Yin Yang Yen

The five vowel letters in English are a e i o u. Let’s focus on the first three.

There is a strange connection here with yin and yang. Depicted in the below image, yin is black and white is yang. In yin-yang there is no gray area, it contains only black and white. The origin of yin-yang comes from the sun shining on a hill: yin (black) is the shadow and yang (white) is where the sun shines.

Observe that the vowels in the words “yin” and “yang” bookend the vowel e. Therein lies the first step to finding the gray area within yin and yang.

Now, look again at yin-yang, and find the e. There are actually two ways to find an e, one e with its loop embodying the white part, and the other e with the loop embodied by the black part. I find this realization elegantly matching the dual nature of yin-yang.

Taking an alternative perspective, it’s possible to construct yin-yang with just two e’s. Start with one e in “light mode” and another in “dark mode.” By overlaying them such that one e’s eye fills the other e’s arm, you will find again we’ve created yin-yang. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are complementary and interconnected, mirroring this blend of two e’s.

There is mounting evidence that “e” has some special and deep relation with yin-yang. So, should there be a yen?

Strangely enough the official currency of Japan is the Yen, coincidentally its name derives from their word for round.

Back to the concept of a gray area, where could it be? A first idea would be to infinitely zoom in on the boundary between yin and yang, finding two gray e’s intertwined in an ouroboros.

If you spun yin-yang like a coin, and observed the boundary line, you would see a shape resembling an hourglass, an electron’s orbital, or a mathematical lemniscate. The two foci in the lemniscate are the ‘eyes’ of yin-yang.

Let’s recall that yin-yang is actually a 2-D projection of a 3-D representation. Its creator saw a sunny hillside, probably around 9 am or 3 pm, and cast it into a 2-D image based on the hillside’s illumination. Zooming out further to 4-D, where the fourth dimension is time, we can see yin-yang as one snapshot of the hillside of many throughout the day. Yin dominates at night when everything is completely black, and yang prevails at noon when the hill is fully bathed in sunlight.

One can simply average the hill’s brightness throughout the day; blending all the colors until we arrive at a pure gray. Or one can perceive all instances of time in a stacked volume, not far from the pages of a book. Flip through the pages fast enough, and the yen of yin-yang comes to life before our eyes.