The lines of the first two hexagrams can be regarded as keys to understanding all the lines – all yang lines at the beginning being a little like the submerged dragon, all yin lines at the beginning being somehow akin to treading on hoarfrost. These lines are formative, models for what follows.

I think the same can be said – maybe even more usefully – of the first instances of  key words and phrases: ‘seeing the great person’, for instance, or ‘having a direction to go’.  Because these phrases occur so often, they can lose some of their freshness and impact in readings.  Looking at their introductions helps to enrich the concepts with imagery and context, and to add colour and dimension to what can otherwise seem formulaic. And I do believe that these are deliberate introductions of key concepts.

(There are more ‘first instances’ further along in the Sequence, but as no-one knows how old the Sequence is, and not everyone’s prepared to believe it’s more than random, it might be contentious to call them ‘first’. Let’s stay with Qian for now.)

‘Seeing great people’, or ‘seeing the great person’, occurs first in 1.2:
‘See the dragon in the fields.
Fruitful to see great people.’

The first thing you notice is that in the space of just 8 words, one is repeated – the verb, to see. There’s a deliberate parallel, used to unwrap and develop the ideas. Seeing the dragon in the fields is like seeing the great people. Maybe it’s what makes it fruitful to see them; maybe it’s the sign of a time when it’s fruitful to see them.

That last option has the greatest resonance for me: it follows the pattern of much of the poetry in the Shijing, the Songs, where a natural phenomenon and a human situation are simply placed in parallel without comment. Somewhere in the space between them, in the mind of a listener, the emotion of the poem can be felt. The same approach works to create an oracle: here is how you can sense this quality of time, it says.

We modern Westerners, of course, are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to sensing the qualities of dragon-times. But if we understand this as a dragon that brings rain, and we can see that now it has at least woken up and reached the fields, even though it’s not yet flying… then we have some sense of possibilities opening out, powers of nature becoming available to support co-operative human endeavour. Time to see great people… time, I think, to benefit from some insight into how we might best work with these powers and possibilities. The great people – whether they are wise advisors and mentors, those with influence, or even (as Wu Jing Nuan suggests) diviners – know what will work in practice.

I think this is a useful idea to carry with you throughout the Yi: if it’s fruitful to see great people, perhaps there are dragons around; perhaps there are great creative potentials available, maybe large forces at work you don’t altogether understand, and perhaps you could use some wise help.

(If you’re wondering why I keep saying ‘great people’ rather than ‘great person’….

Here’s an article from Bri Saussy about sin. Now I’ve learned that the original Greek, hamartia, means missing the mark, I can’t help thinking of Hexagram 40, Release.

The theme of Release includes forgiveness. The Image, bringing things to a human level, shows how the noble one can do the ‘untying’ work of the hexagram and allow the simple and complete freedom of movement the Oracle describes:

‘Thunder and rain do their work. Release.
A noble one pardons transgressions and forgives crimes.’

Bri writes that

In the story of Christ as in the older stories that follow the same path, there is a moment where all sin is redeemed, forgiven, washed away and cleansed.

– impossible not to think of thunder and rain doing their work. We all know in a simple, literal way how the clear air feels after a storm, and that gives life to the metaphor.

Bri continues:

By analogy, our vision is cleared, our aim is steadied, our target still, waiting, and available.

And in the final line of Hexagram 40 – which is very much the ‘apotheosis’ kind of line 6 –

‘A prince uses this to shoot a hawk, on the top of the high ramparts.
He gets it. Nothing that does not bear fruit.’

When she first became ill, last month, I asked Yi… well, I wish I could say I asked for advice first, but in fact I started out by asking for a prognosis for her. I received Hexagram 8 unchanging, and got the strong feeling this was no prognosis, but was referring me back to my ‘source of oracle-consulting’: why had I asked? And how about starting over from there? So I did, and asked for my own role or place in all this as it unfolds.

I received Hexagram 19, Nearing, with no changing lines. I needed to step up, to watch over my family – to be the one with the overview, the carer.

‘Above the lake is earth. Nearing.
A noble one teaches and reflects untiringly,
Accepts and protects the ordinary people without limit.’

This does make sense to me – not so much because not a blood relative, as she feels like a mother to me anyway, but because I’ve ‘been here before’: my mother spent a long time going in and out of hospital.

So I’m to be Nearing: always oriented towards the others, moving towards them, being aware of the whole situation. Being emotionally present and as available as the water that wells up under the earth. Not, for instance, shutting down or running the other way, as I might easily have been inclined to do…

And here I must pause for an aside about 19 in general, before I tell you about the ancestors who Neared.

‘Nearing.
Creating success from the source, constancy bears fruit.
Arrival at the eighth month means a pitfall.’

(I know… this is not the same translation as in my book. After a lot of research yesterday, I think I got the translation wrong – it simply can’t mean ‘reaching an end in’. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to change the interpretation so much.)

The old character for ‘arrival’ shows an arrow that has struck the ground. It’s arrived: it isn’t nearing any more. Nearing means yuan heng li zhen, success from the source, harvest in constancy: a huge positive potential tending towards realisation. Nearing is a state of potential, of tension; if I arrive at the 8th month, harvest time, and set out to reap results, I lose that potential. When the arrow lands, the energy of the bowstring has been discharged and lost, and the movement of its ‘Nearing’ flight has ended. Or in more pragmatic terms, if I scythe through the grain stalks, they won’t be growing any more.

So if 19 happens when you need results, you’re out of luck. And if in a 19 time you let your overview collapse down to a focus on results, you’re sunk. Probably the results will be bad, but in any case something much larger will be lost – and in several readings in my journal, that was empathy and relationship.

For me in the hospital there were no ‘results’ to be had – no way of influencing outcomes, nothing to get hold of – so I just kept on Nearing. I carried the hexagram with me (and sometimes I think Yi provides unchanging readings just so they’re ‘portable’ in this way) day after day.

But Hexagram 19 is also interpreted as the Nearing of a benevolent ancestor. I remembered this as we were driving down to the hospital one morning, and began thinking of ancestors whose help I could use. My father, certainly – a very patient, very calm man. And my mother, with her powers of organisation and ‘getting it done’ – and the very moment I thought of calling on her, I could hear her asking, ‘What can I do?’

That’s exactly what she would say, and so from there I became more involved in the idea. By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was joined by parents, grandparents, many wise and indomitable old friends from the Willows (a day centre for the elderly where I was lucky enough to volunteer for a decade), a powerfully shrewd and determined friend of my mother’s, and even a couple of dogs. An unstoppable, inexhaustible force! I drew on them throughout the day, and always had enough.

Next day I found an initial reluctance in myself to do the same again, as if that would be asking a bit much. Fortunately a couple of Willows people who were never slow to laugh at my absurdities pointed out that this was nonsense, and my crowd of ancestors and I went into the hospital together. Some of them brought strengths well-suited to eliciting a helpful response from the medical staff. Some of them brought endless reserves of patience for caring. Some brought experience of showing some nasty diseases who was boss.

I want to be clear that in my experience this was not just a matter of imagination and memory; I wasn’t just letting myself be inspired by these people’s example. I do that a lot – but this was different: they were there. At one especially fraught point I started to wonder what my father would have said – only to realise, in a moment of extraordinary clarity, that it was exactly, word for word, what I (he) had just been saying. He was already Nearing.

It’s said that Hexagram 19 can mean you are the one who nears, or that some benevolent power is nearing you. On the face of it, that seems unsatisfactory: yes, but which does it mean? Are you nearing or neared? It turns out that it really does mean both at once, and for the past few days for me it could not have been otherwise. I could not possibly have been the one Nearing for so long if my ancestors hadn’t also drawn near. The resource really is as inexhaustible as the lake within the earth.

With thanks to Mum and Dad, Grannie and Grandad, Daphne, Kitty, Rhoda, Dorothy, Vi, Joan, Candy, Meg…

I’ve embarked on Clare Josa’s excellent 28 day meditation challenge. The guided meditation she recorded for the first week began with roots and branches. You ‘grow’ roots into the earth and branches up, then follow a steady pattern of inhaling through roots, exhaling through branches, inhaling through branches, exhaling through roots. I’ve found I feel the quality of the energy changing, and the opening at the tips of roots and branches: inhaling earth-strength, growing branches, inhaling light, spreading and transmuting into roots…

And then, because my monkey mind is also full of hexagrams, this reminded me of xun

and dui.

Xun is the trigram of roots: open and sensitive to what’s below. And the branches mirror that: they’re sky-roots, open above, like dui. So the two trigrams together make a kind of energy diagram of a tree and its relationship to everything around it, open below and above:

And then isn’t it funny how this hexagram, 28, turns out to be the one that mentions the growth of trees?

28.2:
‘Withered willow sprouts a shoot,
Venerable man gets a young wife.
Nothing that does not bear fruit.’
28.5:
‘Withered willow sprouts flowers,
Venerable woman gets an upright husband.
No blame, no praise.’

And the rejuvenation of the tree even parallels the way humans come back to life through relationship.

And… lines 2 and 5 are each just at the interface between solid and open, where what’s absorbed through the open roots and leaf-surfaces can be felt as part of your self.

What I came to love about volunteering was how great things arose from such simplicity. You see what someone needs, and you provide it, spontaneously and without thought. The things you do may all be very small, and often the things the people around you do are also small, but when a whole group of people with this same motive force comes together, something great emerges and lives are changed.

Last week I had 14 as part of my weekly reading. My re-application forms for volunteering arrived (I’m changing volunteer placement, which means more government checks – more 47 than 14, those…) and I was on the alert for 14-ish things.

When I was coming home on Thursday night, I found myself short of money for the ’bus fare. Before I even had time to be embarrassed, much less to worry how I was going to travel the 10 miles to the train station, the man I’d been chatting to at the stop stepped forward to pay the difference for me. We were perfect strangers with nothing in common, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. He saw a need and – in the same moment – acted to fill it.

Later in the same trip, I was cycling home from the station and had a slight mishap with the back of a parked car. Someone showed up to move my bike off the road, check I was OK, and wait with me in the rain until my husband arrived. When we’d assured him I was fine and there was nothing else he could do, he quietly went home.

A couple of days later, a forum I just joined organised their first group phone call. There is no leader running this group. Someone has created a private forum for us; someone has an account with a free teleconference provider and volunteered to lead the call; someone else collected up our email addresses and sent out reminders with the details; someone else provided download space for the call recording. The call happened, and it was good.

All this is 14 in action: Great Possession that arises because people see needs and fill them, and because we co-operate.

Where is this to be found in Hexagram 14 – besides in experience, that is?

There’s the name of the hexagram: Great Possession. The word for ‘Possession’, which also means ‘being’, shows an open hand. According to LiSe, “Later a piece of meat was added, to emphasize possessing.” You can see as much on the Chinese Etymology site – except that, on reflection, you cannot tell whether the hand is holding the meat or offering it.

(While you are enjoying the wealth of information on the Chinese etymology page, you may notice that – wholly in the spirit of Hexagram 14 – it has a ‘Paypal donate’ button towards the top right. Please use it!)

Also… 14 follows from 13; Great Possession arises from People in Harmony. In fact, since these two hexagrams are an inverted pair, you can say that Great Possession is the same thing, the same pattern of energies, as People in Harmony, just seen from a different angle. (And if you read about the ‘gift economy’, as I’ve just begun doing, this makes wonderful sense.)

And most simply of all: the pattern of the lines of hexagram 14 -

- shows five strong, solid, yang lines gathered around a single, open yin line in the fifth place. This is the place of vision and choice, and it is the ruling line. The guiding principle of this hexagram is the yin: what is open, responsive and (as Karcher says of hexagram 2) willing to provide what is needed. It creates the upper trigram li – fire, light and vision. Seeing what is needed, responding spontaneously to provide it, Great Possession comes into being and we are wealthy.

“What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”

Proust

Hexagram 29, Repeating Chasms, has a reputation as one of those ‘bad hexagrams’ – which is basically code for ‘hexagrams the experience of which we typically do not enjoy.’ Only, of course, it is more than that…

The two words of its name are equally important:

Repeating also means rehearsing and learning: this is the classic hexagram of ‘learning opportunities’ (also something we might prefer to avoid).

Chasms are pits, depth and absence, and also the dangers of running water. We experience them as the complete absence of anything solid – and for a comical take on this, see ‘Hexagram 29 and learning to swim’. (Though the experience I describe there would have been a better picture of 29 if I’d had no idea whether the pool had an opposite side I could reach.)

I have seen Hexagram 29 describe the experience of someone who is going blind and doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to cope. Someone who never hears from the one she loves. Someone who finds her ability to do her beloved work slipping away, and who has no idea what she might be or how she might live without it. The roof beam of Hexagram 28 has broken, the structure is falling, and there is no more support or reassurance to be had. What’s left?

There are many stories of Hexagram 4, Not Knowing, coming as Yi’s reproof to someone who asks too many questions. Repeating Chasms can do something similar, but whereas 4’s message is something like, ‘There is no answer for you because you’re too immature to understand,’ 29’s is more like, ‘No matter how desperately you want there to be a solid answer, there isn’t one.’

29 is not only chasms, but repeating chasms. The pit will yawn open on your path again and again until you stop searching for detours and travel through it. A few examples…

Someone close to me is suffering, and I don’t know how to cope; I never know how to cope. I write in my journal, ‘Oh, how I wish I had some kind of strategy to handle this!’ (Ultimately the answer is to stop wondering how and allow the free flow of compassion. This is scary in itself – it feels like pouring myself out into a bottomless pit – but it transforms the situation.)

Or there is Barbra’s experience, as she described it in her second comment on this post. When she received Hexagram 29, she imagined her life might be in danger – but what she and those close to her actually faced again and again was the need to go through the fears of illness, disability and lack.

It’s important to realise that 29 is not always about something big and life-threatening. Looking through my own readings, I find one occasion when it referred to a cold that came back for 24 hours because I did too much too soon, and another where the small cut on my fingertip was going to take many weeks to heal, and I’d learn this again and again every time I tried to find a new way to wrap it up so I could play the ‘cello.

Also, Hexagram 29 is not just a sign of repeating chasms to come. It also describes how to travel through them, living in the dark for as long as it takes:

‘Repeating chasms.
There is truth and confidence.
Holding your heart fast creates success.
Movement brings honour.’

In these times, certainty comes of an inner connection, by holding to your own heart (or from a ‘connected heart’). And it comes of being in movement: undertaking committed action without knowing; being present without trying to make it safe first. (You can’t.) This is a liquid hexagram (not unlike 59), where all you can know to be real is movement – though the moving line texts often advise moving with attention, noticing where you are before hurtling into action.

The Image – always a source of counsel – develops the idea of repetition as ‘learning opportunity’:

‘Waters flow on and reach the end. Repeating Chasms.
A noble one acts with constant character [de],
And teaches things by repeating.’

Water never loses its nature, and so it creates rivers that reach the sea. Sometimes this Image reminds me of what I’m communicating to another person; more often, though, it seems to be what I’m teaching myself. This crystallised for me when I heard Jennifer Louden suggest that I ask what I am teaching myself with each habit.

Come to think of it, that could be yet another way in which 30 emerges from 29.

A subscriber asked me to write about 29, and especially about 29 as relating hexagram. Well… it so happens that my reading for last year was 3 changing to 29, so I can respond with the full benefit of hindsight.

29 as relating hexagram says something like this:
“See this primary hexagram? You will be compelled to learn its depths and intensity, and the movement it demands of you in order to come through.”

Sometimes, especially if two or more lines change to reach 29, the line texts show both the depths of a hexagram – the ways you could fall into it and not be able to get out – and also its flow, what it will take to come through. For instance, I think this pattern’s visible in the lines that join hexagrams 3, 4, 5 and 6 to 29. (Maybe also in 7.2.)

You’re compelled to learn, of course, by repetition: the chasm keeps presenting itself until you do. I spent the first 8 months or so of last year looking for ways to keep on pursuing my chosen ‘direction to go’, and coming up against the same basic inability every time. I was searching diligently for a route round the chasm, and we know how well that works. Eventually, I had to learn Hexagram 3: growth without direction; coming up against my limitations; seeing the smallness of my own perspective compared to the larger scale and longer term.

Thoughts? Examples to share? Please comment…

What came over him, Clarissa says, is what came over the sailors who heard the Sirens. The sirens sing so beautifully and seductively that the sailors lose their minds and jump overboard. Odysseus had his men’s ears stopped with wax and himself tied to the mast so he could listen and survive – and did, since all his desperate attempts to get free of his bonds failed. Clarissa’s sirens seem to be a little like mermaids: their song convinces the sailor he can live a happy married life with them underwater, and he fully expects to be able to breathe there.

This reminds me of the Lorelei, who in Heine’s poem sits on her rock above the Rhine, singing and combing out her golden hair, so that the sailor in his little boat, seized by wild longing for her, forgets all about the rock, crashes into it and is drowned. Heine is the master of irony, and tells the story as if to say, ‘Yes, naturally it’s an absurd romantic cliche, so naturally the oblivious sailor falls for it and dies horribly – and no, I have no idea why I’m so sad.’ The last four lines:

“Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen,
Die Loreley getan.”

Rough translation:
“I believe the waves engulf sailor and boat in the end, and the Lorelei has done that with her singing.” Laconic, matter-of-fact: no more romantic passion here, because the passion has – naturally - just drowned.

Yijing connection? Well… you’ll recognise the powerful, seductive woman, the one where trying to possess her or marry her would be a radically bad idea:

‘Coupling, the woman is powerful.
Do not take this woman.’

Sometimes the woman of 44 seems like a Muse, and sometimes like a Siren, and sometimes like Fate. And when she is in the background to Great Exceeding (hexagram 28) and lending it direction, leading one to go beyond all bounds in Coupling… well, then she is a Siren, or the Lorelei:

‘Exceeding in wading the river, head underwater.
Pitfall.
No mistake.’

That ‘no mistake’ is an enduring puzzle: how can something be a disaster without being a mistake? I mentioned it in a previous post about ‘no mistake’. The one thing I’m sure of is that the ‘no mistake’ comes from a different perspective. For the one drowning there is a disaster; from some other point of view (identified by some brave commentators, but not by Yi) this is not a mistake.

What I’m noticing now is that not only does the Lorelei seem to be singing across the river of 28.6, but the shift in perspective offered by the line might just foreshadow Heine’s final stanza.

Die Loreley
Heinrich Heine

Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Daß ich so traurig bin,
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,
Und ruhig fließt der Rhein;
Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt,
Im Abendsonnenschein.

Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar,
Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme,
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewalt’ge Melodei.

Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe,
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.
Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen,
Die Loreley getan.

(Translates as something like:
I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean, me being so sad. There’s a fairy tale from ancient times that I can’t get out of my head. The air is cool, it’s getting dark, the Rhine flows peacefully; the peak of the mountain gleams in the evening sunshine.

The most beautiful maiden is sitting up there, so wonderful. Her golden finery glitters, she combs her golden hair, she combs it with a golden comb as she sings a song. It has a wondrous, powerful melody.

It seizes the sailor in the little boat with a wild sorrow; he does not look at the rocky reef, he only looks up to the heights. I believe the waves engulf sailor and boat in the end, and this is what the Lorelei has done with her singing.)

The basic thesis of the book is this: your character as an individual is not so ‘individual’ (ie indivisible) after all, but a collection of more-or-less complete sub-personalities. So if you say you did something ‘out of character’, really the ‘you’ speaking is just one of these subpersonalities, and a different one was acting.

Lots of people can be hypnotised into revealing different selves; many of us reveal different selves according to circumstances, such as a submissive spouse who’s also a dominant boss. As children, we might have an imaginary friend in whom we embody and try out alternative selves. People who take personality tests (such as MBTI) have apparently been shown to retest as the same personality from 20-60% of the time (presumably that ‘20-60′ represents the range of results from different studies, and yes, it startled me, too). However, tests of personality traits that get people to imagine themselves within a specific context while predicting their responses show much more consistent results.

Most of us are unaware of this – hence we act ‘out of character’ and say ‘I don’t know what came over me’. Some people, though, are ‘co-conscious’, aware of an inner ‘household’ of personalities, each with their own name, who converse and negotiate which should emerge to deal with different situations.

This seems to be a perfectly healthy, well-adjusted state – and it might help the rest of us to be a bit more aware of our multiplicity. Then, instead of beating myself up for ignoring the alarm clock I’d so determinedly set the night before, I’d be able to set up negotiations between ‘she who sets alarms’ and ‘she who sleeps in’, which might well be more useful.

Nowadays this all sounds remarkably weird, and maybe morally suspect: shouldn’t I take responsibility for what I do? Isn’t it important to be my one authentic self? But of course, our idea of the Self as something of such vital importance is an outgrowth of our culture. In a culture where the Self wasn’t such a big thing, like say ancient China, the idea of ‘co-consciousness’ might seem far more normal. Naturally I’m one person to my family and another in my work, because those are different roles. ‘I’ am at least as much my role or position within a structure as ‘I’ am some sacred unchanging individual – probably far more so.

And in such a culture, it might make a great deal of sense to have an oracle that reflected that kind of selfhood – one that could map out for you the different positions and relationships you occupy, each with their own motivations, undercurrents, connections, harmonies and disharmonies.

Of course, in a culture that believes in the individual, a frequently asked question about such an oracle would be, ‘How am I supposed to make sense of this answer when the different moving lines contradict one another?’

Carter argues that some awareness of how we split ourselves is healthy and necessary:

“If we are to swim in a disjointed and ever-changing world, we need more than ever to pull on our ability to see things from multiple viewpoints and to adopt different behaviours in different situations. As we hurtle from one encounter to another, the ‘self’ that we project has to be altered, if ever so slightly, for each one.”

Could be we know an oracle that might help with that.

This time she’s unwittingly explaining Hexagram 11, line 1, as a matter of fractal flowers.

Hexagram 11 is about Flow, working with it or creating it or stepping into it. There is no issue here with lack of creative ideas or lack of energy and capacity to create (we have a trigram full of each). All that’s needed for the small to go and the great to come, to create growth and make all things possible, is communication – not least inner communication.

Line 1 connects with Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward. (Another way of saying this: you enter into Flow through Pushing Upward; you begin to experience Flow through Pushing Upward.) 46 seems to me to be a fundamentally simple hexagram of aspiration and optimism: there is something higher, so we want to climb up to it; if we point ourselves in the right direction and put one foot in front of the other for long enough, we’ll get there.

So 11.1 says:

‘Pulling up thatch grass, roots entangled,
With more of its kind.
Setting out to bring order, good fortune.’

I like this line. I’ve received it when feeling stranded, stuck, lost… or when, as Havi says, my to-do list is seventeen million miles long. (She must have snuck in and measured it.) This line tells me that whatever small thing I start tugging at, it’ll turn out to be connected to the other things. Any positive move at all will create momentum.

(It’s also an encouraging line to get when handling a bunch of deep-rooted ‘issues’. Yes, they are all tangled up in one another just under the surface; no, that does not mean you are hopelessly stuck. It means that you can start pulling, with determination, wherever you stand, and this will still lead to good fortune.)

Havi’s post is about how you can participate in flow (11) by travelling exactly one step at a time (46) because everything is connected underground. (Yes, she actually says ‘underground’.) Here it is:
http://www.fluentself.com/blog/stuckification/fractal-flowers/

And yet, on the other hand… the experience of the thing is so often more like Already Crossing (which is how Karcher translates it). A decision’s been taken or a commitment made, and things have been set in motion. You are not starting from a blank slate (sometimes this one comes up in readings to point out you’re not asking from a blank slate); you’re not setting off from a standstill, but from a moving base.

Looking after that momentum, handling the uncertainty it generates, is a delicate, difficult process. You can see this in the trigrams: fire within running water. There’s clear inner awareness, but it’s only experienced fully immersed in the ongoing flow of circumstances and change. There’s no separate, still place to stand and observe the order and pattern of things, because the waters are always in motion.

The Oracle says,

‘Already across, creating small success.
Constancy bears fruit.
Beginnings, good fortune.
Endings, chaos.’

The character for ‘beginnings’ shows the first stage of making clothes: cutting out the pattern. The earliest forms of the character for ‘endings’ (which seems to be a more complicated one) shows the ends of threads, tied off.

(You can scroll down the page at Richard Sears’ site to find the most ancient versions of the characters, older even than Yi. If, like me, you find it wonderful to be able to see all these together and compare, please scroll back up again to the ‘donate’ button at the top right, and help to keep the site online!)

Hard to keep a hold on those initial, clear-cut patterns once everything is in flux – and the noble one’s response is actually not to concentrate on the patterns, but on how they might unravel:

‘Stream dwells above fire. Already across.
A noble one reflects on distress and prepares to defend against it.’

She projects her inner clarity into the flow of change and imagines – feels in her heart, according to the characters for ‘reflect‘ and ‘distress‘ – what could go wrong. In this way she prepares, keeps pace – keeps on beginning, in fact.

From this it might follow that when a hexagram changes to 63, the moving line or lines involved represent how the primary hexagram is a process already underway, with its own momentum, like standing on a conveyor belt.

Here are the six lines that point towards Hexagram 63 individually -

39.1
‘Going on, limping; coming back, praise.’
5.2
‘Waiting on the sands,
There are small words.
In the end, good fortune.’
3.3
‘Pursuing a stag with no forester,
Simply entering into the centre of the forest.
A noble one reads the subtle signs and sets this aside.
Going on: shame.’
49.4
‘Regrets vanish, there is truth and confidence.
Changing mandate, good fortune.’
36.5
‘Prince Ji’s brightness hidden.
Constancy bears fruit.’
37.6
‘With truth and confidence like authority.
In the end, good fortune.’

What do you think? I can see how the sands of 5.2 are already moving, leaving no firm place to stand, or how the changing mandate indicates revolution is already underway… but I’m finding it trickier to see a connection at 39.1 or 37.6.