We witness our life energy as being inactive and this inactivity is rather irksome to us, so at first our witnessing is not very fulfilling; we need to have confidence however because not only will our energy become active as the cycle moves but we will also find that witnessing the silence is something great in itself.

The good fortune that appears as a bonus is our realization of stillness; this happens when we have enough confidence in our inner being existing like a bowl that is full without overspilling into outer projections.

Here we stop outer activity in order to witness, and see through the distinguishing mind which stops experiencing in order to look. By stopping what we witness, we do not witness with our whole self and so we form a point of view, which is different from witnessing. Witnessing allows everything to be witnessed without consequence so we do not need a point of view.

Evil is the outcome of narrow awareness always, so here we are joining things together in a narrow way to make unity; externally we will join with people who do the same. It is not necessary to stop activity in order to witness the silence, which is inner, so we are looking in the wrong place.

This opening ourselves to intuitive feeling is the only moving line that also permits the freedom of witnessing, all the others are traps of the mind that are _doing_ witnessing. In feeling, we flow with activity and this shows that witnessing is not an observation of reality but a unity with it.

The king is the ruler, and our ruler is the identifying process. The process of identifying captures all the ways we try to witness by _doing_, but not this one which requires _no doing_, no trapping of the life force. The act of flowing without _doing_ requires that we take no precautions, so the citizens need no warning.

If we do not witness, there is no realization that although we are separate, we can experience whole. Witnessing is the first learning experience of this.

No head symbolizes no co-ordinating function between our inner being and the outer world; creating unity, or witnessing, is the act of seeing that these are one by dropping our habit of having identity as a separate judge of reality. The misfortune is that we miss unity with a greater reality by keeping our own separate one.

Here we have not changed our role, we see activity diminishing and our tiredness will not leave us until we can change. Resting is not for the purpose of allowing new efforts of the same sort we have been making, it is to empty ourselves of that effort so as to become new again; re-newed.

The leafless tree is a winter tree and a dark valley is a night-time valley; the activity has gone out of the life force and until this changes, nothing can happen (the symbol three is of change and the year is a complete cycle).

When we are very tired we seek not only rest but also relief from tension and this leads us to relax restrictions that we normally impose upon ourselves—we indulge. When we open our feeling in this tao this is probably what we do.

Compensating ourselves for our circumstances is indulgence. If we are to benefit from the next turn of events (the man with the scarlet sash, an important one) this activity should be sacrificed or we miss, which is misfortune, but if we have not eyes to see it, it cannot be an error.

Here we withdraw from outer activity, but as our outer activity is our contact with the “other” we isolate ourselves; when we do this our circumstances appear to oppose us.

Exhaustion by rock; rock underlies the surface soil as truth underlies appearances, and truth represents “what is”; here we are exhausted by battling against what is, not accepting our circumstances, and so pain ourselves unnecessarily. In our personal self, our house, we are not aware of our intuitive feeling (the wife) and so do not see our circumstances as the truth would see it.

We turn our attention to outer activity to find something new, recognizing that what we were doing is exhausted.

Gold is an outer value and here we are carried by outer values, always looking for the new within these same values and so always exhausted; but continually looking for the new will eventually lead us to new values, a change in _us_. This is why the arrival is slow.

Here we come to experience our exhaustion of feeling; if we can witness this without trying to act upon it we may see that it is our chosen tao that is exhausted, not our being which belongs to the great tao and is never exhausted.

The nose leads the direction we face and the feet lead the direction we take; both are frustrated, cut off. We are in opposition to a greater truth, our truth is too small and when we cease our attachment to it, joy, flow, will return.

If we had let go earlier we would not be exhausted; here we are too exhausted to accept the energy of the life force.

The creeping plants hold us only because we entangle ourselves with them (we say of habits that they grow on us). Not knowing how our desires creep into actions we cannot act with decision to dissociate ourselves from them. Feeling the regret genuinely is to feel the actual situation, not just regretting the discomfort we are in.

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.