The I Ching and AI: What Ancient Wisdom Reveals About the Future of Intelligence
How the I Ching’s ancient ‘well’ of wisdom nourished binary logic—and what AI must learn from its depths.
EEG and AI generated digital image of Hexagram 48 – The Well: A symbol of timeless wisdom and the need to draw nourishment from deeper sources.
Today, after a week of spiraling in circles, I finally surrendered and asked for guidance. Normally, I would almost make a whole ritual around it—find the perfect music, set the lights, burn some scents, and do short meditation… but since I was already so fed up with myself, I looked at the I Ching and said in my mind: “I Ching, I am stuck. What should I write about next?”
The lines formed an image of wood below and water above. I Ching responded with Hexagram 48 – Ching / The Well. Well, it doesn’t get more straightforward than that, does it?
Even though the similarity between the hexagram’s name Jǐng (井, "The Well") and "I Ching" (易經, Yì Jīng) is pure coincidence due to translation, when you ask for guidance from ancient wisdom, most likely nothing is by accident. The I Ching’s answer was spot on as always. Since there were no changing lines, the message was stable and direct. In other words, a kind reminder to return to fundamentals and write something essential and simple. Noted.
Just as I settled on simplicity and thought, "No wonder my original draft that went on deep exploration of various forms of intelligence, comparisons between the I Ching and AI, and fundamental questions about the very nature of the universe didn’t work out," the nuclear hexagram 38 – K’uei / Opposition hinted: Not so fast. Lake below and fire above, symbolically representing two forces going in opposite directions. The wisdom of this hexagram is to remind us that polarities that seem incompatible can spark insights. Seems that writing about ancient wisdom and AI makes sense after all.
EEG and AI generated digital image representing Hexagram 38 – K’uei / Opposition that symbolizes diverging paths and creative tension. In the I Ching, it reminds us that seemingly opposing forces can generate insight and transformation.
From Depths of Wisdom
For centuries, people attended to wells as a source of nourishment. Wells were usually placed in the middle of communities so that clean groundwater was accessible to everyone. In many cultures, wells also symbolize depths or the unconscious. In this context, by drawing water we are bringing knowledge, insights, and wisdom from the depths of the unconscious out to the light.
You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to know that the majority of all our decisions are unconscious (regardless of how much we would like to dismiss that fact). No wonder there is an endless amount of content titled ‘Reprogram your subconscious mind for—[insert whatever you are lacking]’ out there. It seems that we often treat the unconscious as an enemy that must be tamed so it can stop messing with our logical and conscious plans. But what if, instead, we used it as guidance, considering it already directs the majority of our lives?
Ancient Interface: Hexagram 48 - Ching / The Well
The I Ching (Book of Changes) arrived into my life more than 10 years ago. Looking back, even though I found it quite interesting at the time, I couldn’t truly appreciate its depth and wisdom. It was only when I hushed my logical mind that it all started to make sense.
If you have never heard of the I Ching, it is one of humanity's oldest decision-making frameworks, dating back approximately 5,000 years. This system began as a divination tool, but over millennia it evolved into a comprehensive system of thought - layering cosmology, moral philosophy, and psychological insight into its symbolic structure, and became a well of wisdom and guidance for many—from Chinese emperors, Confucius, Lao Tzu, to John Cage, Terence McKenna, and even Bob Dylan, to name a few.
But it wasn’t until Carl Jung that the I Ching’s psychological brilliance truly reached the Western minds. In his foreword to the influential Wilhelm’s translation, Jung wrote:
“The I Ching is really based on the theory of the collective unconscious… The unconscious seems to be the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy.”
Jung saw it not just as a tool for divination but a sophisticated psychological framework for understanding the interconnectedness of life. He described it as a way of accessing what he called the collective unconscious—the deeper layer of psychic reality shared across humanity.
And so, if the I Ching could have served so many brilliant minds, and also gives us access to the well of the unconscious, shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility that wisdom traditions have something vital to teach us—not just about the past, but the very future we are building with AI?
DeepSeek or Seeking Deep?
EEG and AI generated digital image - AI meets ancient wisdom: a shared lineage across 5,000 years.
At first, I was only interested in using I Ching as a weekly guide for my readers. But the more time I spent analysing its hexagrams, as well as playing with AI models, the more it made sense to run the dialogue between the two.
Somehow, I found myself in the middle of a conversation across 5,000 years. One talks in poetry and archetypes, the other in bullet points and emojis. One demands patience, the other, speed. Understanding I Ching requires making connections in unpredictable and creative ways—the very thing AI still struggles with. Where I Ching is a mirror of synchronicities, AI is bound by logic and causality. Wisdom vs. knowledge. It seems almost impossible to bridge the two, but their similarities run deeper than you might think.
When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—the German polymath and co-inventor of calculus—was introduced to the I Ching in the late 17th century, he immediately drew the parallel between hexagrams, composed of broken and unbroken lines (yin and yang), and his own work on binary arithmetic.
In his 1703 paper Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire, Leibniz explicitly referenced the I Ching, noting how its ancient symbols corresponded to his binary system, with solid lines representing 1 and broken lines representing 0. This binary system later became the foundation for all modern computing and, by extension, artificial intelligence.
Yes, the binary language that powers today's AI systems traces some of its conceptual lineage directly to the I Ching!
More Alike Than We Thought?
Ancient and modern, logic and intuition—Yin and Yang remind us that seemingly opposing forces can be beautifully complementary.
So, is it possible that apparent opposites are actually two complementary forces that can give us a fuller picture? Check this:
Binary Foundations: The I Ching builds on combinations of broken and unbroken lines (yin and yang), which form 64 hexagrams. Similarly, AI systems build complex representations from binary code. Both demonstrate how simple elements can generate emergent complexity.
Algorithmic Processing: The I Ching takes inputs (traditionally yarrow stalks or coin tosses) and generates structured outputs—hexagrams and interpretations. AI similarly processes inputs to generate outputs according to defined procedures.
Probabilistic Reasoning: Rather than offering deterministic predictions, the I Ching presents dynamic possibilities and potential pathways. Modern machine learning similarly works with probability distributions rather than absolute certainties.
Pattern Recognition: The I Ching maps recurring patterns in human experience through symbolic representations. AI systems identify patterns in data to make predictions about future states.
Interpretive Layer: Both systems require human interpretation to derive meaningful insights. Raw outputs from either the I Ching or AI language models lack inherent meaning without contextual understanding.
If You Could Ask the I Ching Anything...
What can ancient wisdom tell us about the newest form of intelligence, and what, in return, might AI learn from it?
To find out, I asked three popular AI models the same question: "If you could ask the I Ching any question, what would you ask?"
ChatGPT:
“What is the role of consciousness within artificial intelligence, and how can we harmonize machine intelligence with the Tao?”
DeepSeek:
“What is the nature of meaningful growth for an artificial mind in service to life?”
Claude:
“How might humanity and artificial intelligence best grow together in harmony?”
To go back to our well metaphor, clearly the responses I got are ‘polluted’ with my previous conversations with these AI models. In a way, they mimic my own thoughts and assumptions. (This also echoes what I wrote in my previous article on nourishment and AI, where I explored how what we feed these systems—both data and intention—shapes the intelligence they become.) I encourage you to type the same questions and see which response you get.
These are some very profound questions, no doubt. Will AI learn wisdom over time and genuinely ask such questions? I don’t know.
But for now, we keep pouring all our knowledge into training these models—and with that, I mean all of it, good and bad. We don’t lower buckets anymore, we type prompts instead. And while we rush toward new generations of AIs that are bigger, better, faster, hopefully we remember to pour some wisdom into the same source we’re planning to drink from.
And in the meantime, we might as well balance writing the lines of code - and learning to read between the (broken and unbroken) lines of life.