Amongst the forces acting upon the emerging life force is our selection of what we will recognize. In this tao we, as identity, are not recognizing emerging activity and this makes it inactive for us in this moving line. This selection of the particular from the whole is the natural course of growing identity but as it matures experience is gathered into its inner being and, if it remains open, the outer and inner resonate as one.

The superior man is one who experiences more widely, which is also less selectively.

Less outer activity tends to balance our outer-inner position and so is in keeping with the tao. By acting out less, we see more of what is going on around us.

This is an outer line and we vary our action according to changes in outer circumstances rather than allowing ourselves to be carried by the momentum of our involvements.

We, identity, are less involved in our active outer world and by acting out in a less entangled way we have a wider view.

The king is the identifying process which rules our conscious world, here we contemplate being in this identified world in a new way, not as one identified, who would be a subject of the king, but as a guest, a visitor. The advantage is that we remain centred, not becoming entangled in identifications.

Feeling is of the life force and of its movements which are the tao, so the movement of this line corrects the imbalance that the hexagram pictures and brings our separated parts together.

Becoming aware of our intuitive feelings gives awareness of the flow of the life energy which is the “course of his life”. It is the superior man who does this because it is a widening view.

Realizing what we have been doing always changes our direction. Becoming more involved in the tao of overlooking life gives insight into ourselves and brings about a change in the balance between the viewer and the viewed, when there is full involvement the experiencer and the experience become one.

When our own life force energies need no expression and have become silent we may follow the tao concerning some need outside ourselves.

Feeling is our first interpretation of the life force, from it we define our reactions and outer actions in the world; here in this tao we are scattering a form of identity so it is counter-productive to turn feeling into attitudes.

Feeling is protected if kept within; in sacrificing the formation of an attitude we must hurry because feeling turns into an attitude so quickly we hardly see it turning, if indeed we see it at all. If we can stop in time, regret will disappear because regret is only possible when we have invested in attitudes.

Our outer activity naturally wanes in this tao, and it is harmonious to allow it to die away so that we have no goal, no desire to achieve. We will then be empty, ready to allow the inner source to pass through and resonate in us.

Our own outer activity is normally directed towards achieving our desires in the world. Here we withdraw from this relationship, it is time to end what we have been doing to make room for something new.

The ordinary man is our normal mode of creating a world out of our attitudes, it takes an extraordinary attitude to realize that our being is indestructible and our form one of continual change.

Feeling is not creating anything and we are living in this state of non-identification more where nothing leads identity and it becomes an awareness of being.

The effort is great when the identifying process gives away the right to identify; identity gives up the ownership of what is there; it is a great statement, a great realization.

Accepting dispersal in our inner being is the scattering of our ongoing self, the realization that this is not necessary to being.

Blood is the life flow, the nourishing medium of our inner life which enables the separate parts to maintain themselves. To scatter this is to dissipate the established pattern of ourself or to keep it at a distance from our ability to be. It is to flow simply with the life force rather than with our own pattern of flow.

Because our outer identifications are not being accepted by our inner self, the source, the emerging life force, withers away.

The bed is where we enter the great unknown and sleep. Here the leg of the bed breaks, which is its connection with the rest of reality. Our identifications, our conscious interests, are somehow at variance with the way or out of tune with our circumstances, too narrowly based.

Here we become separate from the flow by ceasing to feel it. Feeling is our meeting with the flow so if we lose feeling in this tao we do not identify in the whole but only in the outer part.

Here it is the bed frame, its structure, that comes apart. Our feeling of the life force is the base construction of our world reality; without a feeling of manifesting whole reality, our personal reality becomes isolated fragments. This feeling of whole reality we are lacking is the continuance in the way of the great tao.

By decreasing outer activity we become more in tune with our inner being which has rejected our identifications out in the world.

All our identifications are out there in the world, and here we discard them. In this way we separate ourselves from the factors that divided us.

The most obvious danger in this tao about how we identify is our becoming too externalized and here we seem to realize this and cut off our involvement outside. As our being is at present concentrated in identifying, however, this now slips into identifying the boundary of the inner and outer self.

The surface of the bed is the layer or skin between the outer reality—where we (identity) lie—and the inner; if consciousness penetrates this boundary it damages the function of identity in manifestation.

In this tao our identifying leads us astray and our intuitive feeling which is the basis of our identifying is rejected by our inner being. Here our identity gives up following the feeling, seeing it as being in error.

Fish are often used to symbolize our identifications (which nourish identity) in the uncharted waters of the whole reality. Here is a string of fishes, on a common thread and the fish are caught, so our identifications threaded together are captured. A court is where the ruler is ruling, and the ruler of identity is the identifying process, so here this act of catching identifications brings favour and advantage in every way.

Here is a change in the separation depicted by the tao. The inner self witnesses and we have a possibility of realizing the tao, the experience of our self as separate from any identification.

To see whole we have to leave what we were doing, our identifications, however incomplete they seem to be; this ripe fruit could be eaten but we leave it. Wide-seeing superior man is carried in this, and allowing ourselves to be carried in our circumstances we find that there is more order in our lives, not less; if we do not grasp at life our inner needs take care of themselves. The inferior or narrow reality of chosen identifications has no place to be after this realization, he is not needed.