We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for
– Nietzsche
The psychophysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation
– C.G. Jung
According to Carl Jung the Feeling Function is unbalanced in Western society, compared to the Thinking and Physical Function. This is probably correct, but also the Intuitive Function is neglected. For this essay I will consider perception in relation to society.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard said we live in a simulacrum world. We no longer have direct experience of facts when they are filtered through the media. Technology is now advanced so fake images and video are easily created, and will be used for political effect.
Anyone with experience of journalists knows what happens. They write from their angle not yours. With literary training, you learn how to evaluate a text which includes both feeling and thinking. What someone writes is not always accurate, which leads to an evaluation of criteria. Literary degrees are sometimes regarded as a waste of time compared to coding or engineering. If you want money, this is true. If you want thinking skills, this is not true.
At an English seminar, you navigate the meaning of a poem in a group with a teacher and established criticism. There’s no right or wrong, but you have to argue your case. In his book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev quotes a Russian television presenter saying “We all know there will be no real politics. But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”
Trust in authority and expertise diminishes when we see lies, manipulation, and fallibility. In an English department, this is an enquiry with aesthetic consequences. For Sociology, the grounding is different. The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics. It includes analysis, feeling, philosophy, and according to Liu Xi in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons this variously concerns:
Deep feeling untainted by artificiality, unmixed purity of form, empirical truth untarnished by falsehood, moral ideas uninvolved in perversity, simple style free from verbosity, and literary beauty unmarred by excesses.
Liu Xi ponders the Confucian Classics, which includes the I Ching. There are different categories of writing with fantasy and veracity, theory and reality, enquiry and deceit, reason and error, good and bad, according to domain. Those domains slip and slide around in contemporary politics. When they talk, leaders use words they are trained to use. Watch them now and you find the phrase “and that’s why” a common occurrence. We doubt them, so they use story-time explanation like a bedtime Aesop Fable. For journalism, Nietzsche said this which is amusing but profound and contemporary: “They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves.”
We are trained into rationality and science, not Jungian Intuition, but people have experience of what it means. Definitions are unclear so I don’t know if this qualifies as “intuition” or “psychic” but the wider point is non-rational perception. Some years ago, I was driving after midnight more tired than I realised. I reached a complicated section of quiet motorway and for several minutes was proceeding the wrong way. Cars would eventually drive towards me, me towards them. The expression “hairs on the back of your neck” captures it well. It’s not hairs standing up, and it’s not the physical neck, but it’s a good description. Intellectually, I wasn’t aware of what was happening. Psychically, I suddenly was. Something is wrong and it was a prickly feeling in the neck region. There are higher and lower levels to this function so this was perhaps “animal wisdom.”
As I teenager I read books about yoga, meditation, ch’i gung, mandalas and Tai Chi. At university, when I was supposed to be writing about Hamlet or W.B. Yeats, I browsed Religious Studies shelves. There I found a book called Creativity and Taoism, which I read again recently. It’s not especially notable, but reminded me of my search. I read Vivekananda, Gurdjieff, Theosophy, Taoism, Patanjali, Sufism, the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhism. I bought my first Tao Te Ching and I Ching. I still have them, by Gia-fu Feng and Wilhelm.
Jung’s “acausal connecting principle” is a good explanation for I Ching readings. He himself used the book extensively. “Synchronicity” is a term we use in casual conversation, explaining apparent coincidence. Jung refers to it in the forward of Wilhelm’s book:
A concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance
There’s a Chinese I Ching explanation related to synchronicity. The word is ganying, which means correlative resonance. Gan means feel, sense, move, touch, and affected by cold. Ying means respond, consent, or comply. It’s like dropping a pebble in a lake. Ripples extend, and then return. You think of a person, and they phone. This happens to me quite regularly although the thought isn’t mine. It’s theirs, and I feel it.
The I Ching is a deep level of knowing, with shapes and symbols originally discerned (we are told) by Fu Hsi: “Then came Fu Hsi and looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth” (Wilhelm). That description occurs in associated I Ching writings called the Ten Wings. They’re not part of the interpretive text, but Confucian explanatory philosophy. Fu Hsi finds patterns, which become the I Ching trigrams.
Talking about these matters introduces a problem of glamour, like it’s a special or mystical subject. It isn’t. Consider the magic of a good poem, how words and images embed in the social psyche and are quoted for collective effect. Intuition, synchronicity, or ganying, are Functions among others with little application for material society.
There’s a funny book which undermines the glamour of Chinese or any other mysticism. Monkey King, by Wu Cheng’en, is known and loved (presumably) by young people in China. I laughed in a coffee shop after hours of studying the I Ching. It makes me laugh again now, like Shakespearean ribaldry. There we are, reading high art. There it is, a great writer having a laugh. Here’s the Julia Lovell translation:
Cinching his embroidered robe and grasping an iron staff, Hui’an leaped out of the camp. “Where is this Great Sage Equal to Heaven?” he hollered. “None other,” replied Monkey, raising his own staff. “Who dares ask?”
Indeed. Stand for no nonsense.
Panicking, Monkey pinched his staff to the size of an embroidery needle, tucked it inside his ear, changed into a sparrow, and perched on a treetop.
Occasionally useful.
Monkey flung himself onto the bank as a water snake and slithered off into the grass.
A fine conclusion.
I write like this is a magazine column. With research, references, and a lot of time. If you like it, perhaps you would support me.