encountering the i ching

7/27/2019 Encountering the I Ching

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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

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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

www.onlineclarity.co.uk

encountering the i ching

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