A brief note about this post: after someone let me know he was unsubscribing because he hadn’t been able to understand any of my posts, I’ve aimed for a mix of generally-intelligible things and pure Yeekery. Yeekery is that which is only intelligible to Yeeks; a Yeek is someone who sees hexagrams everywhere, might say they are having a horribly 39 day, for whom it’s old news that hexagrams 63 and 64 are one another’s nuclears, and who can’t even remember a time when they didn’t know that the expression ‘regrets vanish’ only appears in the Lower Canon. (OK, maybe allow for a little exaggeration for effect, but you know who you are.)

This post is Yeekery.

I’ve just started working on some new entries for my ‘Words of Change’ glossary – a nice, simple, non-Yeeky little book. I started looking at ming, mandate, and when that appears in the various layers of the text:

Zhouyi: 6.4, 7.2, 7.6, 11.6, 12.4, 49.4, 56.5

I notice that there’s a predominance of line 4, which makes sense to me. Line 4 is the minister’s line, the muscle-flexing, ‘what can I do here? what work is there for me?’ line – a good moment to learn about mandate.

I can’t see any patterns with the zhi gua, but there may be the glimmering of one in the trigrams: qian becomes xun twice, kun becomes gen twice, kan becomes kun and li becomes qian, and dui becomes kan. When qian becomes xun (6.4, 12.4), the mandate feels like something to work with in a time when you cannot bring about immediate change. And when kun becomes gen (7.6, 11.6), these are rulers’ mandates – received at the summit of the mountain – that mark the beginning of a time to build.

I get the sense there is a story being told, from a mandate that’s an alternative to fighting the status quo, through orders, building and labour, through the immensely long gap between 12.4 and 49.4 when mandate finally changes, and then the moment when ming is simply the work you have to do, your own quiet haven within the order of things. This is the first and only time ming reaches line 5, where it can be wholly identified with individual will and intention, and it does seem to be a symmetrical reflection of 7.2 in meaning as well as the changing of trigrams. It’s certainly come a long way from 6.4 to reach its zhong, ‘in the end’, in 56.5.

Here is the part where I wonder if I’m seeing a real pattern or a coincidence:

The mandate is mentioned in the Daxiang in hexagrams 14, 44, 47, 50 and 57. Hexagram 14 has qian below li; 56.5 changes li to qian. 44 has xun below qian, and 6.4 and 12.4 change qian to xun. And 47 has kan below dui, and 49.4 changes dui to kan.

Then the pattern, if there is one, breaks down: 50′s component trigrams differ by two lines, and 57′s not at all, so neither could represent a single line change. (All that can really be said for them is that 50 follows 49 and 57 follows 56, the last two Zhouyi mentions of mandate. But maybe this is a little weak, even for me.) And despite 7.6 and 11.6, there is no mention of mandate in the Daxiang of 15.

Probably my imagination, then. Only… there does seem to be at least a resonance in meaning between the line texts and ‘their’ Images.

‘Fire dwells above heaven. Great possession.
The noble one ends hatred and spreads the good,
She yields to heaven and rests in her mandate.’
…with the Traveller’s Retreat…

‘Below heaven is the wind. Coupling.
The prince sends out mandates and commands to the four corners of the earth.’
…with the times when there’s mandated work to be done even though you cannot master the argument, cannot set the world right, cannot achieve great or lasting things… cannot take the woman because such a match would not last…

‘Lake without water, Confined.
A noble one carries out the mandate, fulfils her aspiration.’
…with the moment of truth and confidence when time and will flow together and the mandate changes…

What do you think? Am I imagining things, or might the writers of the Daxiang have had something like this in mind?

A ‘line pathway’ is my name for what LiSe calls ‘line squares’ and Stephen Karcher calls ‘crossline omens’. (LiSe and Stephen are the ones who actually (re-)discovered them; I just go along for the ride and enjoy the view.) It involves two kinds of transformation: the change of a line to create a new hexagram, and the inversion of a hexagram to find its pair (or sometimes, of course, just to see the same hexagram again).

Thus if we begin with 57.5, changing that line takes us to hexagram 18 – where line 5 would take us back again to 57.

Then if you invert hexagram 18 you see hexagram 17 – and if you mark line 5 in 18 and then invert the hexagram, you see 17 line 2. Same line, same place in the ‘landscape’ of the hexagram, just viewed from the opposite perspective. (If this is unclear, just draw the hexagram on a piece of paper, mark the changing line, and then rotate your piece of paper through 180 degrees.)

Then if you change 17.2 from yin to yang, you reach 58. Mark the line that’s on the same path, 58.2; invert the hexagram, and you’re back looking at 57.5 again.

Wandering round this pathway would be quite useless, of course, if the journey didn’t show us something about the lines and reveal deeper, underlying themes.

Hexagram 58, line 2:

‘True and confident opening, good fortune.
Regrets vanish.’

This comes into the present moment, fu, the place of trust. Regrets belong to the past; they can’t co-exist with fu. This kind of opening is true connection into the flow of things – into 17, Following, which is said to have ‘no causes’.

17.2:

‘Bound to the small child,
Letting the mature man go.’

Commentaries tend to regard this line with deep suspicion, even though the original line has no ill omen at all. It only says that you have a choice, and cannot have both. If you hold onto the child’s way of being, you have to let the responsible adult go – which seems to me to reflect the present-moment existence without regrets of 58.2.

Then 18.5:

‘Ancestral father’s corruption.
Use praise.’

This line uses the power of 57, Subtle Penetration, to tackle corruption. With praise rather than blame, it reaches through directly to the core potential for growth and good, without exciting resistance.

And 57.5:

‘Constancy, good fortune, regrets vanish.
Nothing that does not bear fruit.
With no beginning, there is completion.
Before threshing, three days.
After threshing, three days.
Good fortune.’

So even with an unpromising beginning, even in the presence of corruption, you can go below the old, hardened, defunct surface to find the seed. Yet another image for getting through to the present potential for growth. Reaching the seed in the husk is like reaching the child – the site of pure, present vitality.

No?

Anyway… it starts – before that 61-to-29 reading persuaded me to give readings with specific questions/objectives a break – with a reading about the gift of Jen Louden’s Life Organizer book. The relating hexagram in the reading was 26, Great Taming.

Bought the book, read through, and came to the part where she talks about Intention in a way I hadn’t conceived of it before. She describes the ‘possible bag’, a rawhide bag given to Plains Indian children as they mature. This will be filled with medicine tools, life skills and discoveries. And this, she says, is like intention.

An intention might be ‘staying playfully focussed’ or ‘how can I be kind to myself?’ or ‘listening to Spirit for guidance on the book project’.  Any of these would guard you against becoming scattered and losing yourself by creating its own ‘possibility space’ where skills, discoveries, powers – de – can gather.

OK, Jen doesn’t mention de; this is where ‘hexagram eyes’ come in. What she’s talking about sounds to me very much like Hexagram 26. There’s the outer trigram of mountain acting, as it often does, as a kind of ‘lid’, creating a container. And so,

‘Heaven dwells in the centre of the mountain: Great Taming.
A noble one uses the many annals of ancient words and past deeds,
And builds up his de.’

Also…

There is the farmer, who initially has just calves, piglets, wild horses and an intention.

It becomes fruitful to cross the great river, perhaps because your intention is a supple, stretchy kind of possibility bag that reaches out to encompass more than you can be at home with.

So if 26 is a space for gathering powers, resources, the means of fulfilling a purpose, then it’s a space for its complementary hexagram, 45. Great Taming allows Gathering to come into being. (It even rears the ‘great sacrificial animals’ that will be called for there!)

I wonder whether this could be a useful way to think about complementary hexagrams in general: that they create the space within which their complement is possible. Decrease, for instance, 41, might be said to empty out space so 31 can invite in new influence and feeling. Harmony between people allows the emergence of a purposeful army. And have you read the quotation LiSe chooses to illustrate Hexagram 19?

In ‘Cave in the snow’, Tenzin Palmo says: “Why does one go into retreat? One goes into a retreat to understand who one really is and what the situation truly is. When one begins to understand oneself then one can truly understand others because we are all interrelated. It is very difficult to understand others while one is still caught up in the turmoil of one’s emotional involvement – because we’re always interpreting others from the standpoint of our own needs. That’s why, when you meet hermits who have really done a lot of retreat, say twenty-five years, they are not cold and distant. On the contrary. They are absolutely lovely people. You know that their love for you is totally without judgment because it doesn’t rely on who you are or what you are doing, or how you treat them. It’s totally impartial. It’s just love. It’s like the sun – it shines on everyone.”

Maybe complements allow one another. What do you think?

(Also, how about, ‘The Yijing ate my brain’ as a title?)

This – at least for me when I’m in full Hexagram-6-mode – is a rather delicate euphemism. I don’t have what I want, need and deserve; this is all wrong. Possibly just one other person is all wrong; possibly the whole world is all wrong. It is, in any case, frustrating, unspeakably unjust and not fair, and did I mention wrong?

I really like what Cesca’s written about the parallels and contrasts between the texts of the two: the presence of fu, ‘truth and confidence’, in both, but ‘blocked’ when arguing, and the usefulness or not of crossing rivers. To me this implies that you can have a clear, true grasp of how things are meant to be, perhaps of an ultimate order and harmony… and sometimes you can translate that into a radiant expectancy that inspires you to cross great rivers on the strength of it, and sometimes you’re brought up short by the fact that things are not like that, and then acting out of frustration and opposition (‘I’ll show them!’) is fruitless.

The Sequence has a more down-to-earth view:

‘Drinking and eating naturally mean Arguing.’

Hexagram 5, according to the Sequence, is a time for eating and drinking to nourish the young ignoramus of hexagram 4 – and this means arguing. Scratch the surface of Arguing, I think, and you find, ‘I’m not getting what I need to survive.’ And so we are possessed by the absolute miserable indignation of a hungry infant.

(And here’s an interesting thing… as infants, the only thing we can do about being hungry – the only concept we have of what to do about this – is to protest. That seems to me a pretty accurate reflection of Hexagram-6-mind, or at least of mine. It’s not about acting to change things, it’s just about contesting them. The clear, focussed intent to bring about change only arises in Hexagram 7, the Army, when the waters that were raging against heaven start to flow through the earth – and when we’re told, ‘Mature people, good fortune, no mistake.’)

Speaking of scratching the surface, though… if you look inside 5 and 6 to the nuclear hexagrams at their core, you find the pair 38 and 37, respectively. That is, the core of Waiting is Opposing, and the core of Arguing is People in the Home.

The more I look at nuclears, the more I find it helps to see this hidden core of the hexagram as its work: Waiting is one of the ways we do our Opposing work, find how to live with absolute difference. (The other three ways are Small Taming, the Well and Subtly Penetrating.) I see what is; I see what’s meant to be; the two are vastly, irreconcilably different and yet I must allow them to coexist and let their difference become, as Karcher puts it, ‘creative tension’.

And then Arguing, startlingly enough, is a way we work on creating a Home for People. (The whole set of hexagrams with 37 at their core is pretty surprising: Arguing, Treading, Oppression, and finally Opening. Apparently that nurturing stability takes quite some working out.) First step to a working system: protest what is not working. We won’t have a home, a working relationship between people, until all our protests are heard and we’re all fed.

Start with Hexagram 14, Great Possession -

‘Activate’ its third and fourth lines – change them by opening them out from yang into yin, solid into broken – and you have Hexagram 41, Decrease and Offering –

The two lines whose ‘opening’ creates this change and connection flank the threshold between inner and outer trigrams; they’re the lines in the ‘human’ position, between heaven and earth. The Chinese name for hexagram 41 shows the sacred vessel, the ding of Hexagram 50, with a human hand beside it, as if ready to make the offering:

The elegance of this is so perfect… I wish I had the eyes to see more like this…

And then there’s the content of those lines in 14 that create Great Possession’s Offering:

‘A prince makes a summer offering to the son of heaven.
Small people are in no way capable of this.’

‘It is not for you to dominate,
No mistake.’

There is the question of who will make the offering, of having the resources to do so; there is the advice that not exerting influence, not being in control, is not a problem. Readiness to make offering, and letting go some responsibility and control… together, these point you towards Decrease.

It’s interesting to look at the lines pointing back the other way, too, from 41 to 14:

‘Three people walking,
Hence decreased by one person.
One person walking,
Hence gains a friend.’

‘Decreasing your affliction,
Sending the message swiftly brings rejoicing.
Not a mistake.’

So these are how offering gains great possession – a friend, and rejoicing. Where subsequent lines talk about gaining the blessing of spirits or the strength of servants, these two in particular seem to be about human communication and connection – friends, helpers and companions on the path. Make sense, doesn’t it?

What if you could add two hexagrams together? Not changing lines to move from one hexagram to another, but ‘adding’ them, on the basis that yin + yin = yin, but yang + yin = yang, because you imagine the yang line ‘filling’ the empty yin space.

This idea first hit me years ago, reading what LiSe had discovered about hexagram 15 and the ‘uniting bird’. A quick summary, since I want to share the whole odd idea with you in one post: the name of hexagram 15 is made up of two components, ‘words’ and ‘uniting’. The idea is that ‘words’ is a more recent addition, and the original might just have been ‘uniting’. That could then have various implied meanings, which were only subsequently differentiated and made explicit by adding different radicals: ‘words’ for ‘Modesty’, ‘rodent’ for Rutt’s Rat… and then LiSe says that

Substituting ‘words’ (part 1 of the character) for ‘bird’ gives Jian1, a mythical bird with one wing and one eye. Two of them could fly: the perfect cooperation.

Well… I look at this, and at 15 combined with 16, its paired hexagram and the one that joins imagination to 15′s realism, and get this…

+
=

- hexagram 62, whose Oracle reads,
‘Small exceeding, creating success,
Constancy bears fruit.
Allows small works, does not allow great works.
A bird in flight leaves its call,
Going higher is not fitting, coming down is fitting.
Great good fortune.’

And that is a rather lovely coincidence.

Then just now I was reading this article:
Why you must learn to love the goo.
To begin with, this makes me think of Hexagram 27, Nourishment. I often compare what goes on in the inner lines of 27, where the regular channels of nourishment are rejected, to what happens to a caterpillar inside a pupa. Something like a full internal replumbing or rewiring  is happening… our way of perceiving and receiving nourishment changes completely.

So here is this brilliant article talking about the ‘goo’ phase between being caterpillar and butterfly (and also sounding quite a bit like hexagram 29, incidentally, which has 27 as its nuclear hexagram), and suddenly it says,

You know you’re in deeply into the goo when the old form has completely dissolved – but the new form has not yet emerged.

Well… spot the hexagrams…

+
=

…do you suppose?

Let’s look at the other two hexagrams we can build symmetrically in this way: 28 and 61.

+
=

…maybe? There’s a gathering of people, forces, waters, resources, investment, intensity… and there is purpose and direction and the need to move and make progress.

‘Great Exceeding, the ridgepole warps.
Fruitful to have a direction to go.
Creating success.’
Not completely implausible, is it?

And

+
=

Nearing and Seeing are about presence and awareness, and together are also about mutual help. Also, they describe the approach of a spirit and how it is seen in the space opened up by not acting. All of this seems to me to fit very beautifully with Inner Truth.

So anyway, here are some ideas to play with. (Do you know if anyone else has already described this?) I wonder if it’d feel right applied beyond these few symmetrical hexagrams. (Does 24 + 16 = 51? or 24 + 8 = 3?)

Here’s a connection I fell over by mistake the other day when looking at 55.3.4 changing to 24.

Hexagram 55 is Feng, Abundance, and the garrison city, and the place where there is a full solar eclipse at noon. When 55′s two inmost lines are changing, right at the centre of this experience, then we have 55 zhi 24 – literally, Abundance’s Returning, or Feng’s Turning Point.

At line 2, it was already midday, and so dark, so close to the eclipse’s totality, that we could already see the bright stars of the Dipper. Then at line 3 it’s still darker:

‘Feng is flooded with darkness
At midday, seeing a froth of light.
Your right arm broken,
Not a mistake.’

I’m one of those who thinks the ‘froth of light’ is probably the blurred, distant stars of the Milky Way. It also seems possible to me that now there isn’t just an eclipse, there’s also a thunderstorm. (For one thing, both the ‘flooded with darkness’ and the ‘froth’ characters have the water radical; for another thing, see the zhi gua of this line!) It could not possibly get any darker or more ill-omened – and to add injury to insult, you’re incapacitated. Oh, and this is not wrong. It’s just how it is; doesn’t mean the whole world is broken.

And then, in the second moving line of Feng’s Turning Point:

‘Feng is screened off
At midday, seeing the Dipper.
Meeting your hidden lord,
Good fortune.’

Now, again, we see the Dipper – the star we can use to orientate ourselves. We may still not be able to see to move, but we can understand what to aim for. And with this strange kind of inner clarity (again, see the line’s zhi gua), we can even plan to meet with a Yi lord, someone or something we’d never normally connect with, and create good fortune.

We’ve gone from being completely incapacitated to seeing an unlikely, possibly unwelcome way to create good fortune. The eclipse has gone from totality to just a glimmer more light. Hexagram 24 is the winter solstice, the darkest time of year and the moment when it begins to grow lighter; it’s also the moment when you begin to reconnect with your own inner sense of direction. So these two lines are Feng’s Turning Point – what could be clearer? (Honestly, anyone would think the people who constructed this Oracle knew exactly what they were doing or something.)

So… maybe any line or group of lines changing ‘hexagram x’ to 24 show ‘hexagram x’s turning point’. (And maybe one day I’ll learn to see this!)

With single lines it’s often more visible:

36 gets its turning point at line 3, when you go hunting and take the great leader – from which (just as in those lines of 55) it does not follow that you can instantly turn on the lights.

27 has its turning point at line 6, when you find yourself are at the source of nourishment, rather than seeking it, and so finally can cross the river.

2 has its turning point at line 1, when the season is turning and things are solidifying.

But multiple lines are trickier, and a pattern only starts to emerge for me when the original hexagram describes something – like an eclipse – that I can readily understand as having a turning point.

A couple more examples:

Hexagram 17, Following, has to do with sensing and going with the invisible flow of things (not least your own emotions or desires), and picking up on guidance as it comes. It changes to 24 through lines 4 and 5:

‘Following makes a catch. Constancy, pitfall.
With truth and confidence, holding to the path with clarity,
How can this be wrong?’

‘True and confident in excellence.
Good fortune.’

These are the only two lines in the hexagram to mention fu, truth-trust-confidence (as in the name of hexagram 61). Following’s turning point is when you establish fu, a sense of connection and rapport with your world so you can set your direction truly.

(Aside: this fu is not the same character as the fu that is the name of hexagram 24, but it’s a homophone, and I think I was once told by a scholar that 24′s fu actually replaces the trust-fu in the Mawangdui manuscript. I’m not sure of my memory on this, though, so I’m asking wiser heads for help and this paragraph may disappear if I turn out to be completely wrong…

Update: yes – Harmen confirms that the trust-fu is only used in 11.4 in the Mawangdui manuscript, and in almost all other cases the 24-fu character is substituted.)

Another example: 41 changes to 24 with lines 2 and 6, the only two to include the phrase ‘not decreasing, increasing it.’ Of course the turning point of Decrease would be the moment when it changes its nature and becomes Increase.

(And then 42.5.6 to 24 should be just as clear, and can I ‘get’ that one? Can I thump. Anyone…?)

Havi Brooks has been writing some very nice inadvertent Yijing things lately, even to the point of accidentally writing about the connections between hexagrams – and then she’s had to put up with me bouncing around in her ‘comments’ section ranting on about hexagram sequence, trigrams and nuclear hexagrams on a blog that has nothing to do with the Yi at all. (You can find all those comments via the following links to Havi’s posts.)

Havi’s been writing specifically about being visible, or invisible, and that desire to hide the light under a bushel. She actually suggests ways for small business owners to be a little less visible, so they can feel safer… and of course I think of and comment about Hexagram 36 (wouldn’t you?) and how that inner light moves on into 37 (as Havi opens a real, physical ‘home’ for her work) where it can have its influence and start to make its presence felt through the outer trigram.

The nuclear hexagram – the hidden possibility – in Brightness Hiding is 40, Release. Of course if you hide your light, you are liberated from the need to be something for someone, and your path isn’t defined by anyone’s definition (including your own) of what you should be doing. Havi’s ‘invisibility hacks’ hint at this.

But the difficult thing to grasp – in the abstract, anyway – is how, if Hexagram 36 contains the possibility of Release, Hexagram 22 can do so as well. The two feel more or less like opposites: not that they’re structural opposites, but in experience. If a small business owner received Hexagram 36, it would be time for some of those invisibility hacks, keeping the sensitive insight hidden away, safe from destructive criticism. Whereas one who receives 22 – Beauty, Making Beautiful, the creation of images to express and communicate the essence – needs to concentrate on marketing, making herself visible and understood. (I’ve even seen 22 talking specifically about website design quite a few times.) Marketing. Ugh. Where’s the release in that?

And then Havi talks about when visibility leads to safety, and it all becomes clear.

These groups of four hexagrams form a ‘family’ that shares the core hexagram as siblings share DNA (like this one sharing Hexagram 37). Karcher reads them as a ‘cycle of seasons’, ordered by the development of the first and sixth lines: yang-yin is spring, yang-yang summer, yin-yang autumn and yin-yin winter.

I find it’s enough simply to be aware of these hexagram groups, so that you can take notice if Yi keeps showing you the same nuclear hexagram: the core challenge, the work you’re doing, the idea you’re bringing to expression, in all these different ways.

Hexagram 54, the Marrying Maiden,

is contained within hexagrams 11, 26, 18 and 46

which differ only in their first and sixth lines.

The Marrying Maiden is a young girl, not yet a woman, married off as a second wife into her new home. This is the first wife’s marriage; it’s not about her; there’s no place for her desires, plans and priorities. If she tries to ‘bring order’ according to her own lights she will meet with misfortune; no direction she might set will bear fruit.

She embodies the none-too-pleasant experience of finding yourself in a situation, probably not of your choosing, where you come second and have no direct power. And yet – this is her home now. So being the marrying maiden also implies that you are plunged all unprepared into a situation beyond your measure, and compelled to grow into it.
As nuclear hexagram, 54 seems to imply that experience of being moved into a bigger space, becoming part of a bigger story – and if the story is bigger, it’s no longer just about you.

Hexagram 11 is Flow, the time when ‘small goes, great comes.’ There is a powerful current of creative energy, and frequently (especially when the hexagram is unchanging) people experience this as being swept up into the flow. Even if you were quite attached to those ‘small’ things now disappearing downstream, now you have to deal with events and experiences on a larger scale. You have been ‘married’ into a bigger world.

Hexagram 26, Great Taming, describes a more conscious, deliberate move to another level:

‘Great taming,
Constancy bears fruit.
Not eating at home, good fortune.
Fruitful to cross the great river.’

The big farmer tends and nurtures his livestock, not just for the sake of accumulating wealth, but as a springboard to bigger things: to grow beyond the domestic sphere and be of greater service in the world. So although the hexagram is about attaining mastery, it contains the hidden possibility that you are like the marrying maiden: as you venture out away from home and across the great river, you will no be longer ‘ruler in your own domain’, but entering someone else’s.

In Hexagram 18, Corruption, the marrying maiden’s experience – that feeling of being in a situation run by someone or something else, and not according to your own intent – seems a stronger presence. At line 1, for instance,

‘Ancestral father’s corruption.
There is a child,
The deceased elders are without fault.
Danger. In the end, good fortune.’

The child enters into the family’s story and inherits the corruption of the ancestors; he must needs work through the complexities and darkness of a situation not of his making. That the corruption is ‘not his fault’, like the complexes we inherit through our parents are ‘not our fault’, is supremely irrelevant.

This gives new meaning to ‘finding yourself’ in a situation beyond your measure. Perhaps this is the heart of the challenge for the marrying maiden, the work Hexagram 54 represents: really inhabiting the place where you are, whether or not you chose it or like it. You attune yourself to it; you don’t attempt to transform it into something else before you have become part of it.

The nuclear hexagram is a latent possibility; its meaning seems to emerge more strongly when the hexagram is unchanging and has nowhere else to go. This is the case with Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward – the ‘winter’ of the 54 family, when the seed of the nuclear hexagram has shrunk away and nothing on the surface hints at its presence.

Pushing Upward is a wholly positive, active hexagram: make the effort, set out, and you will make progress, step by step. You have the autonomy of a king (the one who faces south). And yet when this is unchanging, it suddenly asks – ‘So, you are climbing? Where to, exactly?’ And you may find yourself moving into a much bigger space or undertaking a more daunting task than you had imagined. Even the king can be a marrying maiden; it all depends on the scale of his surroundings.

I’ve started thinking of the trigram li – fire and light – as being like eyes, particularly when it’s the inner trigram. Then sometimes it seems to look out at the outer trigram, and sometimes it seems to look through the outer trigram, as through a lens or a filter to perception.

Hexagram 49, Radical Change: fire in the lake. I think of the tiger change and leopard change, and the trigrams start to look like the shaman’s eyes shining through the new mask. You could imagine how awareness is radically changed by its new way of relating and being; you could imagine how the way of being and relating (that is, the ‘form of government’ on a personal level) is transformed by a new awareness that lights it up from within.

Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding: fire hidden away under the earth. It’s night-time; perhaps the eyes are closed, and the light of awareness is earthed up like a charcoal-burner’s fire.You might be hiding the extent of your insight (often what 36 seems to be advising); you might be seeing in an earth-like way: open, receptive, not doing anything to change what you see, just being aware.

Hexagram 63, Already Across: fire under water, the picture of a pot on the boil, and of awareness firmly trained on change, flow and risk. The noble one ‘reflects on distress and prepares to defend against it.’

Hexagram 13, People in Harmony, fire under heaven. I imagine the people gathered round the fire and looking up at the night sky, each tribe identifying one constellation as the image of their own ancestor, seeing how all the different shapes are part of one sky.

Hexagram 22, Beauty: fire under the mountain. The noble one is ‘bringing light to the many standards’, looking at the rules and boundaries, solid as rock, that contain human life. Perhaps she watches the changing patterns of light flickering over the rock, or perhaps she sees the mountain as if from the inside, observing how even this grows and changes. And perhaps she notices how the mountain stands in the way of her vision and limits how far she can see. She ‘does not venture to pass judgement.’

Hexagram 55, Abundance, Feng, the moment of decision: thunder and lightning culminate as one. The world is seen in terms of responsibility, what must be done. Swiftly, decisively, immediately, vision translates into action. (In contrast with Hexagram 21, where the trigrams are reversed, and action and experience translate into understanding.)

Hexagram 37, People the Home, fire inside and wind/wood outside. It could be that the family are looking out through the wooden structure of their home, seeing with the influence and mores of the home as their filter. It also suggests bringing clear awareness to your influence: the noble one’s  ‘words have substance and her actions are consistent.’

Hexagram 30, Clarity, fire within fire and spreading illumination, is harder to write about. I’ve an idea this may be because it refers to a kind of awareness that’s completely outside my experience.

Anyway, that’s one way to interpret li on the inside, as eyes and a place to see from.

(Does it play a similar role on the outside? Certainly in 64 it seems to be the eyes and ears of the fox crossing the river, li above kan…)