My research into Early Heaven didn't really blossom until had three things had happened, the first (and most crucial) was the realisation that the mysteries of the gua are encoded in binary notation.
This enabled me to draw a diagram that hints at the two rotating halves of the Taiji Tu. The method of drawing this glyph is detailed on my page devoted to binary.
The second spark that rekindled my enthusiasm occured when I drew Fu Xi's eight gua as a graph or chart showing their topmost lines at the centre. The shaded blocks represent yin (symbolically, the darkness), while the unshaded blocks are yang (the light).
Again, although this may not look very impressive to the casual glance, I noticed an inherent similarity to the Taiji Tu .
And when I applied a statistical smoothing to the blocks of shading, I found a figure that explained the tradition of the "eyes" in the Taiji Tu - a feature that had always bothered me because although I understood their symbolism (yin contains a seed of yang, and yang contains a seed of yin) it always seemed rather contrived and artificial.
Here at last was evidence that the eyes are absolutely integral to the Early Heaven tradition, and actually demonstrates that the Taiji Tu itself derives directly from Fu Xi's teachings.
But, as so often happens in life, just when I felt that a breakthrough had occured, I was sent back to the beginning: I discovered that even this insight had been made before.
I had enjoyed the process of discovery immensely but I felt frustrated and disappointed that I wasn't really contributing anything new to the sum of human knowledge. Until, that is, I remembered an observation I'd made years before: it was the third key yet I had always dismissed as being broadly irrelevant!
I had seen the Taiji Tu shining in the heavens: it was in the moon.
© Ken Taylor 2002 - 2006.