The I Ching as Bible 2

way of life. Some of the most influential statements of this feeling
came from the Beat writers of the time: Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, Gary Snyder. They and others were searching for
meaningful lives. In some ways they botched the job, but the
important thing was that they were aware that their physical
well-being did not mean they were living a "good life." They were
keenly aware that their inner lives-the lives of their minds,
emotions, psyches, and spirits-were as real as their bodies, and in
some ways more real. They realized that part of the bankruptcy of
traditional Western morality was that it had given all its attention
to the well-being of the body and to scientific rational
intelligence, and had essentially ignored the inner life.
Young Americans of the 1960s did not trust the church, so they set
out to find a life of the mind and spirit in other traditions. They
looked energetically at Buddhism, Hinduism, and Middle Eastern
religions and philosophies. Young black people became Muslims.
White kids from suburban families became Zen Buddhists and
Hindus, or at least they tried to. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
made trips to America, and the Beatles followed him back to India.
Alan Watts wrote enormously popular books for Americans about
Buddhism. I remember being influenced by a popularization of
Hindu philosophy called Be Here Now by a Westerner who had
adopted the name Baba Ram Dass.
The 1960s passed. By the late 1970s, people thought of the whole
endeavor as a misguided waste of energy and a joke. Most of the
young spiritual rebels of the 1960s got sick of living in the
uncomfortable surroundings they associated with spiritual life and
returned to the comforts of middle-class food, transportation, and
money. Those who continued to seek the spiritual life, whether in
books or drugs or traditional religions, came to be seen by
Americans in general as cranks or misfits. The period saw a
resurgence of interest in contacting dead spirits and belief in the
power of crystals and mental telepathy. In 1972 I took a college
course in the anthropology of magic and religion, and we read
books by popular mystics like P.D. Ouspensky and so-called black
magicians like Aleister Crowley. They were disturbing books. The
UFO phenomenon, which is probably a manifestation of an inner
condition, emerged full-blown during the 1960s. People seeking
inner meaning tried different kinds of divination, including
astrology, tarot cards, and-the I Ching.
I was introduced to the I Ching in this context. A friend showed me
how to throw the coins to obtain the hexagrams, and we read the
oracles with fascination. What we did was purely superstition,
according to the dominant scientific-rational view of reality. Most
well-meaning middle-class Americans believed science had long
since debunked and disproved all superstitious nonsense about
supernatural realities; even the Catholic church was the butt of
jokes for many Americans because of its weird rituals with incense
and chanting and drinking wine believed to be blood.
I admit I don't know exactly what to think of all this. I do know
that, contrary to the jokes now told about "peace, love, and
understanding" and deluded spaced-out hippies, and contrary to
hard-core scientific cynicism about religion and the existence of an
inner, spiritual, and moral life, the impulse during those years to
find some kind of spiritual reality was intense and real. It was just
that many people failed to find any evidence of it. Many people,
but not all.
Those who told me that the I Ching is their bible believe they have
evidence of things unseen. Tarot cards and ouija boards mainly
dropped out of their lives as either unreliable or dangerous or
simply fake. Some of them keep a skeptical eye on astrology.
Drugs have long since left their lives as dangerous, short-lived,
and largely illusory. But the I Ching remained and actually grew
in importance to them. Why?
Well, the initial attraction to the I Ching involved its use as a
contact with the spiritual world. You throw the coins, they
symbolize lines, and you look up the arrangement of lines in the
book, then read the commentary, which supposedly answers your
question. Pure superstition. Except that people discovered that
things were happening in the I Ching that were not happening, or
happening far less satisfactorily, in other kinds of divination. One
thing was, amazingly, that the answers were right. Let me tell you
a story that still startles me, even years later.

The friend who originally introduced me to the I Ching decided to
make a scientific test of its objective reliability. His question was,
"Is some ordering force actually at work, or is this merely total
random chance?" For his test, he threw the coins randomly,
challenging the I Ching to make sense. On the first throw, he
ended with the oracle Wilhelm translates as "Youthful Folly"; the
original text is translated thus: "It is not I who seek the young fool.
The young fool seeks me. If he importunes, I give him no
information." This was startling because it would be just the sort
of reply you might expect a real oracle to make in response to a
frivolous test of its authenticity.
But a stranger thing happened. My friend continued his test,
throwing the coins three more times. Three more times he drew
the oracle of "Youthful Folly." This can mean only one of two
things: Either an extremely improbable and truly fantastic
synchronistic coincidence occurred, or the oracle actually
(generously) answered a question that should not have been asked,
by warning of its foolhardiness. Four times in a row.
I have never known anyone who has used the I Ching to say it was
wrong or that it misguided them. In my experience, it has never
been wrong, by which I mean that although sometimes the
response is very hard to understand or seems ambiguous, I have
never seen a clearly unfavorable response in a favorable situation,
or vice versa. And I have frequently seen responses clearly borne
out. The oracle has been exact and lucid about favorable and
unfavorable periods of my own life, including a troubling period
that began soon after a decision to forgo a long-term visit to
China.
So my friends' religious confidence in the I Ching began with
their experiments in occult and mystical activities, what we now
call the "New Age" movement-the interest in occultism and
mysticism that grew out of the 1960s into whole ranges of
popularizations of Eastern religion and philosophy, Native
American mysticism, shamanism, channeling, paganism, myth
enactment, psychic healing, meditation practice, past-life
hypnosis, and many other similar offshoots, including the quite
bizarre alien abduction phenomenon.
The I Ching is different, though. Not only does it seem to reply
meaningfully to questions, but it provides two other important
things: first, clear, reasonable instructions about living a good life;
and second, a coherent picture of the cosmos that integrates my
friends' deep sense that the outer, material world and the inner,
psychic world are equally real and intimately related. This is
critical. My friends say, "The I Ching is my bible," because it
provides exactly what religion, apart from church politics,
traditionally provided: guidelines for living a good life, and
contact with the inner or spiritual world. A point of moral
orientation is available in the I Ching, which many people believe
is not available in traditional Western religions or most of the
shallow New Age efforts to formulate a working spiritual life.
What's really interesting is that this point of orientation is
available in a text from ancient China. It strongly suggests that the
moral values we sense deep inside us are common to widely
diverse people. Wisdom, justice, temperance, patience, endurance,
perseverance, honesty, courage, piety-virtues taught by Plato, not
to mention Jesus-are present not only in Western, but also in
Chinese culture. And they are identifiable in South Asian cultures,
Middle Eastern cultures, and other cultures all around the world.
If I'm right about even part of this, it means that religion is not an
evil political tool. Instead, it means that religious institutions were