What are the Fundamental Aspects of Change Anyway?

 

What are the Fundamental Aspects of Change Anyway?

Time Passes – Another Understanding Evolves

” And thus we can also say that li [pattern in its most personal or integrated sense] encodes networks of social and cosmological knowledge in a distinctive practice-oriented medium that is neither strictly “oral” nor “literate”...

...Zhu Xi (1130-1200) takes hexagrams as signs in a process of mind training. His project is to work back past the meaning of the Chinese language texts to what he sees as the pre-linguistic expression of the meaning in bare hexagrams, and from the hexagrams to the deeper layer of meaning that they in turn represent – to the very order of things, which he calls “the pattern”, ( li ).”

Kidder Smith, from The Difficulty of the I Ching, pages 5 & 15

“Patterns of energy flow were the great metaphysical discovery of the prehistoric world because they were analogies for social life and for the structure of the whole cosmos....Energy flow is fundamentally the same for our life processes as it was for our distant [prehistoric] cousins.”

Paul Shepard, from Welcome Home to the Pleistocene, pages 162 & 163

While Kidder Smith was examining how we, as modern interpreters perceive the Yijing, through its various avenues of cognition, Paul Shepard, as a biologist was exploring the genetic principles of perception itself. And even with the limitations of these types of broad-brush explanations, a note of cosmic patterning, at the heart of the Aspects method, reveals itself to us in the duplicity of their language.

The three sancai, or potentials, of Heaven, Earth and Man are terms that reflect one way of seeing the world, an ancient way, but also modern when reinterpreted as Environmental, Personal and Cultural context that more accurately reflect our sensibilities today. Their metaphysical relationships are best understood as patterns imprinted on our very genes.

The sixteen Aspect groups could be read as the Aspects of Change. Or for that matter, so could the interactive, dynamic relationships of all three image/potentials in each hexagram, as they reflect each hexagram's conceptual meaning. Yet, in consideration of the idea that a more primitive perception (energetics) is a key to understanding the deepest layers of meaning in the Book, perhaps it would be more accurate to define both sancai (the three potentials of environment, humanity and culture) and sixiang (the primordial flow of energy) in their simplicity as the two, deepest Aspects of Change available to us.

The Aspect groups themselves represent sensible realms of experience, and the patterns of energy flow that give rise to those groups are what continues to connect us with the prehistorical world of our inherent human nature. But it is the very notions of time (when, within a cyclical flow of energy) and place (where, in context) seen as a mutually reinforcing continuum - so modern yet so primitive - a truly fundamental way to explore the Changes.