Coincidence by David Ambrose Read Free Book Online Page B

images, I was more than ever convinced
     that I was right. At some time in my childhood, a time of which I had no recollection, I had been photographed on that studio
     set with two people I had no memory of ever knowing, but who were clearly good friends of my parents.
    I lay awake long into the night, turning things over in my mind, trying to make sense of what was going on. It seemed undeniable
     that
something
was going on; but then again, why should it “make sense”? Nothing that I had ever read about synchronicity suggested that
     its meaning was accessible to logical analysis. The very essence of “noncausal connection” amounted to a defiance of logic.
     If there were any overall pattern to these random subjective events, it would emerge of its own accord and in its own time.
     I felt a growing conviction that something had started and was taking its course. I had no idea what, but it was not over
     yet.
    As I gazed up at the dim chiaroscuro patterns on the ceiling, the prospect of what might lie ahead, where I might be going
     on this journey, began to fill me with an apprehension that was not entirely pleasurable. In truth, I was beginning to be
     more than a little afraid. All right, maybe I was going to get a book out of this thing, but was it worth the risks that I
     felt lurked somewhere just beneath the surface? Was I unwittingly starting something that I would be unable to stop? Which
     was stronger, my writer’s curiosity or this sudden inexplicable unease? I would have to make up my mind soon. But how?
    Then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. The
I Ching
, or Chinese
Book of Changes
. I’d come across it first of all in college, not long after first discovering synchronicity in school. At the time it was
     enjoying a certain fashion that was a hangover of the sixties. Kids consulted it over their love affairs, their careers, whether
     or not to major in this or that subject, where they should go on vacation. I remember even then thinking they were trivializing
     something that was more deeply rooted in the fabric of reality than they realized. In fact I became aware that if you asked
     it too often about trivial or irrelevant things the answers it gave would become increasingly meaningless and unhelpful. It
     seemed to have an in-built resistance to being misused. But I had taken it seriously for a while, and been startled more than
     once by the sharp pertinence of its answers to my questions.
    The
I Ching
goes back to around 3000 B.C., and its origins are inevitably shrouded in a certain amount of myth and mystery. Some authorities
     attribute the main body of its worth to one Wen Wang as early as the twelfth century B.C. It has remained always a profound
     influence on Chinese thought and philosophy, but did not reach the West until the nineteenth century. Jung seized on it as
     being central to his theories of synchronicity and the collective unconscious. It rests, like astrology, on the notion that
     all things in the universe are interrelated, and chance is the key to our understanding of our place as individuals in the
     great scheme of things.
    The way the
I Ching
works is you throw three coins six times. (The Chinese originally used a more complicated system involving yarrow sticks;
     many still do.) Each throw, according to the distribution of heads and tails, gives you a line that will be either unbroken,
     broken, or changing. The pattern of the six lines (the hexagram) that you eventually assemble will correspond to one of sixty-four
     oracular pronouncements that have evolved over the long period of the book’s use.
    These pronouncements do not amount to direct answers to whatever questions or problems you may have on your mind. It is up
     to you, the reader, to divine the personal meaning of your hexagram from a close perusal of and reflection on the several
     pages of text that accompany each one of the sixty-four possible patterns.
    To the more fundamentalist