Without active feelings there can be no resonance between ourselves and others (what is other to ourselves). Any relationship that will open our awareness has to be with something or someone different from ourselves.

We need to seek our complement, not our likeness, for feelings to become dynamic and resonate with one another.

The tao is about feeling the resonance of relationship but here we are shy of the contest that polarity involves and transfer our attention to outer activity, doing things rather than feeling them and thinking things out rather than feeling them within us. In this way we miss the change in ourselves that the resonance of feeling would cause.

Weapons are symbolic of our polarity in activity; we hide this polarity which tends to create contest if it is manifest; we mount an easily defended position and so we miss a whole cycle of activity—we have to wait for this challenge to recur (symbolically three years). If we can gather our courage we should go forth and experience consequences instead of hiding from them, and this change is probably more possible than we think.

In this tao we (personal self) are accepting, the top three lines are all yin so we are recognizing our circumstances; here in this moving line the activity of the life force diminishes naturally in its cycle, and to follow the inner light even when it appears to go out is great modesty. Identity is light-seeking, activity-seeking, it exists in the contrasts made by defining. This modesty of following even in the inactive part of the cycle brings a great change to our sense of reality.

Here our ordinary sense of modesty, of the self in relation to other selves, leads to modesty of a different dimension, modesty of the inner self regarding the great self or whole. This is a great change or crossing of the great water.

In the context of modesty this lessening of feeling comes to mean “making less of” the life force, not imposing our view on it.

Manifesting modesty is the same as diminishing our manifestation of self and its separate desires; it has to do with realizing that the stronger our personal self becomes, the more our experience holds itself away from wholeness.

Acting out of modesty is allowing action to take place, like unfolding something that is already there rather than thinking that our acts create. This action completes itself and leaves no karma, no part of it attached to the personal self.

To identify less with the outer world is modest whether it is active or passive; modesty is about finding an approach to reality where we ourselves exist less, consider ourselves less rather than consider ourselves to be less; this has to be done without purpose or we exist in our purpose. True modesty is to be found at the centre of our being where we are not separate, where the life force flows through without being held.

Modesty is the non-involvement of self, not its denigration, so when we become less involved in our feelings of modesty, we are claiming less of reality to be our own. This maturity of identity leads to the decay of its separateness, but this separateness is what the personal self identifies as itself and so resists its decay.

The feelings requiring our separateness are the rebels, rebelling against the cycle which is now about becoming more whole.

Here in this moving line our inner being does not accept the modesty that is being expressed. Modesty that is expressed is trying to achieve something by the expression.

The expression of modesty is manipulative; the essence of modesty is not to notice itself.

Here the silence of identity (lines 4, 5, and 6 are yang) ignores the activity of the life force and it ceases to have influence.

The brake is applied; there is nothing we can do about it but follow our circumstances. Any attempt to get out of our circumstances will prove unfortunate so we need simply to experience where we are. A lean pig is an underfed pig and when we are under-stimulated we “leap about” to cause activity.

Feeling is our link between the undefined inner and manifest outer; here in this line new activity of feeling is occurring although identity is taking no notice.

Our present identifications (the guests) are not noticing the nourishment available, but this cannot be error, it is just circumstance.

In this tao we do not have a true picture of our circumstances and in this line we act out in circumstances of which we are ignorant.

If our increased involvement is with a sense of outer peace all is well, but this is likely to be a search for outer activity and if it is we will search and find none.

The tank which has or has not fish in it is our personal inner being and the fish are our personal identifications in this. Here there are no fish, the process of identifying is inactive in this tao, so if we expect something we are disappointed.

Our intuition about our circumstances as shown by line 2 is inactive; by accepting this lack of interpretive feeling, we allow life to happen to us.

The melons, the gourd family of fruits, have a multitude of seeds in the fruit casing, many possibilities. These possibilities are hidden within the fruit, the fruit is hidden in the leaves, it appears that nothing is there; then suddenly from this nothing (from heaven) there is a happening. This describes how life is when we do not anticipate it.

By accepting the energy of this tao which flows through emotional channels there is a forcing of their recognition.

The way emotion forces its way into recognition is often uncomfortable and causes regret, but it is necessary for it to be expressed so this is not an error.