The internal alchemist learns to directly SPEAK to Nature using the qi field. The same faculty used to listen to the inner voices of the five body-spirits is used by the adept to LISTEN to voices from inner heavens. Chuang Tzu defined a sage as "one who hears". At deep levels the qi language is sung as the inner music of the spheres, what Immortal Lu Dongbin called "listening to the stringless tune". At this stage one is beyond the images of the physical or astral planes of Later Heaven, and merged in Early Heaven, which is vibrating too quickly for the human mind to shape its qi field into recognizable physical images. It is experienced as pure sound, light, and vibration -- the building blocks of Early Heaven before they are assembled into physical form. This inner sound meditation cuts through and vertically links all time-space zones and the empty spaces within them: the eternal present moment of the Origin, the cyclical time spirals of Early Heaven, and the linear time of Later Heaven.

The I Ching trigrams, apparently adapted from the black and white dots of the ancient Ho Tu and Lo Shu diagrams, is a symbolic language that has been used to express the changing patterns of nature. Because the patterns of nature are multi-dimensional communications, the I Ching trigrams have also been interpreted as matching the stages of alchemy. This makes the I Ching useful but not necessary for the practice of internal alchemy, which speaks directly to nature without any mediation by external symbols/trigrams. Its trigrams constitute a formal or artificial language, but one that accurately reflects the deep patterns of the qi field flowing just below its symbolic images.

The Yi Jing (I Ching ) does not really predict the future, but rather merely reflects the field of all possibilities arising in the present moment. of the adept As such, it is a useful symbol (artificial) language for communicating with Nature, a kind of mathematical system whose systematic correspondences are attuned to cosmic rhythms of change. But the Yi Jing doesn't read these patterns; it is that humans use it to connect to the same patterns within their own deep intelligence.

Past and future are just Later Heaven human concepts of linear time that in the deeper heavens don't actually exist. Past and future in Early Heaven are probable patterns cycling into the present moment as possible parallel realities. In Primordial Heaven there are no time cycles, only the potential created by the orginal trinity in an eternal present moment. Humans have the ability to simultaneously communicate with the qi field of these different realities in the physical present moment. The advanced alchemist doesn't need to use the Yi Jing, because their body-mind has become a living Yi Jing by virtue of its deep resonance with Nature's yin-yang pulsations.

In nei dan meditation where I've attuned to the Yi Jing 's yin-yang trigrams, I experience them not as binary mathematical symbols, but as 8 tones or chords, with original jing-qi-shen as the fundamental tone/chord radiating out from the center. The 8 Early Heaven tonal-trigrams rotate counter-clockwise, the 8 Later Heaven tonal trigrams spiral clockwise away from the Origin. These multiply themselves into 64 tones, as found in ancient Chinese bronze sets of 64 bells set to a pentatonic (5 Phase) scale.

The Yi Jing becomes a musical-alchemical coda of how Nature "sings" itself into the repeating qi patterns (64 tone-hexagrams) of Later Heaven existence. The song of existence then falls back into silence at the center before repeating itself. What is missing from the I Ching symbols, and cannot be symbolized, is the Original spirit shaping and choosing the configuration of "qi music" (hexagram). In Later Heaven humans have the free will to choose what energy pattern they wish to create in response to the condition of their life. But deep cultivation is required to realize that freedom.