy veil that we must discard, these filters help us to make sense of reality -- to experience it in such a way that we might make progress by living and learning. But make no mistake that it really is through filters that we perceive.
(This view of reality corresponds in many ways with the findings of modern physics, which itself accepts that such concepts as a physical and permanent universe populated by objects that are separated in time and space is only an illusion of a deeper reality.)
It is this realm of 'pregnant potential' that, through the I Ching, we may access and, by means of it, control the invisible ocean which shapes the continents of our physical reality.
Part 2
