The inner activity shown here draws our motivation inwards and the outer energy is depleted.

Motivated parts of our identity, the people, do not like the situation, but the wide view is that one must go with the cycle and experience all its aspects.

Here we feel the life force less and have some confusion, so we ride life, we ride on the acceptance in this tao which enables us to act without owning the action.

The left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain where immediate, whole action dominates; the thigh gives power to the knee joint as we run and leap. These together with injury show that our ability to move instinctively in our circumstances is impaired. We are helped by allowing ourselves to be carried.

In this tao the light, the identification, becomes inner so the Chinese image speaks of the increasing outer activity of this line as a rebel.

The hunt is for identification and the south stands for the high noon of activity, so we have this rebel identification in the outer place; what leads this is the desire to be in control of circumstances and the tao does not support this. If, however, we take outer activity itself as the evil this is excessive.

Here we become less involved because the feeling is too painful. This tao has a transitory nature because outer expression cannot be held for a long time without stress developing from the essential need to manifest, and if this is blocked we must feel less or break through the blockage. This moving line indicates that we cannot easily experience the silence any longer but we have this way of withstanding it by withdrawing attention.

Prince Chi lived at a time of outer despotism and he hid his convictions in order to preserve them. Here we do likewise. When wounded we are unable to give battle.

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.

When beset with polarity we are in stress, choosing yet unable to make a choice and changing our choice even before putting it into effect. Here in this line the life force becomes quiet and this gives choice a rest.

It is the life flow emerging more quietly and lessening the stress, it is not our doing and cannot possibly be an error, but when beset by choice we are always overconscious of error.

Greater activity of our intuitive feeling enables us to find direction in the life force.

Yellow is an active colour (almost in the middle of our visible spectrum), applied to an arrow which indicates a chosen direction—we have chosen an active direction; this direction is between extremes, being given as “one” which is the whole or middle way of unchoosing. This direction ends the vacillation of choice which deprived us of identifying, in the same way a fox deprives man of his nourishment (three foxes because continual change of choice was the problem).

To obtain freedom of flow identity needs to act out without identifying itself in the movement. Here in the line we seem to be confused about this and expect the life force to carry us out of stress without our taking part at all.

We want to be carried yet we do not want to let go; not allowing activity is still controlling it.

To become involved in outer activity is to make it our own; this gives entanglement, not deliverance. Only when we take ourselves out of the equation do we see that it balances.

The toes lead our steps and our steps are our personal way. The friend with trust is the life flow itself; willful activity causes the flow of circumstances to appear untrustworthy.

We are no longer trying to discern the life force and so in a tao of release we allow it to be what it will.

We cannot be released by following something, for we are attached to what we follow. It is necessary to be alone and open to be free; separating from attachment enables us to be free.

Here identity chooses not to choose, which is release as the stress was in the choice.

The hawk sits on a high wall choosing what he will catch. High up is symbolically the head and a wall is a boundary and barrier, so we have been choosing from our position of defining which confines the choice; here the prince (identity) takes a direction (shoots an arrow) which kills the chooser.