At the cosmological level all the major philosopical schools in China shared ideas related to ancestors and heaven discussed in the last chapter. They also shared an underlying assumption that the cosmos came into being on its own without a creator of the sort so important in most western thinking. Insteasd of focusing on mechanisms that set things into motion, whicha are important where there is an assumption of a creator, these thinkers emphasizied the organismic interconnections among all the constituent parts, stressing relationships and concurrences much morethan causes. Seeing the cosmos as an integrated whole, Chinese thinkers were not inclined to organize their world in terms of opposites that esclude the other, such as natural and supernatural, life and death, or mind and body. Rather, they saw all oppositions as complementary polarities, in the order of night and day, yin and yang , and knowledge and action. Moreover, they thought in terms of processes and phases more than discrete things.