Invocation To Kun, The Receptive Poem by Denis Mair

It's not easy to address you. There is so much going on within you, yet you present no form. You are the ground under the feet of things. You are not just neutral, featureless groundstuff. You have tendrilled rootlets; you have a tangle of fibers like a blanket of horsehair felt. You are a tapestry of grit, humus, rhizomes, bacteria, worms, nematodes, woodlice, grubs and things we don't yet know about. Any ground from which things emerge must be fertile. Being fertile means that you have secrets of internal circulation. You have interlocking metabolic cycles; you balance thousands of enzyme reactions in homeostasis. How can I start telling about what has already been accomplished- -all the things we take as given when we make our departures? You are not some homogenous, dark, passive stuff. You differ according to the platform that has been achieved. You are a quilt made with a hundred patches of cloth, but in sleep we only feel your warmth. You differ in all your ways of mothering us. Sometimes you are the formal matrix, where we solve the new formula or postulate an elegant theorem. When we understand the new theorem, we see it was built into your matrix of rules from the start. Sometimes you enclose us in your incubation chamber, feeding our embryonic ferment with your richness, and isolating us from the storms and shocks outside. When we stay too long, this is not always good for us.
You are as busy inside as the snow on a television screen. But your snow is not seen, because all the dots follow each other within you. You have completed the community of your inner agents; you have tied the strands of flow together; you have joined the knots into a carpet for our feet.
You exist as the celtic knot of living fabric. The moment when your labyrinth came together must have been accompanied by a breakthrough of light, but we cannot see past your 'darkness'.
In one of its wonderfully elliptical insights, the Book of Changes characterizes you as something 'simple' that 'clumps together'. This simplicity means you are so well woven we come along and simply use you as a fabric. You 'clump together' because integration is what you eternally offer.
The macramé knot of life could not have been tied easily. Normally, in our flashy, fleshly theater of consciousness, we see only a few strands getting tied together. In our theory of evolution, we say they got tied together incrementally because they were of use to each other. But the basic metabolism of life is made of thousands of strands. Each strand is an enzyme cycle- -a feedback loop that takes energy from metabolites or builds a protein. Each strand depends on the others, so before the loops were closed, they would have been useless to the others. It's not something that could happen by gradual improvements. Once they were tied together, they became reliable germ plasm for the phylogenetic tree. The coalescence of cellular protoplasm is the hidden prelude to the panoply of evolution that fills niches and expresses a myriad forms. What a flash of light must have accompanied the moment when it came together! So some would say that the living fabric was conceived by Qian the Creative. But looking further toward the source, below that flash of light, what a deep matrix of concentration had to have been accomplished to let Nature's insight flash forth! Below every breakthrough there is a deep Kun matrix of samadhi. Samadhi in the cosmos is the intuitive, preparatory weaving that conceives life's eventual mesh.
And there is no limit to how deep that samadhi-concentration goes. Below the integration of an individual mind is the confluence of substances that allowed intelligent beings to arise. And below those substances is the great samadhi of the universe that conceived of the sublime mutual accommodation among the properties of matter.
The substrate of matter is not a grab-bag of neutral building blocks: it is full of countless enabling tricks. The interlocking scheme of elements was a breakthrough that paved the way for emergence of life. While the laws of matter were being conceived, there must have been a very deep level of enmeshing. The vacuum of space is filled with energy fluctuations that appear to cancel each other out. According to string theorists, it took thousands of levels of integration to get from strings to matter. Symmetry built upon super-symmetry, until a singularity came and hatched matter out of sheer energy and mathematics. But from the perspective of Kun, the deep samadhi of world-nurturing is eternal, without beginning or end, regardless of any abrupt leaps into history. Kun always goes further down, preparing the Way, not just for the next breakthrough, but for all future breakthroughs!
Of course, we cannot get close to appreciating what Kun has done. We watch the work of nurturance from way up here on our high platforms of the world-tree. We feel the limbs rocking in a storm, but we cannot see very far down. Mostly we feel her in our nurturing bonds, in our community. But now we see Her being interrupted and chopped up by constant new developments, because things are cooking up now on our platform. We play along with the breakthrough, the flash, the happening. Our consciousness is tuned to detect the 1% change against the steady 99% backdrop. But always, and at whatever level, Kun is there knitting transient things together, laying the groundwork for something that will weather the changes, preparing a seedbed for breakthroughs that won't exhaust themselves on their first try.

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Thanks to Wang Hao for translating this into Chinese:

坤德颂

称呼你并不容易。你体内变化万千，但你没有外形。你是事物脚下的根基。你并不只是平淡无奇的基质。事物生长的地面必定肥沃。肥沃意味着你拥有内循环的秘密。你有鬈须般的毛根，你像马鬃毯般缠结的毡布。你有相互联结的代谢圈，你让千百万种酶反应保持平衡。我怎样才能开始讲述已经完成的事情——我们启程时认为毋庸置疑的事物？你不是同质、黑暗、消极的东西。你因所获得的平台而变化。你是一百块布头缝成的被子，但我们在睡梦中只能感觉到你的温暖。你以不同的方式给予我们母爱。有时你是形式矩阵，我们在其中用雅致的定理解答新的公式或者假设。当我们理解了新的定理，我们会发现它一开始就内在于你的系列规则。有时你把我们装进孵化箱，用你的丰富喂养我们的胚胎酵素，把我们和外界的风雨和震荡隔离开。如果我们逗留得太长，并不总是件好事。
你体内繁忙，就像电视屏幕上的雪花点那样。但你的雪花是看不到的，因为你体内的小点彼此跟随。你已经完建立了内部执行因子的群落，你已经把一股股的流动束起来，你已经把一个个小结都连在一起，让我们双脚踩踏。
你存在，正如用活生生的纤维打成的凯尔特结。你的迷宫来到一起的时刻必然伴随着光的突破，但我们看不透你的"暗"。
按《易经》那种极为浓缩的语言，你被形容为一种善于凝结的"简易"事物。这种简易表明你编织精美，我们走到你跟前，却把你简单地用作一块织物。你"凝结"，因为你永远给予的是事物的结合。
生命的花边结原本不易编织。在我们浮华、肉感的意识剧场里，一般只能看到三两缕丝线结在一起。从我们的进化理论来看，我们说他们被结在一起是因为它们彼此为用。但生命基本的新陈代谢由几千缕丝线结成。每一缕线都是一个酶的循环——一个从代谢物中汲取能量或者制造蛋白的反馈圈。每一缕线都依赖其他线，但如果某一个圈还没有圆满地形成，或者只完成了95%的循环，对其它线毫无用处。一旦它们被结在一起，就会成为物种发展谱系中可靠的种质。原生质的结合是悄无声息的序曲，后面跟着填补生态位、展露无数形态的全面进化。它聚拢的瞬间必定伴随着光的辉煌闪耀！所以或许有人会说生命的织物是创造者乾所孕育的。但是细看源头，在光闪之下，必定形成了聚合的深层基质，让大自然的洞察力闪现出来！每次突破之下都有坤的三昧深层基质。三昧是直觉，是一种想象中的编合，孕育了线最终的真实编织。
三昧等持深不可测。个人思想的整合之下是大自然的整合，可以让有智慧的人升起。在这之下是宇宙伟大的三昧，它孕育了物质的法则。
事物的基底不是一堆中性的积木，它充满了无数助动的诀窍。元素的连锁设计是一个突破，为生命的出现铺平了道路。物质的法则孕生之时必然存在很深的一层缠结。空间的真空充满看似相互抵消的能量波动。"超弦"的理论家相信要两万层整合才能把弦变成物质。给超级对称加上一层对称，直到出现某种奇点，并把物质从单纯的能量和数学中孵化出来。但是在坤眼里，抚育世界的深三昧是永恒的，无始无终，不论历史是否出现突变。坤始终走得更远，不仅为下一个突破而且为将来所有突破铺路。
当然，我们无法真正认识和赞赏坤的作为。我们在世界之树高耸的平台这头观看抚育的过程。我们感到枝干在暴风雨中摇动。我们向下看不到太深的地方。在我们的社群里，往往在抚育我们的纽带中感受到她的存在。我们看到她被接二连三的新发展打断、切碎，因为事物在我们的平台上煮开了锅。我们与突破、闪光和偶发事件周旋。我们的意识只关注99%的稳定背景下出现的1%的变化。但不论在哪个层次上，坤始终在把转瞬即逝的事物编织到一起，为能历经风雨的事物筑实根基，为突破建起苗床，让它们不致在初试锋芒时耗尽自身。

王浩中译