Every culture in the world has tried to demystify it. From the Oracle of Delphi in Ancient Greece
to the Nechung Oracle in Tibet, we have looked for the ability to speak prophecy and to answer
questions about the future. When you think of the word "oracle" you might think of neon signs,
crystal balls, or images like these from popular culture. But in fact the word "oracle" literally
means "to speak" and oracles were thought to be portals through which the divine could
communicate powerful insights to humanity. In the 17th century, one of the oldest and most
influential oracles was introduced to the western world. It was believed to hold the answer to any
question you asked of it. It's called the I Ching or more commonly the "Book of Changes."
"Well the thing which amazed me about the I Ching and caused me to become so deeply
involved with it, is this fact that it seems to work against all rational expectation,
the carrying out of this random ritualistic activity,
seems then to give a reading which is in fact applicable to the unique situation."
"Everybody, every elite, used the I Ching, everyone it's because it was just so illuminating,
again the idea the mirror of your mind, you know, that that it will allow you
to reflect what you're not even aware of, that's just a very exciting idea."
In the television show Mad Men which was set in the 1960s, Don Draper meets a girl who introduces
him to the I Ching. The I Ching isn't just a book filled with ancient Chinese philosophy, it's an
oracle used for divination, to look into the future, and to answer questions about our lives.
"What are you doing?"
"Don, ask a question, you can just think of it, you don't have to say it out loud. Perfect."
She tosses the coins and later in the episode, she approaches Don
in his office to give him the results of the I Ching reading, among other things.
"Does someone love me."
"What?"
"That's what your question was."
"Why would you say that?"
"That's everyone's question."
It's an odd and surreal scene, and it shows us just how popular
and influential the I Ching had become in America by the 1960s.
For instance in November 27, 1965 Bob Dylan gave an interview where he described the I Ching as
"the only thing that's amazingly true, period, besides being a great book to believe in, it's
also fantastic poetry." In 1966, Allen Ginsberg, a founding father of the beat generation of the
1950s, and a major counter-cultural figure of the 1960s, wrote a widely distributed poem called
"Consulting the I Ching smo-king pot listening to the Fugs sing blake." And former Beatles musicians
John Lennon and George Harrison were also known to consult the I Ching. Lennon sang about it in
his song "God" released in 1970. And Harrison used the I Ching to help write the lyrics to the song
"While my guitar gently weeps." In the west, artists and musicians helped push the I Ching
into the spotlight. But what exactly is the I Ching? And where does it come from?
The I Ching is considered to be the oldest of the great Chinese classics emerging as early as 1300
BC. It's made up of 64 symbols 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.
Each symbol in the I Ching is called a hexagram, because it's made of a combination of six lines,
and each has its own unique divinatory meaning. A line in a hexagram can either be solid,
which represents yang, or it can be a broken line, which represents yin. These lines are formed
through a divinatory procedure by separating and counting yarrow sticks, grains of rice,
or most commonly by tossing three coins. 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. We can compare yin and yang with the binary language of
ones and zeros used in computer systems. And by using different combinations of ones and zeroes,
we can make every kind of computer program. In fact, the 17th century mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz was deeply impressed by how the I Ching had invented a binary number system
centuries before he did. And we can also see this binary system in our own bodies
and in our nervous system. Where for example, a neuron that carries electrical signals from our
nerves to the brain will either fire or not fire. If it fires it's a yes,
and if it doesn't fire it's a no. When we combine these solid and broken lines into hexagrams,
we find that everything we experience is made up of a combination of little yeses and no's. We can
see this in the symbol of yin and yang itself, where black and white are opposites but each
implies the other, each contains its opposite, and conceptually you can't have one without the other;
they're inseparable. The 64 hexagrams are a symbolic language and each symbol captures
an insight that expresses one of the 64 states of change that we find in life and in nature.
When you understand that particular state of change, and when you see how it operates in your
life, then you can best respond to that situation when it arises. For example let's say you ask
the I Ching a question and it gives you hexagram 46. This hexagram called "Sheng" refers to the
concept of pushing upward. Here we're given the metaphor of a sprouting seed that pushes through
the surface of the soil. The symbolic message is to let small victories build on one another,
to bring you closer to your goals, even as opposing forces might try to bury you.
The message emphasizes the importance of patience. The author Philip K. Dick who is also known for
consulting the I Ching was amazed by its accuracy, and how it would often seem to answer the hidden
question "behind" the question. He wrote that the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular,
advice that transcends the immediate situation, its answers have a universal quality, and if you
use the I Ching long enough, and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you
as a person. And while in the west the I Ching became a symbol of 1960s counterculture,
in china the I Ching was very much mainstream. For thousands of years it was used by men and
women at every level of society from the social elite to the common person as a tool
to help clarify decisions and to navigate the world around them.
A story from the 1780s describes a Manchu military commander named Fukang'an who was responsible for
leading his army through a war against a group of rebels. As the conflict dragged on, more and more
resources were being used up, and he was beginning to doubt whether it was worth it to keep fighting.
He sought advice from a man named Luo Shijing who was renowned for his skill with divination.
Luo consulted the I Ching which gave him the hexagram 35, also known as "jin." Jin is a
message of progress and advancement. It describes a metaphor of a bright light that rises above the
earth to illuminate the darkness. It says that "if progress is impeded, then persist
and you will find your fortune." Hexagram 35 is considered to be a very positive sign. Luo
took this message to the military commander and gave him the advice to keep fighting the battle.
He followed this advice and eventually succeeded in beating the rebels, winning the war. What's
interesting is that hexagram 35 talks about the "nobleman of kang" which shares an interesting
synchronicity because the word "kang" also appears in the military commander's name: FuKANG'an.
After his victory he was also given the rank of noblemen from the throne which is another
astonishing synchronicity. One of the most important philosophical ideas to come out of
china in the fourth and third centuries was 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 and feeling, you might ask: does the I Ching as
an oracle for divination really work? And if it does, then how? Let's look at a few theories.
The ethnobotanist and author Terence McKenna was so fascinated with the I Ching
that he carried out a mathematical analysis to try to explain how and why it was arranged 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 ancient
attempt to map the nature of time itself. In an interview McKenna described how it might work.
"If what we're saying is that time is fractal, then implicit in that statement is the idea that
patterns repeat on many many levels, well that is really what all systems of divination all over the
world have always claimed, that in a pool of water, in a flaw in a crystal, somehow these
objects these processes become microcosms of the larger situation in the macrocosm."
McKenna believed that the idea of history repeating itself implies that there must
be patterns that reoccur over and over again in time. Throughout history we find periods of war,
followed by periods of peace, times of prosperity, followed by famine, and cycles of economic growth,
followed by recession. If this is true, then understanding one smaller cycle in time could
in principle help us understand broader cycles in time. The idea of a structural similarity between
the universe, the macrocosm of everything that exists, and human beings, which are a microcosm
and a small part within it, has a very ancient history. And it's found in many belief systems
worldwide. In ancient Greece, ancient Iran, and in Chinese philosophy. It was believed that
uncovering truths about the nature of the cosmos as a whole revealed underlying truths about human
nature, and that understanding human nature revealed truths about the cosmos as a whole.
This is reflected in the maxim "as above so below," each is contained within the other.
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was also known for his work with the I Ching. Jung actually wrote
the forward to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, and in the early 20th century it was
largely due to the efforts of German-speaking thinkers like Jung and Wilhelm which helped
the I Ching gain wider acceptance in the skeptical and rationalist countries of the west.
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, they're
connected by meaning. One example of synchronicity is seeing the same name over and over again in
seemingly random and unexpected places, only to find that it's the name of a suburb where you
finally find your home. Along these same lines, we can think of the I Ching as a "synchronicity
machine" because by tossing three coins and finding the corresponding hexagram, we purposely
make coincidences between our own thoughts and the pages of the book. The falling of the coins,
the state of mind of the asker, and the divinatory symbols are all things that fall together in time.
And the corresponding answers we get from the I Ching are a symbolic mirror of the present
moment. And through this process, we create meaning in a way that helps clarify the present
and gives insight into a possible future. Jung was astonished by the fact that such a seemingly
random procedure could produce such insightful answers. He argued that meaningful answers are
the rule with the I Ching, and that it seems to have a remarkable intelligence of its own. But why
should this be? Jung believed that our lives are not a series of random events. He saw a deeper and
underlying order which he called "Unus Mundus," latin for "one world." And which describes
the concept of a unified reality from which everything emerges into which everything returns.
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 simply 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 it is in making you project your unrealized thoughts
onto its pages?" This is because being able to project your own thoughts about a problem
you're having can help you clarify those thoughts, and it can help you move forward
to find new solutions. And we can see the value of this in psychological tools like the Rorschach
Inkblot Tests where the whole point is to have the subject project their thoughts, desires, and
memories onto the inkblot images. In fact, they're called "projective tests" for exactly that reason.
And whatever you happen to believe about the merits of using it as an oracle for divination,
the I Ching has been used for centuries in the ancient world as a psychological projective test.
What's more, Jung saw the rich symbolism in the 64 hexagrams 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," which we looked at in this video. According to Jung, the collective
unconscious is a universal storehouse of symbols, images, and ancestral memory that are found in
every person and in every culture in the world. When we use the I Ching to clarify our thoughts,
we're tapping into a vast repository of ancient wisdom that stretches back to the
beginning of humankind itself. Jung saw such value in the I Ching as a psychological tool,
that he used it extensively in his own life and with his own patients. In the end there are many
paths available to all of us and nothing has to compel you to take this particular path. As Jung
wrote: "the I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself,
nor is it easy to approach, like a part of nature it waits until it's discovered, he who is
not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not obliged to find it true,
so let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning." In the next
video we'll look at how you can use the I Ching to access the wisdom and archetypal symbolism
in its pages. Once this video is available, you'll see it appearing here on the left. If it's not yet
available, then i think you'll enjoy the video on the right. If you like this video, please show
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As always thanks so much for watching, take care of yourselves, and i'll see you in the next video.