Unfoldings

In my paper The Yijing as a Symbolic Language of Abstraction I suggest that the complete six-dimensional structure of the whole hexagram lattice is too complex to be comprehended in its entirety; we cannot take in the whole of reality at once. Instead, we each have our own individual perspective.

A theory of perspective is developed, expressed using the symbolic language of the Yi. The nature of the symbols of Yi means that the scope of any perspective depends on the amount of energy that we can bring to our attention and where that attention is focused. If we have a low-energy, limited attention, then our experience of reality will seem to unfold as a linear sequence of individual situations. If we have a wider span of attention, we will be able to see more of the connections and relationships between the situations that we encounter and our experience of reality will be as an interconnected network of events.

The paper explains the background to this idea in detail, and the reader is refered there for a technical description of the construction. On these pages I present some example unfoldings.

Unfoldings with Narratives

In the following pages, an unfolding is broken down into its individual substructures and each is discussed.

• Unfolding through - in the paper The Yijing as a Symbolic Language of Abstraction this unfolding is called the "extrovert" unfolding, because the changes are focused in the outermost aspects of the situations. In fact, these are the aspects most remote from Being, below and above its limits, in the dimensions of matter and pattern. In that sense, a better name for this unfolding might be "physics and philosophy".

Diagrams

The following diagrams present complete unfoldings without any descriptive text.

• The Whole Lattice - this diagram shows the complete Boolean lattice. This is a complex structure, mathematically equivalent to a six-dimensional hypercube. This structure provides the context for all of the individual unfoldings.
• Unfolding through - in the paper The Yijing as a Symbolic Language of Abstraction I call this unfolding "introvert" because it is the innermost lines of the hexagrams that provide the focus for the change. A more descriptive name might be "unfolding through the heart and mind" as these are the lines which are in focus. In this diagram, the red arrows show a cyclic path through the unfolded structure and the black lines complete the individual facets. The grey lines show some of the energy connections in the lattice that are outwith the dimensional range of the individual facets.
• Unfolding through - I refer to this unfolding as "explicate matter" because this is the domain where the energy of change is focused. As with the previous diagram, the red arrows show a cyclic path through the unfolded structure and the black lines complete the individual cubes. The grey lines show some of the energy connections in the lattice that are outwith the dimensional range of the individual cubes.