The I Ching > II. Dao = Tao explored in the I Ching, Confucius’ Tao, Jung’s archetype of Self in the unconsciousy

II. Dao = Tao explored in the I Ching, Confucius’ Tao, Jung’s archetype of Self in the unconscious

Perhaps I should clarify the use of the word Dao. There is no need to exhaust the meaning of the word Tao for very simple reasons. One is that the reality is far greater than what a word can capture. The other is that delimiting such a thing as Tao creates distracting arguments on what it is or is not, when the point is to find our way in it to maximize our being and effort at existence. Suffice it, then, to use the word Tao to indicate the way of the universe, and, in particular, the way we humans find ourselves in it.

This means, of course, that there would be hundreds of articulations of Tao. And there are—any attempt to figure out the universe and human participation in it. In China alone, even though the I Ching functions as an early definitive effort that articulated it once and for all, many ramifications followed. Each philosophical or religious school has its own articulation, whether based on the I Ching or not. In the West, the scientific paradigm proposes to uncover the mysteries that underlie the laws of the material universe, and, in the past century, the laws of the psyche. These laws of the psyche, particularly in the psychology of Jung, are probably the same as the laws of human manifestation the I Ching is concerned with.

The I Ching has the distinction of placing the human being in the cosmos. This placement is not just material, as the material is only the visible pinnacle of an underlying order. The I Ching attempts to intimate this larger order, which we call the Tao of the universe. This Tao is, at the same time, the tao of the larger psyche from which we, as individual psyches, are offshoots. How all this works is still mysterious to us. Nonetheless, like love, which we also know without knowing what they are, we can monitor the effects, rather than analyzing the cause. The study of the I Ching, then, provides a key to the workings of the human psyche. This possibility did not escape Confucius, who apparently devoted quite some time to studying it.