Sometimes, change happens, not as a result of a cycle that drives the change, but as a chance encounter.
Sometimes, change happens out of the chaos that is an integral part of the ordered cosmos. An event can materialize out of the blue, with no prior notice, blindsiding us and careening us out into the vastness of interstellar space.
These changes are not predictable. They are part and parcel of what I had touched upon in previous posts, regarding the duality requirement of all things.
Duality Requirement:
Wait…did I write something up about the duality requirement in a previous post? I must have, because this is a very important aspect of the Tao.
Hmm. I can’t remember. I have written about so many different ideas and thoughts on this website over the years that it would take some time to dig around to find it, if in deed, I had already written about it.
In any case, here it is in a nutshell.
Nothing escapes the Taobabe’s duality requirement, not even the Tao.
You must be raising your eyebrows and wondering why I am calling it the Taobabe’s duality requirement. Truth is, I stole this idea from the Ta Chuan (smirk).
[The I Ching]…has principles which contain the categories of all that is–literally, the molds and the scope of all transformations. These categories are in the mind of man; everything, all that happens and everything that undergoes transformation, must obey the laws prescribed by the mind of man. Not until these categories become operative do things become things. [1]
This means that if I have thought about it and it is in my mind, everything that undergoes transformation must obey the laws prescribed by my mind.
If I, the Taobabe, states with unequivocal steadfastness that nothing escapes the Taobabe’s duality requirement, not even the Tao, then it will be so (at least in my universe)–but hey…
I am the Universe.
Wow. It feels great to be a goddess. Hehehe. 😀
Having said that, the Universe is a huge fractal that continues onward and inward indefinitely, but even though it moves forward and onward infinitely, it does not move backwards infinitely.
That is true because there is a beginning, whereby nothing can precede it. This is the finite. Nested within the finite is infinity. In other words, nothing can encompass the depth, breadth, and scope of the original finite Heaven, but everything else that follows this finite-ness is infinite.
One of my favorite physicists, Nassim Haramein, spoke of the duality requirement in an easy to understand way: Inside any finite boundary there is the possibility of infinite divisions of the space, each time creating another set of information. Therefore within any finite boundary there is the possibility of an infinite amount of information. Therefore… you are an infinite being… ~ Nassim Harramein
Remember, the Tao requires a balance of equal and opposing forces: Yin and Yang, black and white, 000000 and 111111, cyclic and sequent. With sequent change, the duality requirement of cyclic/sequent is fulfilled.
Sequent Change
Sequent Change, as defined by the Ta Chuan, Book 2:2, is the progressive [nonrecurrent] change of phenomena produced by causality.
OK. All this shuck and jive (sorry Mr. Wilhelm) basically means that the very first time the SEQUENT CHANGE occurred, it was a singular event.
It had never happened before, so therefore, it was a true beginning. A true Initial Sequent Change, which eventually fractalized into all subsequent sequent changes, but it never returns to its starting point.
Einstein stated that time is an illusion; it is what prevents everything from happening all at once. [2]
Looking at it through the lenses of the scientific community, it hardly makes sense. As far as we can tell, time is real.
The clock counts time in tick-tocking seconds, and the seconds march forward with disregard for the human condition. Time ravages all things (mostly), and it moves in only one direction (that we are currently aware of).
That’s because Sequent Change has always been misunderstood to be existing in the realm where causality operates mechanically, within a non-living entity made up of moving gears and cogs.
BUT
The Universe is ALIVE! I know the Universe is alive because I am the Universe, and I AM ALIVE. The I Ching also supports my assertion by stating that Sequent Change is the succession of the generations, something that is very organic.
The way of the Creative brings about the male.
The way of the Receptive brings about the female.
Therefore, the beginning of sequent change appears, manifested in the succession of the generations, an onward-moving process that never returns to its starting point. This shows the extent to which the Book of Changes confines itself to life.
This means, by using forces of gravity in a certain manner, we can scrub the timeline backwards and forwards as much and as often as we wish, and we can follow all the various future timelines to see where they may go. Remember, the curvature of space-time is mathematically defined by ten more curvature terms than are constrained by the portion that is controlled by matter (more on this in a future posting).
This is due to the fact that gravity and time are, essentially, the same entity. However, in scrubbing the timeline backwards, we can go no further than the Initial Sequent Change.
I wrote about that very first Sequent Change in my posting Round Heaven Square Earth, where Heaven decides to explore, thereby creating the initial change that was needed to begin the initial cycle of Changes which eventually fractalized down to our existence at this very moment.
Subsequent Sequent Changes will depend on an infinite number of occurrences which may or may not affect the Universe. This is true because the character of the I Ching lines, both yin and yang (firm/yielding), combine with the character of the place (superior/inferior), results in a great multiplicity of possible situations. [1]
And therein lies a very compelling question: WHY? Why does Cyclic and Sequent go together? Why does Cyclic Change even need Sequent Change?
I will explore that question in a future posting. For now, au ‘voir, and namaste.
(to be continued)
…
[1] Ta Chuan: The Great Treatise
[2] Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
Taobabe 
taobabe,
This post is coming along at just the right time…’sequent change’ is such a great category and name for one of the types of change…
I am much more a mathephobe than a polymath. What the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away…absence of math skill has probably actually (just a theory) facilitated any writing skill I may possess, which is a segue into my next question:::
A couple of days ago we discussed my writing a ‘pseudocode’ type recipe for a Yijing wearable, specifically Brian Fitzgerald’s watch. Now, as you know there are many programming languages…some look much more like strictly math equations than others.
IF you were looking around for a programming language for non-mathematicians, one that had a look-and-feel more like a blog than a codebase, it would probably be Python.
Seeing your strings of 111111s and 000000s and use of the word ‘sequent’ catalyzed an idea.
Python has been called ‘a language that looks like pseudocode’. It’s becoming chic and fashionable for women to have coding expertise.
The Yijing beadset that I designed contains a very non-standard serial sequence of all 64 hexes, Compared to the sequence you see in any modern I Ching tome, it is COMPLETELY chaotic. But, in the programming world, there is a strange flavor of binary sequences that are both CYCLIC and SEQUENT. They have actually been called by one author ‘chaos that repeats’. The beadset contains one such sequence. Anyone can use the beadset without programming expertise, but knowing what makes the beadset tick could demo quite a few hardware desig and pseudocode demos…which is why it will be used as a TM for Sudokodo.
So, I am announcing here that not only do I accept your offer of collaborating on an article/blog posting about pseudocode/Yijing divination, my contribution will also include runnable examples in Python that will actually do Yijing divinations in programming code that looks almost as friendly as a blog posting, targetting NOT computer scientists but the taobabe culture you seem to be very effectively creating through example. Gawd, do I love smart women.
BTW, my two daughters are taobabes in the making…so I have a vested interest in helping to create easily assimilable content that could result in producing affinity for coding, etc.
Not STEM, but STEAM (putting the Art back into STEM!).
~Allan
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Yay!!! I’m glad you are going to be writing about this because I do not have the capability of writing about programming code. Please let me know when you will be posting your writing on your webpage and I will repost your post on Taobabe. Thank you!!!
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Btw, I sent Brian Fitzgerald a short msg via his blog yo inform that you are interested in a post on such a topic…he sent a msg back that was pretty enthusiastic, so maybe you’ll have sources from two different ‘wells’. As Python programs go the computations involved in Yijing divination would be pretty introductory, unless an attempt was made to adhere to the probabilities of the yarrow stalk method was implemented.
I’ll be ready to send your blue set of oracle beads pretty soon…is your address still at #17?
~Allan
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I just started looking at Python. In fact, I went through the online course and worked through the first chapter. It’s hard. And boring. 😛 But it’s not completely hopeless. I can grasp it, if I know that this tool will do what I want it to do. As yet, I do not have a goal in mind, so it is rather tedious. I’ll keep working at it until I know what it’s good for. 🙂
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Bravo Taobabe, for actually starting!
You’ve immediately touched upon one of the “gotchas” of learning to code.
It’s not like learning to ride a bike, where you just ‘learn how to ride a bike’ (simple goal: pedal in a wavering line for awhile without falling over). It’s really kind-of important to have a “reason” to program, which at the beginning is simply collecting a few very simple tasks to accomplish successfully of very slightly increasing complexity.
Whatever online course you chose should be helping you to do this, but many of them have “generalized” obstacles to overcome that you may or may not find interesting.
What course did you choose? If you got the feeling that the course was teaching you the recipe for doing and I Ching reading in software I bet you would find it more interesting.
Python has quite a bit of function built in that make it easy to have littlle modules of text (called ‘strings’) stored in variables (like “line1” or “line6”). Using some Python commands, I bet at the very beginning your course is showing you how to put text (as “Hello World!?) into a variable (label for text or numbers, a ‘handle” if you will) and how to display the variable (maybe like “Print line6”).
In this way, relating what you are learning to what you already know can be pretty interesting 🙂
Allan
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Here’s some already written open source code that accomplishes I Ching divination in software, written in Python. Someone else’s source code can give you ideas about obvious ways to do things, and ideas about how you would do it yourself (once you get a bit more familiarity::::
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/lucid/pyching/
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Previous comment’s link is made of pure “unobtainium” 🙂
Found this elsewhere, (Cli is mnemonic for “command line interpreted, which means a version of Python that runs in a text window like DOS…a non graphical program that’s character based):::
https://github.com/roorco/CliChing
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Taobabe,
I just had (another 🙂 great idea.
We’ll use the Python code in the previous comments link to actually design
an intro to Python course, based on an introduction to the I Ching.
After looking at the code in the link I kind-a-sort-a can tell what the code is doing, but the Pythista who wrote the code obviously wasn’t trying to teach Python, or really even teach Yijing divination in the 21st century…although s/his code is a perfect starting point for either.
https://github.com/roorco/CliChing
If you read the Python code in the link, you might find it kind of tough to follow what”s happening because the comments aren’t designed for a raw Python beginner. So, I’ll put the code on my site and add some stuff to it that makes it suitable for an actual beginner’s Python programming problem. Might break it into smaller, more digest-able modules easier to understand by ‘knowbs’ like you, AND use the code in any Yijing wearable that gets designed that can run Python.
Remember…that was the original idea…a 21st century I Ching divination wearable imbued with taobabe chic and a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ lianshanyi electronic functionality, capable of accessing solid state drive data atop the coldest partially evacuated Kunlun volcanic expansion 🙂
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Allan, I am sooooooo far away from doing something like this. 😀 I think I can say “Hello world.” And that’s about it.
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Hehehheh :(:
‘Sudokodo’ is many things, but I don’t often draw attention to the fact it is also a martial art.
All martial arts are subject to Sun Tzu’s rules of war.
One of his rules is, “when you are far away, appear to be near).
Since you appear to be ‘soooo far away from doing something like this’, I must say I am glad to hear it :):
I will add ‘a program made of a thousand codes begins by writing just one”:)
~Allan
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