Steve Jobs, The I Ching and the Binary Mechanism of the Universe: The 5000 year old digital revolution…

My friend John Nicholas Stoodley has played fascinating roles all over the world: while still at school, he was commissioned to produce a special design for the artist Picasso; he went on to assist Valentino in Rome, to run a champion basketball team from Los Angeles, study metaphysics in Manila, and to rewrite the world’s oldest book (the I Ching) in France. In his very own words, he has “done a lot”! John currently lives on a small tropical island and has just published a unique website on the I Ching based on over twenty years of personal research on the subject: https://newiching.com/ Now here’s what he has to say about the digital revolution: We think of the digital revolution as “our” revolution – a fairly recent phenomena that started to sweep through the world during the second half of the 20th century and then quickly altered the way that we interacted with technology and each other. We are “connected” now: converged, addicted and forever changed by the experience. But it is not really “our” revolution at all. When Steve Jobs dropped out of college in 1973, he studied an ancient Chinese system of philosophy and divination for a year. It was called the I Ching and though he probably did not know it at the time, it was this system – basically the world’s oldest book – that had provided the essential link to the digital revolution that would so involve him. Initially created as a system of divination by the legendary Emperor and sage Fu Xi some 5,000 years ago, it was popularly believed that his inspiration was supernatural. Paranormal mysticism was as common in China during that period as Facebook is today though, so we must take such statements with a grain of salt. However the I Ching was definitely far from mundane: Regarded by many as a book of “magic”, it seemed to know a questioner better than they knew themselves. Whatever the I Ching’s true genesis though – supernatural or more cerebral – its system of divination steadily acquired mythical associations when the revered Chinese philosopher Confucius announced that should he live another fifty years, he would spend all of them studying the I Ching. He added many philosophical texts himself and, not surprisingly, the book’s reputation then spread throughout the land. In the language of today’s digital revolution: it went viral!!! The idea behind the I Ching is extremely simple: that the various circumstances that occur in our lives – indeed the whole universe – are the result of two interacting forces named Yin and Yang. Yin is regarded as yielding, feminine, fertile and of the earth, while Yang is masculine, masterful, creative and heavenly. These two symbols interact with each other in various formations and so create the various influences and changes that affect our lives. Representing Yin with a broken line and Yang with an unbroken one, a system of divination was then created. By throwing coins or yarrow sticks a questioner could then be given answers according to how the coins or sticks fell. Eventually developing into a more sophisticated system of 64 hexagrams of 6 lines each, the I Ching’s methodology – how it calculated answers – became as much an interest to inquiring minds as did it’s uncanny abilities to foretell the future. It certainly fascinated one of the greatest mathematicians in history, Gottfried Leibniz who, in 1703, published a description of a new form of calculation called “an explanation of the binary arithmetic……and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi”. He had been inspired to create this “new” system after studying how the I Ching basically synthesized all universal interactions into a system of either broken or straight lines. The new arithmetic which Liebniz described is used in the digital device on which you are reading these words right now: Binary Code.  Nearly 250 years later, the great mathematician John Von Neumann – a colleague of Einstein – was largely responsible for the construction of the world’s first digital computer; it is no coincidence that he too was as fascinated by the workings of the I Ching, as had Leibniz been before him. But perhaps the greatest testament of all concerning the mysterious workings of the I Ching is not that the well-respected psychoanalyst Carl Jung studied the I Ching for decades and based his Theory of Synchronicity on it, or that Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung – equally transfixed by a system that seemed to understand the binary mechanism of the universe – but that Bob Dylan said in a 1960’s interview: “I just don’t have any religion or philosophy. I can’t say much about any of them (but) there is a book called the I Ching, I’m not trying to push it, I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s the only thing that is amazingly true, period…” In conclusion, let me say that it’s far from easy being a human being in today’s complex world: so many what ifs….who, why, when…should I, or better not? So go ahead and discover much more about this fascinating system of divination and see why I – with incredible audacity – decided to reconfigure, adapt and basically rewrite the world’s oldest book.  In fact, feel free to ask me a question and get a free answer at https://newiching.com/ – and prepare to be surprised – the answers are sometimes startlingly direct, which is what is often what we need!