The Sixty-Four Changes

From two marks, a whole world of situations. Stack a broken line (yin) or a solid line (yang) six high, and there are exactly sixty-four possible figures — the full range of change, each one a moment in the turning, each shading into a neighbor as a single line flips. It is a binary cosmos: the smallest possible alphabet, combined, spells everything. The Kabbalah builds the same way — the Sefer Yetzirah's twenty-two letters combined into the 231 gates, the 72-fold Name unfolded from three verses, the 42-letter Name from the opening of Genesis. Two traditions that looked at creation and saw a combinatorial code: a few marks, weighed and combined, and out comes the ten thousand things.