SAPIENS RISING

Consider the following description and elucidation of the I Ching system. I have worked with it for over thirty years and speak from both study and my personal use of it as an oracle system.
Appendix D

The Philosophical Basis Of The I Ching
The I Ching, based on the philosophical premise that the only permanent thing about the universe is change, has been used as an oracular system, teaching one how to live most consciously and well on the level of opposites ( good/bad, beautiful/ugly, true/false, etc.). It purports to predict, if one pays attention to the positive elements and negative elements in any given current situation, how that situation will transmute into a particular situation in the future. This is its most important feature: it can accurately determine, predict what will be the future resolution of any given situation from the elements which are internally undergoing transmutation within the present one. This presupposes that there is a law which determines and governs our consciousness, that it is identifiable and that it can be comprehended and practically applied. It specifies that there are 64 hexagram/gestalts and not some other number of identifiable gestalts which are fundamentally adequate and sufficient to differentiate and specify the states of the human mind. (If we evolve to habitual four-dimensional consciousness then, I speculate, we would have to expand the I Ching system, perhaps adding additional components to the hexagrams to mirror the additional dimensionality of our consciousness -- although the "secret" of the I Ching is that it already integrates the effect of the fourth dimensional component implicitly.

The I Ching As Oracle
The inevitable question prompted by the nature and operation of the I Ching system is, obviously, How could the originators of the I Ching even conceive of chance division of a bunch of yarrow sticks or chance throws of three coins being able describe the precise situation in answer to a question posed by the user much less predict the future outcome of that situation? I do not claim to be able to answer this question definitively. I can, however, say what I have learned that has proven out over time.

There are several interrelated principles fundamental to the I Ching which can be expressed in modern terminology and which give clues to the answer to this fundamental question.

1> The system is built up from the concept of primitive distinction. By primitive is meant the most fundamental operation of the human psyche at basis of all perception and comprehension. By our nature, unless we discriminate one thing from another we do not comprehend anything. Even discrimination itself must be discriminated from other things and actions for us to recognize it and other things. We comprehend by distinguishing, by discrimination. The I Ching, working on that basic assumption, takes it a step further: it says that, as soon as one discriminates any thing as such, its opposite is immediately discriminated. If one discriminates cold, hot, as its opposite, is automatically discriminated, distinguished. If one distinguishes truth, so false is automatically distinguished. Since a thing can have only one opposite, its logic goes, things may be seen to come in twos. This is a foundation of the I Ching, based on empirical and experiential observations over thousands of years.

2> The I Ching is a closed, self-referential system; each hexagram contains within itself every other hexagram and each hexagram expresses the nature and dynamics of the entire system. This is a key concept: the hologrammatical nature of the system makes it a kind of unified field law of consciousness. This structure mirrors the image of the human psyche held by the developers of the I Ching. They had a full appreciation of the universe and the human being as part of that universe as lawful, operating according to the laws of chaos and complexity. But they also realized that the most fundamental characteristic of human nature was that we identified ourselves as being self-referentially aware and, ultimately, had to rely on our subjective perception and comprehension as criterion of truth. A system that modeled our mind's operation therefore would be adequate if it modeled its essential self-referential characteristic.

3> To reiterate, the I Ching is explicitly based on chaos and complexity theory and, since it is a dynamic model of the human psyche in operation, this means that it assumes the human psyche operates on the basis of the rules of chaos and complexity also.

4> The I Ching assumes action at a distance is a fact. The most adequate metaphor we currently possess for what the I Ching calls "Influence" is that of the morphogenetic field as theorized by Sheldrake (A New Science of Life) and the mental influence of the human mind on electronic machines as documented by Jahn and Dunne (Margins of Reality). Both studies present evidence, controverted and resisted by our current scientific establishment, that information is transmitted to other minds and objects at a distance effecting information modification and increase and physical change. Although we are now only beginning to tentatively even experiment in this area and tend to deny even the possibility of such phenomenon, it has been a robust concept for thousands of years within the Chinese ethos.

5> The reason that action at a distance could be taken for granted is that the Chinese scientific view also assumes the existence of higher dimensionality. In fact, it is this higher dimensionality, conceived of as both higher intelligence and higher geometry, that the I Ching is designed to enable the user to contact through the self-referential modality using chaos theory technique.

6> There is a certain hologrammatical structure inherent in the I Ching. Due to the fact that it is essentially a self-referential system, it is fractal and hologrammtically expansive so that it contains temporal cycles the length of which (three days, ten days, three years, ten years, etc.) are natural periodicities arising directly from its structure. As a result of having recognized these cycles within the written commentaries on the I Ching and programmed them into his Time Line Zero computer program, Terrence McKenna was able to overlay them on history and has found startling and precise correlation with the major events and turning points in human history. If we put together all these elements then an answer to the fundamental question as to how the I Ching could conceivably work at all is at least possible. The user, in throwing the coins at this moment, under this set of circumstances, with this specific mind set and intention and question, altering the physical conditions immediately present in just this specific way, is, in terms of chaos theory, effecting the initiating conditions of the situation with the coin tosses in such a way that it is at least conceivable that a kind of attunement with one's own and general higher consciousness and with a higher, probably fourth, dimensional geometry is achieved with a degree of relative accuracy so that the hexagram produced resonates from and with all those factors. To put it in a much simpler form: the I Ching is a psycho-physical mechanism intentionally structured to put the user in resonance with the space-time dimensionality of his or her current intention/question. From the space-time perspective, although we think in linear, sequential cause and effect, all events and phenomena are "simultaneous" and mirror all other events fully -- just as the I Ching, in slow motion in consideration of our "slow motion", sequential thought processes, demonstrates how all 64 hexagram/gestalts flow one into the other. As a result, the hexagram produced as an answer to the user's question, even if one only grudgingly allows subconscious anticipation on the part of the user, can trigger the proper understanding and act as an entry into the system itself. The hologrammatical richness of the self-referential nature of the system, in which each hexagram contains the potential to become all the other hexagrams, can take one to the transcendent level of the perspective of four dimensional consciousness regardless of through which door one enters. Is the I Ching an accurate mirror of our consciousness? Based on my own experience with it, I must answer Yes, on the level of opposites. And its nature and structure makes it seamlessly linked to a psychic tourist guide like the Book Of The Dead, for the transition to more expanded states of consciousness as dealt with in the Book Of The Tao.

Is it comprehensible immediately to almost everyone? I would have to answer No -- although the inherent attunement with the human psyche and the almost poignant names of each hexagram dictated by the system itself make it maximally resonant and intuitive. But, because the system is as rich and deep as it clearly is, it must be learned as a whole, the principles not only understood but patiently observed operating in one's own psyche.

It has been important for me to also experience what the limitations of the I Ching are. There is a certain level of consciousness at which it drops out. It is structured and fine tuned to express the laws of the psyche operating at the level of opposites and to mirror the subtle constant changes as one moves from gestalt to gestalt, situation to situation at that level of consciousness. But when one moves to expanded, relativistic awareness, the I Ching, as expressed in line four of Hexagram One, The Creative, enters into realms that are uncharted -- at least by its context. At that point one moves into the flux of the Book Of The Dead, the guidebook for the transition past opposites to the highest levels of consciousness we can attain at this point in our evolution -- although, by the very fact that we can at least conceive of there being levels of consciousness beyond the most expanded we can attain now, we are on our way there. The important point here is to recognize the limitations of the I Ching: it is as correct and powerful in the three dimensional context of our consciousness as it is because it recognizes the involvement of a fourth dimensional influence, but it does not address our consciousness operating directly in a space-time mode as such. The Book of the Tao does that.

To summarize: I submit that the I Ching is a well developed, comprehensive schemata of the human psyche's range of possible actions and reactions at the level of three-dimensional consciousness, the habitual, usual level at which we comprehend and communicate by discriminating and naming discreet phenomenon in terms of opposites. Even more succinctly: the I Ching is a powerful, dynamic system expressing the operative laws of human consciousness. Since it explicitly deals with the three-dimensional realm of discriminated opposites in lineal time as its primary focus it may be seen to be analogous to the Newtonian laws of physics. Are there laws of human consciousness that apply in relativistic or quantum mechanical terms? Yes. And we have indication of those already. We will speak of them later but the point here is that we have laws of consciousness already known to us. I suggest that the I Ching actually encompasses the basic operational laws of our consciousness quite well. Not only can and have they been computerized in a robust system but they are amenable to empirical verification through rigorous psychological studies, Assuming that we have an objectively oriented tester who knows the I Ching in depth, is familiar with its system of metaphors, knows its cycles, and understands its basic philosophy and operation, numerous subjects would be trained to use the I Ching as an oracle and the hexagrams received as answers to their questions and the advice, admonitions and praise received through the changing lines in the hexagram would be compared to the person's situation as seen and agreed on by the user and the tester. The resultant hexagram would then be compared to the outcome of the user's situation in question to see if it really mirrored the outcome as the user and the tester agreed it to be. I would predict that the correspondence of the hexagram received as an answer and its internal changing elements would seem to grow as the tests progressed especially if the user was new to the I Ching. This phenomenon would manifest since the I Ching, as a feedback type of system, would also be instructing the user as the test progressed and the learning would allow for greater subtly of comprehension and relation to what would probably be a somewhat foreign metaphor at first. Obviously, this test scenario only suggests a format and would probably require a much more rigorous and refined approach. But the possibility of rigorous testing clearly is available.



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