When I asked people their biggest challenge in working with the I Ching, so many said, in one form of words or another, that it had to do with confidence.
Forming a question, casting a hexagram, even coming up with intelligent interpretations of the answer – these things might take some practice, but they flow together naturally enough. Taking those interpretations and acting on them is something else altogether. It demands confidence in the oracle itself and confidence in your own interpretation. (One of the things that I was surprised to learn from the survey: it’s not necessarily that people don’t see meaning in a reading, it’s that they’re not confident that they’re seeing the true meaning, instead of a reflection of their own desires or fears.)
So I thought I should ask Yi about this, and picked up the beads. The first question I thought of was,
“Where does the confidence to act on one’s understanding of a reading come from?”
Yi says it comes from Hexagram 62, Small Overstepping, changing at lines 1 and 3 to Hexagram 51, Shock.
Those two hexagrams are a very precise description of the moment when you move towards acting on a reading. ‘Small Overstepping amidst Shock.’ Shock would be the experience of change and upheaval that might bring us to the oracle – or that the oracle might bring to us; Small Overstepping is a way of responding to this that might lead to confidence.
Hexagram 51, Shock, describes reactions to change – such as the change that’s occurred in the preceding pair of hexagrams. There is Radical Change, and there is the Vessel that embraces and founds the new – and then we have a pair of hexagrams, Shock and Keeping Still, reflecting on how we might respond to all this emotionally. At first,
‘Shock, creating success.
Shock comes, fear and terror.
Laughing words, shrieking and yelling.
The shock spreads fear for a hundred miles.
Someone does not lose the sacred ladle and libation.’
This can describe a time for divination – the ground just vanished under my feet, where am I?, panic panic… – or an effect of divination, if you approach the oracle already confident in something and have your assumptions exploded.
It also describes the state of mind the diviner is looking for. In the midst of your own reactions, if some part of you can manage not to ‘lose the sacred ladle and libation’, then the shock itself is transformed. At a deep level, it’s revitalising, not destructive; it reveals a spiritual continuity that might previously have been covered over by all the constructions above it.
So this suggests divination as a kind of emotional opening-up; the confidence must come from the ladle and libation, the continuity of offerings and spiritual experience, if it’s to arise at all.
The primary hexagram, Small Overstepping, pinpoints the moment of acting on the message. ‘Overstepping’ is about crossing a line, a threshold. In this case, theoretical understanding of the reading is on one side, and changing in response to it is on the other. Also, more often than not, common sense is on one side, and acting in accordance with the advice of an oracle is very decidedly on the other.
But it’s motivated by the preceding hexagram, 61, Inner Truth. These two are a complementary pair: every line of 61 changes to give 62. So in a sense, Small Overstepping is a complete, total response to Inner Truth, changing everything. There is the inner resonance of a reading, and then there’s the requirement to take it ‘out there’ and carry the message through in the real world.
‘To have faith surely means acting on it,’ says the Sequence, ‘and so Small Overstepping follows.’
So you step out into the world armed with your faith. This transition is made while you’re ‘small’ in strength, dwarfed by the landscape, and probably thoroughly daunted by the prospect:
In the landscape created by these two hexagrams, I have a perfect response to my question, an extraordinary mirror of the moment of choice about acting on a reading.
It’s when I get to the moving lines that the picture starts to change:
‘Flying bird means pitfall.’
‘Not crossing over, he defends himself.
Someone is following behind and may kill him.
Pitfall.’
At line 1, the flying bird has forgotten that ‘the above is not right, below is right.’ It’s not lacking in confidence to act at all; it’s just wholly lacking in grounds for action. It’s lost touch with reality. Ouch.
And at line 3, contemplating the threshold, here’s someone with no confidence to act, who won’t ‘step over’ even in a small way because he’s far too busy defending himself. This looks like someone who won’t act on a reading because they want to stay safe. But this is a decision in itself, and not a particularly successful one.
So I ask about ‘confidence to act on one’s understanding of a reading’, and I get two alternative portraits of complete disaster: one line full of confidence to act on its understanding, one wholly lacking it. Neither of them has got the message of the reading; both end in ‘pitfall’.
Do you ever get the funny feeling you’ve asked the wrong question? 
(I tried again with another question – more in the next post.)
The question is based on the assumption that there is one reason for having or not having confidence in a reading that all people share ..I got the feeling the question itself was the over stepping.
Thank you for examining the assumptions behind the question… I always try to do that, but don’t always see them all.
Mind you, I think that Yi could have challenged that one with an assortment of radically different reasons for having confidence. What I think I got instead was a challenge to the deeper assumption, that ‘confidence’ is the most relevant thing.