Time and the I Ching

What is the nature of Time? The I Ching seeks to explain that.

This is important for understanding your own spiritual cultivation, as well as to understanding how Divination works, and why!

The Greatest Changes You Make are the Ones You'll Never See

One of the things that the I Ching teaches you, when you get really deep into it, is to see certain things in really big scales of time.

This also brings with it the realization that all the truly big things, the really meaningful things you can do with your life, are things you will never live to see the end results of.

The key to making intentional change in something, according to the I Ching, is to do it before it starts.

To have a vision of the future, to know how to make change in something before it even starts, requires that you must be able to very clearly observe the present.

So if the future is really Incipiencies existing as 'seeds' in the present, changing the future is all about planting the right seeds. 

How Do You Develop Wisdom?

There is a common misconception that age brings with it wisdom.  That is not true. Even experiences are useless to wisdom, without consciousness. There are great many people in the world who are no wiser at 80 than they were at 18.
Someone who lives an unexamined life is a child forever.

So what does develop wisdom?

It is true that Time brings wisdom. But this requires not just to go through time without any consideration. You have to understand and consider time.
Considering the nature of time and one's place in it and going through it is one part of the process to develop wisdom.  This is part of what is developed through the study of the I Ching.

But this alone is not enough.

There are three other factors that are essential to the development of wisdom:
The first is an attention and awareness of your Self. Most importantly, recognizing your own imperfections. It is through time that we can measure these imperfections, so that we can work on them, and through time track our improvement.

The second is the Will. Will is the raw determination to change yourself. Self-inquiry is useless if you consider yourself but make no effort to transform yourself.

The third is concentration, Attention. This is only available through disciplined training. If you practice discipline in developing your ability to be actively conscious, the Will can then be accurately applied.

Without an understanding of time, you cannot measure the self.
Without the will, you cannot take action to transform.
Without concentration, you cannot apply the will effectively.

If you  have all of these, you can know how and where to work on yourself, and take note of your ability to change. This is how you develop wisdom.

"Incipiencies": More on How the I Ching Works

Incipiency is a concept inherent in the I Ching, because it is inherent in space-time. But the term (it's explanation, and centrality to I Ching studies) is largely attributable to the master Zhu Xi.

It emerges out of the question of "how does the I Ching tell the future"? The answer is: it doesn't. The I Ching measures the present, this moment. But you have to imagine this moment as a set of interconnecting streams from trillions of previous choices, from events that took place yesterday, the day before that, 50 years ago, 4000 years ago, 12 million years ago, etc. Each choice both sealed off a whole bunch of possible futures, and created a cascade of effects that would have a possibility of happening in the future. And in the present moment, we have the culmination of that weight of trillions of trillions of circumstances.

With me so far?

So, if we understand that, we also understand that the future is observable in the present moment; by looking at those past streams, where they can and cannot lead, which of them cannot be altered at this time (unchanging lines) and which of them could be (changing lines). The future exists as a kind of seed already in the present. It is not here but the ingredients for it are all here.

In I Ching study there's a saying that goes something like "you cannot change something once it has happened. If you want to change something, you need to change it before it happens".

The changing lines reflect those incipiencies, the malleable spots in the present moment in Space Time, where you can make a choice, you can drop a new pebble in the stream of space-time to alter the current and change the course of the future.

Understanding Incipiencies

Sometimes great change, disaster or windfall, appears to happen suddenly.

This is an illusion of perception.

The moment where change seems to be happening with great speed is in fact long after the seeds of that change were planted.

The sage can look back and see many conditions, little developments, without which that great change could never have taken place.

All change actually starts with a series of smaller incipient events; often these will not even resemble or seem to have anything to do with the great change they can lead to.

Thus, the skilled practitioner can learn how to observe these earlier conditions, and make great changes eventually happen (or prevent them) with very little effort.

This is the power that a profound study of the I Ching grants: to be able to see the process of time, and how to change things before they happen.

A Poem From Zhu Xi

It is easy to be young,
but to get to become old-school is hard.

Seeing Time
like one inch of light in the darkness,
impossible to ignore.

By the still pond,
unborn Spring grass dreams;
yet on the front steps
the sound of leaves
fall like rain,
announcing Autumn's coming.


-Zhu Xi (who called himself the "Tea Immortal")

On the Scope of the Great Work

On a personal level, the Great Work involves each individual's progress to manifesting the Superior Individual, and attaining to the level of the Sage (Enlightenment).

But on a greater scale, the Great Work involves the spiritual evolution of humanity as a whole.
In that greater scale, the work you do applying Virtue in the world is not meant to change the world at this present time, but to lay down currents of Change that will change the world over the course of cosmic Time. 

Presidencies, nations and whole civilizations will come and go while we perform the Great Work.
Things happening in the world now are the ripple-effect of things Initiates did 300 years ago.

The things we do with consciousness now will ripple forward to change the entire world 300 years from now.
The Great Work on this scale is done not for one's own gratification, because it is not anything any of us will live to see.





It is work to change the future.