Synchronicity and the I Ching

Abstract

THOSE SYSTEMS WHOSE PURPOSE is explain phenomena, reduce the seemingly unrelated richness of experiential data certain principles or categories in terms of which any and all given phenomena might be understood, are dependent upon a working notion of connection. If the field which a given system seeks order is the totality of phenomena, then the resulting system will be a philosophy, at least in the sense that Charles Sanders Peirce conceived it, viz., to find out all that can be found out from those universal experiences which confront every man in every waking hour of his life. . . ' And within the system, the notion of connection, or of connective principle, will have be such that a meaningful application of it is possible no matter what aspect of experience one is addressing. The grand scheme would be find a connecting principle which is universal in its application, a principle which would serve as the warp thread and pattern holding together the entire fabric of phenomena, that is, a thread which would be found at any and every point which one chose examine. Causality is just such a connecting principle. As such, it has occupied a central position in Western philosophy, and a reading of the basic philosophical texts of Buddhism and Vedanta will serve show that its hold on the minds of Eastern philosophers has been no less intense. Causality has been the primal choice of connective principles, all others being either peripheral or reducible finally it. Nevertheless, a number of important acausal connective principles have been put forward in Western and Eastern philosophy. The theory of Platonic Ideas (that the empirical world is ordered as a cosmos precisely because it is a manifestation of a perfectly harmonious ontological world of pure Being), for example, might be construed causally (Archetype X causes phenomenon x), but the point is that it need not be thus construed. The purpose of this