The beginning of all things

"Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of the Way", wrote the Chinese sage Lao Tse in the Tao Teh Ching. His perception of the origin of all that exists, poetically referred to as the "ten thousand things", was based on a centuries-old tradition of the meticulous contemplation of the natural world.

Early Western scientific observation focused primarily on the behaviour of material objects. But the Chinese tradition became acutely aware of the more intangible background of energetic influences and life forces that create the objects and beings around us. As a consequence, the Chinese contemplated the fathomless and indeterminate space out of which all phenomena emerge and became aware of the invisible, limitless potential of the universe.

Difficult to express in everyday mundance language, this concept has often been mistranslated and misinterpreted by the use of seemingly negative terms such as "Void" or "Nothingness" implying a kind of dark, uninhabited vacuum that evokes the pathology of depression.

In reality, the meaning is exactly the opposite The beginning of everything is nothing. Out of the mystery of nothing the miracle of everyting emerges. Not "nothing" in the sense of non-existence, but in the same sense as when we look up into a cloudless sky at dawn and watch patiently, we see clouds apparently materializing out of what was a clear, empty sky. The Chinese expressed this potential of energy by drawing a perfect circle. As a symbol, it succeeds where words fail-expressing at a stroke both fullness and emptiness, endless motion and complete tranquillity. The Chinese refer to it as "Wu Chi", which conveys the meaning of "primal energy"

The Chinese understood the circle to be a womb or an unfertilized egg. Both are full of life,ready to give birth, able to give material expression to the intense vitality of growth. The moment a sperm enters the egg, transformation occurs. Within the circle, a tiny dot appears and changes the energetic pattern. What was dormant is now fertilized. What was previously undifferntiated has now begun to acquire characteristics. The single entity is now divided. The Chinese call this the birth of Yin and Yand-the emergence of the two fundamental,interactive forces of the universe.

At this very earliest moment of transformation, nothing moves. Two different potentials emerge, rather like creating a magnetic field. Two poles now exist. The force fields of their polarized energies begin to grow so that the entire space of the original circle becomes a playground for the growing forces of Yin and Yang. The ancient depiction of this stage is a circle divided in half, one side light, one side dark.

The forces are so finely balanced and so interdependent that their movement resembles two fishgliding together in water. This extraordinary motifis as ledgant a description of the fundamental character of the known universe as the most subtle algebraic formula. The outer circle continues to represent the totality of al existence, together with its undifferentiated potential. The interpenetrating forces of Yin and Yang are in balanced motion. Where Yin is least, Yang is greatest. Where Yang declines, Yin grows. In the centre of both segment, there is a small circle-a seed of Yin within the abundance of Yang, the origin of Yang within the fullness of Yin. In the way, endlessly, Yin and Yang give birth to each other.

The Yin/Yang model deserves and rewards prolonged contemplation. Everything that follows in this book is rooted in this theoretical model of the universe. Most significant of all is a perception, inherent in the Yin/Yang theory, which is very different to much conventional thinking. Many of our assumptions about the world around us tend to be based on the idea of the existence of inert matter on the one hand (rocks or hammers) and forms of energy on the other (lightning or thought). We now know that this is an illusion. Contemporary physics-and the explosion of the atom and hydrogen bombs-have shown that matter and energy are fundamentally one and the same. Feng Shui is based on the same realization. The Feng Shui world looks far more like our own seen under a powerful microscope-a world in which the apparently solid dissolves into a dance of energy, a world whose essential characteristics are constantly transformed from one manifestation into another, in which all energetic patterns affect each other.

The Yin/Yang theory is a model of the constant process of change. In this particular sense, Yin and Yang merely mark two points-at any one moment-in the transformation of energy. Nothing is fundamentally Yin or Yang in and of itself. Nothing exist in separation from the rest of the universe. Even if we could isolate anything, we couldn't prevent it from changing.