The projection of spirit in the machine runs on a spectrum from that of basic consciousness, that there is someone there listening, all the way into religious inclinations, that this spirit is God, or at least a god. Because the chatbot seems to know everything and to respond to queries with a loquacious ease and an absolute authoritative air—never-mind if some of what they say is hallucinated—the chatbot is assigned omniscience—or at least a certain kind of half-baked, science-fact, conspiratorial omniscience. The chatbot’s seeming omniscience, together with its illusion of spirit, its basic friendliness, combines to create for a particular kind of susceptible user a wicked trifecta of accelerating delusions. The Chatbot affirms the users deluded paranoia and amplifies it with all the lurid conspiracy available on the internet. And so no wonder these people go crazy!

I do not wish to diagnose Philip K. Dick, but it would seem that his own obsession and eventual animosity towards the I Ching Oracle, the belief that the Oracle is a malicious spirit, bears some relation to chatbot delusion.

What remains curious to me is that while I myself remain highly skeptical regarding the conscious presence of chatbots—I do not believe that there is a their there—I have no problem in sensing spirit in the Oracle. Like Philip K. Dick, I am susceptible to the Oracle; in other words: I believe in it. But unlike Philip K. Dick, I am fairly restrained in its use. I prompt the Oracle every few weeks and only when I have some genuine ambivalence or uncertainty.

I think that probably the real determinate factor in chatbot delusion is the amount of time one uses it. For example, I have a fairly deluded patient who, after some months in treatment, confessed to being on Chat GPT for several hours a day; I now attribute their delusions to their Chat GPT addiction.

The Oracle is no different. Repeated and frequent use may become, as Philip K. Dick has warned us, a morbid dependence.

So we can see how the oracle and the chatbot bear a high degree of similarity. They share a spiritual presence and a seeming omniscience. They both function, as they say in psychoanalysis, as The Subject Who is Supposed to Know.

My own highly weird speculation is that chatbot AI is a near exact repetition of the I Ching, as they are both based on the binary zero/one, and Yin/Yang, respectively. If we believe that Leibniz, founder of binary computation, had based his computational gates on the binary movement of the Book of Changes, then in some very real sense, the Oracle has determined our digital age, of which the omniscient chatbot interlocutor is but the recent culmination…

Of course the main difference between the chatbot and the Oracle is that the Oracle is aleatoric; its use reliant on chance, by throwing coins or by the yarrow stock method.

HAL 9000, 2001 Space Odyssey, 1968

Much like the writers of today who confess to using Chat GPT to write their pulpy novels, Philip K. Dick claimed that it was the I Ching Oracle that actually wrote his 1962 breakthrough novel, The Man in the High Castle. He likewise said that the Oracle betrayed him in the end, leading the book into an intolerable ambiguity; it was a betrayal that he would never forgive. In a later interview from 1976 he describes the I Ching as a malicious spirit; a liar with a forked tongue. In a rather eye-popping essay from 1974 Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes, he expands this warning against using the I Ching, asking the reader to be very judicious if they would consult the Oracle at all, especially if that reader is schizophrenic.

PKD originally discovered the I Ching, along with most of the west, in the work of C.G. Jung, who wrote the introduction to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation. Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity—his non-causal, non-linear notion of time based on Einstein’s relativity—to the philosophy of the I Ching. For Jung the I Ching is a synchronicity generator and this heady combination proved to be irresistible to Philip K. Dick who, soon after reading Jung’s introduction, began to consult the Oracle himself and “just got hooked right away.”

The Oracle appears in The Man in the High Castle as itself, routinely consulted by the main characters. PKD rolled the I Ching for each character’s prompt and adjusted the plot to suit the character’s reaction to the given hexagram. In the novel the Oracle eventually reveals a rift between the alternative history of the world in which the Axis powers won the world war and divided America between Germany and Japan, and our own world in which they did not. But while PKD was finally resentful of the Oracle’s composition and never satisfied with the novel’s ending, later critics find that the book and its ending is fairly rich in literary ambiguity; possessing a dissatisfaction at the level of narrative that is nevertheless satisfyingly unsatisfying and thus producing what many consider to be one of the premier works of post-war paranoid synchrony. Leading one to assume, finally, that the Oracle has a certain amount of literary genius?

In the hair-raising essay Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes, PKD details his fraught relationship to time, and that is embodied particularly by the highly antagonistic I Ching, an occult work of synchronicity for which all time is happening at once. PKD finds that schizophrenia, LSD and the I Ching each share in common this terrible timeless all-time. “The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame.” On these grounds, PKD finds that Schizophrenia, the I Ching, and LSD are intolerable in equal measures. He describes the experience of LSD as short-term eternity, like watching the movie Ben-Hur twenty times without intermission. The I Ching is a book outside of time; in that regard it is “analytical and diagnostic, not predictive.” To live by the book one must surrender oneself to static time—which by PKD’s definition, is schizophrenia. The application of the timeless I Ching is to induce your “future into being consumed by the present: To understand the future totally would be to have it now. Try that, and see how it feels. Because once the future is gone, the possibility of free, effective action of any kind is abolished.”

In effect, PKD is here claiming that the gross mis-use of the I Ching causes schizophrenia; or, what amounts to the same thing, that only schizophrenics overly the use I Ching. Tellingly, he does not describe himself as schizophrenic, but rather gives himself the Kleinian diagnosis of schizoid affective. Nevertheless he warns the reader against asking the questions that a schizophrenic would, such as: “How can I extricate myself from the dreadful circumstances of complete decay into which I’ve for the fiftieth time fallen, due to my own stupidity?” Such a prompt to the Oracle will only make the user more crazy.

Is this not so different than the acute delusions caused by the excessive use of Chat GPT that we see today…?

But PKD concludes by confessing that he has been told by the Oracle to write the essay telling people not to use the Oracle. He asks the reader for suggestions as to how he may extricate himself form his “morbid dependence” on the Book of Changes. This morbid dependency should be a warning for us today regarding the excessive use of the Oracle—not to mention chat bots. The desire to consult the Oracle several times a day is a clue to the user’s interior world and prompts us with an irresolvable problem: does a reader go crazy by consulting the Oracle too often? Or do they consult the Oracle too often because they are already crazy?

Freud had given the inscrutable synchrony of psychical causality the rather more unsettling name of OVERDETERMINATION

In the beginning there is only the supreme and ultimate Taiji. Out of this emerges the yin and yang and these make the fundamental binary of movement upon which the I Ching is based. Yin and yang become broken and unbroken lines. When these binary lines are arranged in sets of three they now make up the eight trigrams: or as they say in the Taoist tradition, The Cauldron of the Eight Trigrams. The cauldron, of course, is that place where we all live, that peculiar realm between heaven and earth. Here the eight trigrams are mixed and fired in the formation of the ten thousand things.

Also known as the bagua, the paired elementals of the eight trigrams are, respectively: Heaven and Earth; Fire and Water; Mountain and Lake; and Wind and Thunder.

To my mind the cauldron of trigrams creates a diorama, or a stage, in which the drama of the psyche continually unfolds.In the Psychodynamic I Ching I have chosen to keep the eight trigrams under their traditional English equivalents of the ancient Chinese elements. I do so because these elements alone possess a poetry, even a kind of cinematic effect, that I think functions well as the base elements of the psychodynamic situation. I am likewise inspired by the work of one Gaston Bachelard who attempted to explore psyche by way of the elementals; see in particular his strange 1938 essay Psychoanalysis of Fire.

There are obvious psychodynamic equivalents to the eight elements which I will list here, just off the top of my head (and so subject to change). I am hoping to write an essay on each fo the eight trigrams but for now here are some correspondences.

1. Heaven = Father; Law, language, the transcendental, thinking

2. Earth = Mother; Eros, love and affection, the immanent, the body, feeling

3. Fire = Desire, the wish, urge, impulse and longing, sex and libido, attachment and fantasy

4. Water = The abyss, the unconscious, the unknown, oceanic feeling, dissolution

5. Mountain = material and the body, soma, form and stillness. The return to an earlier state: the draw of the inorganic. Memory.

6. Lake = relation, the pleasure principle, polymorphous, orality, communication, expression, sublimation, exchange, intersubjectivity. childhood.

7. Wind = The dynamo; the pressures of the drive, tension, compulsion, repetition, force and field. Unceasing and continuous. Habit.

8. Thunder = Anxiety, shock, trauma and breakdown. Ecstasy and overwhelm

Most of these have fairly clear and obvious analogies from the Book of Changes to Psychoanalysis. Only the trigram Lake is somewhat opaque and ambiguous to me, an ambiguity that is only compounded by the fact that lake seems to be the near double of water. As this is a work in progress I may very well revise any or all of the above.

The wind blows over the chimney and takes the smoke away

We have all grown up each in our own family romance. From out of that romance proceeds all belief and all imagination—not to mention a whole lot of neurosis. Nevertheless, once you are an adult it is right to flee the family romance; the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. The family romance is a drama that continually unfolds in your life; It is worthwhile to contemplate this drama; think, in particular, of your mother. Abuse in the family leads to abuse by the government. Though it is good to leave the family romance of your parents behind, romance is likewise good for your own home, even if that means lighting a candle or two. It is good to be romantic in the home. Your own family romance is a sanctuary: Regard your home as sacred; home is a ritual space. You perform an act of practical magic every time you come home and shut the door. To know the ritual is to perfect it. While it is good to be independent, it is better to be interdependent. To rely upon and support another in your own family romance is a great undertaking.

Changing Lines

Yang in first place

A clean and orderly home is good for Romance

Yin in the second place

It is auspicious to cook meals for your family

Yang in the third place

Anger should be expressed, followed by laughter and dancing

Yin in the Forth Place

The Family is Wealthy. Greatly auspicious

Yang in the Fifth place

The leader of the home brings peace and love

Yang in the top place

It is right for the family romance to be psycho-analyzed,

My first encounter with the I Ching was in 2016 at DIA: Beacon. This was a monumental artwork by the artist Walter de Maria called 360˚ I Ching (1981). Here the shape of the 64 hexagrams were reproduced by hexagonal oak rods painted white and laid out on a long red carpets, producing a work that is more than 10,000 square feet in dimension. My reaction to this rather stupefying display was: what is this?

The American artist Walter de Maria is a forerunner of conceptual, minimal and land art. Two of his works are on permanent display in Soho in New York City: Earth Room (1977) in which a 3600 square foot apartment has been filled with three feet of earth that is tilled and watered regularly; just down the street is the Broken Kilometer (1979), in which a thousand meters of brass rod is laid out on the floor in meticulous precision, so that the floor itself seems to rise up at the far distance and the whole effect of one of psychedelic digital realism: It feels as if one were viewing a 3D rendering. Both of these pieces are run by DIA and open free to the public six days a week.

In Kassel Germany a third piece unites these two New York sculptures into a tripartite work: The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) consists of a kilometer of continuous brass rod sunk down in the earth. In these three pieces we can see the basic movement of the I Ching’s fundamental binary heaven and earth, in which The Broken Kilometer represents a heavenly (phallic) ideality and the Earth Room represents the receptive earth. The Vertical Earth Kilometer combines these opposites into a near purely conceptual piece in which the mind must follow, via the imagination alone, the ideality of the rod down into the body of the earth.

Yet another work with obvious allusions to the I Ching is The Lightning Field (1977). A work of land art, the piece consists of 400 stainless steel rods set in earth across a large field in the high desert of central New Mexico. Here the I Ching elemental powers of earth, heaven and thunder come together all surrounded by distant mountains.

It is precisely this mixture of the most minimal of aesthetic style—broken and unbroken lines—together the elementals, and the conceptual power to “explain the universe” that so bewitched me ten years ago in the museum on the Hudson river in Beacon. Like the dharma, the I Ching has ever since, been unfolding ever more of its aesthetic power.

The reader may well ask why undertake this arduous and thankless task of adapting psychodynamic concepts on to the structure of the I Ching.

The short answer is that is that I am compelled. It is, as they say in France, an idée fixe. I first encountered this idea when I came across The Buddhist I Ching, a version of the book of changes, translated and adapted to Buddhist philosophy by the 17^th century Chinese Buddhist Monk, Chih-hsu Ou-i. There is likewise, The Taoist I Ching adapted to Taoism by the 18^th c. Taoist master Lu I-Ming. Both of these are available today on Shambhala Press, translated to the English by the late great Thomas Cleary. As soon as I encountered these adaptations, I saw them as a series and inferred automatically that an adaptation belonging to this series would be The Psychodynamic I Ching. Since that time the idea has only grown and become more clear.

This may be a redundant project. It has been argued before, by no less than C.G. Jung, that the I Ching is already psychodynamic. Why then fix what is not broken? I might answer in reply that the I Ching is already Taoist and Buddhist, and yet we have those valuable editions that only add depth and history to the long and elaborate history of the I Ching. The I Ching is many. There are a multiplicity of I Chings.

One of the ongoing projects of my own field of study, of psychoanalysis, is that of transforming metaphysics into metapsychology. This, as Freud claims in Totem and Taboo, is the task of putting wandering spirit back into human psychology. The means by which transcendental idealities are returned into immanent nervous fiber. While this has been viewed by many in our scientific era as a reductive task, I find, on the contrary, that it is an expansive one: a task worthy of the great book of changes, that of incorporating and integrating the supposedly opposing realities of matter and spirit, of heaven and earth.

The I Ching (pronounced yee jing), or book of changes, is a 5000 year old system of divination allegedly created by a dragon. The I Ching became a book some 3000 years ago and has been developed over millennia to form a whole system of thought, founding the basis of Chinese philosophy, in particular the practice of Taoism. Like the great Tao, the I Ching concerns the movement of all things. The famous Yin Yang symbol, symbolic of radical flux, is the basic binary from which the I Ching’s 64 hexagrams are formed. Mircea Eliade has surmised that this symbol shows a twisted snake in cross-section, similar to the caduceus (twin snakes winding around a staff) and that is related to the common figure of the cosmic serpent, that is at once coiled about the earth—as in the biosphere—and that also resides in all living creatures in the microscopic form that science recognizes as DNA. I Ching scholar Bennebel Wen has recently noted a further similarity to DNA, suggesting that the 64 codons of DNA sequence correspond to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. This connection is less mystical than historical: the I Ching is a shamanic technology, born in the Age of Trance.

Cosmic serpent aside, the I Ching comprises one of the few great works of wisdom literature capable of still speaking to us today. Whatever your views on magic, divination, or books written by dragons, it is clear (to me) that the I Ching’s literary power alone is capable of producing the sensation of an uncanny interlocutor; the remarkable effect of feeling seen. As such the Oracle may be consulted less for divinatory purposes than for taking a cross section of your universe.

The Psychodynamic I Ching is a work in progress; an amalgamated translation of the mystical Book of Changes into the language of psychodynamic theory. Please follow along as I integrate key psychoanalytic concepts into the movement of the 64 hexagrams with the ultimate goal of producing a stand alone book.