I recently had an email from ‘M’, who’s baffled by a recent reading. M’s particular question was a little unusual, asking what he himself is really looking for in a given situation, but the basic problem he’s having is familiar:

“Essentially, I am confused as how to interpret the original hexagram, changing lines and subsequent resulting hexagram as the two hexagrams seem contradictory.”

The first hexagram looks like something he might want; the second doesn’t. So…

“Is it possible that currently, I want what the first hexagram describes but will inevitably evolve through the changing lines to desire what the resulting hexagram describes or is the oracle suggesting that I may avoid wanting the second hexagram by correcting my path before the 6 at the top changes?”

This is something I have ranted written about before – the splendid nonsense that’s created when we try to string hexagrams and lines out along a timeline, where the primary hexagram and its lines  always cause the relating hexagram. If we just stop doing that, and instead read what we cast – just one six-line figure, one unit of meaning, that can contain the meeting of two hexagrams – then the nonsense evaporates.

Here’s a step-by-step way of approaching this. (In practice, naturally, it’s not so formulaic – but I think this is a decent starting point.)

Look at the two hexagrams together

- and imagine ways they might fit together to make a single answer to your question.

This is an exploratory, speculative stage, looking at possible relationships between the hexagrams. Those relationships are shaped by two major factors: the general nature of that primary hexagram-relating hexagram interaction, and the natural movement of the hexagrams themselves. ’46 changing to…’ can be ‘pushing upward through’, ’25 changing to’ can be ‘disentangling from…’, ’61 changing to…’ can be ‘experiencing the inner truth of…’, and so on.

(24 changing to 23 feels like a special case, since the hexagrams work together as a pair, and each already implies the other. I imagine M might be looking for Return amidst Stripping Away.)

The overall nature and shape of that interaction between the hexagrams within a reading is a beautifully complicated and elusive thing. A simple phrase I like to start with in many readings is ‘the [relating hexagram] of [primary hexagram]‘ – relating hexagram as an aspect of/ perspective on the primary. 34 (Great Vigour) .1.2 to 62 (Small Excess) – might be the experience of applying Great Vigour and having it set in proportion, reduced to size. 38 (Opposing).2 to 21 (Biting Through): how otherness meets, comes together incisively, creating a working unit. 33 (Retreat).1.3 to 25 (Without Entanglement): the disengaging part of retreating, where you recognise what is and isn’t yours.

Expect to find each hexagram present now

Part of M’s difficulty, I think, was that he’d relegated Hexagram 23 to the future – whether possible or inevitable – which made it fantastically hard to imagine or relate to. Usually, both hexagrams are present and recognisable – and the relating hexagram especially, as the more personal, subjective one. M surely doesn’t want 23 – that experience of loss, of the futility of purposeful action, of having things torn away from you… – but he mentioned that he’s changing his life to care for his mother, who’s seriously ill. So Hexagram 23 appeared as the emotional landscape, the backdrop to all his experience: it’s something he accepts, while Return is something he aspires to.

Then look to the moving lines…

…within this context. Seeing the reading as a single unit, you’re looking at the primary hexagram with the relating hexagram ‘shining through’ it, moving lines lighting up as if a current flowed at the points of difference between them. So the line texts are a portrait of the interaction of the two hexagrams – and as simple or as confusing as any human situation…

(This post is about the basics. If you know them already, you can skip this and seek out something more sophisticated.)

‘How important are the changing lines?’

Someone emailed me to ask that: his ‘I Ching’ book had taught him to read one hexagram with one changing line for every reading, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) he wasn’t getting much from the changing line. He wondered how important they were – and he also wondered about the merits of this one-hexagram-one-line method.

I can sympathise. Thinking back to my very first I Ching book (Legge, picked up from the Oxfam bookshop), I found the lines alternately baffling and annoying – I’d receive a hexagram I liked and then a line within it that I really didn’t. Or, of course, a mix of lines where I couldn’t make sense of them together. I skimmed through the introduction, picked up the muddled impression that the lines were an addition by the ‘Duke of Tschou’ (whoever he was) to King Wen’s original hexagrams, and told myself it would be more authentic not to look at them at all.

Er, well… oops?

Changed my mind a bit on that one.

The changing lines are the heart of the reading.

Receiving a hexagram is like being given a map of the territory; changing lines are like pins in that map to show where you are or could be.

In practice, this means that if the message of a changing line differs from that of the hexagram in general, the line always takes precedence. The hexagram may tell you something like, ‘You are sailing free in the middle of a vast and deep ocean.’ The line may say something like, ‘Mind the iceberg.’ It is as well to take notice of the line.

Also…

Changing lines change

By following their changes through, from solid to broken or broken to solid, you discover the second hexagram of your reading. The meaning of the reading as a whole is found in the interaction between these two hexagrams – so methods that completely discount the second one are not very helpful.

The traditional way of seeing this is to say that you receive one hexagram, some lines change, and this results in the second hexagram, later on. This should really be in another post… but in brief, I find it more helpful to see it as receiving the two hexagrams together as one – simultaneous, superimposed, mapped onto one another. The changing lines show the points of difference between the two hexagrams: they are the places of movement, or tension, or exchange. They light up because this is where energy is flowing.

(If you look only at which line positions are ‘lit up’ in this way, you see the Patterns of Change of your reading – a useful picture of the energies at work in your question, those that bring you here and those that can take you through.)

Also…

Changing lines interact…

They express relationships between different layers of the situation, or different paths or approaches within it. If they contradict one another, that’s because there are contradictory elements within the situation you asked about – conflicting desires and motivations, for instance, or opposing choices available.

…and their number varies

You might have one line changing, or six, or none. Each of these situations carries significance in itself – significance which isn’t available at all, of course, if your method only ever allows one line to change.

If Einstein said, ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler,’ then he would have appreciated the Yi. The complexity of the situation you ask about will be represented with absolute precision in the moving lines – their number, their relationships, the ‘conversations’ that go on between them.

We would, of course, like it to be simpler: then the oracle could reveal how all the complexity of human motivations and relationships is really simple, clear and logical as 2+2, a complete doddle to understand in 5 minutes flat…

(It seems that what Einstein actually said, in a lecture in 1933, was,

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

…which is pretty much the perfect description of a Yijing reading, isn’t it?)

Obligatory rant

I don’t really need to say this, do I? I’m not a fan of methods of consultation that take all that elegant complexity and replace it with a single moving line every time. (The same goes for casting a full reading and then applying a formula so you can ignore all the lines but one.)

I think that approaching Yi with such a restrictive method is a bit like setting out to have a conversation with someone wise and interesting, but deciding first that he/she must be compelled to keep things simple and immediately understandable. How to achieve this? Well… you could gag and bind your sage, and invite her to point to flashcards with her nose. That would work.

I like reading tarot blogs – there’s a whole supportive culture out there of readers, and the challenges they face are not so different from   those encountered by Yi people. For instance, here’s Brigit writing warmly and with a good dose of common sense about dealing with difficult clients.

It’s actually odd how few of these ‘difficult’ people I’ve ever met. My clients tend to be self-aware, imaginative, responsive people – I don’t believe I’ve ever met the ‘sceptic’, nor the ‘it’s an emergency’ one. But here’s one I have got to know:

The “Not Possible” Client

Reader: “From what I’m seeing here, the relationship is well and truly over.”

Client: “Nope. Not possible. He loves me.”

Reader: “I understand you’re hurting right now, but the Ten of Swords is showing me that this relationship has come to an end.”

Client: “You’ve got it all wrong. He loves me and we’re going to be together. I don’t care what you say.”

Hmm.

And you’re secretly thinking, “Then why the hell did you just pay $50 for a reading?!”

My Advice for Dealing with this Type of Client…

No amount of reasoning is going to change this client’s thinking. She has a very clear idea in her head about what’s happening and if anyone offers something different to that, it will fall on deaf ears.

You may be best to say, “It sounds like you already have a pretty good feel for the situation, and you already have the answers you need, just by listening to your gut. Shall we move on to another topic?”

(from Brigit at http://www.biddytarot.com/dealing-with-difficult-clients/)

Or you might not… for whatever it’s worth, that’s not how I’d respond.

To begin with, going back to first principles: I, the reader, might be wrong. Stranger things have happened. Especially in a situation where any impartial outside observer would agree on the facts of the matter – obviously he’s just not that into you, obviously the ‘business opportunity’ is a money pit and/or scam, obviously the only way to deal with the tyrannical boss is to leave the job… – it can be tricky to avoid joining the ranks of those impartial observers and to notice what the reading’s actually saying. (And the better you know the person, the more insight of your own you have into the situation, the trickier it gets. It is very, very hard to listen openly to someone and have a real conversation with them when your mental image of the situation is completely different from theirs.)

So. You might be wrong.

But if you’re not? Suppose the visible facts of the matter, everyone who knows the situation and all the readings agree that there is no game in this field, no life in this empty city, the future holds Stripping Away/ Splitting Apart, maybe with some 24.6 thrown in for good measure, so you’d eat your yarrow stalks and/or card deck if you’re wrong about this one… and still the querent’s saying, ‘No, that’s not how it is at all. You wouldn’t understand, but I know.’

Then what? As Brigit says, ‘no amount of reasoning is going to change this client’s thinking.’

Well… how fortunate that this isn’t even remotely the diviner’s job.

As a reader, your role is really not to take the insight and vision the reading gives you and transplant that into the other person’s head. It can’t be done. Vulcan mind melds are actually not real.

What to do instead?

In the heat of the moment, full of your awareness of the reading, compassion and frustration, this is hard. But what I try to do is to let reasoning go, and just share imagery and tell stories. I’d be quite open about this: ‘You know, this really doesn’t look promising to me at all… but let me tell you the story of the line, and you can listen and find what resonates with you.’

And then maybe something like this:

‘It just says, “In the field, no game.”

In old China, people actually laid out ‘fields’ especially for hunting. They drew the boundaries, set out to hunt down what they wanted within them. But in this field, within these lines, there’s nothing – no animals, no birds, not a whisker.

It’s odd how the oracle doesn’t say that this is bad. Just that there’s this field where you go hunting, and what you’re looking for isn’t there…

You’re persevering in pushing upward, you have this enduring aspiration and desire to make progress… only the field’s empty…’

And no more than that: tell the story, listen to the response. Maybe they just say the field can’t be empty; maybe they insist on reading the relating hexagram and ignoring the rest. But maybe, somewhere in their response, is a tiny seed that’s the beginnings of understanding. If you detect its presence, it’s not a great idea to pounce, dig it up, throw it into a pan of boiling water and shout ‘Germinate!’ at it. You say ‘oh, yes’, echo their insight back to them. You use the word ‘maybe’, you leave questions hanging, and then you retreat and leave space for the imagery to work.

A mystery of divination: oracles don’t just tell an objective truth; they talk to people. If we’re deluded, sometimes the oracle will puncture that delusion in one go; sometimes it interacts quietly with the delusion to foster sanity. Some readings come like lightning and transform thinking in a split second – but some changes of thinking need time to grow, and may need to grow in ways that you, as reader, have absolutely no clue about. Not every change has to happen on the road to Damascus.

As I was saying, this is hard for a reader. You see someone pouring out their love or time or money (or all three), full of hope and yearning; you know this is going nowhere… of course you want to do something to make this stop – and pretty soon you find that you can’t.

Only… nothing is broken here, because your task as reader is not to change anyone, but to give them the gift of connection and relationship with an oracle. The changing part will be taken care of. As Stephen Karcher said to me many years ago, when I was dithering anxiously over beginning phone readings, ‘Trust the oracle.’

I’ve been very quiet lately – busy preparing to upgrade all the software that runs Clarity. Now it’s time to take the plunge and run the upgrades.

While the upgrades are running, some things – the forum, shop and anything you log in to – won’t work. They’ll close on Monday morning, and if all goes well they should be back within the week.

For more information, and an email list that’ll provide more detailed updates, see this page.

Thanks in advance for your patience!

When people ask me how they can become more fluent and confident with their readings, I always, predictably, say something about experience. Consulting with Yi is a relationship and a practice – not something you can learn how to do first, and then start doing it.

You get to know hexagrams and lines when you receive them in readings and learn their meaning from the inside. The English language is a beautiful thing, but it’s not really adequate to conveying that inner sense of the shape and dynamics of an experience. What’s the difference between the loss of solidity in Hexagram 59, Dispersing, and Hexagram 23, Stripping Away? What’s the difference between 29, Repeating Chasms, and 4, Not Knowing, as ways of being in the dark? Long articles could be written to answer those questions, but if you have learned the hexagrams from readings, you will know (in a way you never would from reading the articles).

Of course long articles and books of commentary are good things too; they have their place. But as any beginner who’s flipped from one commentary to the next trying to relate to a reading will tell you, their usefulness is limited. You can go through stacks of the things without ever feeling a personal connection. It’s true of pretty much any commentary, traditional or otherwise, that it will sometimes be truly uncannily accurate, real when-did-you-plant-those-hidden-cameras? stuff, and sometimes… nothing. Words on a page.

That’s the moment when you can go back to the words of the oracle itself, read them as if no-one had ever written a commentary, and learn directly from your experience.

Either that, or you assume something is wrong with this reading. Something wrong with your question, perhaps, so it’s answering the one you should have asked (now work out what that one was…), or something wrong with you, so it’s not answering you at all.

The problem with this approach is that, if you take it to an extreme, discarding every reading that’s hard to relate to at first, you never develop a personal relationship with the oracle. Instead you relate to the commentary and let that have the last word – invalidating your reading and your experience.

Another problem with this approach is that, in my experience (!), it’s very rare for the Yi not to answer – but very common to have to rearrange one’s ideas a bit to be able to relate to its answer, or just wait to understand – and also not unusual for it to speak in ways that no commentator has ever imagined possible.

So… I’d say trust experience, learn from it, and give it priority over the commentary tradition.

Only there are, of course, problems with this approach, too.

A single experience cannot exhaust the meaning of a line. Not that anyone would think it could, of course – but when that one experience is yours, and is a powerful experience with a great emotional impact, it can come to dominate your understanding of a line. And that can be misleading.

A line describes the deep structure of a lived moment – but many lines have nothing to say about the scale and importance of an experience, nor even necessarily its emotional impact. And those, of course – the importance of the moment and how it feels – are the things that tend to dominate our memories. We can end up associating a line with an especially potent experience, and then being just as lost as ever when the next reading with that line seems to have nothing in common with it at all.

Or rather… nothing in common at all except the line – that is, except some fundamental underlying shape to the thing, sometimes easy to see, sometimes not so much.

(What does getting your car boxed into its parking space have in common with a repressive regime? What does a computer packing up due to a melted motherboard connection have to do with the social hazards of drunken disinhibition? The answer to the first question is a hexagram, the answer to the second is a specific line. Any guesses?)

Also, sometimes the reading is answering a different question, and trying to bend it into shape round the one you asked would be worse than useless.

So how can you learn the I Ching from experience, and not lead yourself up the garden path without a paddle?

First… recognise that hexagrams and lines can have personal meanings for individuals. When a line resonates with some experience of great personal significance, Yi can use it as a private nudge, part of a private conversation. For instance, Hexagram 4 for me has to do with my information-addiction (‘if I have that book on the shelf, all my problems will be solved!’), whereas for someone else it might have more to do with a bad habit of repeatedly texting the boyfriend, or repeatedly bugging the oracle with thinly-disguised versions of the same question. So when a line with a personal meaning shows up in your reading, by all means consider whether it’s a specific reminder.

(Only don’t automatically extrapolate from your personal meaning to other people’s readings – and don’t let them do that to your readings. Sometimes encountering the person who’s had just the right experience with the line is part of the synchronicity… but not always.)

But for a clear, general meaning you need to learn from experiences – plenty of them.

Most importantly, you need an I Ching journal: something that lets you find previous experiences with a hexagram quickly – and the more ways it allows you to search, the better. I’d strongly recommend using a computer, at least to store the essentials (question and casting) so you can find them again, even if you prefer to do most of your writing longhand.

Second, you need to do readings. There’s a school of thought that argues you should reserve consultations with Yi for the most important questions, as a sign of respect. On the one hand, I can see their point; on the other, this is a little like waiting to learn to swim until you fall off a ship. I’d suggest talking with Yi about some things that are not so critical, maybe even situations that you more-or-less understand already.

And you can benefit from other people’s experience. We have a Community for that (with, don’t forget, the private Change Circle for more in-depth exploration that isn’t indexed by Google).

Also… don’t forget commentaries! True, a great many are economically recycled Wilhelm/Baynes, and others are built from first principles (concepts of the oracle’s internal structure and what it ought to be saying) with varying degrees of sensitivity to the text. But plenty of authors are also diviners; you never know when you might be reading a distillation of experience. So differences between commentaries can be welcomed in the same way as difference between experiences: holding them together in your mind, letting the shared deep structure reveal itself in all its bare simplicity.

Here are some thoughts on the moving line texts of Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward. I’d like to have a good dive in here – drawing on the meaning of the line position, the relationship to the zhi gua (the hexagram each line changes to) and the line pathway, along with experience, to get a feel for each one. (This kind of work lies behind what ended up in my book – but space there was limited, and here the page can be as long as I like… you have been warned…)

Before I fill the screen with stuff, though, let’s just have the uninterrupted flow of the lines themselves:

‘Welcomed pushing upward,
Great good fortune.’
‘True and confident,
And so it is fruitful to make the summer offering.
No mistake.’
‘Pushing upward in the empty city.’
‘The king makes offerings on Mount Qi.
Good fortune, no mistake.’
‘Constancy, good fortune.
Pushing upward step by step.’
‘In the dark, pushing upward.
Fruitful with unceasing constancy.’

Line 1

‘Welcomed pushing upward,
Great good fortune.’

Line 1 – the place of beginnings, the first inklings of a hexagram’s theme, of inner stirrings and itchy feet, as often as not. Many hexagrams do not encourage acting on those itches/stirrings (take the first lines of hexagrams 34 or 43, for instance!) – but in Pushing Upward, that basic desire to move onward and upward is the heart of the whole thing, and it is welcomed.

It’s an interesting word, that ‘welcomed’ – something of a technical term for an action that is in harmony with the time. Hence it means something that receives consent, is allowed, an action that is true and loyal, and simultaneously just something that is possible. The cosmos at large says yes to this.

It makes clear, intuitive sense that this first line joins with Hexagram 11, Flow - a hexagram full of ‘yes’. The first step onto the mountain moves into this creative flow; to want to begin is good.

Looking at the line pathway (46.1, 11.1, 12.6, 45.6), it seems that this first step is taken with deep, wholehearted emotional involvement. If you read the crossing from 45.6 to 46.1 as a story -

‘Heartfelt lamenting, weeping, snivelling.
Not a mistake.’

‘Welcomed pushing upward,
Great good fortune.’

- then you can imagine the first steps taken in response to a sense of loss, something missing. Heartfelt emotion is the force that overcomes resistance and creates an initiative in harmony with the time, hence capable of developing momentum.

Line 2

‘True and confident,
And so it is fruitful to make the summer offering.
No mistake.’

The second line position – in any hexagram – seems to me to reach out and upward in search of connection. So at this stage of the climb, you’re moved not by where you are or where you could go, but by what you can connect with – through fu, truth-confidence-trust, and through a modest offering.

The offering named here, yue, was a small one. In his excellent article on 46, Harmen mentions that it’s also the name of a measure: one-tenth of one-tenth of a dipper. As an offering, yue was made of plant matter only (no ‘great sacrificial animals’ here!), and was proportionate to your rank.

It helps to think of rank as not just an empty bureaucratic status-label, but in its ideal sense of a true measure of your personal capability. Then this becomes an offering that’s naturally proportional to what you can give – and you can see the connection to Hexagram 15, Integrity. With a completely clear sense of yourself – both your limitations and your potential – you can make a true yue offering. It’s your personal call to the spirits (see the fan yao, 15.2) and you – not any external standard – are its measure.

(Quite often the person who receives this line is tacitly asking, ‘How much can I be expected to give?’)

The line pathway (46.2, 15.2, 16.5, 45.5) suggests that this small offering can restore relationship and health.

Line 3

‘Pushing upward in the empty city.’

This is a disconcertingly neutral line!

People’s experiences with it vary from bitter disappointment because you expected a warm, lively welcome in the city, to overwhelming relief because you expected resistance and hostility there. The small image (commentary on the line) just says ‘no reason to hesitate.’ There’s nothing for you here; move on through.

This fits at line 3, because here just inside the threshold between inner and outer worlds, the question is often, ‘How far can I go out there? This thing I have in mind – can I really move towards it?’ And yes… you can move towards it and keep on travelling. It’s just that sometimes the world’s consent comes as perfect absence and emptiness. (The idea is that this was once a major city, full of life, but it has been abandoned.)

46.3 changes to Hexagram 7, the Army: marching on with purpose in mind, not stopping to reflect on the scenery or dwell on how it might have been. And the line pathway (46.3, 7.3, 8.4, 45.4) encourages the wisdom of not fixating on this empty husk, but looking beyond. The centre of life and meaning is not where it was, maybe not where you expected to find it, certainly not where you are now. So good fortune is available from looking beyond and outside your usual perspective, and just from keeping going.

Line 4

‘The king makes offerings on Mount Qi.
Good fortune, no mistake.’

Mount Qi is the sacred mountain close to the Zhou homeland – an ancestral spiritual home to them. Line 4 (in general) tends to ask, ‘What can I do here?’ seeking a working relationship with this place and time. So reconnecting with your roots at Mount Qi, anchoring your present striving to that ancient rock, is a powerful act.

The line changes to Hexagram 32, Enduring. Cities may come and go (line 3), but ancestors and mountains endure. As long as you can refer to the mountain, you will know where – and when, and who – you are.

And yet… experience suggests this line isn’t quite all it seems. Enough people have received this line in situations where they are clearly not getting what they aspire to, and not about to get it, that I’ve had to take a second and third look at it.

For instance: ‘Good fortune, no mistake.’ It’s often the case that ‘no mistake’ means ‘even though this looks very much like a mistake to you, it isn’t one.’

Mt Qi was the sacred place of the Zhou long before they were the ruling dynasty, when they were just a small people of no particular significance or distinction. But what was the sacred mountain then is still the sacred mountain now, and it doesn’t look so different. Perhaps what endures and creates meaning isn’t so connected to ‘progress’ after all.

Then there is the line pathway: 46.4 is reflected in 32.4, and you might expect to find its subjective experience there, maybe along with some necessary wisdom. 32.4 reads, ‘In the field, no game.’ As simple as that. (The ‘field’ is specifically the area you mapped out for your hunting, so the experience is quite specifically of not finding something where you expected it to be.)

And the other lines in the pathway (45.3, 31.3) indicate a time when more intense desire and emotionality is not helpful – which would make sense, if what you want is unavailable.

So… I believe 46.4  marks a time when your personal desires and aspirations are not being rewarded. The message is that this is not a mistake – on the contrary! And so the optimal response is not to want it more and pursue it more avidly, but to set it in context by redirecting your attention: away from the object of your desire, back towards your roots, towards what is permanent and real. Then you have the foundation for a more real, more connected progress: good fortune, no mistake.

(You could see line 3 as looking outward, onward and beyond, and line 4 as looking backward and inward… and if you changed both lines together, you’d have Hexagram 40, Release, with its choice of path…)

Line 5

‘Constancy, good fortune.
Pushing upward step by step.’

Line 5′s traditionally the place for the ruler – certainly the place for vision, choice and guiding principles. Only the guiding principle in Pushing Upward turns out to be one step at a time. I remember walking up hill paths with my parents as a child – running ahead and relishing the view to start with, but as we climbed higher and the slopes got steeper, my focus would narrow down to my own aching feet and the simple act of putting one in front of the other.

This is a line of encouragement, often in the face of setbacks. Yi says first that constancy is good fortune, which is really the first thing you need to know, and then ‘step by step’. Mountains can’t be leapt in a single bound; the only thing you can do next is the next step. (Tautological, yet oddly easy to overlook!)

So why does this line link to Hexagram 48, the Well? Partly as comfort, I think – there’s water as you need it (and you can’t drink for the month). And partly to suggest a parallel between hauling yourself up the mountain and hauling the bucket up the well – all the way, inch by inch, because almost all the way is no better than not starting at all – with great respect for the small, simple, incremental things. (And – if you look round the whole pathway – a corresponding wariness of complications and ambition.)

Line 6

‘In the dark, pushing upward.
Fruitful with unceasing constancy.’

Line 6 is traditionally said to be ‘outside’ the hexagram – and this one surely is outside the realms of purposeful ascent, just because you can’t see where you’re going. In the original just as in English, ‘in the dark’ has both literal and figurative meanings.

Commentators come down hard on this idea of pushing on up in the dark, calling it following ‘blind impulse’ and ‘ego’. Yet it’s worth noting that the Yi does not say ‘So stop!’ And goodness knows, it’s really not shy about telling people who are headed blindly into trouble, moved by not-so-spiritual impulses, to stop. On the contrary: pushing upward in the dark bears fruit – with unceasing constancy.

All the way up this mountain, there’s been the question of how you orient yourself. The itch to move is enough at first, and the true desire to make your offering. Then the empty city, the sacred mountain, and your own next steps. But if you’re to keep climbing here in the dark, how are you to know where you’re headed?

It’s good to remember that the earliest meaning of ‘constancy’ is ‘divination’. The two concepts meet in the idea of holding to the truth you know and to your way of knowing. So pushing upward in the dark bears fruit if you divine without stopping to rest (‘unceasing’ means literally without rest, without pausing for breath) – if you keep on referring to truth.

In his article, Harmen describes this line as being on the mountain at night, especially close to the the spirits, and vulnerable. He seems to be imagining something like this. Certainly, this is a scary line – it no longer feels like ‘getting somewhere’, let alone ‘getting something’ – the small image says that it means ‘loss not gain’. (Should you receive this line when you have a specific goal in mind and any alternative way of reaching it, I’d look into the alternative!)

The line changes to Hexagram 18, which is also scary… but from experience, and from the line pathway, I don’t feel it means that the process of pushing upward has itself become corrupted. Rather, it’s past the stage of striving for a goal and hence is finding something simpler as a guide. 18.6 and 17.1 show a radical reorientation, choosing quite different standards of measurement to the norm. And if you read across from 45.1 to 46.6 -

‘There is truth and confidence, but no completion.
Then disorder, then gathering.
Like a call, one clasp of the hands brings laughter.
Do not worry.
Going on, no mistake.’

‘In the dark, pushing upward.
Fruitful with unceasing constancy.’

- then there’s a strong sense of continuity – that you only need one line of connection, one call, to guide you…

As promised… one more step along the path through Hexagram 46.

In this post, I’ll have a go at a couple more ‘hexagrams of context’: two more ways of saying ‘this is not that’. In the last post I looked at 46 with 45, Gathering: the contrasting, paired hexagram. Pushing Upward is not Gathering Together – the dynamics of the thing are quite different, inward focus as against upward striving – yet the two together form a unit. A very helpful tip I picked up from Stephen Karcher is to think of your reading as not just ‘Pushing Upward’ but as ‘the Pushing Upward aspect of Gathering-Together-and-Pushing-Upward’. This lets you perceive ‘not-that’ and also ‘part of that’.

A quite different kind of ‘not that’ comes from the complementary or opposite hexagram, the one created by changing every line.

Hexagram 25, Without Entanglement, has no line in common with Pushing Upward; nothing could be more different. But of course, seeing them together, that’s not the only thing you notice. You also see how they have the same pattern of lines, and how they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw.

These two are visibly both opposites and complements, and both ways of seeing them help in readings. The opposition is generally easier to observe. Hexagram 46 is wholly committed to striving upward. Hexagram 25 is disentangled. Hexagram 46 can create something good; Hexagram 25 may experience something bad, but knows this is not of its own creation. Basically, if I receive 46 I’m going to be looking for ways I can undertake more, engage more, take it to another level…  – and if I receive 25 I’ll be asking myself what I need to put down, to disengage from, to straighten out my relationship with the world. I can do one or other of these things, not both. Simple.

Only… they are also complementary. Seeing them this way is harder – complementarity has something of a koan-like quality to it, I think. I find I will sometimes get a non-verbal sense of how hexagrams are complementary when I’m in the midst of experiencing one. I had that sense of 46-25 once when walking through the woods near our home, with their beautiful mature beech trees. They grow, they draw nourishment upward (standing with them, you can feel the power of that), and their living essence is joined with the creative life of the whole just as 25′s inner trigram, thunder, joins with its outer trigram, heaven. Their dao is natural growth, and that exists simultaneously as 46′s upward striving and 25′s immutable participation in the creative principle.

As I was saying – a non-verbal sense. You might do better to ask the trees directly.

…

Another not-that: the shadow hexagram. Since I wrote that post and started experimenting with this idea, I’ve found it’s a reliable way of finding how not to think about your hexagram – and hence, how not to think about your question or situation. (I’ve also been reading Scott Davis’ fascinating book, The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context, and one of the many structural principles he uncovers in the sequence of hexagrams is meaningful usage of this ‘shadowing’ principle.) Hexagram ‘minus 46′, counting back 46 steps from Hexagram 64, is 19, Nearing.

Here’s LiSe describing Hexagram 19:

“In old texts ‘lin’ is often used for descending towards a valley. It is nearing, but it is also overseeing. From high above one sees the whole valley.”

That’s a very different perspective from the foreshortened view you get as you start to climb the mountain. Nearing calls for you to be the one with the overview, the adult caretaker who sees things and people in their totality. If you try to do this in a time of pushing upward, in ‘one step at at time’ season, you’ll be paralysed. (And conversely in a time of 19, it wouldn’t work at all to immerse yourself in and identify with the process.)

The shadow hexagram stands out particularly clearly for me as something I can work with when I contrast it with the nuclear hexagram. The nuclear is exactly what the original hexagram really is ‘about’ – its inner theme, the work that’s being done here. And for Hexagram 46, that’s 54, the Marrying Maiden. She can’t look down over the whole scene, and she certainly doesn’t get to be the responsible adult: she has to feel her way in. Pushing Upward: not time to try for an overview or think of yourself as responsible for the whole; time to think of yourself as the newcomer, the junior, and try to find your place.

Or as LiSe puts it, for Hexagram 46:

“Do not live past or future, but live the moment, developing itself step by step, like a plant, growing around obstacles. Its goal is not somewhere out there, but in itself, an inherent plan. It is one with what it becomes.”

(Is this enough Hexagram 46 to be going on with, do you think, or should I post something about the lines?)

This is a topic that came up in the I Ching Community with reference to weekly and annual readings – how people can be frightened by them, maybe scared into paralysis by a sinister-looking line – and it got me thinking about the scariness of readings in general.

What is it that’s frightening about readings?

Obviously, predictions of doom are scary – as anyone who’s ever hesitated to ask for fear of what the oracle might say is well aware. But  predictions of possible, but not-quite-fated doom are more so, I think. There’s something you could do to make a difference, but how can you tell if you’re doing it right? As LiSe once said, negative lines are something like mother saying, ‘Don’t run into the traffic’ – but which way is the main road?

And actually, this isn’t only true of unpleasant lines. Any reading that tells you there’s something you could do to make a difference brings on a sense of responsibility – and it’s rare to get a reading that promises x (good or bad) will happen completely regardless of what you do, isn’t it?

So having realised this was more complicated than I thought, I turned to Yi for help. What is it that’s frightening about readings?

Yi says it’s Hexagram 9 unchanging

That’s not the answer I was expecting. After I’d cast the first three lines, I was thinking I might receive Hexagram 1: the sheer creative power of readings, if you pause to become aware of what you’re doing, is daunting. But no – in practice, it’s Small Taming.

‘Small taming, creating success.
Dense clouds without rain
Come from my Western outskirts.’

It’s not the cosmic power that’s frightening, it’s our position in relation to it: the small farmer under the dark clouds, knowing something is coming, but it’s not time yet. In casting the vessel, Hexagram 9 (with Hexagram 10, and facing 44-43) has to do with creating the relationship to heaven that’s needed to complete the work of casting. We need natural resources, and our own commitment, but beyond that we need the less quantifiable, less manageable gift that is connection to spirit – blessing, the favour of the spirits, maybe just good luck. The farmer, looking up at those clouds, knows this very well. He begins the process that continues in Hexagram 10: learning to work with the power of heaven.

Small Taming is on the face of it a much milder, gentler hexagram than 10, Treading. I’m usually glad to see it: the down-to-earth message of small-scale cultivation, the reminder that I can only do what I can do. However, those clouds can bring an anxious, oppressive atmosphere – especially for someone who is eager for greater clarity and certainty (like, for instance, someone consulting an oracle).

Work makes me nervous

Interestingly enough, there’s no promise of doom in Hexagram 9. On the contrary – it foreshadows mandate to come: the clouds will come from the West, the Zhou will be empowered to march on the Shang. There is work to be done now, and there may well be bigger work in future. I don’t know about you, but this prospect makes me nervous - not least because if Yi’s shown me how, and then I don’t get it right, whose fault is that?

So for me, Hexagram 9 represents all the readings that say, ‘Yes, this can be done, and it will take work’ – especially since the particular work they require is often something I’m not naturally inclined to do. And also, they tend not to tell me when my efforts will pay off:

‘If I get to work digging this field, when will it rain?’
‘Later.’

There’s an awkward mixture of knowing and not knowing here that’s not at all reassuring.

Choice: also scary

Small Taming represents an awkward, intermediate stage: you’ve chosen your place, your fields to dig; you have work to do, but the outcome is still under a cloud. That is, it comes after choice – following from Hexagram 8:

‘Seeking union naturally has occasion to tame things, and so Small Taming follows.’

Make your choice, find the centre to flow from, and naturally you start to gather things around it, to ground it in reality. You start to build fertility in this soil, plant these seeds… Small Taming implies a choice made.

I think we make this choice when we consult. Sometimes asking a ‘What if I…?’ or ‘How can I…?’ question is a first real, inner shift towards commitment. Asking an oracle is not quite the same thing as just entertaining the idea. And even with quite open-ended readings – ‘What should I be aware of this week?’ – we are still saying, ‘Here I am, in this reality.’ (I’ve a feeling that the imaginary world of all the other places we might have been is altogether easier to inhabit.)

The nuclear hexagram of 9 is 38, Opposition – and I’ve noticed that the experience of a nuclear hexagram is often more vivid in an unchanging reading. It has to do with ‘seeing differently’, the uncanny, the unfamiliar, the not-quite-understandable – and also the gulf between how I imagine it, and how it is.

Something indefinable changes when you leave the realm of possible scenarios and come into contact with how it is. (And if you’d been led around blindfolded for hours – or years – and finally the blindfold was taken off, wouldn’t you hesitate for a moment before opening your eyes?) You can’t go back. (No, not even by casting another reading…)

The shadow hexagram of 9 (hexagram ‘minus 9′) is 56. In response to a reading, thinking of this as something you’re ‘just passing through’, en route to a future destination, is exactly the wrong way to engage with it – exactly what gets you stuck. It makes the reading all about the destination, not the present; it reduces your interaction with your present reality to the bare minimum: not changing it, not changed by it.

And that can be a problem with readings: we approach them wanting to know what’ll happen, or even how to reach a destination, and this can leave us ungrounded, divorced from the only place we can do anything.

The upside?

The downside to fear of readings is obvious enough: background anxiety, or at worst complete paralysis: my weekly reading says something bad, so I’m staying under the duvet until it goes away. Or there’s avoiding readings altogether (or just readings on some particular topic), for fear of what they might say – being more comfortable in maybe-land.

Could there be an upside? I think so – at least to a healthy respect for what we’re getting ourselves into here. If I ask, I’ll be told. How much reality do I feel up to; how much commitment am I ready for?

Besides… if I ask ‘what if I do x?’ and get told,

‘Confused return, pitfall.
There is calamity and blunder.
Using this to mobilise the armies: in the end there is great defeat.
For your state’s leader, disaster.
For ten years, incapable of marching out.’

…for instance, there’s no harm in setting out to understand why it’s such a bad idea after deciding not to try it.

And some suggestions

So how not to be overwhelmed by scary readings? I think Hexagram 9 contains some hints:

‘Wind moves above heaven. Small taming.
A noble one cultivates the natural pattern of character.’

The clouds are dark, but you can keep working, keep following a reading’s advice, keep it in mind and let your awareness be shaped by it, as the winds are ‘shaped’ by heaven. And the unchanging character of this reading suggests you do this for its own sake, not with a view to anything else.

For me, working with a reading starts before I cast it, with some awareness of my expectations, fears and reasons for asking. (When I re-open for business with readings in a week or so, the first step in the process will be an ebooklet called ‘Ways of Opening’ that walks you through this kind of preparation.) It means I’m entering into the relationship – taking up my hoe – willingly.

I’m not sure why I never find weekly or annual readings frightening. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination, or my innate, incorrigible optimism. Maybe it’s the awareness that none of my worst moments have been predictable anyway – readings have helped me through them, but I’ve never ‘successfully’ predicted anything really nasty for myself.

I think it’s also that I’m willingnot to understand a reading right away: if an open reading says something ominous I can’t currently recognise, I don’t spend too much time trying to predict how or where this might show up. Instead, I work on letting the reading change my perceptions – treating it as a kind of ‘radio tuner’. (I need a new metaphor for this. How many people nowadays have ever tuned a radio by turning a dial?) So I’m not trying to predict the future, just to be more closely aware of its seeds in the present. An open reading becomes a process of gradual discovery.

More generally… do readings; do readings about small-scale, definitely non-frightening things; keep a journal. Build up your experience, and with it a realistic confidence in your powers of ‘tuning’ and recognition. Oh, and talk to other readers: there are probably many people who’ve had the same nasty line and are still at the I Ching Community to talk about it.

What would you suggest?

Because of that incorrigible optimism, I expect I’m missing some things here. Any advice from experience? Or thoughts on Hexagram 9 unchanging?

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…