Hilary Barrett, I Ching

I call the hexagrams that are naturally related to the cast hexagram, regardless of its changing lines, ‘hexagrams of context’. They make an extended family of contrasts and sources. (Those simple old human ways of understanding something – seeing what it isn’t, and telling its stories – work just as well with hexagrams.)

Hexagram 46 isn’t Hexagram 45 -

- except that, if you turn round and come at it from the opposite direction, it is after all…

That is, these two are an inverse pair: two perspectives on the same pattern of lines. Hexagram 45 has its two solid lines high up in the outer trigram, a Gathering of meaning, resource and dedication all focussed into one powerful moment. The king is present in the temple, the great people can be seen, great offerings are made, there is a direction to go…

…and this naturally tends to turn around, with the solid lines internalised, and the sense of being part of something significant translating into a desire to go somewhere significant, to offer something. The Xugua (Sequence) says,

‘Assembling and moving higher is called pushing upward, and so pushing upward follows.’

This is what is called pushing upward – the sequence follows just from naming the essence of the gathering. There’s a sense that the gathering contains the aspiration within it (‘fruitful to have a direction to go’), and 46 gives it expression. It’s the story we see unfold when a whole group of people all aiming for the same thing starts to move, or when you align your whole self – all the ‘little selves’ – towards a single purpose, and then naturally find yourself in motion. Investing and identifying creates its own momentum.

Receiving Hexagram 46, you look at Hexagram 45 both for this broader sense of story from the Sequence, and also for the ‘this is not that’ insight from the contrasting pair.

The contrast within each pair of hexagrams is summed up in the Zagua (contrasting hexagrams):

‘Gathering means assembling; Pushing Upward means not coming back.’

That gives you a simple idea of the dynamics of the thing: you could represent Gathering with a lot of lines spiralling inward towards a focus, and Pushing Upward with one broad arrow pointing upwards. If you receive Hexagram 46, you don’t have to try to uphold a great meaning, all pooled into a single reservoir. You can travel one step at a time.

Sometimes that comes as a relief: I’m only expected to take one step, not leap the mountain in a single bound. But it can also be disconcerting, as it speaks of real commitment. (You can imagine that deciding to climb to an altar to make an offering, and then deciding it’s too much like hard work and turning back would not be the done thing.)

So some people receive 46 and say, ‘What, all that?’ (or ‘what, no helicopter ride?’) and realise they don’t want to start. Especially when it’s unchanging, Hexagram 46 invites some questions about the ascent: is this something you can commit to wholeheartedly? What are you pushing up towards -  and is that somewhere you want to be so much that you’ll undertake the climb? Which wall is this ladder leaning against anyway?

And this brings us to the hidden core of 46, its nuclear hexagram: 54, the Marrying Maiden. (A nuclear hexagram is found by ‘unpacking’ the original hexagram’s inner lines – 2345 – into a full hexagram – 234,345.) Pushing upward contains a drive towards relationship and connection, a desire to participate in something bigger. And the ultimate experience of participation in something bigger would be finding you have become part of something much too big for you, you’re relatively much smaller than you’ve been used to, and your own will and intention are of no consequence. So – apparently paradoxically – at the heart of all the purpose and drive of 46 is the girl who finds that ‘to set out to bring order means a pitfall, and no direction bears fruit.’ For example, you get the dream job but find it overwhelmingly stressful, and hard on your self-esteem.

(The other hexagrams with 54 as nuclear are 11, 18 and 26. They have in common this inner experience of getting out of your depth – by no means always a bad thing.)

(And speaking of going one step at a time and getting utterly out of your depth – I think there’s another post’s worth of hexagrams of context to write before I start on the moving lines, post-apocalyptically.)

The trigrams of Hexagram 46 seem to embody its nature particularly clearly.

Earth

contains wood

- a straightforward picture of a germinating seed.

The Image says:

‘Centre of the earth gives birth to wood. Pushing upward.
A noble one with patient character,
Builds up small things to attain the high and great.’

The authors of the Image were always quite deliberate in the words they chose to express inner and outer trigrams. Wood isn’t merely below or inside earth, but at its centre; it doesn’t just ‘happen’, but earth ‘gives birth to’ it. (The verb is elegantly chosen, too: its character originally shows a growing plant.)

Having an inner nature of xun, wood, suggests an inner tendency to move and grow, finding a way round or through. It isn’t forced; it does not occasion resistance. It’s instinctive, gentle, natural.

The work of the hexagram, exemplified by the noble one, is to turn an earth-like attention to this deep growing nature.  The noble one has patient de – that multifaceted word that means not just a tamely abstract ‘virtue’ but also the power of intrinsic character. Patient de is the power to obey and follow along in a given direction: earth’s power, which opens space for growth and provides what is needed. It acts to allow a whole potential to be realised.

(You can see kun doing the same work in other hexagrams where it’s the outer trigram: closing borders in 24, accepting and nurturing in 7, supporting and protecting in 11… in each case, providing for the particular needs of the inner trigram.)

The noble one with earth-de can accumulate small things to attain something great. In readings, this hexagram counteracts that human tendency to want to have done it all already, as soon as we think of it – a tendency that can lead to discounting or altogether rejecting the first signs of growth because it’s ‘not enough’ (not big enough, not far enough, not good enough…). Which makes about as much sense as crushing a seedling’s first shoot because it’s not an oak tree. You only get a pile of grain (the original meaning of ‘accumulate’) by piling up grains; when climbing a mountain, you can’t miss out the first step.

And in the spirit of the hexagram, I’ll publish just this little post, and climb into moving lines and hexagrams of context later…

Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward, has to do with step-by-step progress onward and upward, and the effort of the climb. It also has to do with offerings: Harmen, in his fascinating article on the hexagram, says,

“Sheng was the name of a certain sacrifice, and because of the close resemblance between the old forms of sheng and dou, I believe that sheng could refer to a sacrifice made to the constellation beidou [the Big Dipper].”

He also mentions that the name of this hexagram in both Fuyang and Mawangdui manuscripts is a homophone of the received name, and means to make an offering at a high place – related to the ancient tradition of climbing a sacred mountain to make an offering.

So Hexagram 46 has to do not just with progress but with the desire for connection and participation at a higher level – with the implication that to reach that level, you need to do the work, and climb.

In readings over the years at the I Ching Community, Hexagram 46 has described the desire for more fulfilling work, for a fuller relationship (or for marriage), for democracy and social change. It’s pointed to the need to embark on a project, make progress, take steps to improve one’s financial situation.

What also comes across clearly, browsing through past threads, is that Pushing Upward isn’t only about quantitative change, but also qualitative – about experiencing the deeper meaning of a situation, not reducing it to numbers. (‘The rent bill’ actually represents a relationship with the landlord; ‘the job’ actually represents finding your work in the world.) And as an inner experience, 46 can translate into a desire to talk to someone, connect with something – even just to be in motion (especially in the darkness of line 6).

There’s an offering to be made; you need to climb the mountain to make the offering. A big lesson of the hexagram is that you can’t teleport to the top of the mountain; the only way up is one step at a time.

The oracle for Pushing Upward is something like a diagram of the engine that can make such an ascent:

‘Pushing upward, creating success from the source.
Make use of seeing great people.
Do not worry.
Set forth to the south, good fortune.’

There’s a powerful internal logic to this. It begins with yuan heng, ‘from the source, creating success’, which taps into the deep original energy of inspiration and develops a two-way flow, through offering (an early meaning of heng), between human work and spiritual source.

Then the advice is to make use of seeing great people. It seems to me that while yuan heng propels you into movement, seeing the great people pulls you onward. ‘Make use of’ emphasises that this vision has a power you can apply in your climb.

As ever, the  great people can be one or many, seen inwardly or outwardly; they can provide help, guidance or inspiration. In Pushing Upward, though, I think their most important ‘use’ is as a model; to see the great people here is to have the possibility of success in sight, and a more vivid, personal sense of relationship to the goal.

Next – ‘don’t worry.’ This needs saying, as it’s natural to worry when setting out on a climb. Steep slopes limit how far you can see;  you can’t anticipate the path ahead, and have no tangible sign you can in fact climb all the way. Anxiety presses in – especially at lines 3 and 6 – and Yi’s simple imperative helps.

And finally, good fortune in marching out to the south.  ‘Marching out’, or ‘setting out to bring order’, is quite often not a good idea in the Yijing: your ideas of how things should be ordered are not always fitting. But this march to the south – the line starts with ‘south’, indicating that you point yourself in the right direction first, and then set out – is clearly,  unambiguously blessed. So what does it mean to go south?

Harmen’s article establishes a connection between the name of Hexagram 46 and beidou, the Northern Ladle or Big Dipper, which by Han times was said to ‘serve as the chariot of the emperor’ and have a governing role in the heavens, and which was already the recipient of sacrifices at the time when this hexagram text was written.

Then there’s this quotation from The “South” in Chinese History, by Kwok (thanks to Charly at the I Ching Community for finding this!):

“To the extent that early Chinese cosmology was intricately involved in conceptions and theories of kingship, often invoked to lend earthly rule cosmic sanction, the ruler on earth took on the position of the North Polar Star and was also known as the nanmianjun (south-facing ruler). …Facing south has become not only propitious in the celestial and terrestrial affairs of life itself, but also a position of enormous honor, often, in social situations, offered to the guest of honor.”

While the North Polar star isn’t part of the Big Dipper, it’s located in the night sky by extrapolating a line from two of the Dipper’s stars. So all this might provide some contextual clues: if you adopt the position of the North Polar Star, or if you ride in the Dipper-chariot, then you would travel south. And in this way, you would at the very least have the most honoured position, and you might well be the ruler. (The King is in the temple of the paired hexagram, 45, and makes offerings in 46.4.)

You are lined up with the stars and the compass; by implication, you are aligned rightly; your undertaking is in harmony with cosmic order. This doesn’t come with guarantees that it will work out as you have in mind – it remains true that the path is too steep for you to see very far along it – but your essential direction is good and true. And so the oracle as a whole carries a great motivational charge – Yi’s best ‘pep talk’:

‘Pushing upward, creating success from the source.
Make use of seeing great people.
Do not worry.
Set forth to the south, good fortune.’

If you click through to http://www.ichinglivingchange.org/, you’ll find a series of four posts on the US election. I wanted just to mention them here, as I think they’re intriguing readings and worth a closer look.

Here are Stephen’s questions and Yi’s answers:

What is American hiding?
56.3.5.6 changing to 45 – the Traveller’s Gathering

(A search for its role in the world, drawing on a sense of history, continuity and shared values? A nasty tendency to self-destruction – through undermining relationships with other nations? or in other ways?)

What is Romney hiding?
47.1 changing to 58 – Oppression’s Opening

(Stephen points out the apparent allusion to Romney’s comment on the ’47%’; I don’t really want to speculate about the line.)

What is Obama hiding?
45.2.3.5 to 32 – Gathering Lasting

(Those lines seem beguilingly easy to interpret, don’t they? 45 is full of emotion, none of which would be regarded as very ‘presidential’, all of which needs hiding. The true desire to make an offering while knowing how small it is in the greater scheme of things; intense vulnerability, lamenting all that doesn’t work; being the incumbent, in the ruling position, yet lacking trust (self-trust?). But then – ‘from the source, ever-flowing constancy, regrets vanish.’)

What will happen on election day?
3.3 to 63 – Sprouting, Already Across

(I do wonder whether Yi isn’t playing with us, with 3.3. It sounds as though American voters will just barely manage to avoid losing sight of the reality of the situation, running heedlessly after their desires and getting hopelessly lost. So to turn this reading into a prediction of the outcome, we only need to know which candidate is encouraging that headlong dash into the forest. And then in support of the interpretation, maybe also identify the ‘Demon Country’ in the fan yao and its pair!

I see Stephen has deliberately not undertaken this reading as prediction, and focuses on the nuclear hexagram and its ‘family’ rather than the moving line, looking for inner processes rather than outcomes.)

Of course it’s impossible to interpret any of these without political opinion shining through – and mine from over here in the UK is not at all well-informed.

By the way, we also have a forum thread on the subject.

Or annual readings, or readings for the season or even just for the day… all the readings where the question is just,

‘What do I need to be aware of for this period of time?’
or maybe just,
‘Advice?’

You might have some ongoing issues in mind – we usually have, after all – but you’re not asking about any of them specifically. You’re just asking for a guiding principle, something to carry in awareness as you go about daily life.

What they’re no good for

Let’s start with what these readings aren’t good for. First, they’re no replacement for asking direct questions about a specific decision. If you need to decide whether to do X or Y, just ask ‘What if I did X?’ and ‘What if I did Y?’. Be direct, be straightforward; ask what you need to know. Trying to apply general, open readings to specific decisions is pretty much a recipe for muddle and frustration – especially the ‘but which option is this referring to?’ kind.

And more generally… I wouldn’t rely on an open reading for immediate clarity. My weekly reading does have an immediate effect: it sets the tone for the coming week, often rewriting my priorities and plans for me. (I’ve taken to doing the planning after the reading!) But I wouldn’t expect to come to a true understanding of the reading until the end of the week, with the benefit of hindsight.

(I was listening the other day to an online interview with Stephen Karcher. He said that if you have perfect clarity as soon as you cast a reading, any reading, you’re doing it wrong. The reading is supposed to confuse you at first. I don’t know if that’s absolutely always true, but it’s a good principle, I think, and a great antidote to the fear that ‘it hasn’t worked’ if understanding isn’t immediate.)

Another thing these readings aren’t good for: a precise description of a fixed period of time. A weekly reading, for me, says something more like, ‘Here’s an ongoing process that’s becoming especially relevant now, so pay attention.’ I certainly don’t discard it as irrelevant on day 8: it’s in the journal, so I do my best to refer back to it and build on it. (This is why I don’t do daily readings: I just couldn’t keep up.)

Annual readings are tricky in a whole other way. Mine for this year is 56 changing to 23, of all things. It’d be counterproductive, at best, to treat that as a prediction. For me it’s more of an underlying theme and ‘stuff to work on’.

What they are good for

Weekly readings – annual, seasonal and daily ones, too – are good for three things: learning, guidance in crisis, and awareness.

Learning

This is one thing that’s always true: weekly readings always mean learning, at least if I’m paying attention. It goes two ways: the readings give me a better chance of understanding and learning from experience, and experience provides me with new illustrations of the hexagrams and lines.

Also, the readings evolve from one week to the next, and that nudges me to move on. Last week, for instance, one of my moving lines was 9.3:

‘A cart losing its wheel spokes.
Husband and wife avert their eyes.’

Amongst other things, I saw how the wheels came off on various things I’d promised myself I’d do, and the line suggests to me that this is connected with a breakdown in internal communication in the face of great truth (zhi gua 61). My reading for this week begins with Hexagram 53, Gradual Development: slow and steady progress towards marriage and (re)union. I feel it’s inviting me to start moving towards an inner reconnection.

Guidance in crisis

Some things just happen, and don’t leave you time to ask Yi about them. At such times, I’ve found very often a recent reading talks to me and sustains me. Of course, that doesn’t have to be an open reading-for-the-time, but in practice it often is, perhaps because those readings represent a clear, uncluttered invitation to provide what I need, not just what I’m aware of needing.

Awareness

I need a new metaphor for this for the digital age… but an open reading works a lot like tuning a radio. It takes your attention, hones it and gives it focus, so you’re ready to receive messages more clearly. Then the messages flow in, through events, conversations, dreams, reflections, synchronicities. You turn on the radio and hear commentary on your moving line. Or you notice first that the reading describes one situation in your life, then that it also describes another… and then you start to see how these two experiences are images of one another, each reflecting light into the other’s mysteries. Experience expands into new dimensions and full colour.

Hm… I see this is a theme I come back to quite a bit. For instance here’s a post from 2008 about divination for awareness, and this more recent post that mentions a couple of weekly readings.

I’ve been looking at the patterns that take shape within the ‘container’ formed by hexagrams 3 and 50, and wondering what they might mean. Here’s a bit more wondering.

It looks as though hexagrams 3 and 50, living energies and vessel, form a mould, within which an individual life (or culture, or way of living) can be cast: become embodied, take shape, become real.

So then… what might be said about the nature of the stuff that takes shape? It seems to make sense to look at the parts of it nearest to the mould, where the traces of its imprint are more distinct:

• Hexagrams 5 and 6 mirroring 47 and 48 (differing by a single line at the outer boundary, 1/6)
• Hexagrams 7 and 8 mirroring 46 and 45 (again, differing by a single line, this time at the inner threshold of lines 3/4)
• Hexagrams 9 and 10, mirroring 44 and 43 (exchanged trigrams, with the single open line at 3/4 or 1/6)

5/6 and 47/48 share a very simple theme: the need for water, when and where it can be used. Without this, nothing can be created. On the outer edge of this set in particular, there’s water everywhere: in the name of Hexagram 5, where the character shows falling rain; underfoot in bogs, sands and mud, in the Well, and of course in the trigrams themselves. 6 and 47 have more to say about deprivation and struggle for resources. To be able to work with earth – to grow crops or shape moulds – we first need water. So we start at 5.1 – the line that connects with 48 – by going to the altar mound on the outskirts to make offerings for good weather.

7/8 and 45/46 deal with human resources, choice and will. The army, the chosen union, the gathering, the concerted effort to push upward; kings, generals, hunts, offerings, emotion. The overarching theme is of bringing the power of humanity to bear. 8.4 ‘seeks union outside’ to find the breadth and depth that’s needed, and reaches out as far as 45 – where in 45.4 its desire to belong and be of service contributes to ‘great good fortune, no mistake.’

9/10 and 43/44 are connected in a different way: not by a single changing line, but by an exchange of trigrams. Xun (wind/wood) and dui (lake), mediators and messengers, move around the trigram qian, heaven, seeking to create a relationship with the great heavenly powers. We need the clouds to bring rain, we try to get close to the tiger or the ancestral spirits; try, perhaps, to live like Yu the Great with the exigencies of heaven’s command. Following tigers, or maybe wrestling with angels – not easy. It’s far from obvious how to cope with 44′s powerful woman, or even with the frustrations of Small Taming.

Well… in a book of hexagrams, it seems good to pause after three sets of two. In a single hexagram, there are three sets of two lines: the first two for earth, the central two for humanity, and then heaven. And what about the themes of these three sets of two pairs within the casting mould? Hmmm…

It seems to me that these three sets of hexagrams evoke the three great resources needed for a successful casting: natural resources, human commitment, and spiritual connection. That would suggest that receiving one of these hexagrams in a reading carries a distinct significance: you’re engaged in creating a whole, and at this time you need to work with this resource as a part of the whole.

The nature of this depends on where you are, of course: the first decade of the Yijing shows a much simpler experience than its fifth. Everything from hexagram 5 to 10 has that sense of a first encounter, whereas the 40s show the depths and subtleties of an established culture. It’s the difference between rainfall and the well, or between Yu’s first gathering after the floods and the great offerings at the temple, or between the dangers of following a tiger through the forest and standing up in the king’s court.

What can come after earth, humanity and heaven? Hexagrams 11 and 12: the first big natural ‘punctuation mark’ of the Yi, the first complementary and inverted pair (what Schorre and Dunne call a ‘River Crossing’), and the mixing of hexagrams 1 and 2. And towards the other face of the casting, hexagrams 41 and 42, Decrease and Increase. Maybe what comes next is the dance of relationship through ritual, and an awareness of cycles?

(More questions than answers from this mould-casting pattern, in the end…

Do all the lines connecting those outer layers – 5.1, 48.1, 6.6, 47.6, 7.3, 46.3, 8.4, 45.4 – have more in common? And what about the hexagrams outside the mould, 1-2 and 51-64? Are they simply ‘outside’, beyond? Are they shaping rather than shaped?

What are the chances they’ll run out of questions about Yi any time in the next 3,000 years?)

… what does it mean for readings?

That’s what an aggravatingly clear-sighted friend asked when I started enthusing at her about the beautiful ‘casting’ structure between hexagrams 3 and 50. And I suppose it’s not an unreasonable question… ;)

Maybe one day it’ll mean I routinely consider the matching hexagram from the other side of the metal as part of a hexagram’s meaning, so no reading with 39-40 is complete without giving thought to 13-14… but not as yet, certainly!
So far, all it means for me is a difference in how I see individual hexagrams that seem particularly important in the pattern. For instance, in the liquid centre of the metal, Hexagram 26, Great Taming -

- takes on a new dynamism if I think of it as the interaction between the power of liquid metal within and the clay mould outside. The mould is light, dull, perhaps brittle; the metal is vivid, mobile, too dangerous even to get close to – and yet, like the accumulated strength of human cultural knowledge, the mould contains and shapes the metal and turns it to use.

The central (median) point between 3 and 50 is, strictly speaking, 26 and a half, so the ‘centre’ is Hexagrams 26 and 27. And 27, Nourishment -

- looks to me now like the creation of the empty mould: strength on the outside that determines the shape that will emerge. Better take a good, long and imaginative look at that mould now, to form a clear mental image of what will emerge from it.

Then hexagram 28, Great Exceeding or Great Transition -

- is – aptly enough – just off-centre. And that looks to me like the strong liquid metal taking shape within the mould, or maybe threatening to overflow it, or through excess pressure to crack the thin layer of clay at lines 1 and 6. The marriages at lines 2 and 5 do seem to be pressing hard into the mould of expectations.