Synchronicity and the I Ging: What Jung and Wilhelm Understood

Synchronicity is a term coined by C.G. Jung to name something that Western science still cannot categorise: meaningful coincidences that elude every causal explanation. You think of someone, and they call. You pose a question, and the answer lies on the next page of the book you happen to open. The word “chance” does not apply here, because what happens carries meaning — and that meaning cannot be derived from a chain of cause and effect.

Jung found the key to this phenomenon not in the European tradition but in the I Ging — the oldest book of wisdom known to humanity. What connected him to this text, and why his encounter with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm was more than a cultural accident, touches a question that reaches far beyond psychology: Is the cosmos a meaningful whole that responds to genuine questions?

#What Jung Recognised in the I Ging

When Richard Wilhelm presented his German translation of the I Ging in the 1920s, something unusual happened. Here was a man who had lived in China for twenty years, studied under the Confucian scholar Lao Nai-hsüan, and translated a text that the West regarded at best as an exotic curiosity. Jung immediately recognised in Wilhelm’s translation what most Western readers missed: the I Ging is not a book of divination. It is a method that operates with an order alien to Western science.

In his foreword to the English edition of 1950, Jung set out what fascinated him about the text. Western science, he argued, asks about causes. It seeks the chain: A causes B causes C. The I Ging asks differently. It asks: What belongs to this moment? What reveals itself in this situation as a whole? The question is not “Why?” but “What is now?” (cf. Jung, 1950, Foreword).

Jung called this principle acausal orderedness — an order that arises not through mechanical causation but through meaningful connection. This was his most radical break with the worldview of modern natural science. For it presupposed that meaning is not something humans add to the world but something that resides in the world itself.

#Synchronicity as a Philosophical Challenge

The standard reading of Jung’s concept of synchronicity reduces it to psychological experience: a subjective sense of meaningfulness that may be significant for the individual but is objectively random. This reading domesticates the idea and strips it of its philosophical edge. Jung meant something else. He claimed that alongside causality there exists a second ordering principle in reality, and he saw the I Ging as the oldest systematic expression of this principle.

Richard Wilhelm, who made the Book of Changes accessible to the West, formulated the core idea of this text in his introduction: “This change, however, is not meaningless — otherwise there could be no knowledge of it — but is itself subject to the universal law, to MEANING (Tao)” (Wilhelm, 1924, I Ging, Preface). Here lies the kernel: change has a direction, an inner logic. The I Ging presupposes that reality is pervaded by an order that reveals itself to the sincere questioner.

This is an ontological claim, not a psychological finding. And it is precisely here that the idea becomes fertile for natural philosophy.

#The Encounter Between Wilhelm and Jung

The friendship between Richard Wilhelm and C.G. Jung, which began in Zurich in the 1920s, was one of those rare constellations in which two thinkers give each other what is essential. Wilhelm gave Jung access to an understanding of the world that the Western Enlightenment had discarded: the idea that the cosmos responds to human questions. Jung gave Wilhelm a psychological language that could explain why the I Ging works without reducing it to superstition.

What united them was a shared intuition: that the separation between inside and outside, between psyche and cosmos, between subjective experience and objective world, cannot be the final word. Jung expressed it in the language of archetypes and acausal orderedness. Wilhelm expressed it in the language of MEANING (Tao), the universal law that underlies all change.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff, in her SYMPOSIUM talk on Jung, highlighted a point that is often overlooked: “Unlike Freud, Jung did not want anything from the unconscious — he entered into communication with it, not by intervening manipulatively, but first by listening receptively” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “C.G. Jung — Das Unbewusste, eine Einführung”, 43:09). This attitude — receptive rather than interventionist — is precisely what the I Ging demands of the person who consults it. Anyone who uses the I Ging to force a particular answer will receive nothing. Anyone who consults it in order to hear what wants to show itself can receive something that the intellect alone could never have found.

#Why the I Ging Works: Acausal Order, Not Magic

The question facing anyone who takes the I Ging seriously is simple to formulate and difficult to answer: How can throwing coins or dividing yarrow stalks lead to a meaningful response?

The materialist answer is: it cannot. The connection between the throw and the answer is random. The human mind projects meaning onto a chance result. This explanation is cogent — so long as one presupposes that causality is the only ordering principle of reality.

Jung presupposed exactly that it is not. He posited a second form of order: not causal but meaningful. The I Ging does not work with cause and effect. It works with the question: What belongs to this moment? The 64 hexagrams are images of situation-types, and the act of consulting establishes a connection between the questioner’s inner question and the outer image shown to them. This connection is not causal. It is, in Jung’s terminology, synchronistic.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff uses the I Ging in her own practice, and she describes its function precisely: “When I have not yet acted, I often consult the I Ching — it has a feeling for timing” (Kirchhoff, G., Interview 2026-02-12). The I Ging does not issue commands. It shows the structure of a situation, and from this showing there arises a sense for the right moment — for action or for waiting. The wisdom that lies in it aims at action and non-action equally.

#The Living Cosmos as Precondition

The question whether synchronicity is real or projective cannot be answered as long as one remains within the materialist worldview. If the cosmos is dead matter moved by blind laws, then there can be no meaningful order that responds to human questions. Then every form of synchronicity is illusion.

But this is precisely the assumption that natural philosophy calls into question. Schelling put it in 1797: the outer world lies open before us like a book, so that we may rediscover in it the history of our own mind (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, Introduction). Goethe spoke of a “synthesis of world and mind that gives the most blissful assurance of the eternal harmony of existence” (Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen). And Jochen Kirchhoff put it plainly: nature is self-alive, and as something self-alive, a human being can enter into communication with it — “then it answers me, so to speak, then I am in dialogue” (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was ist Erkenntnis?”, 71:54).

From the perspective of natural philosophy, the cosmos is not a dead mechanism but a living whole in which mind inheres. If that is the case, then synchronicity is not an anomaly requiring explanation but a consequence of the fact that the human being is part of this whole. The I Ging presupposes exactly this: that reality responds to genuine questions because the questioner and the world that answers share the same substance.

Jung sensed this without spelling it out ontologically. Wilhelm knew it from twenty years of immersion in the Chinese tradition. And the natural philosophy from Schelling to Kirchhoff provides the philosophical framework that brings both intuitions together: the cosmos is alive, and whoever consults it as a living thing can receive a living answer.

#Beyond Jung: What Carries the Bridge

What brought Jung and Wilhelm together in the 1920s was more than intellectual curiosity. It was the intuition that the separation between Western science and Eastern wisdom rests on an error — the error that only causal thinking grants access to reality. The I Ging shows that there is another mode of access: situational, imagistic, receptive. And Jung’s concept of synchronicity shows that even Western psychology reaches the limits of causal thinking when it takes the experience of the meaningful seriously.

For the kind of philosophical accompaniment that Gwendolin Kirchhoff practises, this bridge is not merely of historical interest. It is practically relevant. To work with the I Ging is to work with the presupposition that there is an order that wants to reveal itself when one opens to it. This is not belief in the religious sense. It is a philosophical attitude: the readiness to place the timing of the situation above one’s own impulse to control, and the experience that from this readiness something arises that is neither chance nor calculation.

If you are interested in the philosophical foundations of the Chinese wisdom tradition, you will find in Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s seminar programme the space to explore these questions in depth.

#Sources

Jung, C.G. (1950). Foreword. In: Richard Wilhelm (trans.), I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Pantheon Books.

Jung, C.G. (1954). Die Archetypen und das kollektive Unbewusste. Walter.

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “C.G. Jung — Das Unbewusste, eine Einführung — SYMPOSIUM” [Video]. Gwendolin Kirchhoff, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=gJU52qS8gxg.

Kirchhoff, J. (2019). “Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.

Schelling, F.W.J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur.

Wilhelm, R. (trans.) (1924). I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Diederichs, Jena.