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.

Then he tells the story of a young man who was also ‘pure’ and child-like, who lived a very high-minded, principled life, believed entirely in freedom in relationships – and was overwhelmed by intense jealous rage, which alarmed him greatly as such possessiveness ‘wasn’t like him’ at all. Rather than seek to ‘solve’ and eliminate this jealousy, Moore spent time listening to it:

“The idea was to let it reveal itself, to allow it to become more rather than less, and thus lose some of its compulsion.”

There is a lot more to this part of Moore’s book – not just about jealousy, but more about understanding such emotions in mythological terms rather than just as personal faults and ‘insecurities’. All fascinating, and makes me want to re-read the whole thing.

But all I wanted to write about here was what this reminded me of in the Yijing. Bringing out the hidden compulsion, giving it more space and more presence, listening to the spirit that’s angered by neglect before it overwhelms you… yes, that would be hexagram 18. (The chapter is even called ‘Jealousy and Envy: Healing Poisons‘.)

And the young man who wants to remain pure and child-like rather than engage with the complexities of adulthood? How about looking across to the complement and pair of Corruption, the place it somehow ‘comes from’, Following? Hexagram 17, line 2:

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

Yi, unlike generations of commentators, doesn’t say whether this is a good or a bad idea, much less why this happens. It’s just that at the inner centre of Following, when reaching out for relationship, when motivated by Opening (the zhi gua, 58), it happens.

Then the paired line, responding to this one, is 18.5 –
‘Ancestral father’s corruption.
Use praise.’
– and that sounds remarkably like Moore’s therapeutic response: ‘using praise’ and gentle power of Hexagram 57 to penetrate to the heart of things without awakening antagonism.

(“What if you tried to learn something from your jealousy,” Moore asked the young man, “like some value in being less open? Maybe you need to be less tolerant in life in general.”)

This naturally sends me looking for more patterns – could it be that each pair of lines in 17-18 is showing a hidden inner motivator and a response that makes it conscious?

Well no, it couldn’t – nothing so obvious or formulaic. Different line positions have different characters, and a conversation between line 2 and line 5 is going to look more like a conversation between client and therapist than, say, a conversation between 3 and 4:

‘Bound to the mature man,
Letting the small child go.
Following, there is quest and gain.
Settling with constancy bears fruit.’
‘Comfortable with the father’s corruption.
Going on sees shame.’

Those two seem like two ways of identifying what’s ‘good enough’. As a reason to step across the threshold into action, at line 3, it bears fruit; as a reason not to change anything, it really doesn’t.

So… no easy pattern here. But this has all got me noticing something else : how many of 17′s line texts are about a choice. An official has a change of heart; you choose the small child, or the mature man; you can choose between following to make a catch rather than holding to the path with clarity. Only the upper two lines, the ones you might expect to be more awake and aware, have just a single thing to follow.

I think this reflects how puzzlingly multi-faceted 17 is in reading experiences: sometimes it’s a state of effortless flow, sometimes it demands a quite frustrating amount of patience, and sometimes the ‘following’ becomes more of a pursuit. All of these utterly different experiences have in common the basic dynamic of ‘going with the flow’, of consenting to it. Then what follows depends on what kind of ‘flow’ you’re connected with: a swift flow of synchronicities or a glacial one too slow to perceive, or the currents of your own desires. Then it no longer feels like ‘consent’ at all, but more like a hunt.

So… the lines, as 17′s junctions and points of change, contain choices. What will you tune into? Which current will you flow with? And the zhi gua for each line suggests what you’re listening to, what’s guiding and moving you, and maybe what choices you’re presented with. (And incidentally… the pathway from 17.2 leads through 58 and 57, and Moore’s story leads through Aphrodite and Artemis…)

This is what happens when reading with hexagram eyes – lots of scattered ideas, some of which might (or might not) lead somewhere. Later. Maybe.

Hexagrams 53 and 54, Gradual Advance and the Marrying Maiden, are what Stephen Karcher calls ‘The Great Marriages’. So what does ‘marriage’ mean?

To a large extent, that depends on your perspective: in old China, marriage for the man means opening his home to a newcomer and all the change she will bring, while marriage for the woman (as in this hexagram pair) means coming home into a new place. Those are two quite different experiences that work quite differently as images in readings. But in the most general terms, marriage means joining, becoming part of something larger than you are, to some extent merging your identity into it, so that your growth and its growth coincide. And ongoing growth and movement is a core theme for Hexagram 53: the geese are still in flight in the sixth line, and the commentary on the Oracle says, ‘Keeping still and penetrating: this makes the movement inexhaustible.’

Of course, this is a fascinating hexagram to receive about a relationship – and of course, it also describes many other things: how a career is transformed through a new job; how a business evolves through growing relationships; how someone ‘comes home’ into health, as a whole, integrated individual. All kinds of journey-growth-transformation in joining-union-homecoming – all kinds of marriage.

Hexagrams 53 and 54 are both about a woman’s marriage: coming into a new and bigger place, which is also coming home. They’re an inverse pair, two perspectives on the same experience. (To see what I mean, draw hexagram 53, and turn the paper through 180 degrees so you’re looking at it from the other end . ) They’re also a complementary pair, polar opposite experiences that fit together to create something complete. You can be compelled to change by being transplanted, like the marrying maiden, into something you’re not ready for and must grow into. Or you can evolve as part of a situation that evolves with you - though naturally this has to happen at the pace of the slowest partner or element in the union:

‘Gradual Progress: the marrying woman waits for the man to act.’

says the Zagua. (This sometimes means waiting for another person, sometimes waiting for some part of yourself to catch up.) Without this waiting, the tremendous gradualness of Hexagram 53, it couldn’t be a marriage at all. ‘Constancy bears fruit’ because the journey is so gradual that it’s easy (not least in our instant-gratification culture) to forget where we’re going, or imagine that we’re making no progress at all.

On the face of it, it seems odd that the marriages would come where they do in the Sequence. We undergo Radical Change and revolution; the old is overthrown, the new is established as the Vessel is cast. We experience this as Shock and respond with Stilling. Next there will be the eclipse at Feng and the Mandate of Heaven – but first, interspersed abruptly into all this epic historical drama, there are marriages. At 53.3, we even get an unexpected insight into these grand military campaigns from a more human perspective:

‘The wild geese gradually progress to the high plateau.
The husband marches out and does not return,
The wife is pregnant, but does not raise the child.
Pitfall.
Fruitful to resist outlaws.’

The husband has marched out to war (it’s the same character I usually translate as ‘setting out to bring order’), and the wife is left alone. We’re in the territory of many soldiers’ laments in the Shijing, as they trudge in the dust behind the carts, wondering who will feed their families. The best anyone can do is to resist outlaws – fight off bandits, and hence fight to stay within the fabric of marriage and society, even as it’s stressed to its limits.

So on the one hand Hexagram 53 is an abrupt switch into domesticity… and on the other hand, maybe not so abrupt or strange, if you think of how the eldest son works through Shock to restore a sense of continuity, and how family is its ultimate guarantee.

This hexagram’s traditionally associated with the ceremonial preparations that lead up to marriage – only, if you look at the moving lines, it’s clearly also about the course of the marriage itself. Successful child-rearing is supremely important: it maintains the chain of connections from the living world through the ancestral spirits to heaven.

It seems as though the journey through the lines is travelling in the same direction, from the shore to the high plateau and beyond. The high plateau is no place for geese to live, of course, and so in the third line it’s associated with the disastrous failure to raise the child. But in the sixth line, I imagine we have a couple who have travelled beyond childbearing age. ‘Their feathers can be used to perform the sacred dances. Good fortune.’ Richard Rutt says this is a ‘ritual dance before the ancestral shrine.’ And Bradford Hatcher says, ‘See the Buddhist Heart Sutra’s line: gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. Gone, gone, gone beyond, completely gone beyond: waking up: hooray!’

Gradual Advance is a steady flow, through to its objective and beyond. You can see from the name of the hexagram, the old Chinese character, that it isn’t a headlong rush:

LiSe explains the components: the flowing water, the wheel, and the channel cut for the water to flow through. Running water is a potent force – flowing free, it can sweep away all you have; channelled, it brings life and power. Or as Ernest Thompson Seton (one of my favourite authors growing up) puts it:

“There is magic in running water. Who does not know it and feel it? The railroad builder fearlessly throws his bank across the wide bog or lake, or the sea itself, but the tiniest rill of running water he treats with great respect, studies its wish and its way and gives it all it seems to ask.”

Marriage is a ‘channel’ itself:

“The love between man and woman that marriage engendered and the emotions and jealousies it provoked was considered a potent and dangerous emotion that doubled the creative force of the cosmos, the connection between Heaven and Earth. It was channelled and articulated in the marriage rites and the River-Mountain festivals and was seen as an image of the fundamental process of Change.”

This is from Karcher’s Total I Ching, and I think it’s an important aspect of 53: we’re channelling a potent, potentially destructive moving force into creative and life-sustaining ways. Other hexagrams also talk about handling and responding to great energies (10 and 11 come to mind), but 53 lays especial emphasis on how gradual this is, so that it becomes a journey, and ‘constancy bears fruit.’

The Image also talks about a gradual change:

‘On the mountain is a tree. Gradual advance.
A noble one abides in virtuous character and improves the ordinary.’

The noble one abides like the mountain and grows in influence like the tree.

“The tree on the mountain grows very slowly compared to the one in the valley; it needs to put down strong roots. As it grows, it creates a micro-habitat around it, gradually, subtly changing the nature of its environment. The noble one’s good character has the same effect, causing a gradual evolution in the habits of ordinary life. Inwardly as still and firm as the mountain, she settles into her high standards as if into a home, and reaches out in kindness like a growing tree.”

(That’s from my own book – I can’t think of much to add just yet!)

It’s interesting to compare this to the hexagram of betrothal: 31, Influence. (31, for the record, is not paired with its complementary hexagram, but it is formed of complementary trigrams, which is a whole other subject.) It also talks of marriage, but from the male perspective: ‘taking a woman, good fortune.’ And it also has an inner mountain, which allows space for the lake above it – or you could say that the lake opens up the mountain, so the noble one ‘accepts people with emptiness.’ Hexagram 53 is the woman’s marriage, integrating with the new place, and its outer trigram is xun: it puts down roots into the mountain, or transforms the mountain (inherited from Hexagram 52) into organic matter, turning independence into growth through connection.

Enough musings for now. Thoughts?

One tiny example… you know how most of the hexagrams’ Images tell you what the ‘noble one’ would do? And then there are three that tell you about the prince, and seven that tell you about the ancient kings. (I’m sure that if someone looked hard enough, they’d find the reason behind all these choices.) And then there is just one hexagram that does something different:

‘Mountain rests on the earth. Stripping Away.
The heights are generous, and there are tranquil homes below.’

Literally, this just says ‘above thus generous, below tranquil homes’: it uses the simple words for ‘above’ and ‘below’, generally used to describe the positions of the trigrams. Of course, it’s usual to translate this as ‘superiors’ or ‘those above’, so we can understand it as social commentary about how a stratified society can function smoothly – but it doesn’t actually mention any people.

Perhaps this is talking about how the ruling class needs to keep the underclass pacified with generosity to avoid social instability, or perhaps it’s talking about the flow of water and minerals from the always-eroding mountain down into the valley. Perhaps (as Wilhelm says in Book III) it’s a picture of how to avoid Stripping Away, or perhaps it’s a picture of how Stripping Away is a constant natural process, and not a disaster after all.

But however you interpret this, this is the only Image with no human figure to imitate or become. It’s depersonalised: there’s nothing to model yourself on but a landscape – or just relative positions within a landscape. And if you think about it, this makes absolute sense: if you’re undergoing Stripping Away, this is not a time to think about the person you might become, what you aspire to or could grow into. It’s fruitless to have a direction to go, and so that sage who wrote the Image is careful not to suggest a direction. Instead there is just a mountain on the earth, and generosity and tranquility, and ongoing change as a way of being.

Here’s one I can share, though…

This morning I picked up a book to read over breakfast before getting started on the first reading of the day, and opened it to this quotation from Rilke:

“I want to beg you… to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

What do you suppose was the unchanging hexagram in the first reading I worked on? I’ll give you about one guess .