Stillness in change

The other day, two passages from two books stood out and seemed to give an interesting view into patterns of change and consciousness. The first was from the Great Treatise on I Ching. The other was from Walter Russell's The Secret of Light.

Here's The Great Treatise:


And here's Russell:


For a little more about Russell's cosmology: he holds that there is a single still light of God, Spirit, or Consciousness. This alone has being. (It is this which is the speaker in the passage.) The thoughts from this One Being are expressed through two moving lights, which change and alternate to make up various effects and sensations, but which are in themselves illusory, and have no being. So our whole life of sensations and appearances is made by these two illusory moving lights, which express the thoughts from the one Mind.

It seems like this way of thinking gives some insight into the I Ching as a system. Taking the two passages together, there is an interesting commonality.

That the trigrams, or "Changes", indicate patterns of movement (or qualities?)
The trigrams are not existent by themselves. They are an seeming movement in consciousness.
Sensation is based on a contrast or relation between these movements.
(This seems to imply tension or tone.)
Sensations do not exist in themselves but only through such relations.
In this way, I Ching can be seen as a book of the vocabulary of sense-able experience (or tensions).
The hexagrams depict movements, and guides us out of storyline, or object fixation, and towards flow.
According to Russell, consciousness itself doesn't sense motion; it is the moving lights that sense each other.
It is due to the presence of consciousness that there motion seems to happen at all. Though consciousness itself doesn't change.

There's more, but you can see how this goes.

I was really surprised and delighted by this because until now I thought I Ching was all about change and didn't deal with an enduring principle like consciousness. But now it looks like consciousness is the basis of everything.

One more thing: Russell expresses the basic law of the universe as "Rhythmic balanced interchange." I believe he means that rhythmic balanced movement is the natural way when the moving lights are centered in the still point of consciousness.

I've been reading more of Walter Russell, and his ideas seem very helpful for seeing I Ching as a cosmic view. Russell describes the cosmos (physically, emotionally, mentally) as being the functioning of basic principles, these two moving lights, or waves, which are centered by the still light of spirit. I think he is describing yang and yin; yang being compression, yin being release.

To open this idea a little: there are not two charges (plus and minus) there is only charging (increasing pressure) and discharging; tensing and rest. A charged condition is unbalanced, and seeks balance.

He describes gravity as a pressure that's coming towards the center of earth, compressing the light waves to apparent solidity. While out from earth, the pressure is released and is in an expanded state.

This is just my sketchy understanding here. But maybe it will give a different way of looking at I Ching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Russell

Walter Russell apparently considered the wave movement of light to be like the movement of a ripple across a pond. The ripple crosses the pond, but the water stays in place. Thus, light does not move.

Some apects of your described view coinside with several "New Age" views. Russell's "light" sounds a lot like the New Age group's "Creation", or "Creational energy". I read somewhere that they have four basic creational laws: your conciousness exist, what you receive (sense) back back is what your conciousness put out, everything is just one thing, and everything changes except the first three. So In their context, "change" has independent governance than consciousness (thus two separate laws). This echoes Russell's "consciousness itself does not "change". I asked Yi whether IC is the algorithm that governs the "law of change" in their context, I forgot what exactly I got but it was quite affirmative.

I looked up Creational energy and found "creation is like the imbalance of balance" whereas the balanced state is called Creational consciousness. This seems to be what Russell is saying, but these people go further and discuss energy centers in the body.

The work of balancing of polar energies (male and female) shows up in several spiritual traditions, especially in alchemy and Taoism. Actually, Russell's writing sounds like alchemy at times. Not that it is obscure, but in that he talks about unifying the polarities which are the foundation of all change. So by talking about one thing, he is talking about everything.

Pocossin, the idea that you mentioned, that light doesn't actually move but is a kind of ripple effect, is very juicy. What is it that is moving, for example? A force? A signal? Also, the idea of a ripple implies that something is rippling. I started to imagine the six lines of the hexagram as being basically yin, but turning yang when activated by movement. As though yin was the foundation of movement or the playing field. This made me wonder if the yang energy is moving across this field in an upward direction.

I don't know if this is a fantasy or if it resembles the way change happens.
What do you think?