“Mountain rests on the earth. Stripping Away.
The heights are generous, and there are tranquil homes below.”

#IChing 23

Andrew Leonard continues to write amazing things. He weaves together so many interesting things that you would not normally connect. Phillip K. Dick, Leibniz, tech, politics, Schezwan cooking, spices, journalism, internet, raising kids, Chinese history and so much more

"The Internet has become as useless as the Book of Changes because it will affirm or deny whatever we desire. And I cannot help but connect this unmooring of online truth, this cacophony of digital nonsense, to the state of politics in the United States today.

President Trump spews out insanity on a daily basis and his henchmen routinely say and do the vilest of things and Elon Musk tweets something factually incorrect almost as often as he takes a breath and it all means nothing because nothing means anything.

A quarter of the way through the 21st century, one of humanity’s supreme technical achievements is a network that facilitates the sharing of lies so efficiently that it broke democracy. Would we have elected Donald Trump president a second time, much less a first, if we still had gatekeepers keeping a lid on all the madness?"

#PhilipKDick #IChing #Internet #USPolitics #ScienceandTechnology

https://andrewleonard.substack.com/p/how-the-internet-became-the-book

DELIVERANCE. The southwest furthers.
If there is no longer anything where one has to go,
Return brings good fortune.
If there is still something where one has to go,
Hastening brings good fortune. #iching #oracle #tao

KEEPING STILL. Keepin his back still
So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into the courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame. #iching #oracle #tao

Another workshop done and glad I got a chance to introduce colleagues to the I Ching hexagrams as an example for #BottomUpDesign and as system for constructing/composing higher level concepts/meanings from just a small set of fundamental archetypes (in the I Ching there're only 8 fundamental trigrams)... It's been hugely influential and a guiding principle for my own work & design philosophy (incl. for most of my #OpenSource projects) and I keep finding ever new uses for applying this approach, here to devise a composable classification system, eventually allowing us to define more complex concepts... In world defined by #TopDownThinking, going the opposite way and showing people the benefits/flexibility is sometimes/oftentimes _very_ hard, but to me unquestionably more powerful...

Ps. Also reminded again of the whole Seed technology and essence/function (aka "ti-yong") contrast/discussion/subplots in Stephenson's Diamond Age... Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagram_(I_Ching)

INNOCENCE. Supreme success.
Perseverance furthers.
If someone is not as he should be,
He has misfortune,
And it does not further him
To undertake anything. #iching #oracle #tao

WORK ON WHAT HAS BEEN SPOILED
Has supreme success.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Before the starting point, three days.
After the starting point, three days. #iching #oracle #tao

We’re probably also the only ones neurotic enough, as a species, to need to make something more complicated than it needs to be, in order to figure out what to do about it. That’s weird. Seems like maybe a turn was made somewhere in our evolution—okay, I’ll say it, a lot of wrong turns—that were not optimal but good enough to survive another day.

9/9 #IChing #divination

Same as every other of the trillions upon trillions of living things on the planet. It’s how we roll. It’s how we decide what we wanna do. Match them patterns. We’re the only ones who wrote an I Ching to make things even more complicated. Complicated enough to make your original problem look simple. Piece o’ cake.

8/n #IChing #divination

Whether you have the balls or the eggs to actually do a thing if it’s gonna be hard, for any reason, is another problem. Given what I fear is coming, I think we could use, in the words of the Waco Kid, “all I can get”, in the way of help. I generally believe in the total indifference to me on the part of the universe. But here I am, matching patterns like crazy.

7/n #IChing #divination

When you wake up, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to look at your problem, say fuck it, and decide. The universe, in all its manifestations, from the quantum level and beyond, came together in just those patterns in those moments, to help you figure out what you want to do. It’s giving you the power to see the eternal meaninglessness of it all, and stand up to it, and say fuck it and whatever comes out your mouth next will be what you want to do.

6/n #IChing #divination

So with your question in mind, read the text. It won’t make sense. How could it? It’s from a different world. But read it anyway. Soon you will start to see the patterns of your problem matching to patterns in the text. These new patterns will find matches within the memory of your thoughts about the problem. This is hard work, so you lie down comfortably and let your pattern matchers do their thing, while you doze off.

5/n #IChing #divination

After they decided they had enough stuff written down, they said, any time somebody has a problem they’re struggling with, they can throw the stuff and match the matches, and read the text and do what it tells you to do. The trick is, as it always is, to ask the right question. To ask the right question, you have to understand the problem. You get that, you’re halfway there, more or less.

4/n #IChing #divination

A bunch of guys (far as I know it was all guys—go figure) who collectively and serially wrote down shit they thought up that they decided had strong correlation with each of the 64 official patterns in the book. It was an amalgam of local political horse shit, declarations of the proper way for a man/leader/ruler to behave and act.

3/n #IChing #divinaton

Now you’re matching patterns of patterns, and merging them into more patterns. This is all non-verbal so far. You’re borrowing resources that normally work in the language pattern machine to process these patterns. Once you have matched the throw with the book, you read the text associated with the match. This text is what passed for AI a couple 1000 years ago in what is now China.

2/n #IChing #divination

The I Ching is a perfectly human invention. Our brains (as are all brains everywhere) are pattern matching machines. We’re so good at it we see things that aren’t even there, because our pattern machine says there’s something there. To cast the I Ching you toss a set number of coins or small sticks, or stones, and note the patterns you see in how they fall and land. Then you look in the I Ching and match the patterns you threw to some pattern in the text.
1/n #iChing #divination

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is a song by the English rock band #theBeatles from their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). It was written by #GeorgeHarrison, the band's lead guitarist, as an exercise in randomness inspired by the Chinese #IChing. The song conveys his dismay at the world's unrealised potential for universal love, which he refers to as "the love there that's sleeping".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJDJs9dumZI

The #IChing comments on #PP: #45 Wu Wang / Innocence (The Unexpected). If someone is not as he should be, he has misfortune, and it does not further him to undertake anything. Confucius says: “He who departs from innocence, where does he come to? Heaven’s will and blessing do not go with his deeds.”

In these times of darkness, aka all-pervasive corruption, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and to give up. But there is a light, although it may be faint. And it is piercing its way through the darkness. It will win in the end. We have to stay positive. We have to believe. The silent majority will overcome. Justice and greatness indissolubly united. The true meaning of all that happens in heaven and on earth. #IChing