This volume of I Ching Mathematics for the King Wen Version sets forth an entire new science by which to interpret and analyze the inner workings of the sacred technology surrounding the ancient Oracle. The Oracle is that aspect of the numinous that speaks directly to human beings. It is the spiritual half of nature that has, of old, been called the World Soul and, more recently, the Imaginal. It has had numerous incarnations as a divinatory instrument among various cultures but none of those have approached the elegant marriage of complexity and simplicity that marks the system of the I Ching. Nor have any of those other sacred technologies garnered the serious attention and research of so many brilliant men and women across the past three-and-a-half millennia. Times change and with them, the most long-lived relics of human experience. Indeed, change they must if they are to continue being a living part of human experience that extends forward into an increasingly complex future.
The essence of such sacred technologies—those systematized mechanisms by which human awareness comes into unmediated contact with the numinous reality of which it is a part—does not, of course, change. What changes is our capacity to understand the ramifications of that essence. In the case of the I Ching, what has changed is our appreciation of the rational-mystical approach to life: Our growing awareness of the holistic and synergistic nature of life has made us realize that reason-without-spirituality is as cynical as spirituality-without-reason is naïve. Its core essence is in fact the very model of rational mysticism: The progressive alternation of foundational polarities into symbols applicable to the widest range of human knowledge provides the rational counterpoint to its mystical relationship with the numinous spirit of the Oracle.
