If we have no active life energy even retreat is impeded, slow, or left too late.

If we identify ourselves with the rearguard of retreat we are clearly retreating from something we still desire; it is dangerous because this goal is not attainable.

Our desired outer activity is identity-forming and here yielding is not desired by identity and is held up by our activity. Identity is too fixed in its ideas to accept retreat.

Our identity is served by our intuitive feel of our circumstances and our definition of these feelings; when we are focused upon a particular outer activity these servants are neglected sometimes, but it is they who distinguish our situation so that we do not act inappropriately.

We have come to recognize the feeling of the life force and being open to this enables us to yield willingly, seeing it as right and not only necessary.

The ability to tap the life force depends on where we make our reality, where we sink our well; here it dries up, we have exhausted the possibilities of something yet we still expect life-giving energy from it, so it is time to sink a new well, to seek other sources of nourishment for our life.

Instead of water there is mud. The well is exhausted and no animals, no manifestation, is refreshed by it. The animals know by instinct, but our own intuitive feeling is inactive and ignored in this tao.

Feeling is a flow, and by feeling the life force more in this tao where it is difficult to manifest it we are defining by feeling, creating by feeling. This will create more of our own images and we will not reach the experience of the source which is the quite innocent and inconsequent experience the tao is offering.

Fish, our manifestations in the life force or water, are first defined by feeling; we are hunting them with our feeling, trying to find them. The water level has been raised to the surface by our feeling but it becomes filled with our images and our hunting for manifest reality. Our method is not sound so the pitcher is cracked and leaks.

Here the life force flows in outer activity, but according to trigram Li of the tao our responses are hesitant and cannot take advantage, cannot see the possibilities so that the inhibitions in the situation are not overcome, but there is the possibility.

Access to the water is no longer blocked but we are not tasting it. If the king, our identifying syndrome, were wise it would be shared by the many parts of our identity. The need in this tao is to taste the emerging life force, not to project it outwards.

We have been concerned with the inactivity of our outer reality (line 3) but now we become unconcerned which gives more energy to the other yin line in our receiving experience, line 6; this is attentive to the life force emerging in line 1, so this movement is turning our attention inward to our reception of the life force.

Here we are concerned with our quietness of feeling (the yang line 2); we experience it. To experience the existing inner quietness is to experience the inner being as it is.

This is its natural condition and we taste it, experience it. It is pure because we have not put identifications into it. Here we experience without identifying, and this is what the tao offers.

Our concern in line 6 of this tao has been to experience the emerging life force because of a lack of flow or a lack of “depth” in our experience. The tao is about not being able to reach this inner depth and here in this moving line the tao is ending so we are no longer concerned because we have “found a way”.

What has made it difficult to experience the water was a lack of reach and an inability to hold it; our ability to reach the life force depends on our not turning it into something else that we want; our ability to hold it is our ability to hold our own identifying, our own self, empty.

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.