The Psychodynamic I Ching

The I Ching (pronounced yee ching), or book of changes, is a 4000 year old book of divination, allegedly written by a dragon and developed over millennia to form a whole system of thought, including the basis of Chinese philosophy, in particular the practice of Daoism. The famous Yin Yang symbol, symbolic of radical flux, is the basic binary from which the I Ching’s 64 hexagrams are formed. Mircea Eliade has surmised that this symbol shows a twisted snake in cross-section, similar to the caduceus (twin snakes winding around a staff) and that is related to the common figure of the cosmic serpent, that is at once coiled about the earth—as in the biosphere—and that also resides in all living creatures in the microscopic form that science recognizes as DNA. I Ching scholar Bennebel Wen has recently noted a further similarity to DNA, suggesting that the 64 codons of DNA sequence correspond to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. This connection is less mystical than historical: the I Ching is a shamanic technology, born in the Age of Trance. 

Cosmic serpent aside, the I Ching comprises one of the few great works of wisdom literature capable of still speaking to us today. Whatever your views on magic, divination, or books written by dragons, it is clear (to me) that the I Ching’s literary power alone is capable of producing the sensation of an uncanny interlocutor; the remarkable effect of feeling seen. As such the Oracle may be consulted less for divinatory purposes than for taking a cross section of the universe.   

The Psychodynamic I Ching is a work in progress; an amalgamated translation of the mystical Book of Changes into the language of psychodynamic theory.