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NEW
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Divination
Practices: I Ching -- Part Two
By Dr.
John Ankerberg and Dr. John Weldon |
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Spiritism
The I Ching, like most forms of divination, is
lauded for its uncanny ability to predict the future accurately.
Consider the following comments of scholar and practitioner John Blofeld,
who assigns the oracle infallibility. In his translation of the I
Ching, he refers to its alleged ability to control the future, and
he marvels over its "terrifying precision":
... it enables any reasonably unselfish person who is capable of
fulfilling a few simple conditions both to foresee and to control the
course of future events! By rightly interpreting and strictly
following the I Ching’s interpretation of universal laws, we
can make ourselves as farsighted as the lesser Gods!… It can be used
to explain the present and predict the future with almost terrifying
precision!... My aim in making a new translation of this work is to
produce a version in the simplest possible language containing clear
instructions for its use in divination, so that any English-speaking
person who approaches it sincerely and intelligently can use it as an
infallible means of choosing good and avoiding evil.... My version is
almost wholly concentrated on the aspect of divination. 1
... What does interest me enormously is that the Book of Change,
when properly put to the test, responds in such a way as to remove all
doubts about its value as to a book of divination.... A really skilled
interpreter who consults the Book of Change correctly will find
that the answers given are never wrong! 2
Although we deny the I Ching’s omniscience, or
that it is accurate to the degree Blofeld alleges, testimonies of
accuracy can be found easily. Clearly it does work enough of the time to
ensure peoples’ interest. And no satisfactory, rational explanation for
this process can be offered. Indeed, we cannot be dealing with some
impersonal manifestation of cosmic law. Rather, it would seem we are
encountering an intelligent power and source of information that knows
us personally; one that can interact with us so as to arrange particular
events and has a limited prevision of the future.
Blofeld confesses that when using the l Ching,
he senses he is dealing with a personal, living being, not merely simple
sticks forming symbolic hexagrams (Jung also felt as if he were dealing
with a living entity 3).
His response to this awareness is common to that of many pagans, who
know only too well the reality of a living spirit behind a sacred object
or an idol. Consider Blofeld’s own amazement:
Like Jung, I have been struck by the extraordinary sensation
aroused by my consultations of the book, the feeling that my question
has been dealt with exactly as by a living being in full
possession of even the unspoken facts involved in both the question
and its answer. At first this sensation comes near to being terrifying
and, even now, I find myself inclined to handle and transport the book
rather as if it had feelings capable of being outraged by
disrespectful treatment. 4
Blofeld expresses his complete bafflement at the
process. Yet what matters to him, and to all who use these methods, are
the results, not the explanation. Whatever the explanation for the power
of I Ching, it must incorporate some kind of extremely powerful,
living intelligence:
As to how the book succeeds in giving answers which produce this
uncanny effect, I do not know…. If you say that the oracle owes its
effectiveness to the subconscious of the one who asks the questions,
or to the unconscious (which is probably universal and therefore
common to all men), or to the One Mind (in the Zen sense), or to God
or a god or the gods, or to the philosopher’s Absolute, I shall be
inclined to agree with every one of these suggestions, for I believe
that most of all of these terms are imperfect descriptions of a single
unknown and unknowable but omnipotent reality.... In other words, I am
entirely satisfied with the results produced by the I Ching;
but do not presume to explain the lofty process by which they are
achieved. 5
Blofeld is very impressed about a living personality
that must underlie the information given. He recounts his first attempt
to use the oracle for divination. As he did so, he was not at all
certain the text did not house, or at least bring him into contact with,
a personal, living spiritual being:
The very first time I did this, I was overawed to a degree that
amounted to fright, so strong was the impression of having received an
answer to my question from a living, breathing person. I have
scarcely ever used it since without recovering something of that awe,
though it soon came to be characterized by a pleasurable excitement
rather than by fear. Of course I do not mean to assert that the white
pages covered with black printer’s ink do in fact house a living
spiritual being. I have dwelt at some length on the astonishing effect
they produce chiefly as a means of emphasizing how extraordinarily
accurate and, so to speak, personal, are its answers in most cases.
Yet, if I were asked to assert that the printed pages do not form the
dwelling of a spiritual being or at least bring us into contact with
one by some mysterious process, I think I should be about as hesitant
as I am to assert the contrary. 6
He also says that "to obtain and interpret responses so accurate and
to the point [is] to suggest almost supernatural powers." 7 Not
surprisingly, a common feature of pagan spiritism—reverence or worship
to the spirits in order to secure their assistance—is also seen as
indispensable for correct interpretation of the I Ching: "An
attitude of reverence—though indispensable—is not the sole condition for
correct interpretation of the Book of Change." 8
Of course, such reverence is also required in rune work, tarot
interpretation, the Ouija board, and other divination methods.
The notorious occultist Aleister Crowley once
commented that "other systems of divination are often manipulated by
demons who delight in misleading the inquirer," and he felt that the
I Ching was somehow above such duplicity. But he still conceded that
the oracle was manipulated by personal intelligence: "The intelligences
which direct it show no inclination to evade the question or to mislead
the querant." 9 Of course,
this was only Crowley’s personal experience to this point and,
certainly, there are many others who have been misled by the oracle. We
have no reason to suspect that its duplicity is any less than in other
forms of divination. After all, subjectivism is a key component in the
divination of the I Ching as in other forms of divination. "It is
a characteristic of the I Ching that it rarely gives a
cut-and-dried answer, and the inquirer must usually think hard to apply
the interpretation to his own situation." 10
Nevertheless, our response to all this is to ask, Why
do so many practitioners have this particular animistic sense of things?
Why this intuition of personal spiritual beings interacting with a book
and its hexagrams? Why would truly impersonal forces "care" about our
respect? The most logical explanation is because personal spiritual
beings do operate through divinatory methods, and they do seek our
allegiance.
Interpretation
Like all forms of divination, the I Ching has
the problem of interpretation. Both the text and the many commentaries
written "explaining" the hexagrams contradict one another. In producing
his own translation, Blofeld correctly observes of the original Chinese
text:
Its exceedingly terse style in many places justifies a number of
widely varying translations; nor it is unlikely that in some passages
several simultaneous meanings were deliberately implied. Moreover, the
Chinese text includes hardly any pronouns at all, so that my arbitrary
inclusion of them for the sake of reasonably good English puts a quite
artificial limitation on the meaning.... I cannot always guarantee the
accuracy of my translation. Judging from several Chinese versions of
the Book of Change in my possession, even expert Chinese
commentators have widely varying and even contradictory explanations
of the more difficult passages. 11
Elsewhere Blofeld discusses two additional
difficulties for proper interpretation:
There are two insuperable obstacles to providing a reliable guide
to interpreting the I Ching’s responses. The first is that so
much depends on the various circumstances leading to the enquiry and
upon numerous related facts, some of which may already be present in
the enquirer’s mind, while others are not recognized as having any
connection until either the response itself or subsequent events
demonstrate their importance. An elementary example is provided by the
fifth line of Hexagram 5, Chun, Difficulty. If that happens to be a
moving line, the response will include the words; "Fertility cannot
easily be brought about," which will obviously have different meanings
for, say, somebody longing to bear a son or daughter, a man
considering whether to buy a certain piece of land, a teacher hoping
to enlighten a backward child, an administrator about to take charge
of a new territory, a person expecting to benefit from a particular
friendship or a business man mulling over a new policy. 12
The second difficulty is to interpret the I Ching
apart from the faculty of intuition or an altered state of
consciousness:
The second obstacle is that the Book of Change can seldom be
accurately interpreted in accordance with a particular situation
unless the faculty of intuition is allowed to play a decisive role....
I wish to warn the enquirer against mistaking his desires or
expectations for intuition.... True intuition occurs only when the
mind has been temporarily withdrawn from all conceptual and
intellectual processes by means of Zen-like concentration, during
which time our consciousness is cleansed of hopes, fears, expectations
and so forth. 13
Correct interpretation of the oracles requires a particular state
of mind—here again, students of Zen possess a special advantage—in
which respect based on belief is a vital factor. 14
…As with oracles the world over, the meaning is so esoteric as to
baffle the mind until intuition, careful thought or some unforeseen
experience provide a sudden illumination. 15
Thus, as Ch’u Chai observes in the introduction to
James Legge’s translation:
The I Ching is like a good poem; the number of words is
limited, but the ideas it suggests are limitless…. A good reader of
the I Ching reads "what is between the lines." This means that
those latent ideas form an essential, often a principal, part of the
I Ching, so that in an appreciative, generally reflective
approach to its material the reader himself often supplies all the
"links" that are necessary to turn these "aphorisms" into a form of
reasoning and arguments. 16
In other words, I Ching interpretation is so
elastic it offers a wide range of potential personal applications. This
situation makes its genuine power all the more impressive, and
spiritistic manipulation all the more easy.
In conclusion, like other forms of divination, the
I Ching works, which is precisely the problem. By leading people to
regulate their lives and decisions in accordance with harmful occult
principles or spiritistic powers, people are subject to forces beyond
their control. Thus, divination methods are fraught with personal risks
that few practitioners suspect are present.
Notes:
1. John Blofeld, I Ching (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968), pp. 14-16.
2. Ibid., pp. 22, 33, emphasis added.
3. Richard Cavendish, ed., Encyclopedia of the
Unexplained: Magic, Occultism and Parapsychology (New York: McGrew
Hill, 1976), p. 124.
4. Blofeld, p. 25, emphasis added.
5. Ibid., pp. 25-26.
6. Ibid., pp. 26-27, emphasis added.
7. Ibid., p. 35.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Cavendish, p. 124.
10. Ibid., p. 125.
11. Blofeld, pp. 17-18.
12. Ibid., p. 72.
13. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation, 2 nd
ed., rev. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978),
p. 73.
14. Blofeld, p. 24.
15. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
16. James Legge, trans, I Ching: Book of Changes
(New York: Bantam, 1969), p. XXXVIII.
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ANKERBERG SHOW |
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Does Scientific Evidence Today Show
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Copyright 2006, Ankerberg Theological Research Institute
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