type of Western mind, with its dependence on strict logic, the whole thing smacks of empty superstition.
To anyone with an element of mysticism in their being, however, it makes an interesting kind of sense, and its use frequently
throws up startling insights and remarkable shafts of self-knowledge.
So it was that at almost four in the morning I pulled down my twenty-year-old copy of the
I Ching
from its shelf, picked out three nickels from my loose change on the dresser, and prepared to consider my fate.
Uppermost in my mind, when I thought about it, was not the question “What is this all about?” It was, rather, “Shall I go
on with this thing or get out now?”
I felt sure that if I did go on, what it was about would be made plain to me in time, perhaps painfully so. There was a passage
of Koestler’s that I’d come across a few days earlier. Describing a brush with synchronicity, he said:
“[It is] as if some mute power were tugging at your sleeve. It is then up to you to decipher the meaning of the inchoate message.
If you ignore it, nothing at all will probably happen; but you may have missed a chance to remake your life, have passed a
potential turning point without noticing it.”
Confident that I could “ignore it” if I chose without fear of repercussions, I decided to let the
I Ching
guide my decision to stop now or go on.
I shook my coins and threw them, six times in all. My hexagram was:
The interpretation of that was “Revolution,” for which the original Chinese character meant an animal’s pelt, which was changed
in the course of the year by “molting.” It spoke of the need for change everywhere in time, but urged extreme caution.
Because three of my lines were “changing” lines, meaning I’d thrown three heads or three tails at the same time, I had an
alternative hexagram to look up before I came to a conclusion. The “changed” hexagram was:
This was “Treading”—literally treading upon something, though it is also defined as the right way of conducting oneself. I
read:
Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite the man. Success.
I took the combination of the two hexagrams to mean that, although I was dealing with something dangerous, luck was on my
side. Things would turn out for the best.
So I decided to go on.
Did I really believe that randomness, or chance, was some sort of key to the universe? I suppose that what I thought, more
or less, was why not? The idea made as much sense as anything else. I know Einstein refused to believe that God “played dice
with the universe,” but he’s been proved wrong about other things. For example, he believed that “spooky” action at a distance
(information traveling faster than light) was impossible. But since Bell’s Theorem and the Aspect experiment in 1982, we’ve
been able to demonstrate it routinely in the lab.
The physicist John Wheeler, who taught Richard Feynman and who despises anything that smacks of superstition or the paranormal,
once suggested that the reason all electrons behave alike is that there is only one electron in the whole universe, and that
it zips back and forth painting reality as we know it like an image on a television screen.
He also came up with the idea that the Big Bang didn’t happen until consciousness evolved many billions of years later and
was able to look back through time and become aware of its own origin.
Go figure.
That was something I would try to do in the book.
Chapter 9
S ara got back on Wednesday afternoon as planned. Although I had intended telling her everything that had happened, including
my having spotted her almost exact double while she was away, we didn’t have a moment to talk before the evening, when we
were due to go to a charity gala at Lincoln Center. One of her wealthier clients had bought tickets and insisted we come along
as his guests. It was hard to refuse, but even harder to keep my mind on the
To anyone with an element of mysticism in their being, however, it makes an interesting kind of sense, and its use frequently
throws up startling insights and remarkable shafts of self-knowledge.
So it was that at almost four in the morning I pulled down my twenty-year-old copy of the
I Ching
from its shelf, picked out three nickels from my loose change on the dresser, and prepared to consider my fate.
Uppermost in my mind, when I thought about it, was not the question “What is this all about?” It was, rather, “Shall I go
on with this thing or get out now?”
I felt sure that if I did go on, what it was about would be made plain to me in time, perhaps painfully so. There was a passage
of Koestler’s that I’d come across a few days earlier. Describing a brush with synchronicity, he said:
“[It is] as if some mute power were tugging at your sleeve. It is then up to you to decipher the meaning of the inchoate message.
If you ignore it, nothing at all will probably happen; but you may have missed a chance to remake your life, have passed a
potential turning point without noticing it.”
Confident that I could “ignore it” if I chose without fear of repercussions, I decided to let the
I Ching
guide my decision to stop now or go on.
I shook my coins and threw them, six times in all. My hexagram was:
The interpretation of that was “Revolution,” for which the original Chinese character meant an animal’s pelt, which was changed
in the course of the year by “molting.” It spoke of the need for change everywhere in time, but urged extreme caution.
Because three of my lines were “changing” lines, meaning I’d thrown three heads or three tails at the same time, I had an
alternative hexagram to look up before I came to a conclusion. The “changed” hexagram was:
This was “Treading”—literally treading upon something, though it is also defined as the right way of conducting oneself. I
read:
Treading upon the tail of the tiger.
It does not bite the man. Success.
I took the combination of the two hexagrams to mean that, although I was dealing with something dangerous, luck was on my
side. Things would turn out for the best.
So I decided to go on.
Did I really believe that randomness, or chance, was some sort of key to the universe? I suppose that what I thought, more
or less, was why not? The idea made as much sense as anything else. I know Einstein refused to believe that God “played dice
with the universe,” but he’s been proved wrong about other things. For example, he believed that “spooky” action at a distance
(information traveling faster than light) was impossible. But since Bell’s Theorem and the Aspect experiment in 1982, we’ve
been able to demonstrate it routinely in the lab.
The physicist John Wheeler, who taught Richard Feynman and who despises anything that smacks of superstition or the paranormal,
once suggested that the reason all electrons behave alike is that there is only one electron in the whole universe, and that
it zips back and forth painting reality as we know it like an image on a television screen.
He also came up with the idea that the Big Bang didn’t happen until consciousness evolved many billions of years later and
was able to look back through time and become aware of its own origin.
Go figure.
That was something I would try to do in the book.
Chapter 9
S ara got back on Wednesday afternoon as planned. Although I had intended telling her everything that had happened, including
my having spotted her almost exact double while she was away, we didn’t have a moment to talk before the evening, when we
were due to go to a charity gala at Lincoln Center. One of her wealthier clients had bought tickets and insisted we come along
as his guests. It was hard to refuse, but even harder to keep my mind on the
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