transition
I've left New York.
I'm now visiting friends and my sister in Boston. And so on.
I've normally celebrated the moments of transition and travel in my life. I indulged myself wholly in those things in the summer of 2007. I somehow expected that I would be able to do it again now.
But I haven't, couldn't. Maybe because that earlier indulgence proved to be so painful in effect--running away severed something so painfully I learned my lesson. But now I've been meticulous about how I'm approaching this transition.
One way to think of it: a paradox of movement is that something Is (statically), then it moves (becomes?), then it Is (statically) again. We can acknowledge a difference between Being and Becoming intuitively--a rock sits, water flows, intuitively. But how does something static become dynamic and vice versa? Some phase transition must take place. But where does that transition fall within our categories, Being and Becoming?
This is a question that is fundamental to the structure of the I Ching.
Each of the sixty-four kua, with their combined total of 384 lines, represents a situation or condition. Each situation or condition contains the six stages of its own evolution:
These are insightful categories. Though they imply that everything is always in movement (Becoming?) which is a central theme of the I Ching, there is room within the system for stillness. In fact, one of the trigrams, Kên, is Keeping Still, Mountain. But we can demand greater granularity of the system. What are the states of transition within 'Expanding"? "Beginning to expand, Expanding to expand, approachng maximum expansion, peaking expansion, slowing expansion towards contraction"...
There are implicit limitations on the mathematics of reality imposed by the I Ching which don't seem to address, e.g., discrete computation, which if it wasn't a fundamental part of reality in the time of King Wen certainly is so now. And yet, what are the hexagrams besides 6-bit strings?
I'm now visiting friends and my sister in Boston. And so on.
I've normally celebrated the moments of transition and travel in my life. I indulged myself wholly in those things in the summer of 2007. I somehow expected that I would be able to do it again now.
But I haven't, couldn't. Maybe because that earlier indulgence proved to be so painful in effect--running away severed something so painfully I learned my lesson. But now I've been meticulous about how I'm approaching this transition.
One way to think of it: a paradox of movement is that something Is (statically), then it moves (becomes?), then it Is (statically) again. We can acknowledge a difference between Being and Becoming intuitively--a rock sits, water flows, intuitively. But how does something static become dynamic and vice versa? Some phase transition must take place. But where does that transition fall within our categories, Being and Becoming?
This is a question that is fundamental to the structure of the I Ching.
Each of the sixty-four kua, with their combined total of 384 lines, represents a situation or condition. Each situation or condition contains the six stages of its own evolution:
- About to come into being Beginning
- Expanding
- Approaching maximum potential
- Peaking
- Passing its peak and turning toward its opposite condition.
These are insightful categories. Though they imply that everything is always in movement (Becoming?) which is a central theme of the I Ching, there is room within the system for stillness. In fact, one of the trigrams, Kên, is Keeping Still, Mountain. But we can demand greater granularity of the system. What are the states of transition within 'Expanding"? "Beginning to expand, Expanding to expand, approachng maximum expansion, peaking expansion, slowing expansion towards contraction"...
There are implicit limitations on the mathematics of reality imposed by the I Ching which don't seem to address, e.g., discrete computation, which if it wasn't a fundamental part of reality in the time of King Wen certainly is so now. And yet, what are the hexagrams besides 6-bit strings?