As this tao is about finishing off activity, now the emerging life force becomes active again we are talking about the beginnings of a new activity.

The work is done, the outgoing breath is finished so there is a new breath coming. In practical life there are many breaths taking place together and out of phase so that they interact. Our breathing out in one respect is the breathing in of somebody or something else and if we leave suddenly this is a shock to the shared experience.

Here we are no longer watching the feelings we have of the life force, we are trusting it and allowing it to be what it will.

Tortoise shells were used in China for oracle reading. When we are unconcerned whether we are feeling correctly, we feel naturally and flow in the tao; this is the same as having the oracle in abundance.

Accepting the life force is genuine decrease of separate self; we do not choose and it is choice that separates the one who chooses.

When we choose we increase what we choose and diminish others, but this increase in acceptance does not do this. If we have a direction we have no need to choose one so it is easier for us. Our home is where we identify and here we do not identify and so have no home, but if we are just part of the life force this is where people identify and we will appear to have followers.

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.

As the top line of the hexagram is accepting this line, it is not we who see the life force as becoming active, it is itself returning to an active phase already and we do not have difficulty in making things anew.

Life force activity returns from a short journey, a short time away; there was not a great trough of inactivity to cause us regret and our normal urge to activity is in keeping with the tao, which brings harmony to our actions and is the great good fortune.

When we do not interpret the life force in feeling we are not separated from it by our selection; this is in keeping with the free flow we are in.

We react to the tao without fuss or stress. Whenever we can be one with the tao we are blessed with good fortune.

In this situation of finishing off a cycle of activity it is necessary to completely finish or there are remainders, karma is made which will still need expression; these retained forms are habit.

The cycles come and go and if we are slaves to our habits we repeat ourselves; this is the danger. No blame because in habit we cannot see ourselves.

Here we project ourselves less into outer activity in a tao which is the end part of a cycle of the life force; this has the effect of centring us, making us more one in ourselves.

By choosing the middle way, not identifying in the outer nor the inner, the multitude we are becomes a whole, returning alone is returning as one.

At the turning point where old activity of the life force is spent and new is about to arrive we remove our involvement from the old, now silent and gone. This is in preparation for a new cycle.

The nobleness of this return is symbolic of the withdrawal of self interest, of priority to the way we are feeling, allowing it to die away with a readiness to take on something new. As this opens out into new activity in the coming cycle there is no regret.

If we become less involved in the emerging tao when it is in an inactive phase we are likely to miss the next emergence of activity and be out of phase with it.

It is self-evident that if we do not recognize that we are at a turning point of the cycle and press on, we shall miss the changes that are taking place and all our responses will be inappropriate. We will be ruled by desire patterns of our already formed identity, so disaster is stated for the ruler (the identifying process is the ruler of identity). If the turning point of the cycle is completely ignored nothing can be done about it until the next turning point, a complete cycle away and symbolized by ten, the whole, and year, the cycle.