Chance at the heart of the method
Every consultation with the I Ching starts with an act of chance. You toss three coins six times, or divide a bundle of stalks, and each step gives you a line. You don't pick the hexagram. It comes to you.
That chance follows precise rules. With coins, each line has a 1 in 8 chance of being a 6, 3 in 8 of being a 7, 3 in 8 of being an 8, and 1 in 8 of being a 9. With yarrow stalks the odds are different: old yang turns up more often than old yin. They're two different ways of letting chance decide.
Why trust something important to chance? There are old answers and modern ones, and both are worth knowing, honestly.
The old answer
In Zhou dynasty China, divination was a way of consulting heaven, the ancestors or the spirits. The fall of the stalks wasn't thought of as random: it expressed something beyond the person asking. That religious frame is part of the book's history, and many people still read it that way.
Jung's idea: synchronicity
In the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung offered another way to think about it. He used the word synchronicity for coincidences that feel full of meaning even though nothing causes one to bring about the other: you think of someone and that very moment they call. For Jung, the I Ching was an example of this principle: your cast and your situation meet in the same moment, and that meeting can carry meaning.
Jung knew the book well. His friend Richard Wilhelm had translated it into German in 1924, and when that translation came out in English in 1950, in Cary F. Baynes's version, Jung wrote the foreword. In it he described his own consultations and argued for taking the experience seriously. That edition was hugely influential in the West, and the word synchronicity has been tied to the I Ching ever since.
An honest look
It's worth saying plainly: there's no scientific evidence that your question affects how the coins fall, or that the I Ching can predict the future. Synchronicity is an evocative idea, but it hasn't been shown to be true.
So why do so many people find meaning in their readings? There are very human reasons:
- You bring the meaning. When you read a text with your situation in mind, you connect what it says with what you're living. That connection is real, even if your mind makes it and not the coins.
- Chance breaks your habits. When you choose, you choose what you already thought. Chance puts an image in front of you that you didn't go looking for, and that makes you look from another angle.
- The texts are rich. The 64 hexagrams speak about basic human situations: starting, waiting, losing, growing, coming together, parting. Something almost always resonates.
- Asking already helps. Putting a question into words makes you see what really matters to you.
None of this makes a consultation pointless. It's a bit like talking with a wise friend who asks you an unexpected question: they don't know your future, but they help you think. You can believe in synchronicity or not, and either way the book can be useful to you.
Chance in Cambios
In Cambios you can choose where the chance in your cast comes from. No source is "truer" than another: they all give results with the same odds as real coins. The difference is in how the gesture feels.
- A secure random generator, the one built into your device. It's the default.
- Your device's sensors, such as the motion of the phone in your hand.
- A seed from your question, together with the moment you ask it.
- Quantum random numbers, optional, from an online service that only sends back random numbers.
- Physics-simulated coins that spin and land like real ones.
Every source other than the secure generator is mixed with it, so none of them is less random. Pick the one that helps the cast feel like your own act. And to make the most of what comes up, read Using the I Ching Well.