Man in the High Castle and the I Ching

 

(May 2026)

The Man in the High Castle is a particularly intricate Netflix series about parallel universes and alternate historical outcomes, focusing on the winners and losers of World War II. In this version of history, the Allies lost the war: the Nazis control the eastern United States, the Japanese control the western states, and a neutral zone lies between them.

One of the more relatable—or at least less objectionable—characters is the Japanese Trade Minister based in San Francisco. When faced with difficult decisions, he periodically consults the I-Ching, which the series describes as an “Oracle.” Because I have used the I-Ching myself and have long appreciated its qualities, I thought it might be worthwhile to describe what I understand about its origins and usefulness.

The I-Ching, also known as the Book of Changes, is most widely known in the West through the translation of Richard Wilhelm, originally published in German in 1924 and later translated into English in 1967 by Cary F. Baynes. Using a method of chance—traditionally yarrow stalks, though coins are commonly used today—the user generates six broken or unbroken lines that form a hexagram. Since there are eight possible arrangements of three lines, there are 64 possible hexagrams in total. Each hexagram corresponds to a chapter in the book containing commentary and guidance.

Like the Oracle at Oracle of Delphi, the language of the I-Ching is often ambiguous. Oddly enough, this ambiguity is part of its power. An unclear answer forces the reader to participate in the interpretation, and I suspect this is the real secret of the book.

How does this process work psychologically? Wilhelm’s translation includes a foreword by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung, naturally, gives the I-Ching a distinctly Jungian interpretation, but one need not accept all of his theories to appreciate the central idea. As I understand him, Jung believed that people seeking answers to important questions already possess those answers somewhere within themselves. The difficulty lies in bringing them to consciousness.

I encountered this problem while trying to decide where to attend graduate school. I understood that the choice would shape nearly everything that followed in my life. The chair of the psychology department strongly encouraged me to attend UCLA to work with a prominent researcher whose “Spotlight” theory of attention was influential at the time. Other faculty urged me to consider MIT, where brain-based cognitive science was flourishing. Meanwhile, a younger faculty member who had recently arrived from Montreal spoke enthusiastically about McGill University, home to psychologists such as Donald O. Hebb, author of The Organization of Behavior, and Ronald Melzack, the internationally known expert on pain research.

I had three attractive choices and could not decide among them. Part of the difficulty was emotional: I knew that no matter what I chose, I would disappoint people whose opinions mattered to me.

At about this time, my classmate Kurt Schloth introduced me to various countercultural ideas, including the I-Ching. So I flipped coins and generated a hexagram. Unfortunately, I failed to record which hexagram I created, but I distinctly remember that the commentary mentioned mountains. My immediate association was with Mount Royal, the mountain at the center of Montreal from which the city derives its name.

Why did I not think instead of crossing the Rocky Mountains to UCLA? Or traveling south through the Green Mountains on the way to Boston? Jung would say—and I would agree—that at some deeper level I had already decided that I wanted to go to McGill. In retrospect, it proved to be exactly the right graduate school for my interests, abilities, and aspirations. 

https://jungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/519-forward-to-the-i-ching