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We humans and our world are a complicated collection of yining and yanging, mixtures that is, and not pure yin and yang. Pure Yin and yang themselves are massively powerful, barely knowable, e.g. the spinning of a galaxy or the coming and going of a universe are still aspects and mixtures of yin and yang. Alone they are too pure to be conceptualised in their entirety, so instead we look at mixtures where there is a slight lean in favour of one than the other; e.g. Mountain, Fire, Lake, Valley. From these we get the gross 64 Hexagrams displaying 64 mixes of Yin and Yang. We see here how there is a progression from one to another and while nothing in our life is as simple as these 64, we get an appreciation of mixture and cyclic motions of life.
The Mixes of yin and yang are what makes up us and the world around us, our mind too. This is why our mind will never form a usable, lasting, answer to life. It may form a good picture but holding onto that for long enough will show that it is as transient as the rest. So in a cloud of yin and yang, mixed and mixing in such a way as to display the beauty and trials that make up the world and peoples lives, we can see that attempting to shape at this level is like trying to waft smoke into the shape of a horse. Instead to manage life, to know the way, we look up.
Upwards from the cloud of yin and yang, is a purer and purer yin and yang. Beyond the coming and going of universes are the components Yin and Yang themselves, pure and powerful they can rotate galaxies fuel suns, hold together atoms. Collectively, in pure balance, they are the Tai Chi. The Tai Chi is Yin and Yang in perfection, movement, yet perfect balance. This will only be hinted at from a humans perspective and nothing to the scale it actually sits on.
Now a brief side look at scale will let us see that scale is only a figure of speech, as are up and down as used here are only for communicating a point and not real. "The universe is vast, it is made of small parts" sounds reasonable but makes assumptions and we are so used to missing the assumptions that we take it as a meaningful statement. Here with the assumptions added; "The universe is vast compared to me, and is made of small parts compared to me". That addition of assumptions makes you see that big and small are just our tools, not real. The universe is one and has no size, as it is one it is not made of any parts.
So we have met Tai Chi, the operation of yin and yang at such a level that we see that life, the universe and so on are 1) unknowable to us, 2) always in balance. So we can rest assured that things are right, all the time, but we don't know the full picture so can't reason why that is.
Beyond the Tai Chi when we have accepted the movement and balance are pure and perfect, we have met The One. The One is less knowable as it has none of our concepts as parts or qualities as we can concieve, it is just One in absoluteness. Beyond this even, when we have dropped the idea that this is One with something else, drop that, drop it now! It is just One. Then with out any notions in our mind, we meet Tao.
Tao (unknowable) gives us The One (represented as a circle). The One with movement is Tai Chi (represented as the Tai Chi or Yin Yang symbol we all know). In that Tai Chi are the pure Yin and Yang. In their motion is a cloud of mixtures shown in the 64 hexagrams by Gua, the broken and unbroken lines. Mixed further to trillions and trillions of parts it is us, our lives and the beauty of nature at work.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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