Introduction
Open
your window and look at life pulsing through it. Can you feel that everything youīre
watching is part of nature?
Can you realise how perfect life
is as it pulses both inside and outside this window? The movement between Yin and Yang as
they search for balance?
This concept of perfection,
which gives meaning and existence to life, has a name: wise men in the past called it Tao.
The Tao, mysterious and meaningful, is that which rules everything we call life. The wise
men of thousands of years ago devoted all their lives to systematise the manifestations of
Tao in the changes of nature.
The I Ching isnīt a religious
book, but a science, an art, a book of living wisdom. These wise men looked at heaven and
realised that there was the sun, the rain and the seasons of the year. Looking at the
earth, they realised that everything was in eternal, alternating movement, switching from
night to day, empty to full, positive to negative, that there was life and death, man and
woman, and inside it all was the Tao, balancing, unifying and managing, through its Law,
all the duality of life. They looked at mankind and realised that they had lost contact
with the meaning of life, with the Tao. Considering further, they gave a name to the way
the natural forces switch back and forth; they called it the Changes. Looking for names
for the two faces of life, they called them Yin and Yang.
The Yin represents the negative,
the shadowy, the night, and everything that is in repose; the Yang represents the
positive, the bright, the day, and everything that is in movement. During the long history
of Chinese civilisation, a system arose from this simple model, and a book that studied
the wisdom of life and showed the changes of nature. It is the oldest and most complete in
the world – the I Ching, the Book of Changes.
From the work of these ancient
wise men we can study, understand and attune our lives to the precise movements of the
Tao. The I Ching is our guide to the paths that take us home, to the meaning of our
existence and everything we call LIFE.
Wisdom isnīt measured by the
quantity of knowledge we have, as many people think; it is an internal state of being in
harmony with nature, with the natural, integral way of living, with the Tao – the
path of Life. The I Ching can reveal this wisdom, prepare you to live according to it, and
to make it part of yourself.
The I Ching was used more than
3.000 years ago in ancient China, without any explanatory text accompanying it. Ancient
people knew how to "read" the yin and yang movements without words. In the
course of time this skill vanished, and King Wen, the founder of the Chou dynasty in the
11th century B.C., wrote the first explanatory texts about the hexagrams. Many
people think that learning the Chinese language will make it easier to understand the I
Ching. I continually point out that most Chinese can barely understand the I Ching. I want
to emphasize that learning the I Ching isnīt about the language we use, but about
understanding the interaction between the Yin and Yang forces in nature. Nature is
everywhere, not only in China but in all of space and time.
The secret of a good
understanding of the I Ching lies in the careful study of natural phenomena, in absolute
sincerity to ourselves, and in learning its structure, which is the movement of the yin
and yang lines to generate the overall picture of the changes (mutations) of nature.
