Earth revealing heaven

It was some time after I thought I’d ‘completed’ my hexagram commentary to contribute to Change Circle‘s WikiWing when I realised there was a line I’d completely forgotten. Hexagram 2, ‘using sixes’: the text that’s read when every line is moving, and Hexagram 2 changes towards Hexagram 1.

‘Harvest from ever-flowing constancy.’

If you use the yarrow method of consulting, or a method with yarrow odds – as I do – then this is the answer you are least likely to receive. And in fact, in all these years of divining for myself and hundreds of other people, I’ve yet to receive it. (If you have experience of this one, please post it in the comments!)

What’s happening at this point? Every yin line is becoming yang: every open line is becoming transparent to the creative energy behind it. I found the perfect representation of this in Jaliya’s ‘Quotable I Ching’ blog (which is a joy): ‘Earth’s crammed with heaven.’ Exactly – and here it shines through.

Another couple of quotations, this time drawn from Matthew Fox’s One River, Many Wells:

“What does God do all day long? God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.”

from Meister Eckhart, and

“Even when there are no atoms, and no elementary particles, and no protons, and no photons, suddenly elementary particles will emerge. …The base of the universe seethes with creativity, so much so that physicists refer to the universe’s ground state as ‘space-time foam.'”

from Brian Swimme.

I think 2.6 must be where it ‘seethes with creativity’.

So why would there be harvest when you respond to this with ‘ever-flowing constancy’?

Yi has already started to coach us gently in the ways of ‘constancy’. First there is Creative Force:

‘Creative Force.
From the source, creating success.
Constancy is fruitful.’

There is creative force at work; it’s good to work with it, to have the loyalty, steadiness and sheer persistence to experience it to the full.

Then Earth, the Receptive starts by echoing hexagram 1:

‘Earth.
From the source, creating success.
The constancy of a mare is fruitful.’

If we can find it in ourselves to be as sensitive and responsive to guidance as the mare, we will gain what we seek. And then –

‘Peaceful constancy brings good fortune.’

The character for ‘peaceful’ shows a woman in the home. It doesn’t imply a limited domesticity, but a sense of being at home in the whole earth, like the mare who ‘bestrides the earth without limit.’

So already we are being taught that there are ways and ways of being ‘constant’. Then as all lines change from earth to heaven, it is good to have ‘ever-flowing constancy’ – ‘lasting perseverance’, in Wilhelm/Baynes. This character – ‘lasting’, ‘ever-flowing’ – actually shows flowing water. But also, in many versions of the character, it shows someone swimming in the current. Have a look at these, at the Chinese Etymology site; especially in the bronze characters, you can see the contours of the human figure flowing perfectly smoothly with the contours of the water.

If the universe is seething with creativity, it may no longer be enough to follow it, or even to be at home in it. Perhaps you need to be already in the flow and moving.