The I Ching

[Jitendra Hydonus]

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 is discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom – if there be such – it seems to be the right book. To one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night. 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. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.

– C. G. JUNG   Zurich, 1949

https://susanrako.com/using-the-i-ching-in-psychotherapy/

Jung and I Ching

In his introduction to the English version of I Ching made by one of his acquaintance*, Jung admits having
pa-kua
Pa-kua, the eight trigrams which form the basis
of  I Ching.
practiced the oracle 30 years before meeting Richard Wilhelm, the German translator of the book. Jung was interested in the method of exploration of the unconscious. He said:

For more than thirty years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance. I was already fairly familiar with the I Ching when I first met Wilhelm in the early nineteen twenties; he confirmed for me then what I already knew, and taught me many things more. (Foreword to the I Ching, I Ching, Wilhelm/Baynes edition).

Using the oracle with his patients during the psychotherapy Jung c ould remember a great deal of meaningful answers. He recalled the story of a patient stuck between ambivalent feelings related to a girl he wanted to ask out (actually the patient suffered from a mother complex). The response of I Ching was hexagram 44, entitled Coming to Meet, which worn saying: One should not marry such a maiden .

Fu Hsi the creator of 8 trigrams
Fu Hsi is the creator of the pa-kua (eight trigrams). He is depicted as a head sitting on a mountain, showing
the trigram chart
But how this book manages to give us such inspired answers, asked himself Jung? And he answered: ...A certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance. (Foreword to the I Ching... )

This principle matches the curious mode of functioning of the ancient Chinese mind. Again Jung:

The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. (Foreword to the I Ching...)

In other words: ...Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast. (Foreword to the I Ching...)

Psyche and matter are not separated in fact, nor are the inner and outer worlds. In concordance with the synchronicity principle, the psychic events and those happening in the outside world may have an acausal, almost simultaneous appearance, a so-called coincidence, and this is why one can use even the ancient method of consulting the oracle to cure neurosis.

Finally: 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. The psychophisical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. (Foreword to the I Ching...)

As for the practice of I Ching, Jung offers a sample on how to handle the oracle and interpret its answers in his substantial introduction to the book.*

[Jitendra Hydonus]

Beyond I-Ching — 3½ Concepts to Transform your Mind and Change your Life

Dr Michael Heng
ILLUMINATION
Dr Michael Heng
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ILLUMINATION
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Apr 27, 2020

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3 Concepts plus another ½ to Rule them all. Become a Change Mastery Leader using ancient wisdom and modern thinking to engage your problems and change your life forever.

Long before other people, the Chinese civilisation had developed functioning socio-political systems and a rich intellectual and philosophical culture. As a Chinese but raised in the way of Western knowledge and social sciences, it was only recently that I became inspired and drawn into the wonderful beauty of the philosophical eco-system elements responsible for the exceptional mindware of the Chinese people. The lessons about change and change management can be applied to every aspect of life, work and play.
I have also added a half (½) Concept to the 3 Basic Concepts in the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching (or Yijing), to complete my understanding in order to share with others their application for today’s environment. We can combine its ancient wisdom with Western (and other) philosophical thought to better engage the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world today.

The I-Ching (Yijing) was developed as a philosophical taxonomy to describe Nature and provide an organising framework of the universe for mapping the impact of its various interactive elements. It has been used as a knowledge framework for much of Chinese medical and scientific practices as well as political and social governance.

Here, I shall refer to the I-Ching (Yijing) Book of the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–771 BCE) since 2 earlier purported versions were lost. The I-Ching Book of Changes has three principal Concepts, namely Buyi (不易), Bianyi (变易) and Jianyi (简易). I have named my ½ Concept Rényi (人易). The Concepts are inseparable and their synthetic yet symbiotic relationships can only be understood in practice in a holistic manner.

1] BUYI (不易) — No Change
Not everything changes. “Buyi” is a core governing concept where everything else may change, but some things remain permanently unchanged. We can think of life and death, conditions of happiness and sadness, pain and comfort, creation of babies, the constant scientific ratio of Pi, circumference and diameter, Pythagoras’ constant √2, Phi or Golden Ratio and many other undisputed permanently unchanged constants.

2] BIANYI (变易) — Everything Change
“Bianyi” refers to permanent change, which are the only change that defies constancy and survived the test of constant. It sees the only permanent change to be slow and steady change. From a cell to a star, in love and other intense emotions, from our mind to our body, bodily growth from baby to adult, from yesterday to tomorrow, everything is changing always, anytime and anywhere. Our learnt response is to accept the changes, adapting and adjusting accordingly in order to survive or develop or grow. The metamorphosis of the butterfly is a good example of “Bianyi”. Other examples include the constant atomic vibration in solids, our continuous thought and mood swings.

3] JIANYI (简易) — Change through Simplification
“Jianyi” encourages the principles of simplification. It focuses classifying happenings and phenomena to derives the general reasons behind them in the simplest manners to be understood using, for example, the 5 Elements and 8 Trigrams models of the I-Ching (Yijing) as sense-making framework to capture and develop responses to the things happening and phenomenon seen or experienced. Unexpected uncertainties can only result from outside these models when the known unknown configurations are “contaminated” by wholly unknown vectors.

3½] RENYI (人易) — Humans Change
“Renyi” is the half (½) concept which recognizes that human actions have consequences. That the human response to changes as well as to satisfy his own unlimited selfish desires, including the desire to hurt and dominate people and things, has serious cause-and-effect chain reactions characterized by the fluxing “yin-yang” dynamics.

Complete the other half (½) of this concept which refers to the change caused by the unlimited and indefinite choices created from human intelligence. Human creativity and innovations make current choice matrix inappropriate and irrelevant. The problem solutions needed to embrace and engage successfully the VUCA world today have yet to be developed. It will require unimaginable creativity to select and interpret the 64 Hexagrams of I-Ching in their conventional manner. They are finite and therefore can be done.
The important lesson from this concept is to change your problem issues by changing your creative mind innovatively. Specifically, you can change your life by changing your mindware. This concept subjects all the other 3 I-Ching (Yijing) concepts and rule over them by transforming your mind to change your life.
YOU CAN BE A BETTER CHANGE MASTER

In the VUCA world, the 8 Trigrams, 64 Hexagrams and other typologies of I-Ching (Yijing) can be useful tools to make sense of VUCA’s volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. But for the same situational context, different I-Ching (Yijing) Masters may arrive at vastly different interpretations of the selected Hexagrams, even after and if they manage to agree on the same applicable Hexagrams!
The basic dualism principle of I-Ching (Yijing) provides the key to unlock the solutions to embrace, adapt and master change in order to obtain new harmonious equilibriums, however temporarily, as one continues to strive and persevere for that elusive, unattainable and unsustainable balance of conflicting change forces.

The “Renyi” concept empowers conscious reality-learning mindfulness through “knowing what I think when I see what I say”. To Change Mastery Leaders, what is most important about any change event or phenomenon is not what has happened, but what it means. Beyond the 8 Trigrams and 64 Hexagrams, the Change Mastery Leader reads, listens and feels every intelligence and applies comprehension, reasoning, judgement, intuition, anticipation to draw his own conclusions for the right creative and innovative action, unbounded by their limitations of previous interpretations.

The Change Mastery Leader visualises unlimited but finite probable, possible and feasible futures using human intelligence as well as the I-Ching experiences of the 8 Trigrams and 64 Hexagrams. He/she asks the unthinkable questions for the unimaginable and known unknown but incomplete answers in the search for the creative and innovative solutions. He/she leverages on the benefits emboldened and empowered by technology, global learning communities and modern knowledge for the change analysis and solutions never ever encountered or envisaged by ancient and current I-Ching Masters.

The Change Master embraces a strategic longer-term perspective. He/she understands from the I-Ching (Yijing) that the only unchanging law of the universe is constant change. His new mindware thinks holistically of the parts in the whole and of their relationship to each other. The conventional win-lose logic from Western philosophy does not appeal to him. The yin-yang dualism embedded in I-Ching (Yijing) emboldens his perspective that all things are inseparable from their opposites. The vectors of change, being outcomes from the confluence of opposite forces, can all be valid targets together for change intervention.

The most powerful conceptual notion sees opposing forces as reconcilable since they are parts of a bigger interacting whole and therefore can be synthesised as new solutions of managed change. This approach is possible with the dualism mindset of I-Ching (Yijing) from the Chinese language itself. The Chinese word for “crisis” is the combination of the words “danger” and “opportunity”. It internalises and embraces a remarkable comfort in bed with both ambiguity and uncertainty. Mentally, the Chinese has merged two opposite notions of “danger” and “opportunity” to create the new prospective word of “crisis”, whereby the Change Master would find within any change crisis the seeds of awesome opportunity.

https://medium.com/illumination/beyond-i-ching-3%C2%BD-concepts-to-transform-your-mind-and-change-your-life-89b3ea7e2bd5#:~:text=The%20I%2DChing%20Book%20of,)%20and%20Jianyi%20(%E7%AE%80%E6%98%93).