Books

George Harrison, the I Ching and While My Guitar Gently Weeps

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on March 3, 2011



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The Concert for Bangladesh 1971




I wrote “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at my mother’s house in Warrington. I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes… The Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and that there’s no such thing as coincidence – every little item that’s going down has a purpose.

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was a simple study based on that theory. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book – as it would be a relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps’, then laid the book down again and started the song.

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Bob Dylan: “There Is a Book Called the I Ching….”

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on February 28, 2011

A reader wrote to me after seeing the post about Richard Wilhelm and the I Ching about an interview with Joseph Campbell, where he mentioned Bob Dylan’s role in saving the Bollingen Foundation…

(Dylan apparently also introduced the Beatles to marijuana, but that is another story.)

Or the time [Joseph Campbell] said that Bob Dylan “saved” the Bollingen Foundation (the Jungian-oriented publishing house Campbell was associated with at the time). When I asked him what he meant, he said the house was on the verge of going under at one point, when Dylan happened to mention, during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, about his interest in the I Ching. The most prominent translation on the market at the time happened to be the Wilhelm version, published by Bollingen–and soon copies were flying off the shelves. It instantly made Bollingen a huge amount of money, and they were up and running again. Great stuff. Source

Interview with Bob Dylan, Chicago Daily News, 1965

I just don’t have any religion or philosophy, I can’t say much about any of them. A lot of people do, and fine if they really do follow a certain code. I’m not about to go around changing anything. I don’t like anybody to tell me what I have to do or believe, how I have to live. I just don’t care, you know. Philosophy can’t give me anything that I don’t already have. The biggest thing of all, that encompasses it all, is kept back in this country. It’s an old Chinese philosophy and religion, it really was one . . . there is a book called the “I-Ching”, I’m not trying to push it, I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s the only thing that is amazingly true, period, not just for me. Anybody would know it. Anybody that ever walks would know it, it’s a whole system of finding out things, based on all sorts of things. You don’t have to believe in anything to read it, because besides being a great book to believe in, it’s also very fantastic poetry. Source

Jung at the End of World War II: “Will the Souls Find Peace?”

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on February 22, 2011

General Alfried Jodl signs the unconditional German nation surrender document at Rheims, France, in order of the new Government Doenitz



Although WWII may seem like a long way away, the psychological processes of projection are always present. We are still at war.

At the end of this interview, Jung says, “I have already suggested that the only salvation lies in the piecemeal work of educating the individual.” Perhaps the internet can accelerate that process.




From C.G. Jung Speaking, edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull,
interview with Peter Schmid was published on May 11, 1945
(Four days after Germany’s unconditional surrender)

“The Germans today are like a drunken man who wakes up the next morning with a hangover. They don’t know what they’ve done and don’t want to know. The only feeling is one of boundless misery. They will make convulsive efforts to rehabilitate themselves in face of the accusations and hatred of the surrounding world, but that is not the right way. The only redemption lies, as I have already indicated, in a complete admission of guilt. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Out of honest contrition for sin comes divine grace. That is not only a religious but also a psychological truth. The American treatment of conducting the civilian population through the concentration camps and letting them see all the abominations committed there is therefore quite right. Only, the object lesson should not be driven home with moral instruction; repentance must come from inside the Germans themselves. It is possible that positive forces will emerge from the catastrophe, that from this introversion prophets will once again arise, for prophets are as characteristic of this strange people as the demons. Anyone who falls so low has depth. In all probability there will be a miraculous haul of souls for the Catholic Church — the Protestant church is too split up. There are reports that the general misery has reawakened the religious life in Germany; whole communities fall to their knees in the evenings, beseeching God to deliver them from the antichrist.

Then one can hope that the demons will be banished and that a new and better world will rise on the roads?

No, the demons are not banished, that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that will be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey. We love the criminal and take a burning interest in him because the devil makes us forget the beam in our own eye when observing the mote in our brother’s and in that way outwits us. The Germans will recover when they admit their guilt and accept it; but the others will become victims of possession if, in their horror at the German guilt, they forget their own moral shortcomings. We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers. “General suggestibility” plays a tremendous role in America today, and how much the Russians already fascinated by the devil of power can easily be seen from the latest events, which must dampen our peace jubilation is a bit. The most sensible in this respect are the English: their individualism saves them from falling for the slogan, and the Swiss share their amazement at the collective unreason.

Then we must anxiously wait and see which way the demons go next?

I have already suggested that the only salvation lies in the piecemeal work of educating the individual. That is not as hopeless as it may appear. The power of the demons is immense, and the most modern media of mass suggestion –, radio, film, etc. — are at their service. But Christianity, too, was able to hold its own against an overwhelming adversary not by propaganda and mass conversions — that came later and was of little value — but by persuasion from man to man. And that is the way we also must go if we wish to conquer the demons.

I don’t envy you your task in writing about these things. I hope you will succeed in presenting my ideas in such a way that people won’t find them too strange. Unfortunately it is my fate that other people, especially those who are themselves possessed by demons, think me mad because I believe in these powers. But that is their affair; I know they exist. There are demons all right, as sure as there is a Buchenwald.
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