Here, in the tao where feeling alone is active and accepted, the life force emerges. It will emerge into active feeling which will either feel towards activity or towards stillness. The first of these is outwards and against the flow of the tao while the second is inwards to its heart—to feel the stillness as alive, not an absence.

Reverence and respect are attitudes we adopt towards those things we do not fully understand, recognize as something great but somehow beyond us. Our directions are confused because the tao is asking us to change direction; the confusion is no error, the unknowing respect is no error, they are simply factors in our situation.

A cycle of feeling is lessening.

The yellow light of late afternoon comes as the sun begins to set and the day (outer activity) is fulfilled in its completion. This gentle image is a beautiful symbol for the activity of stillness, the late afternoon sunlight has just that effect on us. Between high noon and night; at the peak of our eye’s sensitivity; yellow stands for activity of the middle way.

Here we only know outer activity and confuse this with the inner brilliance when it is time for this outer experience to give way to the realization of inner light.

The nourishment of the young and growing is in their experience (their cooking pot) but it has lost its original use, its sense of being real, and has become the rhythm of their song, the habit of it. The old sigh because the future has gone out of life, not being able to see life in stillness. We have a direction which does not continue; the beauty and the brilliance are not there if we see the outer activity as the only real.

In this tao the outer is inactive and our attention is drawn to the inner which is difficult for identity to grasp; turning back to the outer in this line it is as though we turn our attention to something that is just disappearing.

Being unable to feel what inner activity is like, because it seems to the outer sense to be a void, we are out of phase with the life force. In this line which deals with outer activity this tao is naturally difficult.

Giving up our identification with intuitive feeling is to lessen the mind-reality side of feeling, the defining or imaging of it; when we give this up the feeling is left flowing for itself, the inner flows outwards unhampered by images of what it is.

The flow of feeling, an outflow of tears and signs, is dis-stress, this is seen by the mind as distress in its negative meaning of discomfort but for the feeling that is being expressed it is relief and good fortune.

Accepting the life force is accepting the tao most especially when the tao is about the inner flow of the life force. Here we overcome the separateness of identity in some way by becoming one with the flow—yet these words are not quite right, we include our separateness in the flow without rejecting it; only the separateness of our individuality is rejected. This seems odd to our minds because it is separateness that creates individuality; such paradoxes are common on the borders, where reality has two faces at once.

Rebels are symbolic of our divisive parts, or separate identification. Thus it is the separators and not the followers that are killed, it is the separation we are doing away with and this is no error.

The stress in this tao is created by the force of the life energy from the inner acting upon rigid form in our lives (in ourselves). Here the activity is lessened and the stress limited.

This is protection by the inner being, rushes are put under something to soften the contact, they are white because there is no selection in this action (white light is all-coloured light).

Here the rigidity itself is loosening, we are starting to feel the life force again and this is the beginning of new feeling.

The old finds a way to flow again, and it was the lack of flow that caused the excess of pressure.

In this tao identity has excessively structured duality; to act out from this projects the stress into our circumstances.

The ridgepole giving way is like our giving out the stress from within us, we give way to it and the consequences to our environment are unfortunate.

What we are accepting here in this moving line is the inactivity of our outer world, so there is less stress because we are not struggling with our rigidity. This does not change the rigidity but makes it more manageable and may mask the basic problem.

Reliance on masking the stresses we have would be a weak support.

Becoming aware of intuitive feeling that is inactive is to be more aware but not to have more feeling.

This is widening awareness, opening up, flowering; then old feeling (from memory) comes to thought, to consciousness. These do not change things, the flowering does not change the tree and the old woman cannot have children, in other words there is no new growth.

Here we give up the struggle and become unaware of the activity pushing us towards change. When we become unaware of forces they overtake us.

To give way to the flow is no error, only uncomfortable; it overcomes the rigidity and so changes us.