Jung on Synchronicity and Yijing: A Critical Approach

Young Woon Ko

ene 2011 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Jung’s understanding of Yijing for supporting the synchronistic principle reveals the key issues of his archetypal theory. Jung’s archetypal theory, which is the basic motif of his understanding of Yijing, illuminates the religious significance of Yijing. Jung defines the human experience of the divine as an archetypal process by way of which the unconscious conveys the human religious experience. In this way, the divine and the unconscious mind are inseparable from each other. For the human experience of the divine, Jung’s archetypal theory developed in a theistic tradition is encountered with the religious character of the non-theistic tradition of Yijing.

From Jung’s partial adaptation of Yijing, however, we notice the differences between Jung’s archetypal psychology and the Yijing cosmological view. This difference represents the difference between the Western and the East Asian tradition. This aspect is well shown in the fact that Jung’s theoretical assumption for the definition of archetype is deeply associated with Plato’s Idea and the Kantian a priori category. Accordingly, Jung brings their timeless-spaceless realm of archetype into the synchronistic phenomenon of the psyche and identifies the Yijing text with the readable archetype. Yet, the synchronistic moment that Jung presents is the phenomenon always involved in subjective experience and intuition, which are developed in the duration of time. The synchronistic phenomenon is not transcendent or the objective flowing of time-in-itself regardless of our subjective experience.

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Young Woon Ko is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, USA. He earned his PhD in religious studies from Vanderbilt University and is the author of The Beauty of Balance: A Theological Inquiry into Paradox.