The Four Seasons

It's common knowledge that the four-elements were correlated with the seasons.

The four elements correspond to the four quadrants of the sine wave in general, not just the yearly-seasons.

Position and Direction

To see the sine-wave as the four-elements, we have to break it down into it's Yin & Yang properties. Fortunately it's really easy...

Every point on our graph has one passive characteristic and one active:

• Active: Direction - is it going up or down?
• Passive: Position - is it in the positive or negative half of the graph?

Position is passive, because it's the product of something else - the motion. The motion is the driver of position.

Now we have our definitions, we can correlate it to the FAWE...

Season	Element	Position	Direction
Spring	Fire [ + + ]	It's light	it's getting lighter.
Summer	Air [ + - ]	It's light	it's getting darker.
Autumn	Earth [ - - ]	It's dark	it's getting darker.
Winter	Water [ - + ]	It's dark	it's getting lighter.

The FAEW Pattern

The four-elements can be arranged in a number of different ways to acheive different purposes.

FAWE seems to be the form of an individual thing such as a human-body, but cycles of time follow the pattern FAEW.

Why this particular order would be logical and/or advantageous, is a good question. It does allow the elements to change from one into the next by changing only one "gene" at a time. A wave or cycle is a smooth and continuous process.

There are two more patterns to be discovered, and they need a great deal of elaboration. This is covered in more detail in the book.

The Cross In The Circle

We still use this symbol today to depict the sine-wave, as shown in the image at the top.

This symbol is among the oldest found. It's accepted in academia as a symbol of the four seasons, but I suggest our ancestors knew that sound was cyclic, as waves in water are, among many other easily observable cyclic phenomena.

I think they were clever enough to recognise that cycles / the sine-wave are a principle of reality. The principle of the circle is part of the "super-reality" that ours relies on to exist. And people were rightly grateful for it, and venerated it.

I don't think it was exclusively a symbol of the yearly-seasons, but rather of the whole concept of seasons and cycles.

Two Forms Of Time

Time itself is a duality: There are two forms of time, and it is instructive to explain, because it elaborates the qualities of the Dao...

Yang-time is 1-D, linear and real but it's unquantified. Yang time is a quality not a quantity, it's "ages" or "soon".

Yin-time is "just" a measurement of the passage of Yang-time (e.g. 60 seconds) so it has less-"reality". The phenomena of time is real, the measurement of it is less real, it's dependent and limited, it's a quantity instead of a quality.

Yang-time is the real passage of time, that has 'flowed' "eternally", from before the beginning of the universe.

Yin time is essentially an 'illusion' or 'mirage' that occurs when you look at something from a specific point of view... The yearly seasons we experience are a result of the passage of linear-time. We experience 'years' here on Earth, but they're completely arbitrary to the rest of the universe. Cycles are a second-order 'imaginary' form of time.

So while Yin cycles are in some way an 'illusion', they still have a form of reality, and they are useful - even essential. Also, we must bear in mind that these properties of the Dao such 'real' and 'illusion' are relative not absolute.

This interplay between Yang-reality and Yin-illusion is complex and deep, and it demonstrates how you can't have existence without both...

I hope that clarified rather than confused...

The Universal-Grammar

This completes the basic foundation of what I'm proposing: The Universal Plan. There is a lot more explanation and evidence to provide, but these are the basic principles.

I'm now going to present some evidence that the pattern I've described is indeed universal. The UP could be described as the grammar-of-reality, describing the form and bounds of what can be expressed, and how. So the next logical place to look for it is in human language.

Next Page: Universal Grammar