201

The element is consequently half changed.

3. The whole world is chaos. Only your perceptions give it order. Make sounds/movements that make sense of your world.

When one can fully appreciate randomness, this statement is not so terrible. Why do we say, "merely by chance," when chance and randomness are usually used to describe phenomena whose complexity goes beyond our abilities to systematize them according to the systems that we have inherited from our culture? As an artist I use randomness to add complexity to my fairly simple structures. It is my god from which I invoke that which goes beyond my understanding so that I may respond to it spontaneously and go beyond myself. My response shows how I am seeing it because my mind cannot help but try to make sense of it. In the improvisation, what happens may very likely seem chaotic to someone who is not participating. The participant, though, makes a response with some intuitive understanding of how that response relates to the overall environment. The participant creates his/her own channel into a place of understanding in a very complex environment.

202-204

Tender baby daughter, baby son.
From the sign: three days.
No gruffness.

Our perceptions from our senses, instruments, or mathematics can only work by mentally isolating aspects of things or events out of their contexts so that they seem to fit the many models we have stored in our brains (i.e. Plato's ideal forms, etc.). We cannot see or understand anything without them but they can only work by consciously or unconsciously altering the information that we receive. For example: light spreads from its source in the form of photons which we receive in the form of images which correspond to relationships with the information we receive from our other senses. Each of our senses sort of "makes sense" out of each other putting the various stimuli into a usable context. We also have instruments to detect what cannot be observed by our senses and act as adapters for them. One wonders what could still be out there that we have not made adapters for!

205-207

Harm in age.
Advantage in being respectful;
Sickness a year.

That is part of the reason why I say the world is chaos. It might as well be. It is certainly more complex than we can comprehend and, no doubt, we have as many ways to see the world as there are creatures in it. With that as a given, we can interact with each other without judgment, accepting each other's responses as just part of the chaos and showing how we make sense of it by our own response. It would be just as valid to say that the world is beautifully ordered, but that we are so far from being able to understand it that our different perceptions are chaotic because there can only be one truth. However, that is where holy wars come from. Everyone must believe that his/her insights, which are confirmed by experience, must be the truth. We may be better off believing that there is no "truth" and there is not really a need to establish a consensus about what we are "supposed" to see and know. Of course, it is important that we keep from hurting one another, but when we hurt each other it often comes from our believing that who we are and what we think are more important than someone else and his/her thoughts. Maybe that is just part of human nature, but it is a part that often comes in conflict with our natural need to love and be accepted.

208

Yang begins to emerge.
Joy is spread out and folded up.
It is achieved by harmony and peace.
This element is the completion of happiness and joy.
Lost in happy thoughts,Sincerity, sincerity.

When I listen to the noise of running water or an air-conditioner I can hear music, often some music that I have heard just before taking my bath or going to bed. Our brains are perfectly adapted for discriminating stimuli. The more random the stimuli, the more the brain is challenged to find that which it can understand. It is easy to understand the Greek myth of chaos being the beginning of creation. Order comes from the intervention of an anthropomorphic being; a god. In Hindu mythology, Vishnu impregnates bubbles (potential universes) by His glance. "Seeing" equals "creating" because it discriminates and recognizes stimuli. All that is needed for communicating that perception to others is any external response to the stimuli, no matter how subtle. That is almost impossible not to do.

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