Jung, synchronicity, and the I Ching

It all starts with Richard Wilhelm, the translator who made the I Ching readable in the West. He and Jung become friends in the 1920s. In 1929 they publish together “The Secret of the Golden Flower”: Wilhelm translates a Taoist treatise, Jung writes its psychological commentary. For Jung, Wilhelm is a rare go-between, able to “listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality”.

It's Wilhelm who introduces Jung to the I Ching — not as a game of omens, but as a coherent symbolic system. Jung will take it very seriously, making it a companion of thought for thirty years.

Jung uses the word “synchronicity” publicly for the first time in 1930, in his memorial address for Wilhelm, who has just died. He had, he says, coined it the year before to name something that intrigued him: meaningful coincidences, where an outer event answers an inner state without any cause-and-effect linking them.

He would give it a matured formulation much later, in 1952, in an essay with a programmatic title: “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”. The work was nourished by a long dialogue with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The idea remains debated — but it aims at a real problem: why do certain coincidences feel addressed to us?

The most famous anecdote is in the foreword Jung writes, in 1949, for the English edition of the I Ching. Rather than explaining the work from outside, he does something unexpected: he asks the book itself what it thinks of being presented to the Western public. He throws the coins, and obtains figure 50, Ting, “the Cauldron”.

The answer strikes him: the Cauldron is the ritual vessel that holds a spiritual nourishment. The book seemed to be describing itself. Jung, honestly, notes that this was his one and only consultation on the point — and that it seemed fitting. He doesn't claim the chance was forced; he observes that a figure made sense.

In his reading, the book didn't merely describe itself: it also warned. The figure suggested that the Western mind, cut off from the wisdom of its own ancestors, risked misreading it. Jung drew a lasting caution from this — he always presented the I Ching as an experiment to try, never as a belief to adopt.

Here is Jung's decisive move. If the I Ching works, it isn't by causality — the figure causes nothing and announces nothing. It's by synchronicity: the hexagram you obtain mirrors the state of the moment you draw it. The meaning isn't predicted in advance; it's recognized on the spot.

This shift dissolves the question everyone keeps asking — “does it predict the future?”. For Jung, the question was badly put: the I Ching never spoke of the future, it speaks of the present, to whoever agrees to look at themselves in it. It's a mirror, not a crystal ball.

Let's be precise, because this is a matter of honesty. Daoa asks you to believe in nothing: neither in synchronicity as a law of the universe, nor in forces acting through the app. Those debates belong to Jung and his readers, not to a journaling notebook.

What Daoa keeps from Jung is the reframing, not the metaphysics: a figure can make sense without predicting anything, because the meaning is the one you give it. That's exactly the role of a mirror. The figure opens an angle; the interpretation, the reflection, and the decision stay yours.

Of the vast Jungian edifice, Daoa keeps only one thing, the soberest and the sturdiest: to look at an image, and see a little more clearly in yourself. Nothing announced, nothing promised — a present looked at more closely.