Change 1: Frames of Time

Thousands of years ago, Confucius, standing by a river, said: “Everything flows on and on like this river, without pause, day and night.” He was trying to explain the idea of change and how it relates to the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the Tao.

Ergo: Change = Eternal Law = the Tao

1. Change can only be measured when the element of time has been introduced. Time is artificial. It is the construct of humans, in an attempt to define what Change means and to measure its effect on reality as humans see it.

2. With continued and consistent measurement, humans came to realize that it followed the exact same law in every situation, and so gave it a name. Eternal Law.

3. This law, in antiquity, was represented by a single line which represents oneness because it separates above and below, right and left, and a front and back. It was, essentially, an embodiment of opposites called ‘the firm’ and ‘the yielding’, and the continuous transformation of ‘the firm’, melding into ‘the yielding’ and then back again, created the world of being (our 3 dimensional reality). Change is conceived from this continuous transformation, and manifests itself as cycles of complex phenomena such as the changing of seasons, and day and night. The law was observed and duly noted, and that law was Tao.

So. My point in this wordy little blog is to clarify that the I Ching is a book which explains the Tao in pictures, created by various combinations of two images built up of various patterns of broken and unbroken lines. ‘Yes’ was represented by an unbroken line, and ‘No’ was represented by a broken line.

Since the Tao = the Eternal Law, which = Change, we can surmise that the pictures of the I Ching represent Change, which can be measured, in part, by those Changes which occurred through a specified frame of Time.

Understanding the the Eternal Law and how it works will unlock the sequences of Changes which occur at nodes of predetermined time. Ergo—understanding the pictures that represent the Tao allows for those who can see the pictures to also see the changes as it happens on the time line. Go backwards into the past, apply the Eternal Law, and we deduce what must have happened in the past. Go forward, apply the Eternal Law to see the Changes occurring at the nodes of time, and we see what must happen in the future.

So now I come to the part about the Eternal Law. This one is going to take another long wordy post, so I’m going to wool-gather my thoughts here and take a quickie short break for a bit as I ponder about the best way to tackle Eternal Law.

(Continue to Change:  The Three Faces of Change)