The Chinese Book of Changes, I Ching, develops a system of lines and broken lines that represents the processes that underlie all creation. The first unbroken line is the conscious observing existentially inexistent jiva atman Buddhamind self monad of the infinitesimal here and now primal core of being from within time and subjective creativity, the pure private essence of all infinitesimal subjective atomicness. It breaks into public relativistic time and space, into the world, the cosmos, the universe of science and public language. The second unbroken line is the boundless endless all time all space everything Hen, Nirvana, Brahman, One. It breaks into the quantum world of photons, particles, waves, and string theory parts. The public private interface that generates public finite atomness, the atoms that can be publically measured, the atoms of objectivity. The third unbroken line is eternally conserved mass-energy in endless flux. It breaks into mass-less weightless information and information systems in potentially endlessly complex permutations of cybernetics, feedback mechanisms, thermostat like regulators, and levels of system organization. Infinite flux, the unbroken line, makes the improbable probable, that is, generates the bottom broken line of logic, mathematics, dharma, cybernetics, information theory, and the endlessly unfolding string theory complexity that generates the measured world out of the measureless.
In mythology, the first unbroken line is known as Brahma, the Hindu God of Creation, the second unbroken line is known as Vishnu, the Hindu God of Preservation, and the third unbroken line is known as Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction. Once the third line is broken, it changes into the Nous of the Neoplatonists (mind, dharma, logos, systems theory, string theory, logic, mathematics, cybernetics). This changes Vishnu into the Hen (One) of the Neoplatonists and Brahma into the Pneuma (Spirit, Soul) of the Neoplatonists. The breaking of the Vishnu-Oneness line generates the realm of Quantum Mechanics. The breaking of the Brahma-Pneuma line generates the anthropic principle and the shattering of the anthropic principle into public relativistic space and time. Now you have the trinity of science: (1) quantum mechanics, phenomena involving photons and quanta, (2) systems theory, phenomena involving mathematics and systems at various levels of organization, including string theory as the union of highest and lowest levels, (3) and relativistic time and space, phenomena involving gravitation and the cosmic aspect of the above.
Rejoin the breaks in the bottom energy line and you have the laws of thermodynamics that generate the world of emergent systems. You also have the Buddhist trinity of Flux, unbroken energy line, Suffering, broken oneness line, and No-Self, broken Spirit, Soul, Buddhamind line.
These lines and broken lines combine to make eight basic trigrams, combinations of three broken or unbroken lines: Heaven and Earth, Flame (Fire) and Waterpit (Waterpot), Mountain (Mineral/Salt) and Lake (Water/Solvent), Wind (Air) and Thunder (Things in Air). Heaven is the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva trinity and Earth is the Quantum Mechanics, Systems Theory, Relativity trinity. Heaven is the subjective and magical and romantic and Earth is the objective and scientific and realistic. Air is the Neoplatonic trinity and Thunder is the Buddhist suffering trinity. Air is the noble and metaphysical and classical and Thunder is the vulgar and practical and expressionistic.
Mountain is analytical and impressionistic and philosophical and Lake is synthetic and post-impressionistic and literary. Flame is liberal and cubist and artistic and Waterpit is conservative and baroque and political. Now these last two pairs do not quite fit the traditional Chinese interpretation of these trigrams. But, the original pure vision has been spoiled by many attempts to develop relationships between the original system and the traditional Chinese ideas of family relationships, directions of the compass, elements of the physical world, and the progression of the seasons. The result has considerably muddied the original relatively simple schema.
Mountain, which originally symbolized the isolated aloneness of the analytic self, and Lake, the dissolving of the self in space and time (minerals of the mountain dissolve in the lake), have been confused with many images that relate more to local changes in Chinese weather and geography. So also with Chinese image of the free Flame that rips open all organic structures and burns them to their elemental parts like a Cubist painting, as opposed to the river channel that forces things into its predetermined, its fixed patterns (Waterpit. Waterpot) as in some system of Baroque art or absolutistic (read Louis XIV) government.
The message of this system is profound. Do not be overwhelmed by the Thunder, and use the Flame to melt away the metal of the Waterpot, to reveal the hidden truth of Heaven and the Wind (Air) that blows from Heaven. Do not become stuck in the Lake and its marshy pitfalls, the confusions of tribe and language and space and time relationships. Stand tall on the Mountain top and reach for the Wind from Heaven, for the transcendent magic and metaphysics that is never wholly revealed, never completely expressed in the vulgar Thunder, the expressionist events of the public quantum world. Do not submit to the groves of the Waterpit, take the form of the Waterpot, but be your free Flame and Mountain self, rise out of the swampy Lake. Do not allow the Thunder on the Earth to divert you from your quest of the rainbow, the rain of Heaven, the Wind from Heaven (The spirit of Jesus, Aslan the Lion, Virgin Mary, Buddha, Socrates, Mahavira, Kung Fu, etc.) the transcendent spirit from beyond.
As a boy, I heard Ernest Holmes lecture on these ideas ( see his inspirational books, This Thing Called Life, This Thing Called You). Holmes was a great teacher of this three part system in its purity. The I Ching collects these three lines into groups of six, called hexagrams, and develops a complex set of interpretations influenced largely by local Chinese patterns in seasonal weather and geography.
For Holmes, the essential thing, was what the Chinese call the unbroken Yang line. The top line, the creative spirit. It is this unbroken line that is the essential subject of his book, This Thing Called You. Holmes describes how this creative spirit imprints itself upon subjective mind, the bottom reflective Yang line of endless energy flux as it breaks into a Yin line of information and systems control. This is the primitive unconscious of Freud and Jung (for Jung, a collective unconscious filled with primitive archetypes, patterns). This unconscious shatters, as libido, primitive unconscious energy, is smashed to bits by superego and its attempts to maintain systems control. Holmes spoke of a universal energy and information system that mirrored the creative spirit to generate the broken line of the visible atomic world of finite particulars.
The trigram that reflects this notion is the Mountain trigram, where an unbroken Yang line creatively breaks itself into the broken line information systems of subjective mind and systems organization and the broken line of the visible world of physics and chemistry and quantum mechanics. Holmes called this trinity, Spirit, Law, and Body. It is the same trinity that shows up in the works of scientists like Bernard Rensch (German Evolutionist and author of Evolution Above the Species Level). Rensch describes the world as ruled by three sets of laws, those of correspondence, the middle broken line that generates the quantum world of physics and chemistry, laws of coherence, the broken bottom line that generates the world of logic, mathematics, and systems theory, and laws of parallelisms, the long, ultimately, unbroken line of the creative spirit, subjective self, that breaks itself into the many laws of the parallel, psychological, behavioral, public world.
The reason that the physical line lies in between the unconscious energy line and the creative spirit line, is because, according to Holmes, in its deep essence, the physical line is a series of shadows, images, reflected off of the breaks in the unconscious energy line that essentially mirror, reflect the creative spirit, the long line above the broken mirror, that generates the broken images that become the world. When the creative self recognizes its divine origins and returns to the Christ and Buddha mind state, it ceases to see itself and the world in a broken suffering state, and everything returns to the three long lines, to the magical bliss of Heaven. Thus, Christ, Buddha, Aslan the Lion, are the keys to salvation, they are the states of mind required for Adam, the broken created self of the Earth, to return to the unbroken Heavenly creative state from which he/she originally came.
It is possible to generate analogies between the various trigrams and processes in the natural world. Heaven has similarities with genetic mutation and Lake with recombination, Thunder with emergence and adaptive expression and Flame with natural selection. Wind has similarities with genes as sources of physical set points and Waterpit with feedback mechanisms that maintain these set points, Earth with the measurement of emergent properties, and Mountain with the analysis of input of tests and measures and the comparison of data with set points. In evolution, Mountain is genetic isolation and speciation and Lake is its recombinant and hybrid opposite.
Even so these are images, shadows. The deep creativity of life has no reflection that utterly reveals it. The deep creativity of life is hidden and never completely expressed. There is no complete revelation and expression of life’s deep meaning except endless and infinite timeless time and space beyond time and space, within and without. To expect science to be magic is stupid. To expect the scientific forms that emerge from the deep magic of the boundless to completely enclose the boundless is to misunderstand the difference between the finite and the infinite. What is it you do not understand about the boundless? If you keep trying to put boundaries on it you obviously do not understand.
This is important because our finite life belongs to the measurable real, but its source, beyond birth and death, belongs to the boundless, its meaning and significance, its immortality, also. Getting this simple notion is the key to overcoming the fear of death. You are dying now and living your immortality now. The moment of death is simply the final pause that summarizes a million billion preparations, including each night when your self awareness dies and magically springs back to life in the morning.
Because, it belongs to the boundless, your immortality belongs to all metaphors, to the Buddhist, Christian, Animist, Skeptic, Unbeliever, Hindu, etc. It spills over any limit, boundary you attempt to put on it. It is both certain and uncertain, known and
unknown, true and untrue, real and unreal. It is both comprehended in words and incomprehensible. Parts of it are here and there and nowhere. It has parts and does not have parts. You understand it and do not understanding and will understand it and will never understand it. Immortal things are like that. They spill over our limits and just keep going on and on in spite of our confounded mortal parts. Thus, the trigram of Heaven, the three long Yang lines, just keep going on and on and on. Mass-Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It is so hard to understand that, when you are all cut apart in the broken lines of Earth.
Allan Andrews, Bakersfield, California, September 1st Labor Day Weekend, 2007
Each trigram suggests a different approach to immortality. The Heaven trigram suggests a magical approach like the Hindu and the Earth a realistic approach like science oriented western Materialism. The Wind trigram suggests an idealist approach like that of the Episcopalian Christian, C. S. Lewis. The Thunder trigram suggests a Hedonistic pleasure centered Epicureanism. The Mountain trigram suggests the philosophic and the rational, Socratic or Aristotelian, and the Lake suggests the traditional, Neoconfucian, Neotaoist. The Waterpit trigram suggests the fatalistic, Astrological, and the Flame trigram the radical and the skeptical, the Existential, the Nilistic.
The Lake trigram suggest the forming of a group consensus, a complex of souls. The Waterpit trigram suggests its attachment to an astrology as the play, the script for the world system that is to emerge. The Earth trigram would be the physical structure of that system and the Thunder trigram the events and experience associated with its full expression. The Flame trigram would be the release of the souls associated with that expression and their potential suffering, the aboriginal hell generated by their separation from their bodies.
If the Flame trigram is analogous to Dante’s Inferno, Mountain is analogous to his Purgatory, and Wind to his Paradise. Gradually souls become separate from their attachments to each other, to their astrology, and to the world. As they become purified, they become more angelic, more spiritual, more refined and enter more into the ideal states associated with the divine and the heavenly, with Wind and Air. They rise from deep Earth toward the Stars and ultimately beyond the Solar System and the Galaxy and finally beyond this local universe itself, perhaps beyond its macrosystem. At this point, they enter true creativity, true Heaven. Here they become ready to renter the cycle, to begin the return to Earth, to reincarnate by means of Lake, Waterpit, Earth, and Thunder.
There is no proof for this cycle. Belief in it is purely an act of faith. The Astrological systems associated with it through Waterpit, are simply schemata for organizing its associations. Only Earth and Thunder can be publically demonstrated. They are scientific and technical. Flame and Mountain provide rational and skeptical options, creative visions. But, Heaven and Wind are finally dreams, hopes, images of the God of the Ultimate Future who is never measurably present on Earth or in Thunder, but only present as a hope, a value, a vision, an inspiration to the creativity of Heaven and the idealism of Wind.