Here a need for activity stirs, appearing as a move of fate opening up activity. It is necessary to give strength to this and make it a force, otherwise we cannot gain experience (make mistakes and learn) and come up against the world.

The phrase about princes is interpreted in the oracle comments above. The hesitation comes from unawareness of our intuitive feeling of the life force shown in the yang line 5.

Our feelings are not recognizing that the challenge of individual activity is necessary and so we lose driving power. This is part of the birth of an individuality; there are still forces within us which are not ready to leave the great tao, the total parent, and become separate. Knowledge of this is not enough by itself, we need to woo the feeling towards taking part before we really join the dance. We _are_ born and need to accept this fully; the beginning is difficult but as we continue it gets easier.

The chaste maiden is our feeling which is not at this time accepting a challenge. There is no driving power because the horse, feeling, is not connected to our circumstances which are the carriage of our activity. When we refuse a challenge in this way we cannot advance until we meet a new challenge of this same sort, which is the symbol of a whole cycle of ten years before the maiden accepts.

Here we come up against outer world activity, find ourselves without guidelines, and desist. Indeed it is only prudent to do this while we assess the new activity—to rush in with newly-found ego energy is going to create problems.

The superior man is our wide-seeing ability which comes from having many experiences and taking their essence or wisdom into our inner being. In this tao we are in unfamiliar experience but here we can use our existing wisdom to avoid entanglement.

In this tao we are actively feeling a new situation; here we open ourselves to this because it is pleasurable in some way. In this learning tao, there is also learning in how to handle pleasurable situations; if we give ourselves to them like a tap fully turned on, the supply is soon exhausted. On the other hand if we confine our participation to a trickle, the experience is too mean. Here the flow of feeling should be open but not under the pressure of the need to develop self.

Here we do not accept a new situation into our ongoing self and so we separate this personal self from our circumstances.

We cannot flow in our experience so symbolically our life-blood (experience) overflows in regretful feeling.

Line 6 being yin, we are following this emerging life force as it becomes more active.

Now there is energy where there was none, but this needs to be used in following (correct continuance). To follow our circumstances we need to go out to them, to follow with them (the associates).

To follow the life force we need to feel it. Here we are feeling it less and we lack experience of it.

The boy is youth seeking identification and self-experience while the mature man does not need this. That we need it now shows that an inexperienced aspect is active in us and we should allow this experience while witnessing it with our mature aspect if we can. To follow it without witnessing becomes an indulgence.

When outer activity decreases in the tao of following, we do not follow what is on the outside, seeking experience, but follow what is inner, accumulated experience.

What he needs is the wisdom to follow, not to seek experience.

Here identity is following outer activity and when we do this we do it for purposes, to obtain something we have identified.

Having purposes in the world is to get it to follow us, which is narrowing (evil), but if we constantly follow our circumstances as we see them we learn about the narrowness, and this is no error.

Intuition follows (feels) the emerging life force which is inactive here, so we are turning our following to the inner. As the inner is quiet we find ourselves remarkably close to being in the tao—following quite naturally by being part of it—where this feeling becomes very real.

Our inner being does not accept following. It may be his followers he does not accept or his own following of the tao.

Holding sincerely to changing circumstances as though bound fast to them, identification (the king) sacrifices itself in the mature state (the evening is the day matured, the mountain is the wide view of maturity). Whether followers or following is the subject here, identification as a mode of being is given up as a mature view is taken. Identification is not following but a form of owning.

Because our outer identifications are not being accepted by our inner self, the source, the emerging life force, withers away.

The bed is where we enter the great unknown and sleep. Here the leg of the bed breaks, which is its connection with the rest of reality. Our identifications, our conscious interests, are somehow at variance with the way or out of tune with our circumstances, too narrowly based.

Here we become separate from the flow by ceasing to feel it. Feeling is our meeting with the flow so if we lose feeling in this tao we do not identify in the whole but only in the outer part.

Here it is the bed frame, its structure, that comes apart. Our feeling of the life force is the base construction of our world reality; without a feeling of manifesting whole reality, our personal reality becomes isolated fragments. This feeling of whole reality we are lacking is the continuance in the way of the great tao.

By decreasing outer activity we become more in tune with our inner being which has rejected our identifications out in the world.

All our identifications are out there in the world, and here we discard them. In this way we separate ourselves from the factors that divided us.

The most obvious danger in this tao about how we identify is our becoming too externalized and here we seem to realize this and cut off our involvement outside. As our being is at present concentrated in identifying, however, this now slips into identifying the boundary of the inner and outer self.

The surface of the bed is the layer or skin between the outer reality—where we (identity) lie—and the inner; if consciousness penetrates this boundary it damages the function of identity in manifestation.

In this tao our identifying leads us astray and our intuitive feeling which is the basis of our identifying is rejected by our inner being. Here our identity gives up following the feeling, seeing it as being in error.

Fish are often used to symbolize our identifications (which nourish identity) in the uncharted waters of the whole reality. Here is a string of fishes, on a common thread and the fish are caught, so our identifications threaded together are captured. A court is where the ruler is ruling, and the ruler of identity is the identifying process, so here this act of catching identifications brings favour and advantage in every way.

Here is a change in the separation depicted by the tao. The inner self witnesses and we have a possibility of realizing the tao, the experience of our self as separate from any identification.

To see whole we have to leave what we were doing, our identifications, however incomplete they seem to be; this ripe fruit could be eaten but we leave it. Wide-seeing superior man is carried in this, and allowing ourselves to be carried in our circumstances we find that there is more order in our lives, not less; if we do not grasp at life our inner needs take care of themselves. The inferior or narrow reality of chosen identifications has no place to be after this realization, he is not needed.