Is the I Ching Useful?

We know that fire is hot and snow is cold because we’ve felt them. Nothing beats direct
experience. Recently I heard about the experience of a group of friends who have been reading
books you can learn from for many years – books about quantum physics, esoteric wisdom, and
new views on important ideas. These six women have adopted a tradition of consulting the I
Ching twice a year. They met on the weekend after the Presidential Election in November and
reported,

All of us being pretty much overwhelmed, we were simply looking for a clue as to what we
should make of it all. We sat around a table, one of us with a pencil and paper, and each of us in
turn threw the three coins that give you either a solid or a broken line according to whether they
are heads or tails. Six lines were recorded beginning with the bottom one in the series. Once you
have drawn the pattern for the six lines – the hexagram – you look for it in the key that gives you
the number for that pattern.

The question they did ask before throwing the coins was – “What should we make of all of this?”
The hexagram that resulted was number 12, named “Standstill”. When they consulted the I
Ching for the meaning of this, they read,

Heaven is above, drawing farther and farther away, while the earth below sinks farther into the
depths. The creative powers are not in relation. … Heaven and earth are out of communion and
all things are benumbed. What is above has no relation to what is below and on earth confusion
and disorder prevail.

This was very useful for them. You can read the full statement of the hexagram in what is still
considered the best version (translated from the Chinese into German and then into English): The
I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes, Princeton University Press.

Carl Jung wrote the foreword to this book and his approach to the I Ching seems to me the
wisest. He was guided by his own experiences in consulting the ancient text and although he did
not discount the power of the scientific method for discovering what’s correct, he said that there
are events in life that are not predictable or controllable and that do not occur frequently enough
to be measured and validated by science. There are experiences that are personal not
generalizable, in the moment and not reproducible, and meaningful rather than provable. For
these we have to use another way of knowing.

There is something to be aware of though, when we are guided by our own direct experiences.
The human mind can construct irrelevant patterns from experiences, patterns that can become
superstitions. It’s a stretch, but let’s say that someone touched a candle flame and then it snowed.
When it happened again, they came to believe that the first had caused the second. That’s how
some superstitions arise. In the last three hundred years scientific discoveries have freed us from
the bonds of superstition, but it’s time now to add in the profound knowledge gained from
experiences, not just from experiments. That is a key perspective behind WINN. What do we
know because we have lived it? And that we have clear-headedly examined?
Many people have used the hexagrams for fortune-telling or predicting the future in a way
similar to reading tea leaves or consulting Tarot cards, but that may not be how you approach
them. The book group used the one they threw as a guide for understanding the current moment
and had an experience of the mysteriously useful I Ching. They also found that, once again, it
was a dependable and wise guide, like an unfailing guru that can be relied on for insight and
counsel. In hexagram 12, the commentary says that the wise man turns inward and looks to his
own integrity when dark forces are ascendant. Other hexagrams suggest the advantages of
immediate action, but not this one.

Carl Jung wrote in his Foreword that,

“The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern
physicist who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure.”

And that the hexagrams have a meaning,

“… something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events
among themselves as well as the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”

I think that the I Ching can be useful in a variety of ways – from being used as a prompt for
thinking about a current question to knowing that the reality we live in is non-material, truly not
bound by space and time, and that we can experience something of its many dimensions. The
choices are ours. We can explore both the objective and the subjective worlds for ourselves.

https://winnpost.org/2017/01/13/is-the-i-ching-useful/