[MD] MOQ/BOC

[Krimel]

Dan,
Glad to see you checking into Taoist literature. I have never read the I
Ching in detail because it just seems like a catalog of hexagrams and a
process of divination and neither of those interest me much. But the history
and import of these practices I find completely revealing with regard to the
MoQ. It shows the underlying metaphysics of the metaphysics underling both
Zen and the MoQ.

Here is Carl Jung on the subject from his introduction to the 1949 Wilhelm
translation:

"The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now
that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must
necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into
account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in
order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave
things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is
partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under
natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific
laws is almost an exception."

What Jung could not have foreseen is that it was not causality that turned
out to be threatened by recent findings but, prediction. The world can be
perfectly deterministic and yet still unpredictable. The search for truths,
as it turns out, has always been a search for "merely statistical truths".
The search for invariable natural laws was merely a search for truths that
apply 100% of the time. Now we are happy when they apply at above chance
levels.

Here's more Jung:

"The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be
exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call
coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we
worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is
something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable
amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance
or danger represented by chance."

See, in Taoist thought, Shit happens and it up to us to guess what kind of
shit will happen next. Behavioral economists in the present era claim that
we have a sense of probability like our senses of time and space. We
perceive the odds and act on our estimates. Divination, ritual, religion,
philosophy and science are all just ways of hedging our bets.

More from Jung:

"This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed
synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically
opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth
and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve
one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in
space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a
peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as
with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers."

I would spin this a bit differently than Jung. Events in space and time have
no "meaning" on their own. Meaning is something we introduce. Meaning is
reduction in uncertainty or the product of our sense of probability. 

More Jung:

" In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the
hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality
no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in
which it was cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the
divisions of the calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was
understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the
moment of its origin."

In other words the I Ching diviner sees Chaos like the weather. As a kind of
convergence of the currents of time and circumstance that pervade the world
moment to moment. Casting yarrow sticks is like wetting your finger to see
which way the wind is blowing.

The I Ching is a very ancient work. Parts of it date to before 1000 B.C.. As
I have suggested if we want an ancient lineage for the history of the MoQ,
the Greeks were still learning how to count while the Chinese were setting
to stage for a metaphysics of Chaos that still finds application in the
modern world.

Krimel