William Cassidy: On Time, Direction and Prediction

Orientation

If all that might be examined with respect to time and direction were appropriately considered, this article would be unnecessary: even a hindrance. Perhaps this is something of what Kuan Lu, an early third century Chinese fang-shih meant when asked to explain the texts associated with the hexagrams of the I Ching, or "Book of Changes."

"The fact is, those who are thoroughly versed in the Changes do not discuss the Changes."Kenneth J. DeWoskin, Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fang-shih. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 112, quoting the Kuan Lu pieh-chuan.

Time and direction are the stagecraft of dreams. The dreams are life, having all the indefinite properties of illusion yet remaining sticky. We mark off these dreams of life with a past, a present and a future. We go to and fro, reaching out, pulling in. We ought to enjoy the show but it is good not to believe too much. What we really provide for ourselves by marking time and direction is a kind of fantastic parable of egocentricity, which we then invest with an idea of the duration of our egocentric selves in some sort of place or point.

We become controlled by our creations. Our dreams of calendars, compasses and wristwatches. We become imprisoned in misery with hopes and fears for the future, trying to predict when we will get "out." We also look for all the reasons why we stay "in," breeding other sets of hopes and fears for the present and the past. This isn't happy, is it? Why encourage this?

Languages of Man and Languages of Time

When we first begin to seriously analyze time and direction they seem simple to know yet difficult to explain. As we learn more, the language we are forced to use seems unconnected because we are dealing with unfamiliar concepts. These concepts have an open, spacious and even boring, featureless nature. Indeed, there are only slight precedents for the expression of these concepts in any human or machine language. This is because language is concerned with the task of communication in direct and indirect symbols, rather than evocation by direct experience.

But there have been attempts to evoke experience. Among the possibilities we might want to consider is one which says some divination systems, the I Ching for example, could be nothing more or less than attempts to refine the languages of man, permitting more intimate experiences with time. They could be. They could also be the languages of the intimate experiences, celebrating themselves.

Physicists, to take another example, want to talk about time and direction but they must employ mathematics to experience them, referring in aesthetic terms to the beauty of their resulting equations. They want to say their aesthetic is the same as that of time and direction as a naked prospect. This is analogous to defining energy by coming to know energy as that which is totally defined by the energy of coming to know energy. This is magic: a tao. Physicists are scientists and scientists reject magic the way nouveau riche reject something plain and inexpensive they used to own. Physicists therefore know a great deal they cannot explain and explain what they cannot know.

Time and direction are completely open. Time can be any time. Direction can be any direction. The moment we get stuck in the openness, the very moment we observe, comment or otherwise locate, this openness immediately becomes a cobweb of specifics. The time now as distinct from the time possible. The direction coming, the direction going. These are all seen as kinds of time and direction. The categories and the judgements on the categories are as endless as the openness is open. Good time, bad time, lucky direction, unlucky direction. All phenomena and noumena become invested with judgements on the time and directions. The time and direction become invested with judgements on the phenomena and noumena. It becomes possible to talk of one's self and others as distinct participants; to talk of individual destinies. It was a good time, there was a good star in a lucky direction, events are going my way and I have a fortunate destiny. For somebody else the direction was unlucky, the star was bad and the time bred a sorrowful destiny.

The Categories of Fate

We think of the opening lines of Nguyen Du's Kim Van Kieu:

"Within the span of a hundred years of human existence, what a bitter struggle is waged between genius and destiny!"

The "bitter struggle" Nguyen Du wrote of consumed the attention of the early Asian natural philosophers who devised the divination systems discussed hereunder. It led them to the idea of fates and fate categories. Thus, from the early philosophers we learn of fate willed by Heaven, fate determined by time of birth, fate following behavior, and fate of unexpected content.

The fate willed by Heaven seems simple enough to understand. Men trapped in the dream of life found themselves unable to transcend immediate circumstances and so attributed their own powerlessness to an external agency. This view subsumes that time tosses people about according to a set of fixed rules or definite, inherent, intrinsic essence. Taken to its intellectual conclusion, it leads to Heaven above, Earth below: the birth of the yin-yang construct.

Following close on the heels of the yin-yang construct, with its notice of laws, properties, inherent essences and intrinsic powers, comes the assignment of these qualities to the state of pattern, continuity, behavior and sequence. Taken to its intellectual conclusion, it leads to the Way of Heaven and Earth: the birth of the tao construct.

The fates determined by birth, behavior and unexpected content are distinguished from the fate willed by Heaven as a philosophically later development. They are a reflection of the search for an answer to the question of why Heaven's fate affects men in different ways.

The fate determined by time of birth is an extension of the fate willed by Heaven. Some men are born to great wealth and sink into poverty. Some men are born to poverty and rise to great wealth. We can pinpoint certain events along their path which produce certain reverberations. But with the fate of birth we are concerned only with great events or milestones in a man's life. He is a king. He is not a king.

The fate following behavior examines the pinpoints between the milestones. He could have become a king but did not. He should not have been a king but he was. He could have become a king but did not because his wife poisoned him in a jealous rage. Had he not produced that jealousy by showing great favor to a certain concubine he would have been king. The choice was his to make.

The fate of unexpected content flows from the fate following behavior. Here we attempt to understand why, though a man behaves in ways that ought to produce certain results, he suffers contrary or calamitous results. He was a king. He led an exemplary life, had an understanding wife and knew how to keep his concubines in their place, yet one day while supervising the construction of a temple he was kicked by a horse and rendered senseless. He had no choice in the matter.

In exploring these three fates we come to the most stimulating tension in all of astrology: the tension between influence and indication. We also come to the marvelous subject of karma: or the science of cause and effect.

A rather interesting book could be written about the relationship between the doctrine of karma and the practice of astrology. The last and largest chapter of that book would probably be devoted to argument over whether or not the symbolics of astrology, such as the planets or elements, demonstrate an influence which determines fate or an indication of probability.

Early astrologers, having noted that certain things happen, set about to discover the cause of their happening. They approached the task in scientific fashion. First, they noted the happening itself. Next, they attempted to divine the truth or essence of the matter. Following, they recorded everything that related to the matter in time and space. This data permitted the discovery of patterns and the patterns led to categories. Shared happenings in shared categories according to pattern led to the classification of causal conditions: in Heaven, at birth, following behavior, and in the unexpected.

Let us say they found that when the planet Mars is in a certain quarter of the heavens there are problems with fire and men make war. Does Mars influence these events or merely indicate their probability? Is the period ruled under the category of fire problematic because of fire's influence or is fire a symbolic indication of an evolutionary trend?

I believe the early astrologers viewed their referential emblems and symbolics as the choreography of time dancing and most of that which occurred thereunder as simple cause and effect. The outworkings of human karma were seen as occuring through fate and human effort.

This leads to the idea of categories of karma; a matter quite distinct and separate from the categories of fate yet related to fate nonetheless. The fate of birth is seen as an expression of causal karma arising in previous lives. The fate following behavior is seen as immediate karma arising in this life. The fate of unexpected content is seen as an expression of "throwing" karma, or the residual product of specific, intense, immediate karma arising in previous lives.

If we step carelessly upon an insect, deprive it of life and thereafter feel remorse, this is both a set of causes and a cause in its totality. If we coldly plan the death of millions of insects, kill them ruthlessly and feel satisfied about their death, this too is a set of causes and a cause in its totality. In either case, the effect will be in proportion to the cause. Intensity, duration and repetition of cause likewise proportions intensity, duration and repetition of effect. If you spend ten years ruthlessly slaughtering insects, have a change of heart, enter a monastery and spend twenty years in penance the reverberation of your actions will certainly be compounded accordingly.

My Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku, drawing on the Kalachakra tradition, expresses the idea of time orders, such as "lower" time or "great" time. He writes:

"The 'time' that operates our realm is the particular version of Great Time which is allowed through a specific focal setting on the openness of Great Space."Tarthang Tulku, Time, Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality (Oakland: Dharma Publishing, 1977)

Use of the word "focal" in this passage is provocative. Take the focal settings of a camera as an example. Focal settings regulate the amount of light which is permitted to strike the film during a given length of time, and have the character of either decreasing or increasing depth of vision. Thus the focal setting is said to either open or close, to either expand or concentrate light, producing a "heavy" exposure or a "light" exposure. Now compare light to time. Using this as our inspiration we can be led into a seminal idea of the weight of time. Not weight in the sense of mass or weight born of duration, but of repetition.

As we have seen, the mechanics of divination as expressed in Sino-Tibetan practice are founded on observed patterns and categories. These we should learn to regard as the mechanics of time itself:

"Types of power, regularities, and common trends (including the "synchronicities" postulated by astrologers and other observers of nature), and even temporal sequentiality itself, all reflect aspects of what could be called a particular "lower time."Ibid.

We should also remember these patterns have little to do with the referential emblems and symbolics used to express them:

"Early theories centered around the power of objects to behave in certain ways and to bring about certain effects. Objects were thought to "do" things, and to do so by virtue of a power which was theirs by their very nature or essence. This "power and object orientation" has largely been replaced by an attention to frequencies of event patterns, or typical sequences ...There may be a way for these regularities to be viewed in turn as simply an expression of the structure of time."Ibid.

Granting these laws, how is prediction possible? And what is the source of predictive ability? These questions return us to the tension between indication and influence. We can ask ourselves if prediction is merely an explanation of influences but plainly, something more is involved. As Tarthang Tulku points out, "There is a difference between...predictive ability and a fundamental explanation."

Again reaching to the Kalachakra tradition, we find that predictive ability is intimately connected with our status as observers, and our status as observers is dependent on the sequential view of time:

"Whether or not an external physical change is observed to follow a given starting state, there is always a "next moment" for any starting state... The observing process itself is predicated on this fact about time. Everything about our realm, including our status [as observers] depends on the "flow" of time."Ibid.

So, when we make predictions, do we exploit indications? Do we interrupt the flow of time by means of focal settings represented by the indications of our emblems and symbolics? If our status as observers is dependent on the flow of time how is the interruption possible? Is prediction within or without the flow of time?

Although prediction is connected with our superficial status as observers there is a more delicate relationship with the quality of the observation: with the sense of being:

"Although making predictions may seem to require seeing "the future" and then reporting back to the present, predictive knowing actually does not go forward to elsewhere and return. Precognition is possible because it--and we--are not "pre," not "before." For just that reason, such knowing and speaking are due to a deeper abiding in a more inclusive form of "the present."Ibid.

If you consider all of this very carefully you will see how it possible to cut down the forest of changes. You will never fear ill omens or worry about cruel stars. You will be able to predict events accurately but you really won't need to. A Tibetan lama of my acquaintance once said something remarkable about all of this. He said:

I walked into the middle of a vast, open and featureless plain. I gazed upward into a unspoiled blue sky. I shot an arrow into the sky. I do not know where it landed. I did not care if it was a good day or a bad day."

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