I've come to terms with an essential contradiction in my nature. I'm a hippy mystic. And I code. In the same way that I found on my third attempt at reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” that you simply have to give up trying to resolve all the characters and plots, I had to give up trying to resolve these facts. I had to release the brake and, Slothrop-like, just ride the crazy double-helix roller coaster.

The cold rational “works or it doesn’t” world of loops and booleans is fairly hostile to celebrants of synchronicity and believers in unseen forces. On the other hand, I’d say most programmers would accept the somewhat mystic description that code is, at some literal sense, magic: you conjour things into reality with words. Your spell book may be Swift or C++, but the same rules apply: get your incantations right, or they don’t work, or create monsters. Master their syntax and vocabulary, and you can actually make things move with your mind.

One recent spring day in Amsterdam I found myself with a foot in both worlds. Up early, I was cracking the last major hurdle to making my digital version of the I-Ching — a labour of inconstant love since 1988 — work on Apple Watch: I had arrived at the point where it was time to compile and test.

For those of you who don’t code, let me put this moment in context: you get into a state of flow, you become one with your application, you get up in the morning and initialise variables, you go to sleep at night counting arrays instead of sheep, you build and fail and fix and build and fail and fix until you can hold every line of your programme in your head in holographic 3D, recite whole subroutines as mantras, and as you run your final compile it fails again because of that thing you meant to do back in line 1175 so you do that and it fails again because you misplaced a semicolon and you fix that and the whole thing crashes because something called your provisioning profile has the wrong entitlements and you have to go to the Apple site to fix that and after about a dozens cycles of rinse and repeat you're rewarded with a dry, monotone, deadpan, two-word koan of glory: “Build Succeeded.” Among my people, the traditional response to this moment is to CRANK Led Zep’s “Kashmir” and do a fist-pumping victory lap around the room.

My new compile stared at me blankly from the WatchKit simulator on my Macbook. I pressed the yin-yang button six times (as recommended by the ancient method). BOOM! The very first hexagram the finished app throws for me is 53: Development. Development. “The tree that stands upon the mountain did not spring up overnight.” That'll do, app.

For those of you who don't do the I-Ching, in a nutshell: it’s a book of 64 combinations of 6 lines, broken or solid, that form a hexagram. The hexagrams are made up of two three-line trigrams. Each line is a binary state: Dark/Light, Strong/Yielding. Each Trigram is an element: Thunder, Mountain, Fire, Water, Lake, Earth, Heaven, Wind. Each Hexagram is a combination of those elements rendered as a series of images and texts that describe a unique situation. The language of the classic is filled with archetypes and characters that roam our subconscious — the good leader, the strong mother, the great artist, the wanderer — rendered along with everyday objects and elemental nature in poetic imagery that resonates way down deep in the human psyche. It lends itself to the kind of mystic poetry of the early Bob Dylan, Robert Hunter’s lyrics for the Grateful Dead, T.S. Eliot’s verse, the screenplay of the original King Kong, moments from the Wizard of Oz, John Cage’s music, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, and some of the more philosophical episodes of Gilligan’s Island. They all peek out from between the lines (as it were) of my rather eclectic renderings. You approach the I-Ching with a question. In the oldest method of consultation, you divide 49 yarrow stalks into a series of random piles to build your hexagram from the bottom up, line by line, with the line’s nature determined by the remainders of the random sorting process. Or you throw three coins. Or you press a button six times on your Apple Watch.

The bit about pushing a button raises eyebrows with traditionalist hippy mystics who are cool with the whole hexagram thing. The bit about generating a hexagram raises eyebrows in the IT crowd, who are cool with the whole button thing. My mission, geeks and peaceniks, is to help you find common ground.

The I-Ching often gets lumped — even by usually sage seekers like John Lennon — with astrology, numeracy, bone casting, and other forms of oracular prediction. A friend who beta-tests my app dismisses it outright for failing to accurately predict where he’s going to have lunch. For anyone who approaches it like an oracle, the I-Ching is full of the kind of general wise advice that can apply to any situation and seem pertinent. The original, along with every version I've ever known, including my own, has valid transit papers to cross the border into the hokey; the I-Ching’s advice sometimes renders a bit like the entrails of a fortune cookie.

But see, that’s the wrong way to approach it. Carl Jung was a total fanboy of the I-Ching. He wrote the foreword to the definitive Wilhelm-Baynes edition and therein laid out the best defense of the book I’ve ever seen. He didn't believe the 64 hexagrams of an accidentally binary book were attuned to mystic powers that were shaping human destiny with intention. He didn't love it for being an elaborate self-help book for the Taoist Monk set. Jung was fascinated by the role of chance and synchronicity both in the nature of reality and our own perception of it. He was watching the birth of chaos theory and the first glimmers of realisation that the Newtonian physics of action — reaction, cause and effect did not pertain at the level of the very small and the very large — the subatomic and the cosmic. Eastern philosophy’s description of the universal dance was proving a more accurate metaphor for what was going on in the land of quarks and charm than anything in our Western vocabulary.

If chance was one of the fundamental cosmic elements, the I-Ching was like a chemistry set — a place to study the interaction of coincidence and the human brain, like a book of 512 tiny tabs of Mr. Natural in text form, ready to transport you away from the square world of causality and intent and predictable expectations and take you over the rainbow to a different, more thrilling and vital, less black-and-white reality. A place where nobody can explain what connection could possibly exist between the changes in state of two particles thousands of miles apart with no means of communication that our laws of physics allow, and nobody can explain why the random characters of a 3,000 year old book blaze with relevance to a question you just asked.

Jung knew that we are pattern-seeking creatures, that our thirst to make sense of those patterns is unquenchable, and that the I-Ching was a very, very deep well. A skeptic scolded Jung that what seemed “magical” about this book was the simple process of people mistaking meaning from projecting their own subconscious landscape into the imagery, symbolism, and situations in the texts. Jung’s reply was robust: The marvelous thing about this book is that people find meaning by projecting their own subconscious landscape into the imagery, symbolism, and situations in the texts. Like the cave on Dagobah, when we ask what the I-Ching contains, the book replies, as Yoda does, “only what you take with you.” It’s a tool for exploring your uncertainties and unearthing your deepest answers to your own questions.

But why would anyone want the I-Ching… on their watch?

Because I have this crazy idea that like Apple Watch and every other synapse and neuron of the world’s evolving digital subcortex, the I-Ching connects us. It connects us to our deeper selves, to the community of human wisdom, to an ecosystem of human thought about who we are and where we're going and why we're here. And greater connectivity, o my brothers and sisters, is a powerful thing. People who are truly connected to one another don't go to war. People who are truly connected to nature don't poison their own environment. People who are connected to the future don’t allow a slow-motion planetary collapse to continue unchecked.

Apple Watch is one more means of bringing what’s most important to us into a closer, more intimate, more immediately accessible form. You wear it. You consult it. It shapes your time. And do we all, collectively, need our time shaped solely by departure delay information, stock price swings, and heart rate information?

What if the shaper of our time also provided us with space to reflect, to deeply think about questions large and small by jumbling our creative engagement with those questions? By inviting the universe to collaborate with us for a moment in thinking about our actions? By providing us a good solid piece of rope on which to go spelunking into the cave of self-awareness, or perhaps a crowbar with which to open forgotten doors?

Jung cautioned:

“The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them.”

Well I say the world needs more thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them. And if I can arm a new generation of movers and shakers with a magical spell that can open up 3,000 years of human thought and put it at their disposal to reflect, even if for only a few moments in a digitally busy day, to think deeply about what we collectively do, and what will happen to us, I reckon that’s hippy mystic coder time well-spent.