Wiki I Ching

Inner Truth 61.2.6 3 Difficulty

Inner truth lights the way forward; trust your resilience to navigate new beginnings.

From
61
Inner Truth
To
3
Difficulty

One pretends having misunderstood.
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Inner Truth 61
Inner truth and sincerity lead to harmony and trust.
Genuine communication fosters unity.
Be truthful with yourself and others to create meaningful connections.


Line 2
Sincere communication and mutual understanding bring harmony and shared joy.


Line 6
Overreaching or excessive persistence can lead to negative consequences.


Difficulty 3
Embrace challenges and uncertainty; growth is difficult but necessary.
Encouragement and persistence lead to success.



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Original Readings

61
Inner Truth


Other titles: The Symbol of Central Sincerity, Inward Confidence, Inner Truthfulness, Sincerity, Centering- Conforming, Central Return, Faithfulness in the Center, Sincerity in the Center, Insight, Understanding, The Psyche, "Take the middle road and avoid extremes." -- D.F. Hook

 

Judgment

Legge: Inner Truth moves even pigs and fish, and leads to good fortune. There will be advantage in crossing the great stream. There will be advantage in being firm and correct.

Wilhelm/Baynes:Inner Truth. Pigs and fishes. Good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. Perseverance furthers.

Blofeld: Inward Confidence and Sincerity. Dolphins -- good fortune! It is advantageous to cross the great river (or sea). Persistence in a right course brings reward.

Liu:Inner Truthfulness. Sea Lions -- good fortune. It is of benefit to cross the great water.

Ritsema/Karcher:Centering Conforming, hog fish significant. Harvesting: wading the Great River. Harvesting trial. (Hog fish, T’UN YU: aquatic mammals; porpoise, dolphin; intelligent aquatic animals whose development parallels the human; sign of abundance and good luck.) [This hexagram describes your situation in terms of the relation between your inner core and the circumstances of your life. It emphasizes that bringing your central concerns and your life situation into a sincere and reliable accord is the adequate way to handle it...]

Shaughnessy:Central Return: the piglet and fish are auspicious; harmonious: beneficial to ford the great river; beneficial to determine.

Cleary (1): Faithfulness in the center is auspicious when it reaches even pigs and fish . It is beneficial to cross great rivers. It is beneficial to be correct.

Cleary (2): Sincerity in the center is auspicious when simple-minded ... etc.

Wu:Sincerity moves piglets and fishes. Auspicious. It will be advantageous to cross the big river with perseverance.


The Image

Legge: Wood on a Marsh -- the image of Inner Truth. The superior man deliberates about cases of litigation and delays the infliction of death.

Wilhelm/Baynes: Wind over lake: the image of Inner Truth. Thus the superior man discusses criminal cases in order to delay executions.

Blofeld: This hexagram symbolizes wind blowing over a marshy lake. The Superior Man devotes careful thought to his judgments and is tardy in sentencing people to death.

Liu: The wind over the lake symbolizes Inner Truthfulness. The superior man judges criminals and postpones capital punishment.

Ritsema/Karcher: Above marsh possessing wind. Centering Conforming. A chun tzu uses deliberating litigating to delay dying.

Cleary (1): There is wind above a lake, with truthfulness between them. Thus superior people consider judgments and postpone execution.

Cleary (2): There is wind over a lake, with sincerity in the center. True leaders consider judgments and postpone execution.

Wu: There is wind above the marsh: this is Sincerity. Thus, the jun zi deliberates the verdicts and enjoins the death sentence.

 

COMMENTARY

Confucius/Legge:Inner Truth shows two magnetic lines occupying the innermost part of the hexagram, with dynamic lines in the centers of the trigrams. We see the attributes of Cheerfulness and Flexible Penetration -- sincerity thus symbolized reaches even to pigs and fishes and will transform the country. We see one riding on the symbol of Wood, which forms an empty boat -- hence it is advantageous to cross the great stream. The virtue of Inner Truth requires firm correctness and shows the proper response of man to heaven.

Legge: Inner Truth denotes the highest quality of man, giving its possessor the power to prevail with spiritual beings, with other men and with lower creatures. There are two magnetic lines in the center and two dynamic lines above and below them. The magnetic lines represent the heart and mind free from all preoccupation, without any consciousness of self. The two dynamic lines immediately above and below them are each in the center of their respective trigram, and denote the solid virtue of one so free from selfishness.

The trigram of Wood above the trigram for a Lake or Marsh suggests a boat crossing the great stream. The pigs and fishes symbolize the rudest and most obstinate of men. Ch'eng-tzu observes: "We have in the sincerity shown in the upper trigram superiors condescending to those below them in accordance with their peculiarities, and we have in that of the lower those below delighted to follow their superiors. The combination of these two things leads to the transformation of the country and state."

 

NOTES AND PARAPHRASES

Judgment: It is a great accomplishment when Inner Truthalters archetypal forces within the psyche. The ego’s devotion to the Work is the means to this end.

The Superior Man carefully differentiates his options and avoids drastic measures. (Can sometimes mean: "Don't act until you are sure of all the facts.")

Anyone who monitors his dreams and other images knows that the unconscious is a continuous wellspring of psychic energy. Jung has observed that we are probably dreaming all of the time -- the only reason we don't usually notice this is because the conscious mind is so powerful that the more subtle manifestations of the psyche are eclipsed. Since consciousness consists of only the upper layers of a deep continuum of awareness it is obvious that we are being continuously "created from within." The ultimate source of our being is not easily accessible, but all of the empirical evidence points to a "Self" which transcends the space-time continuum -- i.e., lives in another "dimension."

The capacity to nullify space and time must somehow inhere in the psyche, or, to put it another way, the psyche does not exist wholly in time and space. It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness.
Jung --Letters

This seemingly exotic concept was written by Jung in 1939, yet today the theories of the quantum physicists are approaching the point where awareness itself will be recognized as space-time transcendent.

In the modern Kaluza-Klein theory all the forces of nature, not merely gravity, are treated as manifestations of spacetime structure. What we normally call gravity is a warp in the four spacetime dimensions of our perceptions, while the other forces are reduced to higher-dimensional spacewarps. All the forces of nature are revealed as nothing more than hidden geometry at work ... There is a deep compulsion to believe in the idea that the entire universe, including all the apparently concrete matter that assails our senses, is in reality only a frolic of convoluted nothingness, that in the end the world will turn out to be a sculpture of pure emptiness, a self-organized void.
Paul Davies -- Superforce

The physicists now hypothesize an eleven-dimensional universe, and state that the seven "extra" dimensions are somehow "rolled up to a very small size" so that they are not apparent to our senses. If we are going to hypothesize such fantastic realms it is more elegant to hypothesize consciousness itself as emanating from an extra-dimensional source. This is the Pleroma of the Gnostics and Alchemists, the upper and lower worlds of shamanism, or in Jungian parlance: the Objective Psyche or Collective Unconscious.

The familiar spacetime of our conscious experience consists of three linear dimensions, plus time. Time is considered a dimension, but not like the other three -- one can go up, down, forward and backward, to the left or right at will, but one cannot go back to this morning or forward to next Thursday afternoon. The time dimension is a continuous "now" and we experience it and the other three dimensions from the reference point of consciousness -- we are the center from which all dimensions radiate. Consciousness is like time in that it is always "now," and since consciousness emerges from within in a continuous and autonomous flow, we can legitimately hypothesize that we emanate from a power source in another dimension. We are a kind of continuous explosion from within -- a microcosmic version of the "Big Bang" which originated the universe, and which, incidentally, is still exploding-expanding outward into space.

If everything that is recognizable is so only because it has separated itself from the "all and nothingness," leaving its complementary half behind in the unmanifested state, then the earth too must have its complementary half in the unmanifested state, and the force of gravitation it exerts on all the creatures and objects living on it is the striving for reunification between the earth and its unmanifested complementary half which has been left behind in the void as its negative reflection. The earth's gravitational pull thus draws all the earth towards the void which stands beyond time and space, in order to bring about this reunion. If the earth were to yield, all the earth and everything on it would disappear into the center, into the void. But that would be a return to the paradisiacal unity -- to God -- to bliss!
Elisabeth Haich -- Initiation

The image of the hexagramInner Truth gives us the idea of an "empty" center -- as good an image as could be devised from the structural components of the trigrams to show the inner source of human consciousness. The pigs and fishes of the Judgment are the archetypal complexes which must be tamed through the process of the Work, and to "cross the great stream" with firm correctness is to accomplish this holy task.

Through all ages men have sought, and some have found; there is a door through which we can pass out on to the higher planes, but that door is within the soul, it is an enlargement of consciousness whereby we perceive these things to which we have hitherto been blind, and from such perception comes the sense of reality which is lacking while we perceive nothing but appearances. Whoso has this wider vision is freed from the limitations of the five physical senses; his memory extends back beyond birth, and his hopes go forward beyond death ... Having all aspects of his own nature harmoniously developed, he is at one with all aspects of the universe, nothing is alien to him, and no form of existence is hostile. The path of life is open before him and he treads it with joy.
D. Fortune -- The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage


Line 2

Legge: The second line, dynamic, shows its subject like the crane crying out in her hidden retirement, and her young ones responding to her. It is as if it were said: "I have a cup of good spirits," and the response were, "I will partake of it with you."

Wilhelm/Baynes: A crane calling in the shade. Its young answers it. I have a good goblet. I will share it with you.

Blofeld: A crane sings in the shade; its young ones follow suit. [This symbolizes a longing in which others share.] I have a fine goblet and will share it with you. [We should allow others to benefit from something or some circumstance which is valuable to us.]

Liu: A crane calls in the shade; its young ones respond. I have a good goblet (wine, virtue) to share with you.

Ritsema/Karcher: Calling crane located-in yin. One's son-hood harmonizing it. I possess a loved wine-cup. Myself associating, simply spilling it.

Shaughnessy: A calling crane in the shade, its young harmonizes with it: We have a good chalice, I will down it with you.

Cleary (1): A calling crane is in the shade, its fledgling joins it; I have a good cup, which I will quaff with you.

Wu: A crane cries in the shade and her young chime in. “I have fine wine. I would like to share it with you.”

 

COMMENTARY

Confucius/Legge: Her young ones respond to her from the common wish of the inmost heart. Wilhelm/Baynes: This is the affection of the inmost heart. Blofeld: `Its young ones follow suit' indicates heartfelt desire. Ritsema/Karcher: Centering the heart desiring indeed. Cleary (2): The fledgling joining in is the heart’s desire. Wu: The harmony comes from within.

The Master said: "The superior man occupies his apartment and sends forth his words. If they be good, they will be responded to at a distance of more than a thousand miles -- how much more will they be so in the nearer circle! If his words be evil, they will awaken opposition at a distance of more than a thousand miles – how much more will they do so in the inner circle! Words issue from one's person, and proceed to affect the people. Actions proceed from what is near, and their effects are seen at a distance. Words and action are the spring and hinge of the superior man. The movement of that hinge and spring determines glory or disgrace. His words and actions move Heaven and Earth -- may he be careless in regard to them?"

Legge: The young ones of the crane are represented by line one. The symbolism suggests two men brought together by their sympathy in virtue. The subject of the line is the effect of sincerity. As one bond of loving regard unites the mother bird and her young, so answers the heart of man to man.

 

NOTES AND PARAPHRASES

Siu: The man voices his feelings and defends his deeds by clear explanations, which exert a far-reaching chain reaction.

Wing: Here insight and influence are in their finest hour. The deeds you do, the words you speak, resonate in the hearts and minds of others near and far. You may expect a fortunate and beneficial response from your environment.

Editor: We see here a hidden mother bird calling to her young to share a cup of spirits. (Wilhelm, Blofeld and Liu all translate "hidden retirement" as "shade.") The image is of a mother who cannot be seen -- i.e., a hidden source. Psychologically interpreted, this suggests the inner Self, and the shade suggests the darkness of the unconscious from which the Self calls to us. The young birds who respond to the call are the complexes of the psyche, including, of course, the conscious ego-complex. Despite conscious negative associations of alcohol with intoxication, "spirits" are a common dream symbol for the action of the spirit on consciousness. (Aqua Vitae, literally: "water of life," means alcohol or hard liquor.) The overall image then is one of the Self and its complexes united by their common "spirit."

As concerning the most sovereign form of soul in us we must conceive that heaven has given it to each man as a guiding genius -- that part which we say dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth toward our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens. And this is most true, for it is to the heavens, whence the soul first came to birth, that the divine part attaches the head or root of us and keeps the whole body upright.
Plato -- The Timaeus

A. An image of affinity and connectedness which may be hidden or not readily apparent.

B. Self and satellites united in accord: Nourishment which comes from within.

Line 6

Legge: The topmost line, dynamic, shows its subject as chanticleer trying to mount to heaven. Even with firm correctness there will be evil.

Wilhelm/Baynes: Cockcrow penetrating to heaven. Perseverance brings misfortune.

Blofeld: The noise of cocks crowing rises to the sky -- to persist now would bring misfortune. [This suggests that we are over-confident and inclined to crow about our good fortune; but we should remember that triumph seldom lasts long and avoid seeking even greater triumphs at this time.]

Liu: The crow of a cock piercing the heavens. To continue -- misfortune.

Ritsema/Karcher: A soaring sound mounting, tending-towards heaven. Trial: pitfall.

Shaughnessy: The golden pheasant's sound ascends to the heavens; determination is inauspicious.

Cleary (1): The voice of a pheasant reaches the skies; even if devoted, the outlook is bad.

Cleary (2): A rooster ascends to the skies. Self-righteousness leads to misfortune.

Wu: The crowing sound of a rooster ascends high in the sky. It will be foreboding, even with perseverance.

 

COMMENTARY

Confucius/Legge: Chanticleer tries to mount to Heaven, but how can such an effort continue long? Wilhelm/Baynes: How could such a one last long? Blofeld: For how could this continue for long? Ritsema/Karcher: Wherefore permitting long-living indeed? Cleary (2): How can the rooster who ascends to the skies last? Wu:

How long can it last?

Legge: Line six should be magnetic, but is dynamic, and coming after line five, what can he accomplish? His efforts will be ineffectual and self-destructive. He is symbolized as a cock -- literally: "The plumaged voice." But a cock is not fitted to fly high, and will only hurt himself in the attempt.


NOTES AND PARAPHRASES

Siu: Mere words cannot be relied upon. Overdependence on them leads to bad results.

Wing: Your character has developed to a point where you can make a formalized appeal for help and allegiance in attaining ambitious aims. However, your position is not correct for such aspirations. The pursuit of these aims brings unhappiness and remorse.

Editor: The cock is a proud and stubborn bird: loud and aggressive, it is an appropriate symbol of a deluded ego. [Cocksure: "Given to or marked by overconfidence, presumptuousness, lack of thoroughness or cockiness."] The sound of a cock's crowing suggests proud words or vain ideas. His correlate is the weak and inconstant, “drumming and sobbing” third line, and he can be seen as an over-confident ego aspiring to lead the psyche to glory -- an illusion which can only fail and thereby retard the progress of the Work. At worst, this implies bad faith; at best it suggests ignorance and illusion.

Reliance on one's apparent self [ego] leads to ruin. To presume to be all-knowing is extremely harmful. Self-reliance or self-confidence means faith in the higher self. To persist in remaining what one already is or in holding on to one's preconceived opinions at any cost -- such self-importance is unprofitable.
Swami Turlyananda

A. Ego pride destroys the Work.

B. Don't pretend to know or try to understand what is beyond your comprehension.

3
Difficulty


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.