Clarify your sense-making with the I Ching zeitgeist sandwich

The I Ching or Book of Changes dates from Neolithic times and is a pillar of Chinese thought. The oracle is traditionally cast using yarrow stalks but can also be done with coins or just a button on a web page .

This article discusses four aspects of the I Ching that are relevant to our modern times:

• Polarities and the forces between them
• Quantum states and waveform collapse
• Archetypes and patterns
• Rituals and learning

Polarities and the forces between them

We are living in polarised time and was ever thus:

Ecclesiastes 3

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:?a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,?a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

The I Ching teaches us that polarities are fundamentals from which other aspects of life, human experience and indeed the universe derive. Understanding how polarities group and interact is the ultimate sense-making framework. In I Ching these comprise the Yin (represented as a horizontal line) and Yang (represented as a broken line):

Quantum states and waveform collapse

And it gets cooler. From polarities we get 1's and 0's. Leibniz was inspired by his woodblock of the I Ching King Wen sequence to invent binary:

And cooler still. While Yin and Yang do form a binary language that is not the end of the story. Indeed the Yin and Yang most of us know are the Young Yin and the Young Yang. But what about the Old ones .....?

Yes, Yin and Yang are actually Qubits :-)

New ones have just collapsed so we treat them as non-quantum binary.

Old Ones* are just about to enter an indeterminate state before collapsing to their opposite. They are going back in time back into Schr?dinger's famous cat box . How cool is that?

I put this diagram together to show what this means in terms of cycles with reference to the model of Taoist cosmology. Click the diagram to a great website that explains the meaning behind Taoist visual symbols:

And here is a good place to start to understand qubits:

This article explains old and new yin and yang in more detail:

Quantum is key to understanding the craziness of the age of change. Understanding quantum states is also fundamental to strategy. Just ask Ke Jie and AlphaGo:

*Resisting the urge to make an HP Lovecraft joke.

Archetypes and patterns

Yin and Yan are combined together to make assemblages of larger building blocks. This diagram is a great summary:

It's like lego for adults ??

And the great thing is, the I Ching language is the ultimate in intuitive*

E.g.

• Summer has to be summer because two yang lines are (heat and light) *2
• Winter has to be winter because two yin lines are (dark and cold) * 2
• Spring has to be spring because earthy (dark and cold) on top are nourished by heavenly (heat and light) below
• Autumn has to be autumn because earthy (dark and cold) withers when heavenly (heat and light) departs. Sheer poetry.

Here is an example of a completed hexagram:

Understanding archetypes—or patterns—is a critical part of making sense of our VUCA world. And archetypes with built in ambiguity, better still.

*note: I Ching is built from the bottom up—over and under are important, so e.g. light and movement from below raises up earth = spring, light and movement from above presses down on earth = autumn

Rituals and learning

I Ching is traditionally cast with yarrow. No, not like this, AI image generator ??:

Like this:

And the process is repetitive and meditative. I am into my 6th and gaining fluency, having the ritual at least and the creation of the trigrams largely learnt. I have not yet memorised all 64 hexagrams but this will come in time.

The process of casting a hexagram using yarrow takes me about 20 minutes. I can honestly say it is like yoga for the mind. One of the most lovely and relaxing things I have ever done. Mindfulness in contemplation of a question.

Another important feature is spending time with the I Ching is dog whistling the following over and over and over and over again:

• Polarities and the forces between them are important
• Quantum states and waveform collapse are important
• Archetypes and patterns are important

Conclusion

Treat learning the I Ching as a masterclass in sense-making. And if you think fate and consulting oracles is woo, just consider it a narrative random number generator and dive in anyway.

Peace (and war).

Postscript:

<Beware: LinkedIn editor deleted an hour of my work after I pressed the wrong button. This is a compressed version I will publish so I have a saved copy then later elaborate on. And yes it is better second time around so blessing in disguise.>

A joke from the lost draft:

"Comparing your average sense-making framework to the I Ching is like comparing a Sunday kick-around in the park to Brazil vs. Italy in the 1970 World Cup final."

Feng Shui hexagon

Leibniz' woodcut of I Ching

A more woo image with some of the names and orders and polarities in different places (buggy e.g. what is labelled lightening is in fact thunder, mountain, lake is the wrong way up, air is actually wind):

And me struggling to independently come up with the I Ching in a blog from 2020:

Food for thought:

Big Tube theory is a bubble exploring a hexagram:

I guess Big tube is the chi perhaps?

like smoke or water exploring binary code maze.

This is what an AI image generator makes of that thought:

Further thought:

Hero's journey - moving from the normal world to the world of adventure is to take a quantum leap from young yin and yang to old yin and yang.

Indeed this would seem to equate to the second quadrant - from entering the world of adventure to the death/rebirth of aha. So 1/4 old yin yang 3/4 new yin yang is my conjecture.

And I have since found this article on I Ching probabilities showing my conjecture matches 100% to the coin toss method:

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And here is a further iteration after considering it for another day, correcting mistakes and adding in Schr?dinger's Cat:

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