A History of the Future.

[RascalPuff]

To know where you are, you need know where you came from.
To know where you're going, you need know where you are. - Anon

A History of the Future: out of the past and the present...
- K.B. Robertson

Lao Tzu's 'Butterfly Theory':
"The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does."
(Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

For this reason it is recently being proffered that long range weather prediction may be impossible.
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The Tao & The I Ching (Reprise):

"The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our (Western) causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurrring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.


"Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty nine yarrow sticks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it - a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind. With us it would be a banal and amost meaningless statement (at least on the face of it) to say that whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one... There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from appearance, taste and behavior of a wine the site of its vinyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an object of art or piece of furniture on merely looking at it. And there are even (rare) astrologers who can tell you without any prevous knowledge of your nativity, what the position of the sun and moon was and what zodiacal sign rose above the horizon in the moment of your birth. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long lasting traces.


"In other words, whoever invented the I Ching (There are speculations that it was a collective effort of monks; perhaps generations of them), was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the moment of the exponent in which it was cast - even moreso than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be - inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.

"This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed 'synchronicity', a concept that forumulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.


"The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is decidedly psychophysical structure. The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of the events. The causal point of view tells a dramatic story about how D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that A', B', C', D', etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A' and B' are of the same quality as the psychic events C' and D', and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture...."


"My argument as outlined above has of course never entered the Chinese mind On the contrary, according to the old tradition, it is 'spiritual agencies', acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer. These powers form as it were, the living soul of the book.


"... The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results; it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of Nature, the I Ching waits until it is discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self knowledge, of wisdom - if there be such - it seems to be the right book. To one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to another, shadowy as twighlight; to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not obliged to find it true. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning."
- Carl G. Jung, Zurich 1949


"What we do in the present, echoes through eternity".
- Marcus Decimus Meridius (Excerpt from the film, Gladiator)


Refer, 'The Butterfly (*and 'Chaos') Theory', by Lao Tzu (*and Lorenz).
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Regards,
- RP

[austintorn@aol.com]

Whatever brought us here will have to bring us home, or maybe not if we were the result of a 13 billion year journey of lucky accidents, the latest of which, if true, was the extinction of the dinosaurs and 75% of species that paved the final road to us,; but, knowing we were an accident would still be great knowledge.