Synchronicity, I Ching, and my PureBasic journey

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Below is a copy of an older version (posted in the forum of Online Clarity):



I first came across the term synchronicity many many years ago while reading Carl Jung's preface for Wilhelm's book on I Ching . The story about the golden scarab, which Jung related in this book preface to explain his newly-formed concept , did not do much to further my understanding of the subject . I thought no more of it at that point. A short time later, during the few weeks when I was working on my I Ching computer program (called E-KING), something had happened which soon changed all that .

One day while having a shower in the bathroom I left the radio switched on . After some music the broadcast turned to an interview with a local wild-life expert. One of his comments stuck in my mind. He said all species ,big or small, have their own significant role to play in nature. According to him they all help to maintain the fine natural balance in our environment , and we human beings should overcome our fear of creatures such as snakes, spiders and scorpions, and should refrain from mindlessly destroying them . As I stepped out of the bathroom, my eyes right away spotted a tiny white scorpion crawling on the floor . Very rarely did I see any insect inside my living quarter, let alone a scorpion . Heeding the wild-life expert's advice, instead of stomping on it out of my habitual aversion to creepies and crawlies, I trapped the scorpion using a small glass and promptly released it in the back garden .

After this little episode, synchronicity became one of my leading interests, especially as I found out later that Carl Jung had thought synchronicity has a lot to do with how the Book of Change works .


All of my I Ching research , at the beginning, was done relying on books written in English . Even though there is a wealth of literature on this subject in my native tongue , I had no access to it at the time while still eking out a meager existence in a foreign land . My first I Ching computer program, done in English, was completed in the early nineties . Subsequently, for many years , I carried the thought of coding a Vietnamese version, but unable to act on it due to lack of expertise . In those days, computers did not lend themselves easily to non-profitable languages .

Nearly two decades later, the wind of fortune has changed, at a personal level as well as on a worldwide scale . The treasure of my ethnic heritage has become partly accessible online. Software tools have also grown so smart to the point of being almost self-driven . It seems everything I needed to accomplish my pet project has finally come within reach, so in 2014, I sat down to code an I Ching computer program for Vietnamese (EKING-VN).


Learning a new tool (PureBasic), I carefully followed the examples given in the instruction manual, starting with the simplest:




Looking at this screen display, I recognised it as having the form of an I Ching trigram . It followed quite naturally that by simply adding three more items to the menu bar, I would have a very germane hexagram design for my new project:





After several weeks, my program was ready for a road test . I purposedly selected hexagram 9 (Small Capacity) for a trial since this hexagram has the same layout as my intended software menu . My program displayed the correct commentary text for hexagram 9, but failed in its attempt to paint the hexagram form . It kept showing this instead:



which is hexagram 14 (Great Possession) .

My inexperience had introduced a software bug which lifted the desired figure for hexagram 9 up by one line . After fixing this error, it then occured to me that there is no particular reason to stick to the form of hexagram 9 . In fact why not consult the I Ching for a most auspicious symbol for my new program, I asked myself.

Using my trusted coins I seeked the most appropriate answer. The resulting coin throw was this : 1 3 3 1 2 3
And the corresponding hexagram is, you would never guess it, 14 :
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Of all the 64 possible hexagrams, it just had to be number 14. My software is firmly ( and greatly) possessed..

Of all the 64 possible hexagrams, it just had to be number 14. My software is firmly ( and greatly) possessed..

In my mind eyes, Dr Carl Jung appeared to grin from ear to ear . His synchronicity idea has been emphatically vindicated on this occasion .

For me this was an interesting personal experience of synchronicity, and in that sense, truly a great possession !



My E-KING program (written in PureBasic) for Windows-based computers has gone through many revisions since 2014. Around 2019, I have two fully working versions of this software, one in Vietnamese and one in English, looking like this: