I was browsing through a book, which had been recommended to me by Bruce. "In search of excellence", by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman. Just opening it at random, a page here, a page there, to figure out if it would make sense to start reading. It seemed such a huge amount of words, and there is so much else to do...
On one of the pages, I got intrigued. Someone, who was in search of artificial intelligence, studied the problem of programming computers to play chess. He started out assuming that it could be played on a rational basis, but had to abandon that idea. The computer would need something like a century to calculate all possible moves.

So instead he investigated, what good chess players do. He asked them to look at a half-way chess game, just for a very short period, like 10 seconds. They could recall the locations of virtually all the pieces. Players of one rank below the best players scored much less well. But the masters could not remember where the pieces were, if they were placed on the board at random. So something else than short-time memory had to be at work.

He believed that the 'something else' was, that the masters had highly developed long-term memories, in the form of subconsciously remembered patterns. He called it chess "vocabularies". The class A players had a memory of around 2,000 patterns, but the masters of around 50,000 patterns.

The mark of the true professional in any field is the rich vocabulary of patterns, developed through years of education and especially through years of experience.

I had to think of hexagram 29, water repeated. The character translated as 'repeat' also means skill, routine, learning something by training or exercise.

Years ago I read another book, "Das sensible Chaos" by Schwenk. It seems that water has a memory for patterns. That goes for the streams in the oceans, but just as well for the water in our bodies.

The pit, a place of danger, but maybe also the huge reservoir of everything we learned through 'repeating', seeing it again and again, experience.

"The noble man moves according to principles and virtue", both might have a lot to do with patterns which proved effective, and which make up that reservoir.

And finally it might be the answer to 'how' people read the Yijing for others. Some 'know' the rules, what comes first, what then. Others have developed patterns. And for working with patterns, the thinking mind has to be silent, and let the memory do the talking.

LiSe

Are you going to add this to a 29 link on your Yi site? (hopes)

It is very much how 29 works, as I see it. Why the repeated abysmal, if not to develop patterns of thought and behavior? We are our own lab mice, and through self analysis and observation, we learn how the world works. By learning how the world works, we learn how we work, over and over.

I love it.

Hi LiSe-
We know this book in English as Sensitive Chaos. It was out of print for too lomg.
In a way the Canyon of 29 represents what the water is learning about the rocks.
It's a process that creates the canyon. And I believe Kan also governs the memory.
But when there has been Much learning we might be moving into the realm of the eldest son and Hexagram 51 instead.

all water-associated hexagrams will deal with issues of containment/control and so a focus on protection. Fire-associated hexagrams will deal with issues of guidance/direction-finding and so a focus on exploitation.

BOTH map to the general concept of bounding, a sharp distinction of 'them' from 'us'. this brings things to the dynamics of borders and whereever you have a border, or create one, you let lose what lives on borders, complexity/chaos dynamics.

An essential 'border' is that created by dichotomisations, by making a 'cut' of 'this from that'. This making of a distinction reflects the containment of noise and ANY containment of noise will elicit order in the form of self-referencing as dichotomy. (Google the "Chaos game")

The self-referencing is of a POTENTIAL space that is then 'filled in' over time. At first the XOR dynamics, the rote learnings etc, just fill in dots 'randomly' BUT over time they all link up to form a rich associative memory system - we see this in the form of wave interference patterns derived from firing photons at a double slit (EPR experiments in Physics) as we see it in the sudden associative memory skills in savants, or in general experience as we then specialise.. or in the I Ching where these associations are mapped in the XOR material ;-) Understand THAT material and your association skills re the IC will 'jump' ;-)

For waves etc see:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/WaveInterpret.html
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/WaveStructure.html

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/introXOR.html

For the patterns derived from recursion of a dichotomy in general see the QM-based pages such as:

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/bits.html
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/species.html
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/svector.html
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/vision.html

Note that it is through ROTE learning that one can 'suddenly' link the dots - but XOR gives us the relationships before their expression through rpte in that we have identified the METHOD that allows for all of this.

Chris

Water is the most important substance for our body there is.

And what bradford is referring to that water has a memory, I think that's the middle yang line of water.

In the theory of the stems and branches in acupuncture that's also where live is starting. Water is reacting with the power of the planet saturnus, which is the planet of the movement of planet earth.(in Chinese thinking) This planet is the Mother of movement. With Water live starts on Earth and Heaven is reacting with a cycle.
So with Water there is always a connection with the start of life and with the source, the memory of the beginning, the action, the change.

frank_r,

bradford's perspective is valid in the sense that WE are 60%+ water but the main focus from my perspective is not the water, it is the containment. It does not matter what the medium is, the containment of noise will elicit order - this is a fact of nature and is demonstrated in such examples as the 'chaos game' - search for it on Google. - variations on the 'seed' allow for context-sensitive developments or for nothing to develop - see Wolfram's work on the dynamics of cellular automata.

The link to the I Ching is through the pattern formed by the containment , a pattern called the "Sierpinski gasket". It forms the foundation of Pascal's triangle and that reflects the binomial theorem and the I Ching comes out of that theorem (1+x)^n where X = 1 and n=6 to give all of the hexagram yin/yang combinations.

We find that the gasket shape is a very good form of antenna for mobile phones etc in that it picks up frequency patterns well - but then our brain is focused on frequencies as well (all our nerves deal with are frequencies, wavelengths, and amplitudes - and so my comments etc on WAVE and PULSE dynamics in the encoding, representation of information.)

Thus the focus on ENCLOSURE, a BOUNDARY, covers the protective nature of containment/control of water as it does the exploitive nature of guidance/direction-setting of fire. The pattern WITHIN the boundary will be one of self-referencing and as such reflects the IC itself but at a particular, fire/water position rather than earth/heaven.

From a development perspective, yin/yang does not produce much, too yin means too much potentials, too yang means too much actualisation, its is enclosure (the next dichotomy in the recursion) that starts to elicit order and so we need at least the digram levels to make useful distinctions (and so reductions are to 01,02,63,64) but the trigram level is more foundational in setting down core meanings - we differentiate more clearly into the eight qualities that cover all generic meaning and from there comes refinements and 'emergences' where a more robust context can support more complex developments. -- this gets into the hierarchic dynamics of positive and negative feedback.

oh--- and dont forget that we are a combustion system - we BURN energy, no energy, no memory ;-) (there is a range involved in the burn rate that covers intelligence - too slow and we are cretans, unable to link the dots, too fast and we are psychotic! - this covers the inverse relationship of energy/time -thus there is a link to the rate of burning and information encoding/decoding etc - this is covertable to the concept of a base frequency to use to encode/decode information - as we see in holograms - so it is containment issues that matter, be they 'fire' or 'water' or the other six forms. The fire/water categories as such are specialist, bringing out, exaggerating,the containment focus that is in fact represented in all trigrams)


Chris.