The I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest and most influential oracles in history. It was believed to hold the answer to any question you asked of it. It has been used by many artists and musicians including Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, and George Harrison.
It is considered to be the oldest of the great Chinese classics, emerging as early as 1,300 BC. It has also been described as a “book of divination.” Its pages are made up of 64 symbols called "hexagrams" that are believed to form the basic categories of everything that exists. And through its spiritual symbolism, it was thought to provide the means by which to understand all phenomena. What this means is that you can ask it any question, and it will give you a meaningful answer. And for centuries, that’s precisely what people used it for.
The I Ching is based on the idea that everything in the universe is a combination of Yin and Yang. Yin represents elements of darkness, receptivity, and the negative polarity. And Yang represents elements of light, activity, and the positive polarity. Out of these two, come everything.
One of the most important philosophical ideas to come out of China in the fourth and third centuries was the idea that the main goal of human activity was to harmonize with the natural patterns of change in the universe. For many thinkers of the time, divination was a means to understand the cosmos and one’s place within it. And the I Ching had become a powerful tool for achieving exactly this kind of understanding.
But in our modern world, which emphasizes logic and reason, over intuition - you might ask: does the I Ching, as an oracle for divination, really work? And if it does, then how? In this video, we consider a few theories.
1. The ethnobotanist and author Terrence McKenna became so fascinated with the I Ching, that he carried out a mathematical analysis to try to explain how and why it was ordered the way it was. He came to the conclusion that the 64 hexagrams were not a random sequence of symbols, but that they were carefully constructed to give the results that they do. And they were an attempt to map the nature of time itself.
2. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was also known for his work with the I Ching. Jung spent a lot of time trying to understand how an ancient book, could give such meaningful answers to the questions we ask of it. He linked this to his famous concept of Synchronicity. Synchronicities are “meaningful coincidences” that happen when an inner psychological state of the mind corresponds to an event in the world. They aren’t connected by cause-and-effect. Instead, they are connected by meaning.
3. Jung anticipated that skeptics would criticize the I Ching. For example, a skeptic might say that anyone who looks for answers in the I Ching is just projecting their own psychological thoughts and impressions into the symbolism of the hexagrams.But Jung argued that even if this is true “it does no harm to the function of the I Ching. On the contrary.” Don’t you see how useful that is, in making you project your unrealized thoughts onto its pages?” What’s more, Jung saw the rich symbolism in the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, not just as a way to access our own intuition, but as a doorway that could unlock the power of the unconscious mind. And what he called the collective unconscious.