Cultivate patience amidst chaos; build your community with clarity and care.
From
3
Difficulty
To
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The Family
Others appear as ungrateful when they are offered something without giving anything in return. taoscopy.com
Difficulty3
Embrace challenges and uncertainty; growth is difficult but necessary. Encouragement and persistence lead to success.
↓ Line 3
Acting without guidance leads to confusion. Recognize the situation and avoid proceeding blindly to prevent disgrace.
↓ Line 6
Severe separation causes deep sorrow and distress. The situation is painful and requires careful handling.
↓ The Family37
Focus on nurturing harmony in your community or family. Cultivate stability and mutual support by fostering open communication and shared values.
Other titles: Difficulty at the Beginning, The Symbol of Bursting, Sprouting, Hoarding, Distress, Organizational Growth Pains, Difficult Beginnings, Growing Pains, Initial Obstacles, Initial Hardship
Judgment
Legge: Difficulty indicates progress and success through firm correctness. Action should not be undertaken lightly, and it is wise to seek help.
Wilhelm/Baynes:Difficulty at the Beginning works supreme success, furthering through perseverance. Nothing should be undertaken. It furthers one to appoint helpers.
Blofeld: Difficulty followed by sublime success! Persistence in a righteous course brings reward; but do not seek some new goal (or destination); it is highly advantageous to consolidate the present position. [The fundamental idea of this hexagram is that of birth and growth amidst difficulty, as with a sprouting seed becoming a young plant and forcing its way through the earth. Our affairs, being still in their early stages, are vulnerable; we must not wander forth, but attend to them until they ripen; then, with proper care, the seed will bring forth a splendid tree. The upper trigram, a pit, suggests a need for caution; but, if we heed these omens, our success is assured.]
Liu: Difficulty in the Beginning : great success. It is of benefit to continue without planning to go someplace. One should find helpers.
Ritsema/Karcher: Sprouting . Spring Growing Harvesting Trial. No availing-of possessing directed going. Harvesting: installing feudatories. [This hexagram describes your situation in terms of beginning growth. It emphasizes that collecting potential in preparation for arduous labor is the adequate way to handle it...]
Shaughnessy: Hoarding : Prime receipt; beneficial to determine. Do not herewith have someplace to go; beneficial to establish a lord.
Cleary(1): In difficulty, creativity and development are effective if correct. Do not use. There is a place to go. It is beneficial to set up a ruler.
Cleary(2):Creativity is successful. It is beneficial to be correct. Do not make use of going somewhere. It is beneficial to set up lords.
Wu:Distress is primordial, pervasive, prosperous, and persevering. The subject should proceed with caution. It will be advantageous to establish marquisates.
The Image
Legge: The image of clouds and thunder formsDifficulty. The superior man, in accordance with this, adjusts his measures of government as in sorting the threads of the warp and woof.
Wilhelm/Baynes: Clouds and thunder: the image of Difficulty at the Beginning. Thus the superior man brings order out of confusion.
Blofeld: This hexagram symbolizes lightning spewed forth by the clouds -- difficulty prevails! The Superior Man busies himself setting things in order.
Liu: Clouds and thunder symbolize Difficulty at the Beginning. The superior man makes order out of disorder.
Ritsema/Karcher: Clouds, Thunder, Sprouting. A chun tzu uses the canons to coordinate. [Canons: standards, laws; regular, regulate; the Five Classics. The ideogram: warp-threads in a loom.]
Cleary(1): Thunder in the clouds is held back; the superior person orders and arranges.
Cleary(2): Clouds and thunder – Difficulty. Thereby leaders organize.
Wu: Clouds and thunder form hexagram Distress. Thus the jun zi plans and organizes.
COMMENTARY
Confucius/Legge:Difficultyis experienced as Heaven and Earth begin their intercourse, but correct action succeeds in the face of danger. By the action of thunder and rain, which are the attributes of the lower and upper trigrams, all between Heaven and Earth is filled up. But the conditions of the time are irregular and obscure. Authority should be delegated, but the feeling that rest and peace have been secured should not be indulged in even then.
Legge: The written character for Difficultyis pictorial, and shows a plant struggling with difficulty as it rises above the surface of the earth. This initial difficulty is a metaphor for how struggle is the condition of a state which is emerging from disorder after a revolution. The author saw his social and political world in great disorder and difficult to reform, yet he had faith in himself and the destiny of his House. Let there be prudence and caution, with unswerving adherence to the right. Let the government of the different states be entrusted to good and able men -- then all will be well.
According to the arrangement of the eight trigrams, Heaven and Earth are the parents of the other six, who are their children. The first-born son is the lower trigram of Movement, and the second-born son is the upper trigram of Peril. McClatchie renders here: "The figure of Difficulty represents the hard and the soft beginning to have sexual intercourse, and bringing forth with suffering."
The power to move in the lower trigram is likely to produce great effects; to do this in perilous and difficult circumstances (symbolized by the upper trigram) requires firmness and correctness. Good princes throughout the realm will help to remedy the political and social disorder of the times, but the supreme ruler should not trust his subordinates to the point of relaxing his vigilance.
The lower trigram represents thunder, the upper represents rain clouds. The hexagram therefore places us in the atmosphere of a thunderstorm -- a metaphor for the situation of a political state in difficulty. When the thunder has pealed, and the clouds have discharged their burden of rain, the atmosphere is cleared and there is a feeling of relief.
Anthony: This hexagram means that we have not yet found the correct path.
It also means confusion: too many possibilities. Nothing is clear. This lack of clarity is the “hindrance” referred to in the first line of the hexagram. In the second line, the remedies that come forth are inappropriate. In the first stages of dealing with a problem, we are tempted to grasp at solutions, whereas we should wait until the proper actions become clear.
NOTES AND PARAPHRASES
Judgment: Under the conditions of Difficulty it is best to mark time while seeking assistance.
The superior man uses careful analysis to separate order from confusion.
Wilhelm’s title for this hexagram is Difficulty at the Beginning. I prefer Difficulty, because it is a situation encountered at any phase of the Work, not just the beginning.
Difficulty is experienced because confusion and multiplicity prevail during the initial phase of any creative activity -- thoughts and feelings proliferate and threaten to overwhelm the mind with infinite complexity. The only way to proceed under such circumstances is to carefully sort out the components of the situation and arrange them in categories and in order of importance. To "sort the threads of the warp and woof" is to weave a tangled mess into a tapestry.
The Orderly Sequence of the Hexagrams gives us an image of what takes place under the hexagram of Difficulty:
When there were Heaven and Earth, then afterwards all things were produced. What fills up the space between Heaven and Earth are those individual things. Hence the Dynamic and Magnetic are followed by Difficulty. Difficulty means filling up.
"Filling up," is rendered as "fullness" in some translations. This is the exact meaning of the gnostic term: "Pleroma," or "Fullness" which Jung correlates with the Collective Unconscious or Objective Psyche. These are interior dimensions from which emanate the archetypal energies which we experience as instinctual drives and emotional complexes. This is the "hyperspace" from which the Self, via the oracle, responds to our queries and directs the Work.
Thus we see that the third hexagram, following the creation of the cosmic pair of opposites in the first two figures, represents a dialectical progression. Lao Tse, who wrote the Tao Te Ching some six-hundred years after the I Ching was committed to writing, describes this unfolding process:
Out of Tao, One is born;
Out of One, Two;
Out of Two, Three;
Out of Three, the created universe.
The created universe carries the yin at its back
and the yang in front;
Through the union of their pervading principles
it reaches harmony.
The identical idea is found in many traditions, giving it the status of an archetype within human consciousness. It is not necessary to be familiar with the technical terminology of Kabbalah to recognize that the same idea is being discussed in the following passage:
In Chokmah and Binah we have the archetypal Positive and Negative; the primordial Maleness and Femaleness, established while "countenance beheld not countenance" and manifestation was incipient ... It is between these two polarizing aspects of manifestation -- the Supernal Father and the Supernal Mother -- that the web of life is woven; souls going back and forth between them like a weaver's shuttle. In our individual lives, in our physiological rhythms, and in the history of the rise and fall of nations, we observe the same rhythmic periodicity. D. Fortune --The Mystical Qabalah
This idea has been stated very simply:
All things are a single form which has divided and multiplied in time and space. W.B. Yeats -- A Vision
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? -- Black Elk
And also with poetic complexity:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water ... God said, "Let the waters teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth within the vault of heaven." And so it was ... God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply upon the earth. Genesis
There are some profound ideas in these images about the structure of human consciousness and the contents of the unconscious psyche. The basic idea is that of Emanation -- the creation of physical reality from a supreme principle in ordered hierarchies of increasing complexity. This concept is essential for a full understanding of the Work.
The involution of man was his descent from the sphere of the spirit, developing bodies of a mental, emotional and then physical nature until he manifested upon this planet. His evolution is to civilize this planet and to develop mastery of the physical, emotional and mental planes and relink himself in unity with God once more, thus completing the cycle. He came from God as an inexperienced Spark of Divine Fire and returns to Him, with all the experience of manifestation, as a Lord of Humanity. Gareth Knight -- The Work of a Modern Occult Fraternity
In many systems of thought, the proliferation of forces is seen in sexual terms -- the cosmic parents produce entities in male and female pairs (gnostic syzygies), which in turn produce offspring. Hence, Confucius says: "Difficulty is experienced as Heaven and Earth begin their intercourse." That this has an explicit sexual connotation is confirmed by McClatchie: "The figure of Difficulty represents the hard and the soft beginning to have sexual intercourse, and bringing forth with suffering." Thus we see that the correct and incorrect correlation ("intercourse") of dynamic (male) and magnetic (female) lines in anyI Ching hexagram symbolizes the favorable (life-enhancing) or unfavorable (life-negating) combinations of thought and feeling within the psyche.
SUGGESTIONS FOR MEDITATION
The sexual intercourse of Heaven and Earth is also described in hexagram number eleven,Harmony. In terms of these sexual metaphors, what does the term "adultery" imply in regard to the Work? See hexagram number forty-four, Temptation, for further insight on this theme.
Line 3
Legge: The third line, magnetic, shows one following the deer without the guidance of the forester, and only finding himself in the midst of the forest. The superior man, acquainted with the secret risks, thinks it better to give up the chase. If he went forward, he would regret it.
Wilhelm/Baynes: Whoever hunts deer without the forester only loses his way in the forest. The superior man understands the signs of the time and prefers to desist. To go on brings humiliation.
Blofeld: Pursuing a deer without a guide, the hunter finds himself lost in the forest. The Superior Man perceives that he must stay where he is, as going forward would lead to trouble.
Liu: He hunts deer with a forester. He gets lost in the forest. The superior man, knowing this, prefers to give up the hunt. To go on would bring regret.
Ritsema/Karcher: Approaching stag, lacking precaution. Namely, entering tending-towards the forest center. A chun tzu almost not thus stowing-away. Going abashed.
Shaughnessy: Approaching the deer without ornamentation, it is only to enter into the forest. For the gentleman it is just about as good as dispensing with it; to go is distressful.
Cleary(1): Chasing deer without a guide, just going into the forest. The superior person, knowing the dangers, had better give up; to go would bring regret.
Cleary(2): Chasing deer without preparation only goes into the bush. Leaders see that it is better to give up, for to go would bring regret. [ If you have no accurate knowledge yourself and do not have enlightened teachers or associates, and practice blindly, then you will fall into a pit.]
Wu: Hunting in the forest without the guidance of a ranger will result in roaming aimlessly with a chance of getting lost. The jun zi senses the risk. It is better to quit than to proceed and regret.
COMMENTARY
Confucius/Legge: One pursues the deer without the guidance of the forester in his eagerness to follow the game. The superior man gives up the chase, knowing that if he go forward he would be reduced to extremity. Wilhelm/Baynes: He desires the game, but to go on brings humiliation. It leads to failure. Blofeld: His lack of caution in hunting the deer resulted from his being too set on capturing it. The Superior Man always desists when to advance would bring disaster. Ritsema/Karcher: Approaching stag, without precaution. Using adhering-to wildfowl indeed. A chun tzu stowing it: Going abashment exhausted indeed. Cleary(2): Chasing deer without preparation is following the beasts. To go would bring regret and lead nowhere. Wu: Hunting without a guide is like chasing around the game. To proceed will end in an awkward situation.
Legge: The third line is magnetic, not central, and in the place of a dynamic line. These things are all generally unfavorable, but the outcome of the whole hexagram being good, the superior man sees the immediate danger and avoids it.
NOTES AND PARAPHRASES
Siu: The man wanders aimlessly without adequate guidance, like a hunter without a forester. The superior man knows when going forward will cause regret. He gives up the senseless chase and avoids eventual disgrace.
Wing: You can sense the difficulties that lie ahead on your path. If you nevertheless plunge into the forest of obstacles without an experienced guide, you will surely lose your way. Such egotism and vanity brings unrelenting humiliation. A wiser man will alter his goals here.
Editor: Forest symbolism is usually associated with the feminine principle and the unconscious psyche. A deer, being a denizen of the forest, could symbolize an undifferentiated, unassimilated, autonomous force within the situation at hand. As the object of the quest, it represents the answer to a question, a solution to your problem, etc. To complete the metaphor, the forester would be your intuition or inner guide: the Self. The message is that you have no insight into the prevailing situation and should stop trying to force a solution. Cease your fruitless speculation and wait for the way to become clear.
It is only when the human being really knows what he is doing that he can be called self-conscious and responsible. The person who is guided by his ego alone is not self-conscious in this sense, for he is limited in his self-knowledge to the conscious realm only, and beyond this terrain yields himself blindly to the obscure urges and devious impulses of the unconscious. M.E. Harding -- Psychic Energy
A. “Lost in the woods,” you don't yet grasp your situation. Never act on what you don’t understand.
Line 6
Legge: The sixth line, magnetic, shows its subject with the horses of her chariot obliged to retreat, and weeping tears of blood in streams.
Wilhelm/Baynes: Horse and wagon part. Bloody tears flow.
Blofeld: He hesitates like a man trotting to and fro or like one shedding blood and tears.
Liu: He goes back and forth on horseback. He sheds tears with blood! [Arrogance leads to misfortune, perhaps extreme misfortune.]
Ritsema/Karcher: Riding a horse, arraying thus. Weeping blood, coursing thus.
Shaughnessy: A team of horses vexatious-like, dipping blood streamingly.
Cleary(1): Mounted on a horse, not going forward, weeping tears of blood.
Wu: The horse carriage falters along. Tears roll down from the rider’s eyes.
COMMENTARY
Confucius/Legge: She weeps tears of blood in streams -- how can the state thus emblemed continue long? Wilhelm/Baynes: How could one tarry long in this! Blofeld: How could a flow of blood and tears endure for long? [In other words, our present troubles will pass away in time.] Ritsema/Karcher: Wherefore permitting long-living indeed? Cleary (2): Weeping tears of blood – what can last? Wu: Only despair remains.
Legge: The sixth line is magnetic, as is her third line correlate. She is at the extremity of Peril -- the game is up. What can remain for her in such a case but terror and abject weeping?
NOTES AND PARAPHRASES
Siu: The man fails to overcome the initial difficulties and despair.
Wing: You have lost your perspective. You can no longer see your initial difficulties realistically, nor can you find your way out. This is disgraceful and will cause you much regret. It is best to begin again.
Anthony: Desire and fear prevail. The child in us rules. Despairing, we give up our path. “One should not persist in this.”
Editor: Lines two, four and six all show horses in retreat: strong images of psychological turmoil and confusion; two and four have proper correlates however, so they present the possibility of at least some kind of reconciliation. Here, the correlate is line three, who is depicted as being "lost in the woods.” At its most neutral, the image is one of severe disunion. Wilhelm and Blofeld state that the situation is not a lasting one, so all need not be lost if you seek a totally new and perhaps currently unrecognized connection.
In our ordinary life we are limited and bound in a thousand ways -- the prey of illusions and phantasms, the slaves of unrecognized complexes, tossed hither and thither by external influences, blinded and hypnotized by deceiving appearances. No wonder then that man, in such a state, is often discontented, insecure and changeable in his moods, thoughts and actions. Feeling intuitively that he is "one," and yet finding that he is "divided unto himself," he is bewildered and fails to understand either himself or others. No wonder that he, not knowing or understanding himself, has no self- control and is continually involved in his own mistakes and weaknesses; that so many lives are failures, or are at least limited and saddened by diseases of mind and body, or tormented by doubt, discouragement and despair. Roberto Assagioli -- Psychosynthesis
A. Severe disunion prevails, but need not be permanent if you seek a totally new connection.
Other titles: Family Life, Clan, Home, Linkage, Dwelling People, The Psyche, "May indicate a situation where the family can and should help." -- D.F. Hook
Judgment
Legge: For the regulation of The Family, what is most advantageous is that the wife be firm and correct.
Wilhelm/Baynes: The Family . The perseverance of the woman furthers.
Ritsema/Karcher: Dwelling People. Harvesting: woman Trial. [This hexagram describes your situation in terms of living and working with others in a common space. It emphasizes that caring for your relation with those who share this space and for the space itself is the adequate way to handle it. To be in accord with the time, you are told to: dwell with people!]
Shaughnessy: Family members: Beneficial for the maiden to determine.
Cleary (1): For people in the home it is beneficial that the woman be chaste. [In the human body, the vitality, spirit, soul, psyche, and intent all belong to yin and all take orders from the human mentality … When you refine away the human mind, the mind of tao spontaneously becomes manifest.]
Wu:The Family indicates that it is advantageous for a woman to be persevering. [This is a hexagram with its emphasis on women. Both constituent trigrams are feminine … Hence those who endeavor to be firm and correct will have advantages.]
The Image
Legge: Wind rising out of fire -- the image of The Family. The superior man speaks the truth and is consistent in his behavior.
Wilhelm/Baynes: Wind comes forth from fire: The image of The Family. Thus the superior man has substance in his words and duration in his way of life.
Blofeld: This hexagram symbolizes wind rising from fire. The Superior Man's speech is full of substance and he behaves with constancy.
Liu: The wind coming out of the fire symbolizes The Family. The speech of the superior man should have substance, and his conduct be enduring.
Ritsema/Karcher: Wind originating-from fire issuing-forth. Dwelling People. A chun tzu uses words to possess beings and-also movement to possess perseverance.
Cleary (1): Wind emerges from fire, members of a family. Thus is there factuality in the speech of superior people, consistency in their deeds.
Cleary (2): … Developed people are factual in speech, consistent in action.
Wu: Wind comes forth from fire; this is The Family. Thus the jun zi speaks with facts and acts with perseverance.
COMMENTARY
Confucius/Legge: In Family the wife is in her correct place in the lower trigram, and the husband in his correct place in the upper. That spouses occupy their correct positions shows the correct relationship between heaven and earth. The parents rule the family: let the father indeed be father, and the son son; let the elder brother be indeed elder brother, and the younger brother younger; let the husband indeed be husband, and the wife wife -- then the family will be in its correct state. Bring the family to that state, and all under heaven will be established.
Legge: The written Chinese character for Family simply means "a household," or "the members of a family." The lesson of the hexagram is the regulation of the family, effected by the cooperation of the husband and wife in their several spheres, and only needing it to become universal to secure the good order of the kingdom. The important place accorded to the wife is seen in the short sentence in the Judgment -- that she be firm and correct, and do her part well is essential for the family's proper regulation.
The wife is represented by line two and the husband is her proper correlate in line five. The relationship between heaven and earth is analogous to the relationship between husband and wife.
The second sentence of the Confucian commentary, more closely rendered, would be: "That in the family there is an authoritative ruler is a way of naming father and mother." This means that the assertion of authority in a family should be a correct balance of force and gentleness.
Anthony: The Family symbolizes correct relationships between people – the family unit, the spiritual family (the Sage and the student), and human groups generally. When these most basic relationships are correct, the world is made correct through the force of inner truth, through cultivation of the feminine component of our nature, and through persevering in a virtually menial position (from our ego’s viewpoint) so that our work can come to fruition. All this means to forgo striving and self-assertion, and to allow ourself to be led, while persevering in gentleness and devotion to our path.
NOTES AND PARAPHRASES
Judgment: For the correct regulation of the psyche, what is most important is that the ego must be firm and correct.
The Superior Man lives his allegiance to the ideals of the Work.
Applying the Hermetic Axiom: "as above, so below," the relationships within a family are analogous to the relationships within a city-state, or a kingdom, and vice- versa:
Society centuries before the time of Confucius had been organized on the basis of family. In the early days of the Chou dynasty fiefs had been allotted to the feudal lords in a system of planned colonization. These feudal lords, linked to one another and to the royal house by marriage ties, took their families, retainers, peasants, artisans and soldiers to form self-sufficient colonies based on an agricultural economy and governed from well-fortified walled cities. These large family groupings of the nobility were preserved only so long as the relationships of parents to children, brothers to brothers, and masters to servants were effectively controlled. D.H. Smith -- Confucius
If the ideal city is like a family, then the analogy also holds for an individual -- here the comparison goes directly from city to psyche:
Have we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one? ... Then is that city best governed which is most like a single human being? Plato -- The Republic
Psychologically interpreted, the hexagram of The Family symbolizes the psyche, and the Confucian commentary tells us that when its inner components all assume their proper roles and functions, then the Work will come into fruition. ("All under heaven will be established.") The identical idea has been stated in Gnostic thought:
Jesus said to them: "When you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom. The Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas
The husband is the analogue of heaven or the Self, and the wife is the analogue of earth or the ego. When the ego assumes its correct role as the magnetic servant of the Work, then inner transformations can take place. I have paraphrased the Judgment in terms of the necessity of the ego to follow the dictates of the Work, but one could alternately phrase it in terms of keeping emotional responses under control. For the wife to be "firm and correct" is to ensure that emotions, drives and appetites are not allowed to make decisions -- they are servants, not masters. This is the essence of the Work, and arguably the most reiterated idea in theI Ching.
The patient should be encouraged to use his mind, through observation and discrimination, to bring clearly into his awareness the irrational aspect of his drives and emotions, and also the possible drawbacks and harmfulness to himself and others of their uncontrolled manifestation … To act on the spur of an impulse, a drive or an intense emotion can very often produce undesirable effects which one afterwards regrets … Therefore, he should learn – by repeated experiment and effort – to “insert” between impulse and action a stage of reflection, of mental consideration of a situation, and of critical analysis of his impulse, trying to realize its origin, its source. R. Assagioli – Psychosynthesis
The thirty-seventh hexagram teaches us that the way to manage the emotions is no different than the proper management of aFamily. No wise parent can teach a child self-discipline by adopting the child's point of view: permissiveness, either with our children or our own primitive drives and passions, is a sure formula for disintegration. The Work demands that the ego hold the line on this issue -- indeed, it is the ego's only legitimate function.
We are dominated by everything with which our [ego] becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. R. Assagioli -- Psychosynthesis