How Does iChing 2GO Work?

Over the last 5,000 years, the I Ching (or Yi Jing) has been used in one form or another by the people of Asia seeking wisdom regarding their daily lives. The accuracy of the results can vary, depending upon the conviction, intent and discernment of the practitioner. And yet, this ancient tool has been used by millions over the millennia. And today millions of practitioners worldwide swear by its accuracy and relevance. So, it must have something going for it.

What makes the I Ching work? The mechanics of it are fairly simple:

• Formulate a question.
• Think about your question and toss three coins on a flat surface. There are four possible results: three heads; two heads and a tail; two tails and a head; or three tails.
• Draw the bottom line of the hexagram, as follows:

Three heads = a changing broken line
Two heads = an unchanging broken line
Two tails = an unchanging solid line
Three tails = a changing solid line

• Repeat the toss five more times, drawing the remaining lines from bottom to top.
• Find the primary and secondary hexagrams on the hexagram table.
• Read the hexagram descriptions in order.
• Contemplate their meaning.

On the surface of it, this process seems too simple to yield any great insights. How can tossing a few coins have anything to do with the acquisition of knowledge? Or wisdom? Or anything other than random chance?

To understand how this ancient tradition actually works, we need to look to cold, hard science: The world of physics. For most of human history, our understanding of how things worked was based on our senses; on what we could see, hear and touch:

• Throw a rock.
• It flies through the air.
• It hits someone and hurts.

Then the Greeks came along and gave us basic mathematics, allowing us to more precisely record and predict how things behaved:

• Throw a 1 pound rock: 1 second.
• It flies through the air: 1 second.
• It hits someone and hurts: 1 second.

The Arabians came along a bit later and gave us numbers and more advanced mathematics, so we could more precisely analyze how things behaved and begin to understand why.

• Throw a 1 pound rock: 0 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour in 1 second = acceleration; 1 pound traveling at 60 miles per hour = momentum.
• It flies through the air: 88 feet in 1 seconds = velocity.
• It hits someone and hurts: 1 pound of rock = mass; 60 miles per hour to 0 miles per hour in 1 second = deceleration.
  

The science of physics was born! And, this basic understanding of the universe worked remarkably well on objects we could see. We were even able to accurately predict the orbit of planets millions of miles from earth.

Then, in the early 1900s, Albert Einstein made a brilliant deduction. Using simple concepts, but extremely complicated mathematics, he showed that all objects followed certain rules of behavior related to their energy, mass and momentum. His theory was called “Relativity.” Einstein’s theories radically changed our views on gravity in relationship to space and time. His work proposes the existence of black holes (as simulated in the picture at left).

It worked beautifully for describing large scale objects, but not so much for describing the world of sub-atomic particles. It seems these tiny particles don’t really behave themselves very well. In fact, according to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, they follow their own, completely different set of rules. And strange rules they are:

• Two electrons can become “entangled” with each other (see diagram at right). If you separate them and change the spin of one of them, the other will change spin as well, no matter how far apart they are.
• Under the right conditions, a single electron can be in two places at the same time.
• It is impossible to tell exactly where an electron is at any given point in time. Instead, we have to say that an electron will probably be in this place at this time.

But, two of the oddest rules our little friends follow are these:

• It is impossible to know both the velocity and location of an object. If we know one of these two bits of information, the other becomes impossible to know. This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. 
• It is impossible to observe an experiment without affecting the outcome, because our observation of reality alters it. This is called the Observer Effect and was demonstrated by the Weizmann Institute of Science in February, 1998.

These two rules have huge ramifications. They mean that by simply knowing something, we affect the world around us. By simply observing our world, we change it.

Hard science has no means for measuring this affect. Whatever that is, we can't see it. It’s obviously not physical. We have no equipment that can sense it. There are no goggles we can wear that will make it visible. No Geiger counter exists that can measure it. Yet, there must be something that connects us to these sub-atomic particles, something we simply can’t perceive. Hard science has many hypotheses including String Theory, Membrane Theory and the theory of Multiple Universes, but no clear answer as to how this works.

So, if we are to continue our journey of discovery, we must leave hard science behind. We must look to metaphysics to provide answers. The first thing we should keep in mind here is that we are now exploring how the I Ching might work, rather than whether it does or not. This is an important distinction, because we are talking about a connection to the physical world that cannot be measured with our current technology and thus cannot be “proven,” in the conventional sense of the word. Besides, the I Ching needs no scientific validation. Both its merit and uncanny accuracy have been demonstrated countless times over the past 5,000 years. 

With that in mind, let’s continue. Because this connection has no mass we can measure, it does not fit into any physical category. So, we can conjecture that it is a form of energy, like light, magnetism or gravity. For want of a better term, let’s call it Quantum Energy.

Because this Quantum Energy affects the very fabric of our physical world, it must be able to affect the structure of our world as well. Our knowledge changes reality. So, reality must be mutable; subject to change. And we can, and do, change it all the time. This is not some new power we have developed in the last few years. Nor is it some mumbo-jumbo snake oil being offered to an unwary public.

Knowing the speed of an electron affects the electron. Reality is shifted. Our observations of events changes their outcome. And our intent adjusts our reality.

Now we’ve come full circle to our original question: How does the I Ching connect such relevant answers to our questions? The answer I find most practical is that we, the observers, use Quantum Energy to affect the outcome of the coin toss. Given the efficacy of the I Ching and other divination systems, we can assume that they contain some degree of control over the results they present.  In order for there to be control, there must be some degree of knowledge of the outcome. If Quantum Energy h

as both knowledge of the result and a degree of control over the result, it must also include information about our questions and the intellect to identify a response that will make sense to the observer.

This also suggests that we have access to information of which we are only vaguely aware; information about our circumstances: past, present and future. Certainly many people throughout history have demonstrated knowledge of things that were outside their immediate experience: Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce and the Mayans, for example, have all shown a high degree of accuracy in predicting events that have come to pass.

If the I Ching and these prognosticators are accessing information about our world and the future, where does the information come from and how are they accessing it? Edgar Cayce described a vast body of knowledge of everything that has ever occurred in our third dimensional world which is accessible to anyone at any time. He called it the “Akashic Records.” The idea of this vast body of knowledge, or aetheric library, and indeed the word akasha itself, originated with Indian philosophy at least 3,000 years ago.

It is not a great leap of faith to assume that the I Ching, as well as Tarot, Runes and many other forms of divination, access these Akashic Records and use Quantum Energy to affect the outcome of any given reading. Thus, in essence, we are both asking ourselves the questions and giving ourselves the answers we seek.

As we gain experience with the I Ching (Tarot and/or Runes), we gain experience asking the right kinds of questions and understanding the answers we receive. We also gain experience in connecting with the Akashic Records and shifting our reality in incremental ways. Over time, it may even be possible for us to shape our reality in more dramatic ways.

Now that we’ve analyzed the way the I Ching uses Quantum Energy to provide answers to our questions, let’s talk about iChing 2GO®, in particular. iChing 2GO® uses simulated coin tosses to create primary and secondary hexagrams representing answers to the user’s query. Like the physical coin tosses in the traditional I Ching, the simulated coin tosses in iChing 2GO® access Quantum Energy.

iChing 2GO® uses both time and math to generate the lines that make up the hexagram. The application captures the exact instant the user presses the coin button, then uses a complex equation to randomize the result. This combination allows the user’s Quantum Energy connection to choose the result that best addresses the user’s question.