When feeling awakens it awakens to the tao, feels the difficulties that we still have to pass through. Feeling the tao, the way through, will hasten the experience but feeling for escape will delay us.

Small matters are those to which we are not attaching importance; what seems to be important here is to change our circumstances, but to change our circumstances when we are unaware is dangerous.

Here we become less involved in outer activity and this is a relief of stress; being less involved in activity means that we go with it and do not manipulate, thus we get relief and thus we follow the tao as well.

This offering from the greater open reality into ours enclosed by polarity is for our basic needs; when we stop trying to manipulate our reality to get what we think we need, our basic needs are found to be there; if we do not manipulate there is no blame.

The tao is about allowing the inner forces to flow as they will, and here the greater activity of the life force may cause us to think we can move (there is some pressure for personal activity).

The danger comes from our not being aware of the wider nature of our circumstances (lines 2 and 6 being yang).

When intuitive feeling reacts to the life force it is interpreting it and so stands between the whole reality and identity; in identity’s terms it is a link but as reality is whole it is also a barrier.

Identity is our carriage which is part of whole reality except for its self-identification, when feeling does not interpret, the inner and outer are undivided, here feeling becomes active and so divides the outer from the inner. The image is a statement, not a judgement.

Outer activity is part of the flow in the whole, provided we allow it to flow as it will.

There is some danger in urging the life force onwards, it is the beginning of manipulating, so we need to be mindful of the tao. Martial arts are practised to enhance alertness and alertness to the circumstances we are in allows freedom of movement.

Here we are becoming less involved in, less worried by, the outer inactivity and this has a quietening effect on us.

A headboard over the horns was used to restrain and quieten the bull’s too-high spirits. The image sees this as an advantage to the whole.

The less we interpret the life force the freer is the flow of the whole, for interpretation restricts possibilities; the less we interpret the more we accept.

The tusk is not changed when the boar is castrated but the drive that makes it dangerous is removed; this neatly pictures our personalization of activity, the way we own it.

This line is our contact with the greater reality that surrounds us, our personal part in it, so this present involvement of our inner being with the greater undistinguished reality is a culmination of the tao.

This is an acceptance of the great tao, it does not invest identity with some power or other but we are open to the inner silence (of the lower half of the hexagram, Ch’ien). In experience this may involve a deep discovery which brings us into deep peace with ourselves, or it may be that we simply feel more in tune.

Where new energy is becoming available we may look for nourishment in some new experience from the life force rather than that available in our present circumstances.

Tortoise shells were used for divination, and divination is the link between the outer and inner knowing; without the link we lose the thread of what experience is about—nourishing the inner self from outer experience. What is needed is in our experience now.

Intuitive feeling is necessary for us to know our circumstances and if we cannot feel our circumstances we seek nourishment elsewhere.

Both below and above identity in the hexagram we come to the inner, and this hexagram is about nourishing the inner through outer experience; so to seek the emerging life force is to look to nourishment coming to identity in the future, which is not correct or proper, not existing. To look to the inner being for nourishment is to look to what is already formed so it is narrowing or evil.

In this tao outer activity is the source of experience and is essential to nourishment, without our taking part in outer experience the tao is useless to us.

When we avoid outer experience at the time it is offered in our circumstances it is lost and the nourishment of it cannot be had until such circumstances come to us again; this is symbolically the complete cycle of ten years.

Outer activity in the world is an essential part of this tao from which we gain nourishment; we do not, however, benefit from owning that activity and so nourishing our separate ego-being. Here in this line we diminish our owning of outer activity and so can participate more because with less desire we have a wider view.

A hunter which has perfected the art of being alert; the tiger. Looking down he has a wide view. On the mountain we also have a wide view which comes from a vantage point of disinvolvement.

We normally accept ourselves to be as we feel ourselves to be (which is the interpretation line 5 puts upon line 2). Here we are less aware.

Without a feeling of ourselves in our circumstances action becomes hazardous so it is inadvisable to instigate changes.

The inner being accepts nourishment and is the source of outer nourishment while doing so. The position has a fine balance and so has a danger of imbalance; either way it is the producer of a flow of nourishment.

Crossing the great water is changing our way of being, and experiencing without choice makes this change, but if we choose we are fed from past experience, not from the source of nourishment, the present.