Creative Energy

Résumé · The Mears argue that the I Ching, although seemingly a manual of divination, in fact describes an intentionality directing a process of evolutionary orthogenesis. The Chinese authors of the I Ching intuited that ‘the Scheme of Life made manifest in the world was the visible working out of a preconceived Plan. As they saw it, the Plan is being worked out partly through the agency of spiritual intelligences involved in it from the beginning, and then also partly through the agency of man’. Homo sapiens (or ‘man’) was no accidental outcome of natural selection; rather ‘[l]iving “germs” were brought into existence that were destined, after millennia of generations, to become fully developed mankind of the sixth day of creation. Within each one Creative Energy surged unceasingly onward’. The I Ching’s authors, the Mears argue, were able to intuit this truth because, in effect, the Creative Energy, or ‘cosmic soul-life’, bestowed upon some members of the human race a special sensitivity to religious truth. (Gavin Miller)