Hexagram 57 in readings

(Continuing a series on hexagram 57, because it makes sense to approach this hexagram of all hexagrams incrementally!)

What does Subtly Penetrating mean in readings? Well… like any hexagram, it means what it says and what it is, and no amount of commentary changes that. But I have noticed a couple of messages that Hexagram 57 seems to give quite consistently.

First – and this is a big one – xun says this is a process and this is part of a whole. Very often, the querent is asking about what they conceive of as a single action or occasion or attainment, something they’ve separated out in their mind.

‘How can I achieve x?’

‘X is part of something much bigger. It doesn’t really exist as “x” on its own.’

The subject of your question is larger-scale and longer-term; it’s deeply interconnected, and imagining it as a separate ‘thing’ actually makes no sense.

(If you look at 57.5 –

‘Constancy, good fortune, regrets vanish.
Nothing that does not bear fruit.
With no beginning, there is completion.
Before threshing, three days.
After threshing, three days.
Good fortune.’

– that certainly is a specific moment of success, but it’s a lot like those people who become an overnight success after 30 years of work. It doesn’t come out of the blue – and also, it’s not the end of the work; it’s just part of the farming cycle.)

So the question might be about some specific health issue or part of the body, and then 57 would point you back to the whole. Or about making an announcement or sending a proposal, in which case 57 indicates that this has to be part of ongoing communication – and more than that, ongoing relationship and presence. And I’ve also noticed 57 coming up when people ask about ‘finding love’ or ‘finding happiness’ – which is a really strange use of ‘finding’, isn’t it? As if happiness and love were something like lost car-keys.

And secondly, 57 sometimes describes a process of being moved by the many influences and inputs in your environment, like the branches by the wind – how all that becomes part of who you are and what you do. Sometimes that leads us to try to please all the people, all the time, research everything, accommodate and fit in with everything and everyone – and we risk losing touch with the essential, with our own inner seal. It’s still important to have a ‘direction to go’, as the oracle says. So 57 can ask the question, ‘Do you know your direction?’

I don’t believe this casts your direction as your Chosen Purpose, in need of reinforcement against outside influences. It might not be chosen at all: those seals of authority on the table, in the character xun, originally depict someone kneeling; compliance and submission are core meanings of xun the trigram.

The direction isn’t so much something you decide on as an emergent property of the whole environment: something you can perceive through the mutual penetration of inside and outside. It comes from your inner seal, which represents your relationship to the whole. Perhaps seeing the great person (who can be a diviner) helps to reveal it.

In a reading I cast some 10 years ago, with 57 as the primary hexagram, the short answer to ‘Do you know your direction?’ was, ‘No, not a clue.’ I’d been playing in a concert – I’m an amateur orchestral ‘cellist – and had not done very well. Miscounted rests, wrong entries – ugh. What happened?

Being in an orchestra, at least for this amateur, is always 57-ish: being completely immersed in and penetrated by the whole, every part of my awareness connected and ‘tuned’ to pick up cues – from the conductor, principal violinist, other ‘cellists, other string section leaders, other parts moving and interacting with ours, currents of the music, memory of the music, muscle memory of how to play the notes in front of me, what sounds right, the vibrations I’m sensing in my fingertips (which sometimes tell me whether I’m in tune when I can’t hear the sound I’m making)… and so on.

When I’m playing well, all these influences flow together into a single ‘direction to go’, and I’m reasonably confident and competent. On that occasion… not so much. I was blown in all directions at once. For instance, the conductor had given cues (looked and gestured to show us when to start playing) in rehearsal, and then in the concert he sometimes did and sometimes didn’t. So I would think, ‘We come in here – don’t we? – but now he isn’t bringing us in – wait, perhaps I’m too early – oh, perhaps I should have come in three bars ago…’. That’s a classically 57-ish case of indecision. (And not the conductor’s fault: if I’d done sufficient practice, or listened to the music enough, those entries would have been ingrained in me, second nature – influences naturally becoming ‘direction to go’ in the moment.)

But with 10 years’ hindsight, I think that other aspect of 57 was also present, and Yi was challenging my idea of this concert as a single occasion I could isolate and ask about. It’s part of an altogether longer story, one that extends back through everything I’ve picked up along the years, and all the practice I have or (ahem) haven’t done, and also out into the future. Ten years on, I’m still a member of the same orchestra, and still learning.