The Fourth Insight and Hexagram 6

It’s a pervasive character, this I Ching – its way of thinking gets everywhere. Nowadays I find that given a book and a pencil, I’ll be jotting hexagrams in the margins to remind myself of the main ideas.

Here’s one that brings out the pencil – the Fourth Insight from James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy:

“The Struggle for Power
Too often humans cut themselves off from the greater source of this energy and so feel weak and insecure. To gain energy we tend to manipulate or force others to give us attention and thus energy. When we successfully dominate others in this way, we feel more powerful, but they are left weakened and often fight back. Competition for scarce, human energy is the cause of all conflict between people.”

In the margin:

and

The Sequence from Hexagram 5, Waiting, to Hexagram 6, says that,

‘Eating and drinking are bound to mean conflict, and so Conflict follows.’

It’s worth sitting up and taking notice of this. In Hexagram 5, we waited, attended and prepared to receive what we need. Hexagram 6 is the fight for those resources.

In readings, Hexagram 6 is a cue to look for the kind of competition for energy that Redfield is talking about: trying to lay claim to the ‘nourishment’ of attention. Behind the bitter, smarting sense of injustice there is very often a desperate need for recognition: not just to be right, but to be acknowledged as right.

(The complementary hexagram with 6 – the one with every line changed to its opposite – is 36, Brightness Hiding. This is what it feels like to be on the wrong side of someone else’s struggle for power, however petty. We’ve probably all met the individual who enjoy whatever small power their position gives them over us just a bit too much – and probably also felt quite disproportionately hurt by them. But then it doesn’t feel as if it’s about the parking ticket any more; it’s about your light being injured.)

The message of Hexagram 6 is that arguing, by itself, doesn’t usually get the desired result. Redfield would go along with this: grabbing energy from other people, strengthening oneself at another person’s expense, is not a sustainable solution. It’s the competitive mindset, which is also a scarcity mindset (‘if I’m to get more, you must have less; for me to be right, you must be wrong’), and it’s summed up in 6.6:

“Maybe rewarded with a money belt,
By the end of the morning, stripped of it three times.”

Redfield says that even if someone willingly gives you their energy, this can’t last.

The basic issue behind conflict is this sense of scarcity. Why does energy seem scarce? The Judgement of Hexagram 6 says that ‘sincerity and truth is obstructed’. ‘Sincerity and truth’ is fu, which indicates absolute presence and an unshakable grasp on the present moment, a source of single-minded confidence. This is ‘blocked’, like stopping up a hole: it’s as if the flow of energy and communication is choked off. The Zagua sums it up: ‘Conflict means not connecting’.

So energy seems scarce because the real flow of it is blocked. Once again, Redfield would agree:

“The Message of the Mystics
Insecurity and violence end when we experience an inner connection with divine energy within, a connection described by mystics of all traditions.”

Now Yi may not talk in so many words about mystical experience, but it does have its own language to describe a connection with the divine. Ming, the Mandate, is a charge from Heaven: both a state of connection, a weighty responsibility, and a true source of power. In Hexagram 6, the Mandate draws near – or you draw near to it – and because you are given a purpose bigger than your own needs, it becomes possible to turn your back on the unwinnable argument and settle down:

‘Not in control of the argument,
Turning back, approaching mandate.
Renouncing, settling peacefully.
Constancy, good fortune.’

The intriguing thing about Hexagram 6 is that Yi never implies you shouldn’t engage in conflict because you’re wrong. Its orientation is purely and simply practical: you can be completely in the right, and still not be able to win the argument, and so you need to find other ways.

Trying to use conflict as a strategy to ‘complete’ anything is ill-omened. Arguing isn’t a way to decide things, or a way to win. But nonetheless, it has a creative potential that Redfield maybe missed: to see that the status quo is fundamentally wrong can be the beginning of change. I believe this is what’s happening in line 5, the only line of the six where arguing itself is said to lead to good fortune. This line is connected with Hexagram 64, Not Yet Across: a time to consider commitment, to keep one’s ears pricked and listening for changing currents, to think about beginning a journey. Arguing can be a source of good fortune if and only if we use it as an opening, in the full knowledge that there’s no such thing as a permanent settlement. Which is exactly how the noble one uses the dynamics of Conflict in the Daxiang:
‘Heaven joining with stream, contradictory movements. Conflict.
The noble one, starting up new work, ponders the beginning.’