Incipience - Jī 幾 - The art of noticing first signs of yet unmanifested change

Change is the only real constant in the world we live in. No one would deny that.

Noticing change, however can be a bit tricky sometimes.

Some change is happening too slow to notice - this is the image of the trigram 巽 xùn named wind (風) or tree. Changes

are so slow they are barely noticeable, for example that is how a tree grows or even better example would be change in

growth/development of a child. If you are one of the lucky one to raise children you probably noticed the change in your toddler's appearance only after you did not see him or her over the weekend.

Another extreme would be change that happens so fast that, again, we are not able to notice it. This is the image of 震 (zhèn) named "the arousing (shock, thunder)". A soldier on the frontline may become aware that the bullet just missed him only after he heard the buzzing, whistling noise. The speed of the bullet was too high human eye simply cannot register its flight.

I would like to say a word or two about something similar which would not fall into the above two mentioned scenarios. I want to speak about so called Incipience - Jī 幾 which is something that can be observed, noticed but only if one is attuned to this type of change. This type of change is often called "omens" which means a symptom or early indication of something that is in progress and still it has not become obvious (to most people at least).

For example practically all types oh health diseases have early signs which are more than often ignored because humans simply do not pay attention to the changes in their body until problems become acute and severe.

This can be seen in social life as well - I remember very clearly after the 9/11 event in the US the talking heads from the TV screens were blasting "US - the greatest nation on Earth" practically 24/7. Most religions including Christianity teach that arrogance comes before the downfall (in people and societies alike) so now looking back we can see that the US was on the downward trajectory ever since 2001 when "American exceptionalism" was officially introduced. That sort of arrogance was an early sign (Incipience - Jī 幾) of a disease that followed.

The Yi Jing proposes that the bottom line in the trigram is the initial stage of any change when the change is not yet manifested (full manifestation happens in the second line and the excess in the third line). If one wants to steer the direction of any events happening he or she is advised to do it at the earliest stage possible, which is the stage of the bottom line in the trigram, when practically no one else even understand something is happening.

One practical example of that would be something like this: if one is introspective enough he or she will notice the patterns or clusters of his thought, what is ti that one is preoccupied with and if those thoughts are for example drawn towards experimenting with fentanyl (a little bit strong example but exaggeration is used for didactic purposes), just to see how it feels than never do it again, then one will show that he understands the meaning of Incipience and the bottom line in a trigram/hexagram if he nips it in the bud.

I was wondering what the two leading AI chatbots can say about the relationship between the concept of Incipience - Jī 幾 and the symbolism of the bottom line of trigrams and hexagrams in the Yi Jing. I copied their answers below.