I Ching: The Book of Changes

The Book of Changes stands as one of the most important divination texts in human history -- and a foundational text of Chinese culture in general. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss the I Ching. How does it work? How does it relate to other divination traditions and why do humans, concerned with uncertainty, turn to randomness generators?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. I've got a question for you about
childhood divination practices. Did you ever do this thing when
you were a kid that I definitely did where you

(00:25):
were worried about some question you wanted an answer like
am I going to get in trouble because I said
butt head on the playground? And what you do is
you go to some book, probably the Bible or any book,
but especially the Bible, and you just open to a
random page and you close your eyes and you put
your finger on a verse, and then you look down

(00:46):
and it says, now Jehoram, the son of Ahab, began
to reign over Israel and Samaria the eighteenth year of Jehosaphat,
king of Judah, and reigned twelve years. That's the problem
about randomly generated Bible quote patients is that you might
get something really juicy and thoughtful and helpful. You might
get something that's just an incident of hideous violence from

(01:08):
the ancient past or some sort of of psychedelic prophecy,
you're very likely to get a list of progen a
or something like that, exactly. Yeah, and now I never
I don't think I ever did this with the intent
of getting some sort of meaning or guidance from the book.
But I certainly did it out of out of boredom
at times, because growing up in church, you're not everything

(01:31):
going on up there is going to be really interesting
to a young person. So you you only have so
many things you can turn to. You can poke around
in the hymnal, you can poke around in the Bible,
or you can doodle a little bit on the program,
but you can only get away with so much of that.
So you turn to the Bible, and there's there's a
lot of of interesting stuff in there, a lot of
boring stuff in there, just depending on where your fingertip

(01:51):
happens to land. Well, yeah, just after that verse I mentioned.
I mentioned verse from Second Kings because it seems like
very often when you split the Bible in half, you
go some where like in the later Middle Old Testament,
with a lot of that those kinds of verses that
are not super helpful. But right after that you'd get
and he wrought evil in the side of the Lord,
but not like his father and like his mother, for

(02:12):
he put away the image of Baal that his father
had made. Somehow that seems a little more relevant to
saying butt head on the playground, maybe like the but
the ble is the butt head you've done something worthy
of guilt. Yeah, you simply miscast your initial divination there,
you know, like you just needed to be a one
degreeed to laughter the right. Well, it highlights the fact

(02:32):
that some divination actually does feel more relevant than other divination,
even though we would probably say that no divination actually
has access to future or special knowledge, right, Yeah, Like
when one example that comes to mind that lines up
with this is is something I used to do as
an adult, is that we just randomly pull up a

(02:56):
date on the writer's Almanac and see what the poem
for that day happened to be. Uh. This is was
a radio program about literary history, and each day that
they aired it, it would have a certain poem by
by you know, a poet living or dad. You know,
it varied, and since each poem is generally going to
speak to the human condition in in some way, shape

(03:20):
or form, there's almost always going to be something you
can gain from. It's something you can compare to your
own experience, and at times that might feel rather poignant
and perfect and just cosmically aligned. And because we have
such powers of interpretation, we can very easily do that.
I mean, I feel like if I had been trying
really hard, I wouldn't need like a good verse like

(03:41):
the one about baal and reeking wickedness, And I wouldn't
even need a good poem. I could probably make some
kind of sense out of that weird lineage passage, right,
And you could make sense out of pretty much any
poem they throw at you, right, yeah, Yeah, if you
if you try hard enough, if you sort of twist
the meaning enough, you can you can find something in

(04:02):
just about any poem to apply to you. And certainly
you see plenty of examples of pastors and other clergical
individuals out there who who are following, say a liturgical calendar,
and they have a certain passage that they're given for
a given Sunday that they have to transform into a message.
And UH, as a skilled preacher, will be able to

(04:22):
do that. But in a divinatory context, I wonder, why
are we so good at this? And why do we
keep doing it. Why are we so intolerant of uncertainty
that throughout history we always keep coming back to these
methods of seeking secret information from outside ourselves. Yeah, it's
the thing that we fear the most in life, and

(04:42):
yet we summon it in trying to figure out how
we're going to tackle uncertainty. Yeah, and also like, why
do we keep doing it on the assumption, like you
and I, I know are not going to be advocating
the magic powers of any divination method in this episode,
So on the assumption that the information provide through divination
is no better than chance at being correct, why do

(05:04):
we keep doing it? Is there something actually adaptive or
powerful or useful about this process even though it doesn't
actually have magic access to the future. Well, it simply
makes choices easier at times. I think we've all been
in a situation where, uh, maybe it's not as simple
as like who who's gonna serve first in a game

(05:25):
of tennis? But it becomes too much of an effort
to say, decide who's going to pick up the tab
at a bar? Right, it becomes too much of an argument.
There are too many social considerations to take into place. Uh,
it's much easier just to make it random, just a
complete random act. Flip a coin, paper rocks, is, there's whatever,

(05:46):
and just come up with with the with with an answer,
and then you don't have to think about it anymore.
You got it. The cognitive load has just been dumped.
I think that is a great answer, like the laziness perspective,
and we know mother nature is quite lazy, and anything
we can do to reduce cognitive loads and take the
effort out of the process, that can be helpful. Yeah,

(06:07):
it's at the end of the day, you have decision
fatigue from all the other decisions you've made, and you
just can't decide if it's going to be, you know,
macaroni or crab cakes for dinner. Let randomness, Let let
a coin, a flip of a coin decided for me.
And yet there are some contradictions in there, aren't there?
Because that seems to make sense for trivial decisions where

(06:27):
you don't want to be bothered by stuff. But people
use divination methods and you know, casting of lots and
all all that kind of stuff and opening the Bible
to a random verse to make the most important decisions
in their lives. That that's almost when you've most find
yourself seeking this, when you're really desperate, when you really

(06:47):
need to know something, when you really don't know what
to do about something important, then people seek the wisdom
of the gods. That's an interesting contradiction, and I want
to come back to that later. A second thing that
I think is interesting give in the idea that we're
not going to be advocating that any books have magic
powers or have the power to predict to the future,
is that, nevertheless, some divination methods seem better, more powerful,

(07:11):
and more profound than others, even though none of them
are actually magic. For example, your average newspaper horoscope is
it's kind of hilarious to most of us, right, if
you've done some research on the forer effect in making
vague statements that seem like they apply specifically to you,
but in fact they applied almost everybody. You can see
these just the newspaper horoscopes just riddled with them, right.

(07:35):
Or another example would be and there's an even worse
example because there's even less methodology behind it, but the
fortune cookie, which would which we've many of us have
grown up obtaining at Chinese restaurants, is of course, not
even a legitimate Chinese cultural artifact. Sometimes it delightful. Nevertheless,
it can't be the life. Well, it can be fun.

(07:55):
I mean, everybody loves a fortune cookie. It's it's it's
a cookie and it has this shot of paper in
it that you can talk about with your friends or
make a joke about. But it's pretty lightweight and inauthentic
when it comes to considering Chinese divination. Well, to get
into Chinese divination, I want to say that while we're
highlighting divination methods that even while we fully acknowledge they're

(08:18):
not magic and they are really just start effects of
culture that play on our psychological vulnerabilities, some feel like
they get at something deeper. And I think, for me,
the prime example of this would be the Chinese classic
the Eaching, the Guided Divination Book, also known as the
Book of Changes, and that's what we're gonna be talking
about today now. I do want to drive home that

(08:39):
if you ever looked up the Eaching and started to
read about it, and then you get intimidated by this
big block of symbols, well trust us, because we're gonna
we're gonna guide you through the Eaching here and We're
not gonna get too far into the weeds on the
particulars of Chinese divination and sorcery, right, we wanted to
look more at like the idea of the eaching, how

(09:00):
it works in its most basic sense, how it fits
into the psychology of the human practice of divination, and
why so many thinkers, from ancient Chinese philosophers to Carl
Young have believed it to contain such profundity despite the
fact that it doesn't actually predict the future. It doesn't.
It's not magic. It doesn't predict the future. But it
does do something interesting. And what does it do well?

(09:24):
As the name implies that it speaks to change in
our lives and in the universe, as the as the
title the Book of Changes implies. Uh, there's a There's
a wonderful quote I want to read from Alan Watts,
who who spoke and wrote at length about the eaching.
He said, it's almost a mapping of the thinking processes
of man. Yeah, he has a lot of interesting thoughts

(09:45):
about it, especially in the context of thinking about the
Yin and yang imagery in Chinese culture. But Watts also
compares the functioning of the each ing to the logic
gates to the you know, buy aary logic in technology, Yeah, totally.
I mean, in essence, the Book of Changes is just

(10:05):
an ancient book of Chinese divination. Right. You seek the
answer to a question, and you have a process and
the book will help give you some kind of answer. Right.
But it's also much of the more than that, and
it I think it lacks a true parallel in the
West in terms of its influence. So one could perhaps
make a case for the Bible. But the Bible is
not explicitly intended as a book of divination, right, But

(10:27):
I'm speaking beyond like near divination, just in terms of
how important the work is. It's like a root text
for a civilization. It's it's hard. I mean, you could
make a case for the Bible, but but but I
feel like that's not really a direct one to one
between the I Ching and whatever version of the Bible
one is presenting. So this is a classical text that

(10:51):
was recorded in the ninth century BC, and it contains
the verses that incorporate divination terms and images. It was
used by diviners to read sticks or stalks of yarrow
plant that were cast six at a time so that
they fell in the shape of a hexagram, and the
practice would have involved lore, art, and mathematics in interpreting it.

(11:16):
So it's considered one of the great five Chinese classical texts,
and and it serves as a root text for both
Taoism and Confucianism, and beyond that, it also influenced Chinese
science and states craft. Uh. In other words, it's a
fundamental work of Chinese culture. And in fact, it alone
among all the Confucian classics, escaped the book burnings of

(11:36):
Chin Chi Wong, who we recently discussed at link in
an episode. Do you know why it survived? Is there
a reasoning behind that or that just an accident? My
understanding is that there may be more to it, But
it was it was just such a fundamental text. It
was just again it was it is a root text.
You could not just rip it out of the culture,
no matter how many other things you were ripping apart. So, like,

(11:59):
even if you're a person who's devoted to a racing
history and establishing a new world, you there are some
books that maybe seem so pivotal and so important to
you as a tool that you can't get rid of them. Right, Yeah,
it's it's like you can rip down the house, but
this is the foundation. So German sinologist Richard Wilhelm, who
lived through ninety he was a key individual in the

(12:23):
history of Western scholarship on the Eaching, as was his
son as well. Uh. He wrote that there were pros
and cons to the book's importance. On one hand, quote
it forced Chinese philosophical thinking more and more into a
rigid formalization. Yet he also points out they quote apart
from this mechanistic number of mysticism, a living stream of

(12:46):
deep human wisdom was constantly flowing through the channel of
this book into everyday life, giving to China's great civilization.
The rightness of wisdom distilled through the ages. Well being
a book and not just being say, you know, a
method of casting animal bones or something like that, but
having written content, we we do have to acknowledge that

(13:09):
it does contain inherent directional nous, right because it has
written words. There are things that this book says and
things that this book does not say. And that's different
from a totally like a totally free form type of
divination that could say anything at any time, right right,
the sort of magic eight ball kind of scenario right, Well, no,

(13:31):
I mean in a ball has a has a number
of messages to like the eight ball has written content.
I guess it's less it's less literary, but no, I
mean I'm thinking like as opposed to just sitting somewhere
and saying, like, all right, what is what are the
gods telling me? That could go in any direction? When
you've got a book to guide you. The book says
some things in it and it doesn't say other things

(13:54):
constrains you, right, So it would be different than say,
setting in Central Park in New York City and say alright, God,
give me a sign, and then you look around until
you notice something that seems like it might be a
message from the divine And it could be anything. It
could be a peculiar looking dog, a child looks at
you with a with a with a weird eye, or

(14:15):
there's a you know, a large child eating corn on
the cob. But you know that the portant could be anything.
But I like where your brain went with that. But
that was seeing the Robert Lamb reference for our Hodgman fans,
that was one of the portant City lays out one
the weird eye or the corn on the corn of
the cop Okay, yeah, I believe that was one of
the signs of Ragnarok approaching. Now, is there a hexagram

(14:37):
in the each ing of the child with the weird eye? Oh?
I don't know. There might be child with weird eye turning.
All right, well we should actually explain a little bit
more of the specifics of how the book works. So
if you are an ancient Chinese philosopher and you want
to know something about the future, you want the answer
to a question in your life, how would you use

(14:58):
the book? All right? So at this point we really
just need sort of break down the process of the eaching,
how it works. So, what's the most basic question you
could ask of a god or the universe or what
have you, or say a coin you could ask the
same question. You could ask it a yes or no question. Yeah,

(15:19):
basic binary situation here, uh, and we can you can
ask this a virtually anything. You could stare at the
park and say, all right, give me a sign God
you have answer to my question is a yes, and
then you wait till you see the child with the corn.
In a way, it's the most efficient sort of information
dense way of consulting anything, just to ask it yes.

(15:40):
Or no question right yeah, And at the at the
heart the Book of Changes comes down to this yes
no binary. So the cast sticks form lines, and a
single unbroken line is a yes, while a broken line
is a no. But pretty early on the ancient diviners
added additional details to these divined answers a second line,

(16:01):
so now you could have such answers as essentially yes, yes, no, no, yes, no, no, yes,
and then a third line produces the eight trigrams. That's
the that's that's the symbol. When you look at those
charts of all these weird lines and you're intimidated by
the by the eaching, that's what you're looking at, the
trigrams and as as. And also if you've if you've

(16:24):
ever seen an image of the young symbol and it's
surrounded by these different line based symbols than those are
the trigrams. You typically you'll see that on just the
the the logo for S Martial Arts Studio in any
given small town in America. M But but that also

(16:44):
underlines just how widespread these are in Chinese culture and
things that are inspired by Chinese culture. Would you say
it's so widespread that it makes it even into lots
of imagery where the people employing it don't even know
what it's from. Oh, without doubt. So, as will Ham
points out, quote, these eight triagrams were conceived as images
of all that happens in Heaven and Earth. At the

(17:06):
same time, they were held to be in a state
of continual transition, one changing into another, just as transition
from one phenomenon to another is continually taking place in
the physical world. And that's the central idea of the
Book of Change, a universe defined by changing transitional states. Yeah,
I would say that it seems that the primary ideas

(17:27):
within the Book of Changes are duality and binaries, and
then constant flux between them. Right right there, there are
two ways things can be, and you're always going back
and forth between those two ways, right, Does that make sense? Yeah,
totally so. So again, we have these eight triagrams at
this point, and then each one takes on additional meanings.

(17:48):
Uh so, one is the father, the other than mother,
then first son, second son, third son, and then the
three daughters. One is Heaven, one is Earth. When his
thunderwater mountain, wind would fire lake, other attributes such as
strength or resting or penetration or or joyfulness. And then
these you take these these tigrooms and then you use

(18:10):
them in combination with each other, producing a total of
sixty four signs six lines each. Change one line in
one of these, and you change the situation they represent, uh,
you know, such as the earth or thunder. So we're
left with a series of situations expressed as line based symbols,
and the movement of these lines change the situation. And

(18:31):
in response to each situation, there's a right and a
wrong course of action. And this is where the Book
of Changes transforms from a mere book of divination to
a book of wisdom. What should I do about the
situation just revealed to me? Now that's interesting, So the
book this is another way in which the content of
the book actually matters. It's not just a process for

(18:53):
giving you random answers to yes or no questions. It
also tells you something about the situation and wreck men's behavior. Yeah,
it's pretty big. It's it's it's not merely revealed fate.
You have a role to play, and the germinal phase
and all of this is key. This is when things
are most susceptible to change, which matches up with our

(19:14):
experience of reality, you know, and out of this we
get the idea of the dow the course of things,
the great stirring represented in the yenyang symbol UH, and
it was used by sorcerers, diviners, Confucius, Daoist statesman, scientists,
and more, with writings popping up and vanishing over the
ages devoted to the various interpretations and new writings, some

(19:36):
of which we will discuss here, continue to pop up.
Is new individuals and new cultures discover the Book of Changes.
All right, on that note, we're going to take a
quick break, and when we come back we will bust
out an example of the eaching consultation before discussing it
in greater depth than alright, we're back, alright, So today
we've been talking about the eaching, this ancient Chinese method

(20:00):
of divination, the Book of Changes and UH and some
interesting psychological characteristics of it, how it works. But we
we should show you what it feels like to consult
the eaching and get some results. So one example I
came up with last night. For a while, I've been
working on a writing project and I just asked the
eaching last night whether I would get any good writing done.

(20:21):
This coming weekend, because you never know is stuff going
to come up that's gonna draw you away, distract you,
or am I going to be productive? So I did
a virtual version that allows you to use virtual coin
flips to generate the hexagram number, so I didn't actually
have to flip coins or throw sticks. Yeah, there are
a number of different websites that allow you to do this,
and some even give you the choice where you can

(20:41):
you can physically flip your own coins and record it
on the website, which if you if you're like me
and you you play role playing games, you prefer actual
dice as opposed to just pure like it seems wrong
to trust the computer world completely. I want my my
physical uncertainty to take place on the table. Well, there's

(21:03):
definitely a way in which if you actually believe there's
something magic about the process, then you people very often
default to wanting physical tokens for for magical kind of significance.
It's harder to feel like something magic is happening inside
the computer just generating random numbers. But either way, let's
say I don't believe anything magic is going on. I

(21:24):
don't I use the computer and it generates hexagram eighteen
repairing decay. So that bodes well for my writing project.
But okay, so I see repairing decay. Interesting. No, the
Chinese word here is goo, which is a type of
venom based poison made from like combining I think scorpions
in different insects or worms. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone who listened

(21:47):
to the episode I did with Christian about poisons a
while back will recognize this term. We discussed it at length.
This idea that that this mix of magic and actual pharmacology.
Uh that and sometimes just like pure superstition attached to
various peoples that they have a magical power of poison

(22:08):
or google now, but it's also linked to this idea
of decay. And that's where repairing decay comes in. So
here's an example of the kind of thing that the
Book of Changes might say to you if you get
hexagram eighteen or this is what it will say to
you in this English translation, work on what has been
Spoiled has supreme success. It furthers one to cross the

(22:29):
great water before the starting point three days after the
starting point three days and then also the wind blows
low on the mountain the image of decay. Thus the
superior man stirs up the people and strengthens their spirit.
I like that there's a little something in there for everybody.

(22:52):
But I can see where could it definitely can apply
to a writing project, because the thing that it's I
instantly think of as well, it sounds like you've got
editing this this weekend. That sounds like you're you're going
to do some revisions on your existing work, and maybe
there's going to be less the striking out into bold
new territory. I think this example shows some of the
some of the qualities that I was talking about with

(23:15):
the eaching at the beginning, and that even though I
believe that there's nothing magic about it, it's somehow useful
it it's doing something that other divination practices don't really do.
And maybe part of that is just spurring lines of
thought going off in all different directions that allow one
to consider possibilities of action. All right, well, let's do

(23:37):
another one, just just totally off the top of my head.
Maybe a more important questions. Will the werewolves rise up
tonight to consume? Okay, let's consult. This is going to
be the electronic version of the eaching, and so I'm
going to virtually throw the coins, right, it's three coins
for each line. I believe it's true. Yeah, so you

(23:58):
have to throw three coins six times. Ah. And the
arrangement we've gotten sends us to hexagram fifty three chin
development or gradual progress development. The maiden is given in marriage,
good fortune, perseverance furthers on the mountain a tree the

(24:20):
image of development. Thus, the superior man abides in dignity
and virtue in order to improve the Moray's So, so
if we were playing a game of werewolf, this would
there's a lot we could we could we could we
could gather from this. It seems to imply a certain
patients and dignity and dealing with the villagers. Uh and uh,

(24:42):
and in the idea that we're maybe gonna pull this
off in the end if we don't overreact. I mean,
it's a little haunting because it all these images start
to suggest a narrative in the mind, which is that
if the werewolves are out there and they could rise
up against us tonight, actually they're going to take their
time and be patient and wait for a better striking position.

(25:03):
So it might not happen tonight, but it might be
worse in the long run. For us humans. Yeah, and
again this is just an off the cuff interpretation, Bye
bye bye Joe and I. But but clearly someone the
more skilled with the with the eaching would be going
would be applying their own wisdom on top of the
existing wisdom in the literary passage, right, so their whole

(25:25):
traditions on how to interpret. And there's more text too.
I'm just reading the little epigraph bits, right, there's more
text you can consult, and there are traditions of interpretation.
So hopefully at this point we've given you just just
a basic idea of the eaching, and certainly feel free
to play around with any of these websites to get
a little better idea of how this rolling is taking

(25:46):
place and what the different trigegrams look like, and then
reading the passages to get a taste of the of
the literary message for each one. So one thing I
think we should look at if we're considering the potential
adaptive nous of non magical divination systems, or even considering
the relative merits of the Book of Changes compared to

(26:07):
other divination systems, is to look at divination generally and
see where the eaching fits into the map of human
divination methods. And one of the sources who has actually
been very useful by coincidence, I guess, or maybe Young
would say by synchronicity, but certainly by coincidence on this
topic is Julian Jaynes. Not not so much for his

(26:29):
bi cameral mind theory, but just he's got a very
succinct and interesting explanation of the different types of divination
and how they occur. Yeah, and he's certainly his main
interest in it was that, as he saw it, this
was a new way of making decisions by returning to
the directions of the gods by simple analogy. But but

(26:49):
even if you totally ignore the bi cameral mind theory,
I think he's got a pretty good category system for
how divination takes place in human history. And he picked
out there are four sorts, right, You've got oh ones,
you've got sortilage, you've got augury, and you've got spontaneous divination. Now,
now augury is of course in tailing said put pulling
the the intestines out of animals, right, that would be

(27:11):
one type, one type. So you can cast judgments on
the likelihood of a ranged list of things by for example,
looking at the livers of chickens or something like that.
Another category he uses is omens. Omens is the seeking
of meaningful information in mundane patterns of events in the world.
So a blackbird landed on my window sill, that means death.

(27:35):
Oh yeah, and we're all familiar with these. We still
are ridiculously susceptible to these. A black cat crosses your path,
you spec you stepped on a crack. Now your mother
is in the hospital. Yeah. If a fox runs into
the public square of the town, will be devastated. That's
one he sites. So those two you've got. Then you've
got sortilage, which is the casting of lots, which is

(27:57):
answering questions or receiving guidance by reference to unpredictable outcomes
of pseudo random physical events, you know, throwing dice, throwing sticks,
throwing animal bones, generating random numbers to get answers or
get some kind of wisdom. And we'll come back to
this one, yes, And then of course his last category
is spontaneous divination, which is going to be the most

(28:20):
free and the most direct, which is just receiving insights
directly from the gods into the mind of the diviner.
So this would be like a shower thought would be
spontaneous divination if if you interpret it, or you could
compare spontaneous divination to being kind of like omens that
haven't been pre established. So if like you didn't already
know that a blackbird means death, you just see a

(28:42):
thing and you think it means something. You see something
and you're like, oh, well, that is actually a metaphor
for what's going on in our country right now, or
in my life or with my automobile. But so the
Book of Changes would be an example of swordilage that
the casting of lots. Right. Yes, I'm going to read
a passage here from The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes,

(29:04):
because I feel like this just really drives at home.
He says, of sort of edge quote. It consisted of
throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground,
or picking one out of a group held in a bowl,
or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic
until one fell out. Sometimes it was to answer yes
or no, at other times to choose one out of
a group of men, plots or alternatives. But this simplicity,

(29:28):
even triviality, to us, should not blind us from seeing
the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its
remarkable historic importance. We are so used to the huge
variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette, wheels, etcetera,
all of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination
by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate

(29:51):
the significance of this practice historically. It is a help
here to realize that there was no concept of chance
whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery, how odd
to think of it as a discovery of deciding an
issue by throwing sticks or beings on the ground, was
an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For

(30:11):
because there was no chance, the result had to be
caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined. Isn't
that fascinating? The idea that randomness was a discovery in
history that, uh, I mean, we don't know that for sure,
but I think that is a reasonable way of interpreting
what people generally acted like in history. A lot of times,

(30:33):
if you go back into history, people don't seem to
believe in coincidence very much. That they believe that like
if something random happened. It happened because the God's made
it happen that way. And thus, for example, if you
and your friends draw straws, as to who's going to
have to I don't know, do do the unwanted task,
who's gonna have to sweep up after your poker games? Over,

(30:54):
the person who draws the short straw is not just
losing a game of chance. They were chosen by the
gods to sweep up. It might be a punishment. And
also the outcomes of all your poker hands were chosen
by the gods. Yeah, we have no real agency in
any of this. Now, that draws me to the fact
that we mentioned earlier. I think that Carl Young was
interested in the eaching, and for for Carl Young, I

(31:16):
think the eaching definitely meshed with his idea of the
concept of synchronicity. Right. Young believed he had a lot
of essentially magical beliefs, and he believed that there was
an a causal connecting principle in the universe where events
could be connected by something other than physical causation. And
he called that connecting principle synchronicity. Uh, it's it's kind

(31:40):
of hard to explain exactly what he's saying, because, for example,
you think about someone and then suddenly the phone rings
and it's that person, and so he would say, well,
it's not that your thought caused them to call. But
he also would not just say well, it's just pure randomness,
it's pure coincidence. He does think that there's some reason

(32:02):
that happened, it's just not physical causation, and in that
he saw that principle at work in the eaching. Yeah,
I mean, we just to break that down a little bit.
I feel like we can often break that that down
that that's supposed synchronicity in our own lives. For instance,
you're watching a movie or TV show with with a

(32:25):
significant other and there's some framework, there's some mention or
symbol or emblem that shows up in the show, and
since you both have a shared such a shared history,
shared path, shared live, it's liable to trigger the same
association in both of your minds at the same time.
And then one mentions, hey, do you remember that time
we went to the Turkish restaurant? And then you're like,

(32:45):
I was just thinking about that Turkish restaurant. But it's
there's nothing mystical going on. It's just that they're there.
There's certain things between the two of you that are
in attainment. Yeah, I think that's one good explanation for
the feeling of synchronicity. I mean, one thing is just
so election bias, because like most of the time, synchronicity
type events are not happening, and maybe when they do

(33:05):
happen by coincidence, you just happen to notice them and
they seem very significant, but in fact they're very uncommon.
Another explanation could be maybe if they are more common,
then would actually be predicted by random chance. There were
often hidden causative factors, just like you're talking about. There
are things that did cause this correlation of events that
you just can't even imagine, but they are pure mundane

(33:27):
physical causes. All right, I think we'll take a quick
break and then when we come back, we will discuss
some weird and esoteric beliefs about the eaching and then
maybe try to answer that question of what could the
adaptive value of a totally non predictive, non magical prediction
book bank Alright, we're back, all right, So I think

(33:50):
maybe it's time to talk about the Wizard of Psychedelics. Yes,
Terrence McKenna, because because we mentioned earlier that various sorcerers,
sign antis, etcetera. Have taken up the Book of Changes
over the years and found new spins to take on
its ancient wisdom. If there is anybody who qualifies as
a modern wizard or sorcerer, I think maybe Terence McKenna

(34:10):
I would fit that category best. Oh yeah, yeah. Terence McKinney,
for anyone who's not familiar, was an American ethnobotanist, mystic,
psychonautic author, and he lived from nineteen forty six to
the year two thousand. He was a noted again, a
noted author, a definite counterculture figure. If you look him
up on YouTube, for instance, you will find various talks

(34:33):
by Terence McKenna. Interviews with Terence McKenna. I would say
he's worth looking up for his talks because even though
most of the time his talks are full of stuff
that I think is absolute bs, he's so great to
listen to. And he and even while he's saying stuff
that I know is probably not true, it's very it's

(34:54):
very inspiring of paths of thought to go down. Yeah,
I mean, he's clearly you listen to me, there's there's
a brilliance to the man. There's a there's a deep
intelligence Terence McKenna. Uh. And and yet some of the
theories that he throughout there we're definite suit of science.
Some are a little more grounded. I guess. I will say,

(35:16):
we've received a number of suggestions that we cover his
stoned ape theory of human evolution. So perhaps we'll come
back at some point and do that, and even do
a deeper treatment of Terence mckinna's life. Oh yeah, I mean,
I wouldn't write something off just because he said it.
I just mean that, Like as much as I like
listening to him most of the time, even though I've
enjoyed his talk, it's been full of a lot of magic. Yeah.

(35:39):
And for instance, you will find interviews where he's discussing
the eaching. And it's interesting because at times he is
very you know, spot on with with his interpretation of
the eaching and what it means and now it matches
up with human experience and and I'll read a quote
from him in just just a minute. But other times
he is of course taking it and using it, wrapping

(36:00):
it up in his what he called novelty theory. So
he picked up the Book of Changes in the nineties
seventies following an experience on psilocybin or magic mushrooms, and
he started looking at the sixty four hexagrams from the
Kingland's sequence of the of the Eaching. And this, I
think is often considered like the most traditionally authoritative sequence, Right.

(36:22):
I'll include an image of the sequence on the landing
bait for this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. But he he basically came to believe that
the sequence revealed the way time flows through the world,
with peaks and valleys lining up with major events in
human history, all of it moving towards the end of
the time wave, towards the end of time. And guess

(36:43):
when he figured that was going to be today? No, no,
we were were tomorrow. No no, we're way past it now.
But it was November. Yeah, well, I guess, I guess
that was part of the whole twelve thing, wasn't it. Yeah, yeah,
it was. Consider it's considered one of the major factors there.
You know that along with various interpretations of the mind calendar. Uh,

(37:05):
he even had a computer program had lined up with it.
Time wave zero. Yeah, McKenna did claim that in some
sense the eaching quote seems to work that quote against
all rational expectation. The carrying out of this random ritualistic
activity seems then to give a reading applicable to the
unique situation. And I would say that hinging on the

(37:27):
word seems there. I could probably actually agree with that.
I mean, I don't think that it's actually a magic book,
that it actually predicts the future, but it does seem
to provide some kind of value. Yeah, like it cannot
it obviously cannot be used to actually map out the future,
but it does line up with our experience of reality

(37:47):
and our experience of change in time. Yeah. Now he
went beyond that actually though, which is that McKenna thought
that the eaching was not just a product of culture,
but was evidence that the ancient Chinese had some how
gotten ahead of even today's physicists in coming up with
what he called an objectively predictive theory of time. Obviously,

(38:08):
that does not seem very plausible to me, but I'll
admit it's an interesting idea. It would be a cool
idea to entertain. Yeah, and when McKinney is talking about
I mean He's often talking way above my head about it,
and I think the heads of of of many people
who are listening to him. Um, But he was not
approaching it from an area of ignorance. It's it's a
very complicated theories rolling out here is just ultimately the

(38:32):
domain of pseudo science or mysticism. But but, but some
of his his quotes about the eaching I think are
pretty spot on. Here's one from an interview quote. My
conclusions looking at the eaching have been that it is
not possible to know the future. For if it were
possible to know it, life would be a determinism and
thinking would be divorced from meaning and we would be

(38:53):
out of business. But what is possible to know about
the future is levels of novelty, which future states will
fulfill by the happenstance of unpredictable events. Now, this is
a formal well way of saying, we know where the
road goes, but we don't know what the scenery looks like.
I feel like there are two different ways of interpreting that.

(39:13):
One way is to interpret him literally as saying that
he thinks the teaching does in some sense literally predict
to the future, in which case, I think he's wrong.
But if he is saying that it contains insights about
the way life tends to go, I think you could
say that that that could be true. Yeah, I think so.

(39:34):
I feel as we've sort of demonstrated, you can pull
pretty much any of these trigrams out and they will
match up with experiences we've had, or anxieties we've felt,
or situations that we've observed in others or read about
in the history of civilization. But of course this may
lead many people to ask, well, then, does it have
any real value beyond just mirror literature, beyond mere uh,

(39:58):
you know, ancient wisdom in a book? Well? Yeah, And
also does it have value? We asked this question earlier.
I think does that have value comparable to other divination
systems with content like is it actually a better or
more useful book than say, consulting your horoscope in the newspaper?
Or are they all just kind of kind of contain

(40:18):
vague statements about human life that are often going to
feel applicable to you and give you some kind of
feeling of knowing how to deal with things that ultimately
no better than the fortune cookie, which most of the
time you just toss it out, but one in a
hundred or two hundred will have some sort of meaning
and you'll tuck it away in your wallet. Yeah, and

(40:39):
so I think people of a secular, skeptical frame of
mind about divination would tend to assume that, since there
is no actual way to see into the future, all
divination systems are equally useless. They're equally perpetuated by people's
confirmation bias, in general gullibility. It's kind of like you had,
you know, if you have several different computer programmers write

(41:00):
programs to randomly predict the final scores of upcoming football games,
you wouldn't expect one random score pick or program to
work any better than any other. Right, they'd all be
equally useless. But just because people can't actually see into
the future doesn't mean the different divination methods created by
different people's are of all the same equal worthless value.

(41:20):
In a way, I think divination methods, especially the bibliomancy,
like we've been talking about the eaching, As I said,
they have content, and that content, even when exerted at random,
can be on average, more or less insightful about the
present and the future of the wisdom seeker. So while
I think McKenna was grossly overstating the case by claiming

(41:42):
that the eaching is an objective scientific theory of time,
I think there can be divination systems in which the contents,
more accurately or less accurately, tend to suggest to people
valuable insights about their lives and the situations they face.
And in a way, I think this is kind of
analogous to the idea that there could be like a
good palm reader and a bad palm reader. Right in

(42:04):
both cases, palm reading is pseudoscience or it's magic. Uh,
there's no correlation between what your palm looks like and
what your future will be, or there's little correlation. I
don't know. You might be able to like see somebody's
rough hands and think you'll probably continue doing a lot
of work with your hands, but there's not going to
be much actual correlation there. So the reader has no
paranormal access to hidden information. But some palm readers are

(42:28):
going to be better at making correct or insightful statements
about the person they're reading by using all the standard
cold reading tricks. You notice body language, you catch hits
and build on them, and so forth. Or just by
being a wiser person and having more thoughtful stuff to say. Now,
a book doesn't have any way of like reading the
body language of the reader and feeding back off that.

(42:50):
But some books are written by wiser people who have
more insights about the way life goes. Then again you
might wonder, Okay, how could that apply to the eaching
since it has you know, it tends to trade in
these like weird, cool, cryptic kind of statements, right, could
those really be all that insightful? I want to mention
a personal essay. I read an Eon magazine by a

(43:12):
fiction writer named Will Buckingham about his personal relationship with
the Eaching over the years, and he also, in his
own way kind of like McKenna, claimed that the eaching works,
but not in a magical sense. And I think the
most interesting thing he writes in the essay is that
he thinks the value of the eaching lies not in
it giving accurate or certain predictions about the future, but

(43:35):
in providing what he calls better uncertainties. He mentions a
twelfth century poet and scholar named Yang Wan Lee who wrote, quote,
the profound implications of the Book of Changes are what
plunges people of the world into doubts and makes them think.
And then he writes, I use the eaching not as

(43:56):
a certain team machine, but as an uncertain team machine
does solving false certainties. It integrates the fact of unknowing
into the fabric of my thinking, opening me up to
hitherto unimagined possibilities, scattering the monotony of my either or
dilemmas into a myriad of forking paths. I like that,

(44:16):
and I want to think about that well. To go
back to your your example of consulting the the eaching
on your your writing project this weekend, I can imagine
a situation where one is thinking, is not even entertaining
the idea of of of doing some revisions you know,
and then consulting the eaching seems to suggest that you

(44:36):
should do revisions or you know, and it it makes
you contemplate a path that you had already decided to
steer away from, and it makes you reconsider your choices.
I think that is a profound insight. I want to
think about the idea of introducing randomness into behavior. So
most studies show that humans are unable to spontaneous regenerate randomness.

(45:01):
This is often demonstrated. If you get some people into
a room and say I want you to create a
random list of digits, can you do it? Robert, give
me a random list of digits? Oh? What one, three, six, nine, two, three, eight?
Not very good? Is it? Well? I don't know. It
fell random as I was belting it out. But but

(45:23):
I did also I could I could sense myself sort
of casting about for numbers. Yeah. Yeah. Most studies find
that the lists people creative these digits are, in mathematical terms,
very non random. The brain has what it interprets as
an internal randomness generator, Like if I ask you to
say a random word, you'll be able to say a
word that feels random to you. But in fact it

(45:46):
might not be so random. It might be actually pretty
easy to predict what kind of words you're going to say.
And in the case of listing numbers, it is provably
very easy to predict what number you're going to say,
because people have done it with computer models. So I
want to look at a study from Plos one by
Mark Andre Schultz at all. What they did in this

(46:07):
study was that they did this like digit listing thing,
and they came up with a computer model using a
principle called Lewenstein dam a rale distance to look at
a list of supposedly random digits generated by human subject
and then predict what the next number in the sequence
would be. The model was able to do this at
a rate much better than chance. So if the numbers

(46:27):
were really random, they would have the model would not
have been able to do any better than chance right,
and the percentage chance he would expect would be eleven
percent of the computer model getting the numbers right. But
in reality, the mean prediction rate of this program was
twent This means that the lists of digits people generated
were not random. They contained patterns that the human generators

(46:50):
were simply not aware of. And it gets worse. The
patterns were also persons specific. Not only could this computer
model look at a list of random members generated by
humans and do significantly better than chance predicting what numbers
would come next, it could identify patterns unique to each
individual subject. So like if Dale just said six, you

(47:11):
can be pretty sure he's about to say three. But
to extrapolate, isn't a lot of life like this? Like
you find yourself with the urge to do something spontaneous,
to seek novelty, But what do you actually do almost
all the time, Yeah, you fall back on pre existing
patterns of behavior. Yeah, exactly, you do what you've done before,

(47:32):
even when you think you're being spontaneous, like this is
a horrible example, Robert. I know you've had this experience
I have. Do you ever sit down with somebody and say,
let's watch a new movie, let's find something new to watch,
and you go through some complicated, drawn out selection process
to find a new movie you've never seen before, and
you start watching it, only to gradually realize, wait a second,

(47:56):
didn't we try to watch this same movie a few
years ago and we didn't like it, so we stopped
halfway through. I've had that experience with other people. I
tend to remember. It's one of one of the few
things I can I can count on myself to remember,
is whether I have seen a film or tried to
watch it before. But but as far as the long,
drawn out selection process, certainly, there's so many times where
you end up just scrolling through Netflix or Hulu until

(48:19):
you just you just sort of time out on it.
You give up, and you just pull up something that
you were already watching, and maybe we weren't that into
or just something you've seen before, right, But so this
is just about what to watch, and even this shows
that we are so much more patterned and predictable even
when we're trying to seek spontaneity. Of course, randomness and
novelty are so much more important than that, and there's

(48:40):
so much more important than just finding an interesting new movie.
Like at the level of technology and science, random enough
pseudo random numbers and processes are necessary for accurate statistical sampling,
for computer modeling of complex phenomenon, definitely for cryptography. At
the level of biology, randomness is necessary in order or
organisms to evolve. The primary driver of evolution is natural selection,

(49:05):
picking from among random mutations. If you don't have enough
random mutations, if your mutation rate is too low, you
can't adapt, you can't evolve, you can't create a diverse biosphere.
You could live in a world of fragile, cloned organisms,
highly vulnerable to extinction. So I wonder if there are

(49:25):
analogies to this and the behavior of complex animals, like
our macroscopic random mutations of behavior important for the quality
and success of an individual's life. So anyway, I think
this kind of brings us back to the question from
earlier of how predictively worthless divination methods could still be adaptive,

(49:48):
how they might be useful even though they're not magic.
What if divination methods like the each ing are useful
because they introduce an element of randomness into our behavior
and motivation that we would not be able or willing
to introduce on our own. Yeah, I mean, they could
be the only way to introduce true randomness into your

(50:09):
life because even you know, certainly we live within chaotic systems.
But but even within those chaotic systems, there's there's a
fair amount of dependability, you know. I mean, I mean
we build whole structures for our lives to eliminate unpredictability, right, Yeah,
and also playing with a certain amount of probability. Um,

(50:29):
Like I I have to be prepared for various weather
scenarios to take place in the next week, but I'm
fairly sure it's not going to snow. We'll see. Um.
You know, these sort of these sort of considerations come
up time and time again. But if you have a
true random randomness generator, then you were gonna have to think, well,
what if it did snow, what's my plan for the

(50:51):
for the snow day next week, and uh and and
that can force you to consider possibilities that just would
not be there if you did not have something like
that eaching to turn to yeah, exactly. So. The way
I'm thinking about this is that what what if divination
methods are essentially a way we've come up with for
encouraging mutations in our behavior in the evolutionary sense, allowing

(51:15):
our lives and societies to test new ways of living
and potentially culturally evolve. I can't help it come back
to the Game of Werewolf that we just kind of
haphazardly mentioned earlier. But in the game of the Werewolf,
it is random. It is completely random who is going
to be the werewolf in a given game, which individuals

(51:36):
will be the villains of that round of play, and
that pure randomness is one of the main reasons the
game is so engaging. But it brings out things in
people like the randomness can allow you to suddenly have
to be the deceiver when you wouldn't normally play that
role in life, that's not part of your established patterns
of behavior. It draws out things in your personality that

(51:58):
you wouldn't have accessed otherwise is yeah, I mean God,
And then there's I don't want to talk too much
about gambling and all this, but but imagine like the
weirdness of the lottery. In considering this, somebody, we're just
gonna make somebody a millionaire, just just randomly, and see
what happens. See how it affects that everybody. It seems
like it often doesn't work out too good. Well no,

(52:21):
but for other people. For me, I feel like I
could handle it. But that's what we all tell each other, right, Yeah,
that might be different. Even playing the lottery, though, is
is kind of a contemplation of that uncertainty. What did happen?
I mean, generally that's the only option that someone is
fantasizing about when they play it. What if I win?
What will that be like? Now, a counter factual to

(52:43):
this hypothesis that I just put out there that divination
methods might be valuable because they introduce random to s
into our lives is that you could think that, like
in nature, most mutations are either either have no effect
or are harmful. Right, But I wonder if there is
an overall selection effect on introducing randomness into behavior, because

(53:06):
really good deviations from patterns of behavior are are beneficial
enough to keep the whole thing in the in the black. Well,
if you're bringing up at the very beginning of the
episode the idea of pulling up random passages from the Bible,
and we can just apply this to any book that
you yourself consider a book of wisdom. It could be,
it could be any religious or secular work. The first

(53:30):
five times you do it, you could get nonsense, You
could get what would be in a biological level, just
a disastrous mutation. But but then you keep going until
you hit the one that is novel that you hadn't
thought about. Uh, And I mean that's what makes the
process worthwhile. Yeah, well, but that what you just said
also makes me think about how this hypothesis could inform

(53:52):
the idea that some divination methods are actually more adaptive
than others. Even though none of them are actually magic,
none of them can actually predict the future, some of
them do feel more useful. And this could be because,
for example, spontaneous divination would not allow you to depart
from internally establish mental patterns. Right if you're just looking

(54:13):
at stuff and saying, what does this mean from the gods,
you're probably you're just drawing on the same types of
thought processes that would normally guide your behavior. Yeah. Yeah,
you're not really reaching outside yourself for that answer. Sort
of lige on the other hand, maybe more useful for
this kind of thing, because if you're employing sufficiently pseudo
random processes like rolling dice or yarrow sticks or flipping coins,

(54:36):
then you and then you use those numbers to consult
sections of a pre written text that you can't edit
and you didn't create. You are introducing external random factors
into your life that you have no control over. Now,
there might be to some extent and ability to sort
of correct for that randomness by your process of interpretation.
But I wonder if some of the value of the

(54:58):
the interpretive tradition ends about things like the eaching make
it harder for you to ignore the random aspects of
these of these divination outcomes, right, They make it harder
for you to rationalize away novelty and make you sort
of like face the randomness. And of course randomness can

(55:18):
be pleasant, it can be terrifying, Yeah, depending on the
details of what you're contemplating. Totally true. Now, one last
thing I have to kind of wonder about though, if
this is true, If it is true that methods like
this work by introducing randomness into your life, and that
can in many cases have some kind of benefit, do

(55:40):
you lose the benefit if you understand that process, Like,
if you don't actually think that the wisdom provided by
the eaching is some kind of magic thing delivered by
the gods. If you think it's, well, this is just
a random process that I'm using to introduce some creative
novelty into my life, does it still have the same
power to do that? So? Yeah, So the idea here

(56:04):
being that you would have to buy into the eaching
to a certain amount to get anything out of it.
I mean, I'm saying, I wonder if you would have to.
I feel like the answer to that is going to
vary from individual to individual. You know, It's like to
what to to varying degrees. I feel each individual is
able to turn to something like the eaching and and

(56:25):
sort of divide it, you know, and understand that, Okay,
this is not the voice of the divine, but I
can find some wisdom in it, you know, Like, to
what extent can the individual? Does the individual value insight
in literature or in historical texts or or to what
extent do they view randomness as a beneficial aspect of

(56:46):
life and not just pure chaos to be avoided. Right, Well,
I mean yeah, I guess some people would get random
insights or random charges to action, and they would tend
to ignore them because they break patterns of behavior. Some
people are just we're very set in our ways, aren't we. Yeah,
And changes terrifying, but that's that's all. That's the crazy

(57:07):
things that that is what this is all about. I mean,
it's the Book of Changes. It's the book of dealing
with the rate of change in our lives in the
universe and how one is supposed to react accordingly so
as to avoid the more detrimental situations. It's the book
of entropy. Yeah, all right, So there you have it.
Hopefully we gave you a lot to chew on here,

(57:28):
along with just a basic understanding of what the eaching
is and how it fits in with other divination practices
from around the world. If you'd like to reach out
to us uh and discuss any of this, well, hey,
you can find us on social media or on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.
We're also, of course, that's stuff to blow your mind
dot com that is the mothership. That is where you

(57:48):
will find all the episodes of the podcast, as well
as the links out to those social media accounts. Thanks
as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Andry, and
thanks to our guest producer Paul for stepping in today. Paul,
you're doing great. If you'd like to get in touch
with us about this episode or any other, or if
you would like to let us know a topic that
you think we should do in the future, or just

(58:10):
to say hi, you can always email us at Blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
illness and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot com.