In the English introduction from the I Ching book, Carl Gustav Jung gives an example about how to use the oracle. The psychoanalyst admits that he practiced the oracle 30 years before meeting Richard Wilhelm, a great translator of this book. C. G. Jung used to use the book in order to exploit the subconscious. Those who followed him have used the I Ching oracle in psychotherapy.
Example of I Ching in C.G. Jung theory:
A pacient consults the book in order to see result of a connection between him and the woman he loved and a girl who had ambivalent feelings (ambivalent meaning the simultaneously existence of two different aspects). The result shows that the hexagram of “showing up a meeting” leads to “you must not marry this girl”. For some it’s easy to understand and apply the result given by the I Ching oracle, while others are in the contrary situation, because a drawing formed out of six lines can represent a real fact from someone’s present.
Given the fact that some people are only used to what modern science can present, it’s even more difficult for them to understand a divinatory art, such as I Ching, which has been written thousands of years ago, and nowadays still being able to be used in psychiatry as a treatment. C. G. Jung supports this theory by saying the mechanism on which oracles are based on is a synchronicity mechanism.
The synchronicity’s theory
I Ching becomes for Jung a confirmation, but also a possibility through which he can develop the synchronicity’s theory or the coincidence’s theories that do not have any cause as base. The synchronicity’s theory has been partial inspired by the experience C. G. Jung had with one of his patients. This patient had a dream about a golden scarab (meaning insect) and the next day, in Jung’s cabinet show up this insect. The symbolic interpretation of this appearance is explained by Jung as future evolution of his patient who is about to suffer mutations from a rational way of thinking to an absurd and more convenient one. The scarab is seen as a symbol or a clue for death or mental renaissance in the spirit of ancient myths.