What Is the I Ching?
chinafile.com
chinafile.com
BSD 4.4 had a game in it that I'd guess simulated the yarrow generation. I wasn't able to get it to compile on a modern system. (https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/games/chin...)
VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?
DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.
VERTEX: What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?
DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For instance: "The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised." If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.
...
DICK: I've been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for, to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person escapes the tragedy of matrydom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of conflict.
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And from an interview two years later[2]:
Phil: I don't use the I Ching anymore. I'll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I've ever known. The I Ching has a personality and it's very devious and very treacherous. And it feeds ya just what you want to hear. And it's really spaced out and burned out more people than I would care to name. Like a friend is somebody who doesn't tell you what you want to hear. A friend tells you what's true. A toady is the old word for somebody who told you what you wanted to hear. The Kings all had their toadies around them who told them what they wanted to hear. The King said, am I the greatest King in the world? Yeah, you're the greatest King in the world, yeah. Well, this is what the I Ching does. It tells you what you want to hear and it's not a true friend. One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn't mean to say that. But it had already –
[1] - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-view...
[2] - http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/interviews...
He wrote an entire book (exegesis) in which he meticulously describes his exploration of psychotic states and experiences that shook him and shattered his idea of reality. This is not what a "crazy" person does.
"He threw the grenade into the jeep" doesn't sound crazy to me when referencing the choices of an AI. The I Ching just requires a human computer to execute world ticks.
Astrology is just really old computer games about life for a really crusty computing platform.
'It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the LCD screen was a little larger than usual, in order to accommodate the abridged judgments of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of the hexagram. These were unusual texts to see marching across the display of a pocket calculator, particularly as they had been translated from the Chinese via the Japanese and seemed to have enjoyed many adventures on the way.'
'The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to "4".'
'"1 + 1" it could manage ("2"), and "1 + 2" ("3") and "2 + 2" ("4") or "tan 74" ("3.4874145"), but anything above "4" it represented merely as "A Suffusion of Yellow". Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to hand over £20 of ready cash for the thing.'
Just wanted to recommend both Waley and Watson's work, which i thoroughly enjoy. I especially enjoy Watson's full translation of the Zhuangzi.
The same mayor also invented the first vacuum pump.
The I Ching always seemed rather Rorschach-y. But that could be because I've seen suggestions that the popular Wilhelm/Baynes translation is rather Westernised and some way from the original meanings.
It's probably like trying to make sense of Shakespeare if you grew up in China and didn't start learning English until you were an adult. The language isn't just poetic - it's metaphorical, idiomatic, and allusive, and it's probably impossible for non-natives to truly understand it.
For him, it worked out terribly, in the sense of pushing closer to a psychotic state.
From that experience, it's hard for me appreciate the poetic vagueness of this stuff given that same poetic vagueness helps sell Western Astrology.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Dice-Man-Luke-Rhinehart/dp/0879518642
Psychosis and mystical experience are after all closely linked if not objectively identical.
The Yijing, when used properly (as a tool for self-exploration and psychonautics and not for fortunetelling or the chasing of idle fantasies) works similarly to the Tarot or other symbolic systems that operate on the human psyche. There comes a point (with repeated use and appropriate conditioning/reinforcement) that these systems really open up the subconscious and can lead to mystical unions or profound annihilatory experiences (ego death).
So it sounds to me that your friend had no idea about these things and simply could not handle the "results". When you play with fire, you take precautions or you get burned..
He had a theoretical understanding of "ego death" and perhaps he experienced that.
That problem is that none of this quite had a cut-and-dried, desirable effect. He didn't reach the final stage like Friedrich Nietzsche - no wait, he kind of reached the final stage more or less like Nietzsche.
I also consulted it about a possible career change I was contemplating. The result talked about revolution. It seemed a rather pertinent result for the question at least. I did not end up making that particular career change. Perhaps the I-ching poems persuaded me not to make the change, because they talked about how a revolution is a very grave matter that must be attempted only in dire circumstances.
Randomly.
"One could say that the I Ching is a mirror of one’s own concerns or expectations.
feed a random signal in then examine the outputs. Results will tell you something about the dynamics of the system that processes the signal.
"But it’s like one of the bronze mirrors from the Shang dynasty, now covered in a dark blue-green patina so that it doesn’t reflect at all."
Perhaps the input signal from the hexagrams relates to a culture so remote from the modern world that it tells us little about ourselves now.
[1] Wouldn't we all like that?