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Synchronicity as the I Ching Mechanism

Synchronicity as the I Ching Mechanism

Jung’s foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching is the decisive Western philosophical reframing of the oracle. The ancient Chinese, Jung argues, did not need to account causally for the hexagram; they were content that “the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time” (Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, ¶971). The cast and the question share a moment, and that moment has a readable quality. This is synchronicity — “a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality” (¶972).

Jung first used the term in his 1930 memorial address for Richard Wilhelm: “The science of the I Ching is not based on the causality principle, but on a principle (hitherto unnamed because not met with among us) which I have tentatively called the synchronistic” (Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, ¶866 n.). The yarrow-stalk or coin method supplies “some limiting condition… in this apparently limitless experiment, namely a definite form of physical procedure, a method or technique which forced nature to answer in even and odd numbers” (¶865). Yin and yang, as the numerical opposites, become the tertium comparationis between psychic state and physical event.

This is not a metaphysical speculation appended to the book. It is the argument that permits the I Ching to enter the depth tradition at all — as phenomenal evidence for the acausal meaning-principle the tradition has always required.

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