Renum Novarum Cupidus
(the eagerness of new ideas)
Taking something with a grain of salt can be hard at the best of times, but all the time? During lecture today we discussed the I Ching, a Chinese book of synchronicity. A book that uses chance and coincidence to determine a representation of fact. The I Ching institutes an equation of coin or yarrow stalks tossed down, and the answer is taken from the coin faces or the position of the yarrow stalks.
The western tradition most similar to the I Ching oracular divination I think, is our Tarot Cards. The theory that which ever card you draw is the card that will answer your question. So to does the I Ching yarrow stalks fall in such a way that oracles -or anyone familiar with divining the stalks- can answer a question in this manner.
I think that in some ways the ancient Chinese theories on our facts do have some relevance. They believe that human perspective plays a huge part in understanding fact, and that experiments done in a lab have certain attributes that will MAKE the ends correspond to what the scientists find - example from the book: that yes all quarts are hexagonal, so true it is a fact that all quarts crystals are hexagonal. BUT, each of those quarts crystals is different, that they are not the same size or in a completely similar state to each other. So too is fact, that fact is a general knowledge that covers the basics of a larger understanding, and that the way human kind gathers facts will cause some causal result because of our own biases.
That is where I Ching comes in. The idea that fact is fact is stable, but also that coincidence represents a more spiritual or 'higher power' or view. The idea that the realm outside of human perspective would come through in chance, and that it is still relevant because the stalks are part of that moment of question, and that your interpretation can agree with your findings.
Jung, the author in question, says this when he discusses the idea of acceptance. If the Ting, or that spiritual force, were to give you an answer than you might scoff at, would you still scoff if a fellow man gave you the same answer? The way we divine the stalks creates a bridge to our own self conscience - and the inner ideas we draw forth to explain what we read. Is divining an answer through a conscious rational dissection really any different than discerning each fact on ones own experimentation?
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