The I Ching thus seems quite foreign to our present-day systems of human values. The I Ching, as I read it, assumes that humans only have two dimensions for interacting with nature plus two ways of interacting with other humans. In interacting with nature, we have the choice of the time dimension or the space dimension. These are the key man-nature interactions in the 8 primary trigrams. Interactions occur at a particular point in time and in a particular space.
Space is also a continuum from here to there to everywhere.
Everywhere once referred only to the earth, while now it includes the cosmos. But none of these are so clearly evident, fundamental, and unambiguous as time and space. As for human interaction, the I Ching seems to settle on a spectrum that ranges from not acting and being alone, to acting and communicating with others. The first four trigrams deal with not acting or pre-action, the second four with action. Therefore, the first set of four has two for not acting in time and two for not acting in space.