When we are fully accepting our situation this acceptance remains even when there is no activity; identity is naturally activity-seeking so accepting inactivity involves a faith that activity will return.

We feel the movement of inner energies by direct experience of intuitive feeling, so for this feeling to become more active is a natural outcome of the energies ascending within us.

To be in our feelings is to be genuinely involved, and the sacrifice in which we are involved is of the ownership of the ascent; we recognize that it is the life force which ascends and this is no error.

When ascending energy reaches outer action there is no longer any doubt even in a doubting mind, for there it is for all to see.

The life force moves outwards into the world and spreads out there. When this happens we in identity have a feeling of release, of enlargement we sometimes call our success; even if we do think of it in this narrow way we move with the life force.

When we concern ourselves less with an outer experience which is inactive (line 3 is yang) we are taking it as the manifestation of the life force and not our own creation. In this way we offer something to the whole by sacrificing our attachment.

Mount Chi was in the homeland of King Wên, who is reputed to have put the Chinese oracle images in their present form. If King Wên sacrificed up mount Chi it was on the height of his homeland; innerly the height of our homeland is our mind reality, our separated position or point of view, and giving up our separateness is our ultimate sacrifice and good fortune.

Here we no longer accept the absence of interpretation of the life force (the yang line 2), but the energy cannot ascend unchanged if we interpret it so the ascent is checked.

It is in steps if we do not continue in the way without stopping, as in the case of this line.

Without the attention of our inner being (line 6 is yang) the emerging energy becomes quiet. This, in the context of decay, means a disconnection between an activity and the one following (the sixth line is our inner structure absorbed from activity and the first line is the next emerging energy).

For an internal interpretation the father is our past distinguishing which “fathers” our next response. The disconnection noted above is seen as a change of mode which, if a change in distinguishing (a son rather than a daughter which would be feeling) removes the old way of distinguishing (the father’s mode). Changing our way of being is going through instability (peril) but brings good fortune, a new way forward.

Here is a new feeling of the life force; it derives from our old way of feeling (the mother).

Feeling is a flow and so a continuity, consequently the change of one cycle to the next in feeling is not achieved by throwing out the old. The natural flow of feeling is for the new to take the place of the old when that is exhausted, so we allow old feelings to die, we do not kill them.

The old outer activity had ceased and now here is the new in which our identity manifests; changing our outer mode is only carried out when we think the old is inferior and can be improved (the old mode is the father’s). We spend our time making things “better” and this means that we are always seeing ourselves as in some way in error.

We have to regret what we are in order to want to change it but this does not necessarily mean that there is error.

The old outer activity has decayed by exhausting itself; this lessens interest in outer activity so that we do not change what has been done. In this tao it is important that a new cycle replaces the old or identity itself has no vehicle.

Here we are becoming less involved in the inactive feeling of line 2, less attached to it, and this is a turning point from decay to new growth. We prepare to take on a new cycle of activity, which in our usual progress is a development of what has gone before.

The praise belongs to the re-experience of our direction in a new way.

Here we accept the turning point from decay to re-birth as it refers to our own being. In this we can have no purposes.

This is the line of the inner being and as near to experience of the whole as our manifest part can reach. Kings and princes refer to the identifying process which is irrelevant here, where the turning point is in our own being.

A change to greater activity of the life force cannot be fully used in this tao where we are without a feeling of it and not identifying in outer action.

She marries but not fully, he can walk but not fully; it is better to have this partial movement than none, it is better to participate in what is on offer than to live in our images of what ought to be on offer.

As the emerging life force is tending to become active in this tao (the trigram Tui) and everything is slow in our outer world, it is natural for our feelings towards activity to turn to this line which feels the life force. Feeling seeks the “other”, something to feel, but in these circumstances there is nothing available so we can only feel our own responses.

Feeling “looks” both inwards and outwards, but here vision is only on offer inwards so continuing in this is the way to proceed.

We do not properly take part in the outer activity of this tao; we long to share but we cannot (sometimes dare not) give ourselves up to it. When the activity decreases we are able to take some part in it, an entrance into a world we wish to share.

A servant does not participate, a concubine does; a servant has separate quarters, a concubine co-inhabits. Here we become a participator, we enter the world of others and our energies have some outlet.

In this moving line we are involved, we are interested or even dedicated to becoming involved; but this tao is a result of a long time of denial of outer flow and of acceptance of inner inactivity, so becoming interested in feelings of flow does not cause a torrent of activity, it prepares for movement.

In this tao we have been accepting that feeling is inactive; here we no longer accept this and so create a mind-feeling, a feeling stimulated by mind rather than the life force.

Our feeling is, in this symbol, the serving maid of our identifying, supplying the experience that is then identified, and this moving line 5 is about what identity does with feeling, how it dresses it up. The emperor is the ruler and our ruler in identity is the identifying process; this dresses up the experience in a way that is less beautiful than its original natural self. But the moon is nearly full, the growth of the feeling influence is waxing and about to reach its full radiance, so this opening to feeling will allow natural feeling to show itself again and this is good fortune.

Here we cease to accept the life force as it emerges into manifestation and act as though we could create activity; but the life force is not active so our actions become gestures only.

In both these images the action of the person is empty, nothing in the basket and no blood in the sheep. Whether we feel (the woman) or try to make identifying nourishment for identity (the man) there is nothing there and no direction we take, no action we make, will produce the result we desire at present. It is something to learn that we are not the creators.