the

synchronistic

barometer

Herbie Brennan

Some forms of “occult” forecasting seem to work, for some people. One of the tools available for such “magic” is a binary code, invented more than three thousand years ago!

Until the advent of a decent time machine, we must accept that history is often vague and frequently inaccurate. The farther back the period under consideration, the more inaccurate and vague it is likely to be.

Extant histories of Fu Hsi provide an excellent example of the trend. Fu Hsi was the first emperor of China, living almost five thousand years ago. Scholars still wonder if he might not have been legendary. The records are no help. They say things like this:

“Fu Hsi ruled all things under Heaven. He looked up and contemplated the bright patterns of the sky, then looked down and considered the shapes of the Earth.

“He noted the decorative markings on birds and beasts and the appropriate qualities of their territories. Close at hand, he studied his own body and also observed distant things.

“From all this he devised the eight trigrams, in order to unveil the heavenly processes in nature and to understand the character of everything …”

Not exactly packed with information, but not all jabber either. The eight trigrams, for instance, are real enough. They originated somewhere between forty-five hundred and thirty thousand years ago in prehistoric China.

Trigrams, as the name implies, are three-lined figures. They probably evolved from a primitive form of fortune-telling in which the shoulder bone of a cow was heated and future events read from the cracks which formed.

These cracks (it is reasonable to suppose) eventually became stylized into the trigram pattern of broken and unbroken lines. Philosophers moved in. The unbroken lines were taken to represent Heaven, or yang, the positive aspect of phenomena. The broken lines signified Earth, or yin, the negative aspect of phenomena. All possible trigrammatic permutations of the two produced eight figures.

And there the situation seems to have rested for a few millennia until a feudal lord named Wen found himself with time on his hands.

Around 1143 B.C., Wen was living proof that virtue does not bring its own reward. As administrator of the western province of Chou, he was one of the most popular and able men in China. But he got very little thanks for being either.

By contrast to Wen, the emperor of the day, Chou Hsin, was an incompetent. He also seems to have possessed a little of that Oriental bloody-mindedness which it has become fashionable to ignore since President Nixon visited Peking.

Chou Hsin wanted no competition. He had Lord Wen arrested and jailed in the Imperial Capital of Yin, a city now long dead and buried near Anyang in the province of Honan.

Wen stayed in jail for a year, worrying about the distinct possibility of execution and working on a project which may have been designed to take his mind away from immediate problems. He might have remained incarcerated longer, but he was not without friends. Political pressures eventually secured his release.

This development, welcome though it may have been in terms of abstract justice, ably demonstrates the bumbledom of Emperor Chou Hsin. Within months, Wen was leading the province of Chou in open rebellion.

Asiatic civil wars are long and bloody, as America has discovered in Vietnam. More than fifteen years went by before Yin fell and Chou Hsin was thankfully slaughtered.

Even then, the worst was still to come. Rival factions within the victorious forces went to war with one another and managed to raze the capital before settling their differences.

Wen was not alive to see the final peace. It was left to his son Tan, Duke of Chou, to become the first Chou emperor and found a dynasty. Chinese historians, however, decently award Wen the posthumous title of king.

Oddly enough, his name survives less due to military victories than to the work he carried out in jail.

In the year before his friends secured his release, Wen meditated on the trigrams. Eventually he came to combine them into hexagrams—six-lined figures, giving a permutation total of sixty-four—named each one and added oracular explanations.

Forty years later, in the peaceful days that followed the civil war, Wen’s son, the Duke of Chou, enlarged on his father’s work by producing interpretations of individual hexagram lines. Their composite work became known as the Chou I, or Changes of Chou.

Five hundred years later, the greatest Chinese philosopher of all wore out three sets of leather bindings through his frequent consultation of the work. He died wishing for an extra fifty years to devote to its study.

Whether Confucius actually wrote the commentaries on the oracle which are popularly attributed to him is a controversial question among scholars. But commentaries were certainly produced by several of his followers and subsequently incorporated in the text.

The oracle evolved into a Confucian classic and was required study for prospective members of the Imperial Civil Service over a period of two thousand years. It became known as the I Ching, or Book of Changes.

There was a time when science chose to ignore the occult, when claims about the reality of precognition were held to be so ridiculous that they did not even warrant investigation. That time has gone, its departure hastened by the work of men like Dr. Rhine, who established parapsychology as a respectable discipline in the United States.

Because of this, the I Ching becomes something more than an historical curiosity. It is worth paying attention when one modern authority writes: “Its authors were concerned with the principle of everlasting change which governs the exquisitely balanced universal harmony; the transient individual changes that result are of secondary importance.

“Though this ancient work has long been used primarily for divination, it is revered also as a source of wisdom and as containing in cryptic form the quintessence of an incredibly ancient philosophy.

“Its hoary antiquity, its extreme terseness and the mystical nature of its contents all combine to make it highly enigmatic …”

The heart of the book is divided into sixty-four sections, each one headed by a different hexagram, titled and analyzed into its component trigrams thus:

Feng/Abundance above: Chen, the Arousing, Thunder below: Li, the

Clinging, Flame

Chen and Li refer to the component trigrams.

What follows is a brief text, the work of King Wen:

“Abundance has success. The king attains abundance. Be not sad. Be like the sun at midday.”

This in turn is followed by the Confucian commentary—very necessary in most cases since the text is not always as easy to follow as the example quoted—and by a note on the symbolism of the hexagram.

Finally comes the Duke of Chou’s interpretation of the individual lines, any one or more of which may gain extra emphasis via the technical process of consulting the oracle:

“Six in the fifth place means: Blessing and fame draw near. Good fortune.”

The I Ching may be consulted using coins, yarrow stalks or a set of specially constructed divining “wands.” All three methods aim at building up a hexagram which is then interpreted. Using the coin or yarrow stalk oracle, a situation often arises in which the original hexagram is said to develop into a second hexagram which is also interpreted.

In view of this and the fact that each individual line may be stressed, the oracle is capable of producing four thousand and ninety-six answers to inquiries.

No one in modern Rome tells fortunes with the aid of bovine entrails and the pythoness has long departed from her cave at Delphi. Yet the I Ching has not only survived, but expanded its sphere of influence. By the Seventeenth Century, for instance, it had not only reached Japan, but was actually being used to train the Samurai warriors in strategy.

The book is not, of course, a military manual, but Yamaga, who turned the Samurai into Asia’s most feared fighting force, found it useful in determining the best times to advance and retreat. In a way, he may have set a precedent which was to bear peculiar fruit three hundred years later.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and launched the bitter Pacific War, several high-ranking officers used the I Ching as the basis of their naval strategy. Judging by their early victories, it seemed a workable enough idea. Even today, there are Japanese who feel the whole of World War Two might have ended very differently if the very highest levels of their military command had not been too westernized to consult the Book of Changes.

More recently—toward the end of 1962—there were signs that, despite official disapproval of the book as “ancient superstition,” the Red Chinese were using I Ching strategy in their border war with India.

Whatever the truth of this, an Englishman then living in Bangkok was certainly using the oracle to determine the outcome of the dispute. His name was John Blofeld and his experiences with the oracle later led him to produce his own translation of the Book of Changes—or Book of Change, as he preferred to call it.

Blofeld had happy memories of both India and China. As the two teetered on the brink of total war, he watched with something more than academic interest.

Frontier armies clashed in the remote Tibetan border region and the Chinese quickly added victory to victory. Like many another observer at the time—including commentators in virtually every Thai newspaper—Blofeld could see no reason why the Chinese should not sweep down to the plains of India.

He put the problem to the I Ching. His answer was hexagram No. 48, “The Well,” developing into hexagram No. 63, “After Completion.”

On geographical considerations, Blofeld took “The Well” to represent India up to, but not including, its mountainous border region. From the Wen text and Confucian commentaries, he concluded—to his own surprise—that India would lose no territory south of the mountain frontier because the Chinese could not extend their lines of communication farther without serious risks.

When he went on to examine hexagram No. 63, his conclusions were reinforced. He felt the oracle was suggesting the time was ripe for a halt to the Chinese advance, possibly even allied to a minor withdrawal. In these circumstances, the I Ching promised the Chinese would hold their Himalayan gains.

These conclusions were so much at variance with the political predictions of the day that Blofeld actually wrote them down and showed them to several friends. He had the satisfaction of seeing the I Ching proved correct within two weeks.

The more deeply one studies the I Ching, the more one is forced to the conclusion that it is a very curious book indeed. Despite its predictive element, it is not deterministic—that is to say, it does not regard the future as fixed. There is room for free will. Answers advise more on the outcome of a moral course of action rather than stating flatly what will or will not happen. For an ancient oracle, the book is full of surprises.

Perhaps the most startling of these is the discovery that the hexagrams represent a binary system of arithmetic.

This discovery springs from an arrangement of the hexagrams developed by the Sung philosopher Shao Yung and shown, in part, opposite.

If you begin with the hexagram Po (marked on the diagram roughly at the six o’clock position) and move in an anticlockwise direction, each hexagram becomes a binary expression of the numbers one to sixty-four. The broken lines represent the zeros of the binary scale; the unbroken lines the ones.

You can test this out. Pick a number between one and sixty-four, then convert it into its binary equivalent.

For example, if you pick the number thirty, you should divide by two and keep dividing the result by two as shown in the calculation below:

The remainders (shown to the right of the main calculation) after the number has been divided by two until it disappears, represent the binary expression of the number.

Convert this into a hexagram by substituting an unbroken line for each one and a broken line for each zero—and, if necessary, adding broken lines (zeros) to complete the hexagram.

The result, in this example, is hexagram Ta Kuo:

Now count anticlockwise from the hexagram Po (counting Po as “one”). Ta Kuo does indeed occupy position thirty.

To suggest that the arrangement might be coincidental is stretching the laws of chance. But if Shao Yung knew what he was doing—that is, if he consciously developed a binary system of arithmetic—then Western histories of mathematics require to be rewritten.

Leibniz is popularly supposed in the West to be the discoverer of binary arithmetic. He first published his findings in 1679.

Shao Yung seems to have worked out his interesting diagram around 1060 …

The incorporation of a binary system into the I Ching places it in the same broad category as modem computers, or, for that matter, as the human brain. But it does not tell us how the I Ching works.

This problem attracted the attention of one of the great minds of the Twentieth Century, Carl Gustav Jung.

During the late 1950’s, Jung sat beneath a tree in his Zurich garden and put question after question to the oracle. He was profoundly impressed by the answers, not so much by their predictive quality—although he recognized such a quality was often present—as by their appositeness and wisdom.

“Had a human being made such replies,” Jung said later, “I should, as a psychiatrist, have had to pronounce him of sound mind, at least on the basis of the material presented.”

He remained intrigued by the fact that the hexagrams provided him with consistently sensible answers, and in 1949 he set out, almost apologetically, to explain the phenomenon.

In a foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the book, Jung remarks disarmingly, “I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing ‘occult’ is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic…”

But despite the disclaimer, Jung had an answer to the problems of harmonizing the disturbing phenomenon of the I Ching with modem science. The answer was synchronicity.

Synchronicity is perhaps the most intriguing of all Jung’s theories. Stated briefly, it postulates an acausal connecting principle in nature.

During his days of clinical practice, Jung had one patient, Mr. X, complain of a sore throat. Mr. X was under treatment for an emotional disorder and appeared physically to be in the best of health. But Jung’s medical training led him to suspect there might be more to the sore throat than a cold in the chest. He advised the man to see his family doctor for a thorough check-up.

Mr. X agreed, but on the way home from Jung’s consulting room, he collapsed and died.

At about the same time, Mr. X’s wife phoned Jung in a state of high anxiety to inquire if her husband was safe. Jung, who did not yet know of his patient’s death, carefully reassured her. Then, to satisfy his curiosity, he asked why she had panicked.

She told him a flock of birds had arrived at the window of her husband’s bedroom.

The explanation of this curious statement lay in a family tradition associating death with birds. A flock had arrived at the window as the woman’s grandfather lay dying. Years later, the same thing happened when her father was on his deathbed.

As Jung subsequently pointed out, Mr. X’s sore throat symptom was not something which would tend to alarm a layman. Indeed, even as a fully-trained doctor, he had only suspected it might point to something serious. Yet Mrs. X was able to divine danger to her husband in the arrival of a flock of birds.

On another occasion, Jung was treating a woman patient whose analysis had reached a crucial stage where further progress seemed virtually impossible.

She told him of a dream she had had of a beautiful and unusual golden beetle. At that moment, there was a tapping at the window. When Jung opened it, a beautiful golden beetle flew in. Jung trapped it and handed it to his patient, saying, “There is your beetle.” The experience proved so meaningful to the woman that it became a turning point in her therapy.

On the basis of incidents like these, Jung built up his theory of synchronicity. He argued that (for instance) the arrival of birds at a window obviously will not cause death. Nor does death attract flocks of birds.

Yet in the case of Mrs. X, Jung felt there was a connection between the sudden arrival of the birds and the death of the husband. But it was not a cause-and-effect connection. To Jung, the link lay in the mind of the observer (Mrs. X). The nature of the link was meaning. Synchronicity, the label he applied to this new connecting principle, was meaningful coincidence, the same phenomenon that brought the beetle to the window.

Jung’s method of testing his theory was as bizarre as the theory itself. He turned to astrology as the ideal basis for synchronistic experimentation.

Here again, he argued that there could be no cause-and-effect connection between the positions of the planets and the actions of men. Equally, the actions of men could scarcely determine the motions of the planets. Yet astrology, a preoccupation of mankind for centuries, forged a meaningful link between the two. In short, astrology might be expected to produce a situation that is synchronistic.

Jung set himself to examine the birth maps (horoscopes) of a number of married couples. He was searching for the classical astrological conjunctions suggesting each pair would, in fact, marry one another. The conjunctions were there in a statistically significant number of cases.

Astrologers have hailed Jung’s experiment as proof of astrology. It was, of course, nothing of the sort. (At best it might point to some truth in astrology.) But it was very suggestive of the validity of synchronicity.

Although Jung was very wary of introducing “a collection of archaic magic spells” to the modern public, he was nevertheless an honest man and an unprejudiced scientist. On an empiric basis, he discovered the I Ching produced results and more or less committed himself to the conclusion that the oracle reacted to synchronistic stresses as a thermometer reacts to fluctuations of temperature.

He wrote his foreword to Wilhelm’s translation of the work because he thought there was more to the I Ching than met the eye. Observably, he was right; and his own discipline of psychiatry may yet see I Ching hexagrams used as a peculiar aid to therapy.

In psychotherapy, one of the most difficult problems is reaching those specific areas of a patient’s unconscious where his trouble lies. One method already in use by Jungian psychiatrists is a technique known as directed reverie.

Here a patient is required to pursue a detailed fantasy under the direction of his therapist. As session follows session, he is gradually led to those archetypal realms where the roots of his problems might be found.

The technique has proved workable, but it has two drawbacks. The first is the time necessary to guide the patient to the relevant area of his unconscious. The second is the amount of skill and training necessary before a therapist can undertake to guide.

It is, however, entirely possible that both these drawbacks may be sidestepped should more psychiatrists take time to experiment with visualization methods which promise direct and automatic access to given levels of the unconscious.

These unorthodox techniques—all of which are based on the manipulation of symbols—are at present used by only a handful of therapists. The only comprehensive survey of them was, so far as I am aware, written by myself. And even this was not aimed at a professional readership, but merely presented a series of curious-experiments (and their results) for the edification of the lay public.* (*Readers wishing to contribute to my next royalty check may buy a copy of the book, “Astral Doorways” from Samuel Weiser Inc., 734 Broadway, N.Y., N.Y. 10003. )

Within this area, the I Ching hexagrams promise the most fruitful field of research, although they are, unfortunately, among the most difficult symbols for patients to manipulate.

Briefly, the technique for their use is that the patient visualizes a given hexagram as if painted on a door. Holding this visualization as vividly as possible, the patient then waits for the door to open. When it does, he steps through the doorway by an act of imagination and thereafter acts out the fantasy which confronts him, exactly as he would do in the more orthodox form of directed reverie.

This approach is simpler to describe than carry out, but even so, results can sometimes be out of all proportion to the initial effort. The hexagram appears to work directly on the unconscious mind and the exercise in visualization will sometimes trigger a trance state. When this happens, results can be spectacular.

A striking example is reported by the American travel writer, William Seabrook.

The experiment took place in a studio overlooking Washington Arch in 1923. Participants were Seabrook himself, a friend who owned the studio and a Russian refugee of aristocratic origins named Nastatia Filipovna. The experiment was also witnessed by a British vice-consul of the day.

Madame Filipovna had known Rasputin in Russia and was (although not necessarily as a result) prone to trance experiences. Seabrook describes her as “a neurasthenic hyper-imaginative type, already addicted to occult escape mechanisms.”

The hexagram she drew was Ko, which means “Revolution, Molting, Leather or Skin.” In its original sense, the Chinese ideograph for the hexagram means an animal’s pelt, which is changed in the course of the year by molting. The hexagram looks like this:

For the experiment, Madame Filipovna knelt in the semi-darkened studio for a period of some three hours during which, with rare patience and ability, she visualized the hexagram superimposed on a closed door.

At one stage she groaned and her body slumped. Although she did not fall, it seems fairly clear that she had sunk into trance. Later, she informed the witnesses that her imaginary door was opening and she was passing through it.

What follows is an abbreviated version of her description of subsequent events:

. I am outside now. I am lying in the snow … pressed against the snow … I am not cold … I am wearing a fur coat. I am lying naked in a fur coat … flat with my belly and chin on the snow I lie …

“. .. I am moving now … I am crawling on my hands and knees … I am running on my hands and feet, lightly …now!now!now! … I am running lightly like the wind … how good the snow smells … faster … faster … faster …”

At this stage she was panting heavily and drooling. She began to yelp, then howl. Her observers were understandably disturbed and the vice-consul attempted to terminate the experiment by slapping her sharply and calling on her to wake up.

Her eyes opened, but she was still in the grip of her experience. She snarled and tried to take the man in the throat. Fortunately for him, her body had grown stiff from holding the same posture over several hours and she succeeded only in falling.

She crawled into a corner where the three men eventually trapped her with the aid of blankets and brought her out of the trance by holding ammonia under her nose.

Although such experiments are weird, it is still possible to echo Jung’s remark that nothing occult is to be inferred from them. Depth psychologists are well aware that atavistic urges often lie buried in the darker realms of the human mind. Usually they remain buried, but the relevant key can sometimes release them.

Toward the end of the Second World War, psychiatrists discovered a highly successful therapy known as abreaction. This was usually brought about by means of analysis and drugs. Analysis guided the patient to the root of his troubles. The drugs enabled him not merely to remember painful experiences, but to relive them.

As a result, the emotional charge “locked into” these experiences was released from the unconscious and flowed out to provide relief of symptoms. The technique proved particularly successful in cases of “shell shock,” where the experiences which caused the trouble were known to the psychiatrist. But. difficulties tended to arise when the root cause was unknown and the patient, even when helped by analysis, refused to face up to it.

In view of the success of directed reverie, the remarkable results of Seabrook’s experiment and Jung’s experience that the I Ching tended to throw up hexagrams which went mysteriously to the heart of the questioner’s psychological preoccupations, it is not too much to suggest that serious experiments in oracular psychotherapy seem a little overdue.

What, one wonders as this article draws to a close, does the I Ching think of all that has been written? The Chinese, of course, personified their oracle and, using it, one can easily see why. The I Ching reacts to questions like a person. One can almost see hovering above the printed page the dignified ghost of an immensely wise and ancient Chinese sage. What does this sage think of my attempt to tell an open-minded section of the U.S. public about his past history and his possible future? And perhaps more important, how does he think the readers will take to this information?

With the article complete to this point, I put the questions to the I Ching using the coin oracle.

In reply to my first question, “What is your opinion of my article?” I received the hexagram Shih:

developing into the hexagram K’un:

Shih means “The Army” and King Wen’s text promises good fortune and freedom from error—the latter a point very much on my mind because of the complexities of my subject matter. Emphasis on one of the lines, a nine in the second place, reinforces both these promises and adds that a “triple decoration” might be expected from the king.

K’un is the “Receptive,” or “Passive Principle,” and is closely linked in the I Ching to the action of creativity. The text promises “sublime success” but adds, “At first he goes astray, but later finds his bearings. It is advantageous to gain friends in the west and south, but friends in the east and north will be lost to us.”

Overall, the sage seems well enough pleased with my work. I did indeed “go astray” in my first attempt at the article and only later found my bearings in a maze of references. What was lacking originally was personal discipline—something usually corrected by the army.

Gaining friends in the south and west is amplified in the Confucian commentaries to mean making friends with people of one’s own outlook. The statement is interesting in the light of the oracle’s answers to my second question.

My second question asked, “How do you think Analog readers will generally react to the article?” The reply was hexagram Ch’ien:

developing into hexagram Sung:

Ch’ien means “The Creative” and is perhaps the most fortunate hexagram in the entire book. Sung, however, means “Strife or Conflict” and warns that unless developments are treated with great caution, good fortune cannot be maintained and disaster will be the end result.

Taken together, the hexagrams seem to promise a very mixed reader reaction, probably with a high degree of enthusiasm showing in the early stages, but controversy and opposition creeping in later.

When this happens, the oracle advises me to remain calm and ready to negotiate, to be prepared to submit my case to higher authority and trust that justice will be done.

Referring back to the I Ching’s earlier remarks about gaining friends in the south and west, I am reminded how articles fringing on the esoteric tend to strike deep chords in a certain type of mind—a type to which I happen to belong. As a result, I expect the article to excite the interest of (make me friends among) people of like mind, while those who still find parapsychology unpalatable will make up the bulk of readers massing in opposition.

Over to you then, friends and foes…