encountering the i ching
TRANSCRIPT
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Encountering the I
ChingFrom story writing, to Carl Jung and the I
Ching.
An account of the author's introduction to this
remarkable, and most ancient of books.
Sequence
1) Starting to write.
2) Writing as a form of self exploration.
3) Carl Jung and the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
4) Discovering the archetypes in my own work.
5) Encountering the I Ching.
6) Synchronicity and the Mechanism of the I Ching.
7) Statistical investigation of the I Ching.
8) Dealing with the sceptics and the believers.
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9) Author's note regarding translations of the I Ching.
10) Postscript regarding Carl Jung and the Nazis
_______________________________
1) Starting to write
When I began writing, in my early twenties, it was because I wanted tobe famous. I thought I wanted to capture in my work the essence of
something so profound it would set the world on fire and ensure my
name went down in history. Such is the innocence of youth! Well, I'm
in my forties now with several novels behind me, all of themunpublished. There are also many short stories, vignettes, sketches,
outlines, essays like this one,... stories that began but never progressed,
stories that began and just went on too long,... altogether manyhundreds of thousands of words, but the situation is by now
overwhelmingly obvious: I'm never going to make my living as a
writer.
But then I don't need to. I've always been able to make a decent living
doing something else, so why bother writing at all? Well, I believe my
persistence underlines the real reason most writers write. Quite simply,
they write because they are compelled to. It's just that a lucky few get to
make a fortune at it as well. The vast majority of us work in relative
obscurity.
These days, I rarely ever submit work to the printed press. I still write
and I keep a little known web site going for the ten or so people whodrop by each week, but for me writing has begun to evolve more into an
exploration of ideas, a means of experimenting with the nature of reality
through the medium of fantasy, the medium of thought.
The characters who crop up in my stories are like the different sides ofme, characters who act, speak or argue with one another, each from
their own point of view, so moving forward a notion, or dismissing it as
rubbish. The process is a fascination, and occasionally a revelation in
it's own right. It's introspective, unmarketable, perhaps even a little selfindulgent, but it's also personally satisfying in a way I've only recently
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begun to appreciate.
2) Writing as a form of self exploration
Writing is nowadays less about naive ambitions of literary stardom, andis instead more of a vehicle for exploring the nature of reality, including
that terribly fuzzy idea of the self.
Now, the "self" is a dangerous word, a word much loved by
psychobabblers and all sorts of people whose grip on reality seemsrather tenuous. Personally, I like to think of the "self" simply as what
lies beyond the horizon of our conscious awareness.
It is a strange and exotic land, like in olden times, a place of legend. Its
very existence is disputed, and those who claim to have been there don't
always appear sane enough to be capable of reliable testimony. So, forthe amateur explorer, if he's to make any sense of things, he needs to
study the maps left by those who say they've been before, but he must
also pick his way carefully because once we pass beyond the bounds of
what is known, we can fall prey to all manner of delusion.
Now, anyone who follows this particular route will encounter works of
philosophy, psychology and religion. And if one is largely agnostic in
matters of religion, yet plagued by a nagging spiritual need that, in spite
of our best efforts will simply not go away, one will eventually be
drawn to the works of Carl Jung.
3) Carl Jung and the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
Carl Jung (1875-1961)was one of the leading psychoanalysts of his time
and so seems eminently qualified to comment on matters of the "self".
Perhaps his most defining thesis was the idea that consciousnessoperates on three levels. Jung believed there is our everyday
consciousness, then a personal unconscious that is unique to all of us.But there is also a third level - what he called the collective
unconscious, which lies much deeper and consists of archetypal ideas
that are inborn - we inherit them, but not in the same way we would
inherit for example blonde hair or long fingers from our parents,because the archetypes rely not so much on the psychological nature of
our parents but of the whole of mankind regardless of race, creed or
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culture.
In the collective unconscious we are all the same and have been sincethe dawn of time. Now, this is a controversial idea, thus far unproven
and one I have to say that is not widely accepted. Critics have even
suggested that in order to come up with such an idea Jung himself must
have been delusional.
Proof of the existence of a collective unconscious, said Jung, lies in the
fact that the so called archetypes are common across all cultures and
manifest themselves as particular characters in literature and folklore, or
as particular symbols and patterns of belief. So, stories told in Western
Europe for example feature the same basic types of character as storiestold in China or the Bolivian jungle, even though these cultures
remained isolated from one another until relatively recent times, and so
were unable to swap stories.
Now, I'm not qualified to comment on psychological theories, but I do
know a thing or two about writing stories. Stories are peculiar things.
They are a lie. They are the account of an event that did not happen, atale of characters who were never born, but this is okay because
everyone knows and we are happy to participate in the lie because ofwhat we get out of the story. And what we get is emotionalengagement,... not with the writer, who merely acts as a sort of conduit,
but with the imaginary goings on of the story. These goings on are
conceived in the writer's imagination, which has its roots in hisunconscious, and if a story is to work it must achieve a certain
resonance in the readers' mind, rather like the wind blowing over the
neck of a bottle.
But how can the writer bring this about when his readers are complete
strangers to him? Well, if Jung is correct then both reader and writershare the same pool of unconscious archetypes, and a good writer is one
who plays these archetypes in an effective way, a way that achieves
resonance in the reader's mind.
4) Finding Jung's archetypes in my own work
Looking back over my own work, I realised certain types of characterwere cropping up repeatedly in different stories. There were wise old
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men, there were well meaning knuckle heads who had no idea what wasgoing on. There were mysterious women who I now recognise as the
archetype that Jung called the anima (my female alter ego).
Now I'm not saying I play these characters particularly well, only that
they do seem to exist, and because I could point to them in my own
work I needed less persuading of their existence than perhaps someone
who is less familiar with the process of story writing. The archetypes it
seems are indeed an unconscious phenomenon and they are not my
personal property - others have been feeling their presence ever since
men first sat around a fire and told stories.
To me, Jung had hit the nail on the head and because of this I wasreceptive to other aspects of his work. I began to read more about his
ideas, to explore his writings. And anyone who explores the writing of
Carl Jung will sooner or later encounter the I Ching.
5) Encountering the I Ching
I came across it in a publisher's clearance bookshop and would not have
given it a second glance had it not been for the subtitle: "Foreword by
Carl Jung". That one simple link, sparked by my interest in Jung's ideas
was to result in a period of intense study of the I Ching - its history, it's
methodology and it's astonishing potential. Then followed an attempt to
establish at least in my own mind whether or not the claims made for I
Ching were actually true.
The I Ching is a very old book. We can trace it's origins back fairly
accurately some 3000 years to ancient China. It first came to the
attention of the Western world in relatively recent times when atranslation of it appeared in the works of James Legge, a 19th century
Christian missionary, but perhaps the most famous translation was thatmade by the 20th century German missionary Richard Wilhelm.Published in English in 1950, it has existed quietly in the background of
western life ever since.
Both translations are much respected but the essential difference
between their author's is that while Legge was a faithful translator, he
did not believe in the I Ching. Wilhelm on the other hand did. And,perhaps more significantly for me, so did Carl Jung, who even used it in
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his therapies.
The I Ching has been described as an oracle, as a means of telling thefuture, all things that sounded fairly suspect to me but, as I discovered,
to label the I Ching as a means of telling one's fortune, is something of
an oversimplification.
We all have it in us to predict some aspects of the future from ourunderstanding of the natural cycles in nature. For example, as I write,
the oak tree across the meadow from my house stands bare and black
against a winter sky, but I know it will bear leaf again in the spring. It's
more or less certain, obviously, because I understand the natural cycle
of the seasons. Well, the I Ching works along similar lines. It's just thatthe cycles it works with are said to be much deeper that we normally
perceive.
We use it to assess a situation that may be troubling us and then, basedupon a reading of the forces at play, the I Ching will tell us what's likely
to happen and how we should position ourselves to the best advantage.
But of course, for it to do this, the I Ching has to know what we'rethinking, which suggests a link between "it" and the mind of the person
who is asking the question.
Now, I've never had much time for this sort of thing, and being a
rationally minded chap with some training in the physical sciences, my
relationship with the I Ching was never going to be an easy one. Indeed
my immediate instinct was to label it as pseudo science, or meaningless
mysticism. But then I began to study the Wilhelm translation and to my
surprise the I Ching read, not like the pages of a horoscope, nor the glib
text of a fortune cookie, but as a philosophy of life. It made sense and in
spite of myself, it struck several chords.
Carl Jung, who was Wilhelm's friend, was so taken up with it, he wrotethe foreword to the original translation. He swore by its effectiveness
and encouraged his patients to use it as a psychological tool for
exploring their own unconscious. Perhaps inevitably though he often
found himself defending the I Ching against the disparaging views of
the scientific community, including those of his one time friend and
mentor Sigmund Freud, who often despaired at Jung's forays into what
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he called the "black tide of occultism".
Such criticism once led Jung to advise a correspondent against thesetting up of an I Ching Institute, suggesting: "that in order to avoid
the disastrous prejudice of the western mind, the matter would have to
be introduced under the cloak of science."
If you are a scientist, you have a strictly rational approach to life, youquestion everything and you rely on the probing narrowness of fact in
order to reliably advance your understanding of something. It's a good
system and slowly but surely it's brought us out of the dark ages to
where we are now, typing missives onto this barely imaginable thing
called the internet and launching probes into outer space. If on the otherhand you are religious, you take comfort in what is essentially a set of
dogmatic axioms and you have faith that something is the way you havebeen told it is by those who have gone before you. You don't need proof
of the existence of a supernatural being or force. You can simply accept
it.
Those two views of our world are seemingly irreconcilable. The I Chinghowever straddles this divide. It isn't really so much the cornerstone of a
faith, like the Bible for example, or the Koran, more the cornerstone ofa philosophy, a depiction simply of the way things are. And it goes onestage further than religion or science, in that it claims to grant the user a
very tangible link with mysterious forces beyond our understanding. By
so doing it offends the sensibilities of both science and religion, thelatter dismissing it as the work of the devil and the former as
superstitious mumbo jumbo. Either way, it cannot possibly work.
To the devotee, however, proof of the I Ching, lies not in the
mathematics of science nor the testimony of religion but simply in its
application. You have only to use it, they say, to discover that it works.
6) Synchronicity and the Mechanism of the I Ching
I won't go into too much detail about how the I Ching works. If your're
reading this you're likely to be aware already of the large number of
websites on this subject and if you want more specific detail I suggest
you look at some of these. (see later references)
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Basically, the I Ching is divided into 64 chapters, each one drawingupon a particular theme, or aspect of life. By various random means
such as tossing coins and noting how they fall, or the repeated divisionof a bunch of yarrow stalks, we are directed to a particular chapter that's
supposedly related to our query. Then we sift the words for personal
meaning.
Now, by all rational analysis this can be nothing more than a random
process, but to the devotee it is a means of gauging the status of events,
the changing flux of the energy patterns pertaining to your situation.
The chapter you are directed to will, it is said, describe that situation,
point out the way things are going, and suggest the wisest course of
action so that you can take advantage of the likely outcome.
The language of the I Ching is poetic and a little obscure to the layman,so full translations include an explanatory text which itself draws upon
the original commentaries added by the Chinese philosopher Confucius.
The idea is that without too much effort, a little reasoning can yieldpertinent and specific information that will help you think through any
situation.
Now this is supposed to work precisely because of the random nature ofthe mechanism. Jung coined the term synchronicity which essentiallyboils down to the notion that some coincidences can be meaningful. It's
a bit like thinking of a friend for no apparent reason and then bumping
into them a moment later. Jung would have put that down tosynchronicity, and in a similar way, by thinking about our query we
allegedly have an effect on the outcome of the tossed coins.
This is the hardest part for any rationally minded person to accept,
because if you ask the same question twice, you're going to get a
different answer each time. Therefore, if you don't like the first answer,or you don't understand it, you can simply keep on asking until you get
the one you want, or one that you do understand.
Now so far I've straddled the fence, coming down neither on the side of
the sceptics, nor the devotees, but if you were to ask me outright in my
own experience does the I Ching work, then I would have to say that
more often than not, yes, it does work.
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7) Statistical investigation of the I Ching
My early experience with the I Ching yielded some surprisinglypertinent answers but I was still inclined to believe this was due to its
language being sufficiently "loose" to enable it be applicable to a wide
range of situations, that it was possible to get a good answer regardless
of the question, that there were no synchronistic forces at play.
I was also fairly sure I could prove it by a simple statistical analysis but
I was wrong and instead my analysis, carried out over a period of four
months, pointed in entirely the opposite direction and I'm now
convinced something intriguing is going on.
I keep a journal in which I record questions that I put to the I Ching, andthe corresponding answers. After some 200 entries, I began to study the
results. First of all, I looked at how often particular answers were
repeated. Some answers came up as many as 11 times, while others onlycame up only once. On the face of it, this might seem curious, but the
distribution of frequencies (the number of times each answer came up)
was in fact quite normal. It was easy to confirm this by generating 200numbers between 1 and 64 randomly by a computer program, and
comparing the statistics. The mean values and the standard deviationsfor each group were almost identical
At a first glance then, there didn't appear to be anything odd, but this
wasn't a very good test for trying to establish evidence of "intelligence"
or some other force influencing the responses of the I Ching. If the
questions you ask are fairly random in their nature, then the responses
will be correspondingly random.
It proved nothing either way.
What was intriguing though was not so much the frequency of the
repeating hexagrams, but the chronological pattern of the answers I was
getting.
I have to be honest here: the I Ching doesnt work every time. From my
experience with it I know I can expect, on average, between 5 and 6 outof every 10 oracles to be meaningful. The rest will be meaningless, no
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matter how hard I try to twist the language.
This can mean one of two things:
1) The I Ching is written in a sufficiently vague way to yield a
meaningful result 50 to 60% of the time.
Or:
2) I am only sufficiently receptive to "connect" with the I Ching 50 -
60% of the time. (ie you have to be in the right frame of mind for it to
work properly)
Option (1) would indicate no "supernatural" or "psychological"
influences are at work. But option (2), if it could be proven, would
indeed establish some sort of link between the User and the Oracle.
Taking the first 100 oracles as a sample, it struck me that the
meaningful answers seemed to come in good patches, as if on a
particular day I was in a better frame of mind. Then there would follow
a run of bad or confusing oracles.
If the run of answers were indeed being influenced by suchpsychological conditions, then I reasoned it should be easy to establish
through a fairly simple statistical analysis of the frequencies of goodand bad answers. As an example of what I mean, if we let the number
"1" represent a good answer and "0" represent a bad, or confused
answer then, taken over a period of time, a string of responses recorded
like this:
1101001010010001101001100100001010101010100110110010011......
would tell us that we're probably drawing good and bad answers on a
fairly random and probably meaningless basis.
But a string of answers recorded like this:
1111111100000011111000010000011111111111111111000000111
reveals an obvious pattern and suggests that more is going on than can
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easily be explained by chance.
A study of my journal indeed revealed such a pattern. It was not as clearcut as in the above example, and required some analysis to establish that
there was only a 1 in 160 chance that the sequence of the first 100
responses I got was random in nature.
It was unlikely, but within the bounds of probability - just about.
Then I repeated the analysis with the second 100 responses. A similarpattern emerged, even more striking this time and analysis showed only
a 1 in 225 chance that it had been randomly generated.
To my mind this was fairly convincing evidence in favour of the I
Ching. But then I realised there was one weakness in the argument:
Certainly something was influencing the pattern of good and bad
answers, but was it psychological in the Jungian, Synchronistic sense,
or did my periods of waxing and waning receptiveness amount to little
more than a varying degree of willingness or patience to wrestle with
the language, or to spot the metaphors. This would still count as a
psychological "effect", but it would be entirely of my own making, and
certainly not evidence of an unconscious synchronistic connection.
Could such a thing explain the patterns I'd seen?
I looked again at those first 100 responses. I took each answer and
added 10 to the number of the hexagram I'd been given in response. Soif for example I'd been given hexagram 8 as a response, I turned this
into hexagram 18. 51 became 61. When we got to 55, the period 10
"shift" wrapped around to the beginning and we got hexagram 1. 56
became 2, 64 became 10 etc.
In dong this I changed all the answers to truly arbitrary ones,
eliminating the possibility of any synchronistic forces coming into play
and influencing the answers. Thus, by all rational analysis if the
answers had been truly intelligent in the first place, this "effect" should
have been destroyed. Then, by studying the "fake" hexagrams I could
generate a further pattern of answers which would either have a random
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sequence, or a non random sequence.
But what would this tell me?
Well, a random sequence would confirm there had indeed initially beenan intelligent pattern to the answers, and that by an arbitrary shift, I had
removed the synchronistic effect, and destroyed the pattern. This would
provide fairly convincing evidence in favour of the I Ching.
Another non-random sequence would tell me that my attention, or mypatience, had been waxing and waning again, producing patterns of
good and bad answers from what were in fact arbitrary responses. This
would not provide convincing evidence in favour of the I Ching and,after putting so much effort into studying it, I would probably have
slung my copy in the bin.
But there was no pattern.
The string of responses from the bogus answers was as near as possible
the average of what you would expect to get had the sequence been
generated randomly. The arbitrary shift had removed the "intelligent"
effect, therefore it seemed the answershadbeen intelligent in the first
place!
Now, after the statistical work on those binary strings, I was fairly
convinced in my own mind that something unusual was going on withthe I Ching. For a time afterwards, I forgot about trying to experiment
with it, posted the results on this page, and simply began using it. Then,
some months later, I looked back through my journal and I noticedsomething very striking indeed had happened. Something even more
convincing.
Between the 18th of June and the 7th of July 2003, I had carried on a
fairly persistent line of inquiry, using the I Ching as a guide. I wasinterested in exploring man's spirituality, how this tied in with Carl
Jung's ideas on the collective unconscious and also how this could be
reconciled with the various religious beliefs on the subject of an
afterlife or rebirth,... that sort of thing.
I did not repeatedly ask the same question. My own experience and the
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experience of others seems to be that the I Ching's answers to questionsbecome increasingly opaque the more times a specific question is asked.
What I was trying to do was to formulate questions in a direct responseto the previous answer the I Ching gave. So it was more of an
exploratory conversation on a particular theme. In this way my
impressions of the spiritual dimension - if there is one - grew in a
particular direction depending on whether or not the responses to my
questions indicated I was getting "warmer" or "colder".
If I was completely wrong about something - say I suggested the
universe was a balloon being blown out of the end of a giant elephant's
trunk, then I might expect the I Ching to give me a negative response - I
didn't actually ask this question of course because it's flippant and trivial
and I would not have expected a decent answer. But I did ask other,
more serious questions and received a number of negative rebuffs,
which I took to indicate I was thinking about things the wrong way.
Now, there are a couple of hexagrams that might be used to suggest Iwas barking up the wrong tree, namely hexagram 12 which talks about
things being out of accord with the real nature of things, or hexagram 38
which speaks of confronting opposition. There are others of course, but
these are the main ones that spring to mind.
Looking back over that period between June 18 and July 7th , I counted
a total of 55 questions and corresponding responses. Among those 55
responses, hexagram 12 appeared a total of 7 times.
Now, statistically speaking, the probability of getting hexagram 12
should be the same as getting any other hexagram, to be precise: 127 in
4032, which is very nearly 1 in 32. Why not 1 in 64? Well, each time
we draw a hexagram, we often get what is called a changing line which
gives us a second hexagram and this could be any one of the remainingsixty three (because a hexagram cannot change into itself). So, at each
consultation we in effect draw 2 hexagrams. Therefore the chances of
getting a specific hexagram, say hexagram 12, are doubled to around 1
in 32. This is a best chance scenario, and assumes we get a changing
line each time.
Now, if those are the natural odds then what are the chances of getting
the same hexagram 7 times in 55 consultations? Well on average one
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would expect 55x1/32= 1.72 or in practical terms 1 or 2 occurrences in55. But 7? This was significantly above average and therefore an
unlikely occurrence. But how unlikely?
To analyse it statistically and to put a figure on it required a different
approach to the one I'd used with the binary strings. I needed to dust off
my old maths text books and look up a thing called the Poisson
distribution.
The Poisson distribution is used for calculating the probabilities that an
event is going to occur. More specifically if the mathematical
probability of an event occurring is known, then the Poisson distribution
can tell us how many times we might reasonably expect that event tooccur in a certain sample size or over a certain number of trials.
Question: If there are sixty four marbles in a bag, one black and the
remainder white, and we draw marbles out, one at a time, (putting themback after each go) and we do this 55 times, what are the chances of us
drawing out the black marble seven times? - not seven times in a row
but just seven times.
This is the sort of question the Poisson distribution can help us to
answer.
The Poisson is actually an approximation of another distribution - the
Binomial, but this can be a little unwieldy to work with. Provided we
can meet certain conditions in our experiment, the Poisson is accurate
for all practical purposes.
First, the probability, "p" of the event occurring has to be less than 0.1.
In our case the probability is 1/32 = 0.0312 so this is okay. Second, the
sample size, "n", or the number of hexagrams we draw has to be greaterthan 30. In our case it's 55 so again we're okay. Third, the expected
average number of occurrences, given by np, must be less than 5 and
must remain constant throughout the experiment. In our case np=
0.031255 = 1.72, so again we meet the conditions.
For our purposes, the Poisson distribution boils down to an equation:
The probability "P" of getting precisely "x" number of hexagrams over
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"n" number of trials or consultations is: P = e^-l[(l^x)(x!)]
Where e is the base of natural logarithms (2.718)
l = np, or in our case 1.72. This is the average number of occurrences
we might expect in our sample.
x is the actual number of occurrences, in our case 7.
So the probability of getting 7 hexagram 12's out of 55 consultations is:
P = 2.718^-1.72(1.72^7/7!)
P = 0.179(44.53/5040) = 0.0016
A probability of 0.0016, or 0.16%, or around 1 in 625.
That's the same thing as having a bag of 625 marbles, one black the restwhite and hoping to pick out the black marble on the first try, an event
which, in all reasonable expectation, I'd say is unlikely. Except it
happened,... and it happened I believe, because when consulting the I
Ching, chance doesn't really come into it at all.
This was a significant conclusion for me, a practicing engineer,
schooled in the unchanging and deterministic world of Newtonian
mechanics. Quite a shattering view, because time and again the statistics
were pointing to the validity of what in polite scientific circles is known
as an "anomalous phenomenon" or in Freud's more direct, though rather
more poetic language, "the black tide of occultism". But then even
Newton, the father of all that is deterministic, was a bit of an alchemist
on the quiet - perhaps there was more to this than a mere eccentric
pastime.
Whichever way I look at it now, I know the I Ching works, just aspeople have been saying it works for thousands of years. I don't know
how it works, but then as Jung said,the less we think about how the I
Ching works, the more soundly we sleep.
8)Dealing with the sceptics and the believers
As one might expect there are a lot of Internet sites expounding the
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validity of the I Ching. If you study them you will find a lot of float,flowery, "spiritual guru" language which for the uninitiated is a little
hard to grapple with, and prone to abuse by unscrupulous or merelyignorant people. Then there are hard headed secular sites that say it's a
load of old rubbish, and there are fundamentalist religious sites that will
condemn it as the work of the devil. But no one offers anything in the
way of hard evidence to support their claims.
As for me, I've tried to walk the middle path here, keeping an open
mind, and trying to use my rational abilities to identify the danger
zones. But to sceptics, I have to say the devotees of the I Ching are
right: it either works or it doesn't, and even my own most cursory of
studies has thrown up some fairly convincing results, when to be
perfectly honest, I hadn't expected to find anything.
Now, I'm not making any extravagant claims here. For my results to be
valid the experiments would have to be repeated and the results verified
by others. You'd also want to take a closer look at my interpretations ofthose hexagrams and I'm afraid I won't let you because some of the
questions were very personal, and I'd be embarrassed. In short, I could
have made it all up.
So, as if to demonstrate the underlying principles of the I Ching,opinion is typically polarised - some people claiming one thing, others
claiming the exact opposite. At such times, if a man is curious enough,
then, like me, he really has no choice but to experience a thing at firsthand, and draw conclusions based upon his own observations. There is
no danger in this. You can forget your grandmother's warnings about
dabbling with the occult and summoning up demons - the I Ching
contains no demons, imagined or otherwise, and it makes no disturbing
predictions of untimely death, nasty accident nor, unfortunately, lottery
jackpots either - it simply isn't that sort of book.
If, after all this, you're curious about the I Ching, my only advice is to
suspend disbelief for a moment, toss the coins and read what the book
has to say. You may find it instructive, or you may find it unintelligible.
Sometimes you'll get an answer that's so pertinent it will make the hairs
stand up on the back of your neck. At other times you'll have to think
about it,... but since when has thinking on a problem been such a bad
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11) Post script regarding Carl Jung and the Nazis
In studying the I Ching I was greatly influenced by the fact that a manas eminent as Carl Jung thought there was something in it. I'd
previously read Jung's theories on the subconscious and was attracted to
them. However, being merely a curious layman, I have only recently
begun to appreciate the fundamental rift between Jung and his one time
friend and mentor Sigmund Freud.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, this rift came about as a
consequence of their differing views on the nature of the unconscious
mind and why it can sometimes break down. Freud's view of the human
psyche was essentially mechanistic - we are a biological machine andthe brain operates on principles that can be explained in terms of
chemistry and biology, both respectable avenues of scientificendeavour. He also believed that most of the problems one encounters
are due the repression of unpleasant childhood memories, memories
concerning some form of sexual trauma.
Jung's approach was more metaphysical. His ideas about synchronicityand levels of unconscious thought that exist independently of our
bodies, defy explanation in any known scientific terms. He believedFreud's emphasis on the sexual nature of repressed memories was toosimplistic, and as his own ideas grew in stature, there came about an
inevitable estrangement.
People have questioned the ideas of both men, indeed the whole field of
psychoanalysis has its critics, but the move to discredit Jung seems
particularly vehement and personally disparaging. A favourite approach
of his most ardent critics, rather than argue against his work directly and
constructively, is to describe him as a Nazi sympathiser and an anti
Semite, so seeking, as if in some seedy courtroom manner, to disqualifyhis testimony by calling his character into question.
I first became aware of these views on a late night arts programme on
TV towards the end of January 2003, while I was working on the above
essay. On the programme, a very self assured and arty gentleman
dismissed Jung in a single sentence by demonising him as, essentially, a
Nazi stooge.
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For a while my own faith in Jung was duly shattered, as was my respectfor his ideas. Consequently my fascination with the I Ching was
similarly soured. Jung was a Nazi? The Nazis had strange ideas! Surelyanyone associated with Nazism could not be relied upon to provide
sound counsel.
However,....
I've since read sufficiently to reassure myself that none of this is
actually true, or at least it has been misinterpreted. Indeed such was
Jung's affinity with the ideals of Nazism, his name was on their blacklist
and they burned his books.
As for anti Semitism, this label does not fit well either with a manwhose ideas were so open and wide ranging. The opinion of more
learned Jungians and Jewish scholars is that his criticism of Freud's
ideas was either misinterpreted or deliberately twisted to imply anti
Semitism (Sigmund Freud was Jewish).
And, perhaps strangely, not all of Jung's ideas are rejected.
Psychometric testing is very popular in the western business community
as a means of picking people for particular roles, yet it is based entirely
on Jung's theories of character types. So, the critics it seems are being
somewhat selective in what aspects of his work they dismiss.
But this is a personal view and its not for me to argue the case between
the ideas of Freud and Jung. Intuitively, however, I'm drawn to Jung,
not only because of what I've observed in my own work as a writer of
fiction, but also because for all of us as human beings, his is a view that
seems, ultimately, the more optimistic. And if that sounds sentimental,I'm sorry but that's the way I am. As for the I Ching, I shall always be
intrigued by its paradox, on the one hand unable to quite accept themechanism by which it works, while on the other unable to dismiss the
startling accuracy of the answers it gives.
Bibliography:
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The I Ching: Wilhelm/Baynes.
The I Ching: Stephen Karcher.
The I Ching: Alfred Huang.
Introducing Jung: Maggie Hyde and Michael McGuinness.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: C.G. Jung
Syncronicity - An Acausal Connecting Principle: C G. Jung
The Essential Jung: Anthony Storr
C.G Jung. - Memories, Dreams, Reflections: Aniela Jaff
Level III Engineering Mathematics - Greer and Taylor
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