Abstract: Yijing for Sustainable Ecosocial Mindfulness

Abstract
"Yijing for Sustainable Ecosocial Mindfulness"
Invited at the World Conference on the Yijing in Wuxi, China June 2010 (not presented due to scheduling conflicts)
© 2010, Guy Burneko, Ph. D.
www.beyondthematrix.com/inst

Yijing and the kind of existential resonance we come to learn through it models the sustainingly self-renewing potentials of a universe not fully reducible to any single category of existence or ontomethodology.

This paper emphasizes interculturally and transdisciplinarily diverse notions of how we may cocultivate spontaneous, lived resonance with the patterns of life and affairs expressed by Yijing in ways that are ecosocially mature in sustaining mutually beneficial, optimal, Earth-human relations in the life of the inner-connected universe

Ecosocially mindful rectitude is found in complementing fixed habits of thought and social conditioning with creatively spontaneous ones relativizing exclusively discursive, propositional agenda by a measure of appositional thinking and circumstantial or strategic conduct which, according to both Wang Yangming and the systems theorist Edgar Morin, acts according to the need of the moment and not overmuch by relying on the template of a rationalized system, program and policy.

Becoming embodiments of Yijing-like-conduct in everyday life through what Thomas Berry calls the spontaneities of the Earth, we demonstrate the self-adjusting or self-organizing rectitude, the resonance of a nondualizing guan that sustains the productive and reproductive life of compresencing Heaven, Earth and Humankind

From Chung-ying Cheng’s interpretation of guan, we understand that its sustaining rectitude or zheng coinheres with our optimally participating dynamically complementary interrelations amid the field including ourselves, Earth systems and sidereal rhythms through the ever-unique centrality (zhong) of what Morin calls its “self-eco-re-organizing” through our ontoepistemological focusings.

Since this is the one life/body we share with all living beings and natural systems, this opportunity for action and judgment understood in a sustainable ecosocial context is the opportunity, as Berry puts it, for the Great Transformation, the da hua, of reinventing the human through resonantly according our conduct and our consciousness with the spontaneities of the Earth and the universe. This evokes the broad and deep potentials of what we now understand to be in some real sense a coconsciously evolving universe as suggested by quantum cosmological, archetypal psychological and eco-evolutionary-religious views.

The life of universe is too vast, complex and changeful for programmatic and simplifyingly rationalistic abstract and either/or thinking alone to be sustainably adequate. We need headings and resources that are guanlike in their strategically pliant, processual, nondual and nonreductionist ontoepistemology. Yijing and Yijing-like resources complement and compensate our normative ego-consciousness and conduct in the im-mediacy of the currents of life unreduced, unessentialized and no longer simplified and fragmented into habituated dichotomizations, instrumentalisms and unsustainable abstractions.

Attentive participation with the “incipience” of change without one-sidedly imposing imperial programs and anthropocentric, utilitarian, absolutist or reductive ontoepistemes sustainingly engenders lived solidarity and a spontaneous, nonformalized responsiveness with the movements of nature and ecopolity in whose taiji, “the whole is in the part that is inside the whole”