The I Ching: Gaming the Universe
The I Ching (Note 1) is an ancient book of Chinese divination dating from 2000BCE; it was allegedly written by a dragon. I have been reading it recently in continual astonishment. In order to “read” the I Ching you play a game where you ask a question, or prompt the oracle, and then cast three coins six times to generate one of 64 hexagrams. The hexagram you receive is the answer the oracle has given you. This “answer” presents a field of action, an in-depth description of what to expect in any given future situation. One may ask any question. One may receive as answer, for instance, Hexgram 19: Advancement; or Hexagram 51: Shock and Awe; or my personal favorite, Hexagram 31: Moondrift Constancy.
What is peculiar about this book is that any use of the game transforms the I Ching into an animated presence; the answers feel as if they have been thought up there on the spot by a real interlocutor; it provokes the uncanny feeling that this interlocutor is aware of you and that it would like to help. This feeling only increases as you continue consulting the oracle. Soon it can begin to feel as if you and the oracle have developed a rapport; a rapport complete with affection, in-jokes and through-lines; it feels like the book remembers all the previous questions you have asked. Moments of vertigo ensue when the book’s predictions come true. In astonishment, you consult the oracle again. The oracle becomes snide.
I have never been any great fan of horoscopes or divination. For a long time I wrote a fake-horoscope column called What Your Week Has In Store; this amounted to an overly-long troll of the zodiac. I will be first to doubt anyone who claims to know the future by whatever means of divination, be it the tarot, palm reading or the technical analysis of the market. And yet I now find myself in a curious situation where, skeptic that I am, I believe in the I Ching.
How has this skeptic reached this moment of belief?
The sceptic’s flat answer is that the I Ching is a cunningly wrought literary device; the book operates an algorithm that, when run correctly, produces the illusion of presence. The I Ching, after all, belongs to the Sacred Text genre of literature, along with the Torah, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita , etc. Spiritual Presence here is an a priori function of the genre, the necessary component without which the text remains mere text.
But whereas, for instance, the protestant bible necessitates the holy spirit in order for it to have meaning, the I Ching was written so that the spiritual presence in operation here is you the reader alone. The spiritual presence that you encounter is something that is already within you. The book is a Choose Your Own Adventure story where the scene is the universe and the adventure is your life. In this regard, it allows for any other belief or sacred text to coexist. The I Ching is an ecological text—the technical term for this from the field of religion is syncretic (note 2).
We can think of the I Ching as a kind of literal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all based on the fundamental axioms of the Dao. The axioms of the Dao state that change is the universe; everything, all the time, is in a process of flux (note 3). This flux is as near as our own intestinal tract and as abstract as the rotation of nearby planets. It happens in the rise and fall of daylight and in the rise and fall of imperial kingdoms. Your task, with the help of the oracle, is to be aware of this flux before it happens to you. Though Chinese thought may not use this term, from the perspective of 20th century physics, what the I Ching games, in stark contrast to the other sacred texts, is the force of indeterminacy itself (note 4). This is why John Cage admired it and used it in his work.
The immediate effect of using this book is the alleviation of anxiety. Anxiety is the bad way of playing this game. We ask ourselves, what’s the worst that could happen? And then we spend great amounts of time and energy imagining the worst that could happen. The I Ching replaces this bad fantasy of the future with a fantasy in which you can withstand and navigate the unending onslaught of life on planet earth.
Okay. This sounds exactly like what any other Sacred Text does; but how, pray tell, is it able to predict the future?
Here is where skeptic and believer part company; things get spooky.
The believer answers: there is a part of us that is called the unconscious. This part is made out of the pure flux of language itself. This nuclear furnace of language is not bound by space or time. The I Ching is one way of accessing this part of ourselves that transcends material boundaries. We are presented with a future field of action already known in the unconscious; this is an unconscious that we share with all other communicating beings.
This spooky belief does three things:
1. It lowers the stakes. If we are all part of the same process, then we must accept a number of shared processes as necessary, for example: mortality (as Marx describes: the pure abstraction of movement).
2. The universe becomes a “game.” This game has many players, the stakes are as high as we can imagine, and yet, we each have extraordinary agency in the game.
3. An essential fact is revealed: despite appearances the cosmos is not a chaos. Likewise this cosmos has no end. Though we witness daily the end of many things that we hold dear, there are as many, if not more things, that are now coming into being. The I Ching reveals a series of paths through these giant movements of flux that we are always already caught in the middle of.
Notes
The I Ching, Yijing, E Ching, translation: Book of Changes. For a very long time this book has been dismissed by the west as a mere superstition little knowing that the entirety of Chinese thought is built on top of it. Much like the Torah, the original I Ching has generated whole millenniums of commentary. There are now hundreds if not thousands of translations of radically varying styles.
These are world-building texts of the first order. Many of us are still living in these worlds. One may game out from this that we face catastrophe precisely because of the mutual exclusivity of these various worlds; the “world,” as constructed by X sacred text, invalidates the shared reality of the planet. The crux is that we all live on the planet before we live in any “world.” By contrast, because of the I Ching’s Syncretic value, because it spans and accounts for all possible worlds one may argue that it takes place not in a “world” but in the universe.
From the 5th Century BCE “Xici” or Ten Wings, a commentary upon the I Ching allegedly composed by Confucius. “The Changes is a book from which one may not hold aloof. Its dao [i.e., pattern] is forever changing—alternating, movement without rest, flowing through the six empty places [of a hexagram]; rising and sinking without fixed law, firm and yielding transform each other. They cannot be confined within a rule; it is only change that is at work here. They move inward and outward according to fixed rhythms. Without and within, they teach caution. They also show care and sorrow and their causes. Though you have no teacher, approach them as you would your parents.”
In perhaps one of the highest and weirdest moments of the era of High Weirdness, Terence McKenna combined fractal math with the 64 Hexegrams to create his Time Wave theory. This theory predicted that some global event would happen in late 2012, giving rise to the “meme apocalypse” that we all know and have now mostly forgotten. We might be tempted to conclude that McKenna’s math was wrong, and yet the I Ching would not be so quick to falsify; events can remain hidden for some time before manifesting.
