Time Is a Spiral: The I'Ching, The Zodiac, and the Eschatology We Need

Hey friends,

This episode has been a long time coming. It’s the one where I finally lay out the whole architecture… all the systems I work with on Living the Spiral, how they’re related, and most importantly, why I think they matter more than ever right now.

If you’ve been in my world for a while and nodded along when I mention the Fuxi sequence or the 64 gates of Human Design without quite seeing how it all fits together, this episode is for you. And if you’re brand new here, welcome! This is a good place to begin.

The through line is this: all of these systems are, at their root, technologies for locating yourself inside a living pattern. They remind us that we’re not separate from what’s moving around us, that the seasons are not happening to us. I found that when that relationship between my body and the season and ancestral time actually landed in my lived experiences rather than just my mind, something deep shifted. My sense of belonging came alive. And at the heart of it, that’s what this whole project is about.

🎧 Listen to the episode in the player above, on Youtube, or anywhere you find podcasts 🎧

Episode Overview:

The Oldest Question

We start at the beginning, with the impulse that every human culture across recorded history has shared - which is the need to locate themselves inside a larger story. Every culture across spacetime has created systems to address “Where am I in the cycle? What is my relationship with the land telling me? What do the shifting stars and planets say about the quality of this moment??

This impulse long predates writing. What I find remarkable is that across wildly different cultures with no contact between them, people arrived at remarkably similar answers: the sky is a clock, the seasons carry teachings, patterns repeat, and inside the repetition there is meaning. That’s the deep root of every system we cover in this episode.

The I Ching: The Origin Story

We go into the history and mythology of the I’Ching, starting with Fuxi, the mythological sage-emperor who received the eight trigrams (the ba gua) by observing nature. He witnessed the marks on the back of a tortoise shell, reflecting the behavior of water, the shape of wood, and the way things grow and die and grow again. Fuxi saw that reality is made of two forces in relationship, yin and yang, and that stacked in threes they produce eight fundamental qualities of energy: thunder, water, mountain, earth, wind, fire, lake, and heaven.

From there we get to King Wen, who (while imprisoned around 1000 BCE) took Fuxi’s eight trigrams and stacked them into pairs to create the 64 hexagrams - six lines, each broken or unbroken, 64 possible combinations. His son the Duke of Zhou wrote the commentaries for each of the individual lines, and Confucius added his own layers later. The I’Ching we have today is a palimpsest- thousands of years of wisdom in conversation with itself, all built on those same 64 patterns.

I also talk about why I have some frustration with how Human Design sometimes presents itself as if it arrived from nowhere, when so much of it comes directly from these ancient systems that deserve their own reverence and credit.

The Fuxi sequence and binary code

This is the section I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time, and it genuinely blew my mind when I first found it.

The sequence that Human Design uses on the mandala -the Fuxi sequence, also called the Earlier Heaven sequence - is a mathematically precise ordering of the 64 hexagrams that was actually formalized not by Fuxi himself but by an 11th century Song dynasty philosopher named Shao Yong around 1060 CE. Shao Yong arranged the hexagrams starting from all broken lines and moving systematically toward all solid lines, with each hexagram differing from the next by the minimum possible change.

The result is a perfect binary sequence. If you assign yin the value zero and yang the value one and read the lines from the bottom up, the Fuxi sequence counts in binary from 0 to 63 without missing a single step. Shao Yong drew this as a square diagram, with eight hexagrams across, and eight down, where the top line alternates yin and yang every hexagram, the next line every two, then every four, every eight, every sixteen, every thirty-two. This is exactly how binary counting works.

Six centuries later, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had been independently developing binary arithmetic since 1666, received a woodcut of this diagram from a Jesuit missionary named Joachim Bouvet who was living in Beijing at the Forbidden City. Within a week of seeing it, Leibniz sent hi