I hope this post will make sense. It’s something I thought of in the small hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and started counting complementary hexagrams instead of sheep (as you do…) –
Here’s a picture of the Sequence of Hexagrams:

Hm… maybe that could do with some explanation:

• Each complementary pair (including the ones that are inverse pairs as well) is represented with ( ).
• Every other pair is represented by an arrow: facing forward if that pair’s complement is ahead of it in the Sequence, facing backward if it’s behind it. You can think of it as which way the hexagrams are ‘looking’ to find the patterns that complement them.
• The curly brackets don’t represent hexagrams – they just enclose groups of hexagrams that are one another’s complements. The big, orange brackets enclose the Vessel Casting group, 3-50; the others enclose hexagrams 7-16, 37-40 and 51-60. (I could have added more brackets around 51-64, but I thought we’d got enough to be going on with.) If you’re a Change Circle member, you may already be aware of a lot of very lovely – and very meaningful – patterns and reflections created inside those curly brackets that I described in the Exploring the Sequence book last year.
• The little blue letters identify some interesting moments.

Now of course, you’d expect more of the hexagrams in the first half of the book to be looking forward to find their complements, and most of those in the second half to be looking back. The fun starts when you look at the exceptions: the moments when the expected flow forward or backward changes direction.
At ‘a’, you get the first hexagrams to look back to find their complement. Since we entered the Vessel Casting set, each pair has been looking forward – until you reach Hexagram 12, Blocked:

That turns us around to look back. I’ve written about this structure, and the historical moment I think it encodes, in Exploring the Sequence – but even without that level of detail, isn’t it interesting that Hexagram 12 should be the one to compel us to look back?
We start looking forward again at ‘b’. That’s Hexagram 19, Nearing:

We go past the complementary pairs at the end of the Upper Canon – 27/28, 29/30 – and into the Lower Canon, where (at ‘c’) we find the first backward-looking arrow for a while – at Hexagram 33, Retreat,
…which as you see is the complement of 19. 19 is about going forward, and 33 is about going back. (Also, from hexagrams 19/20 to 33/34 inclusive makes eight pairs. ‘Arrival at the eighth month…’?)
The letter ‘d’ marks a unique moment, when complementary/opposite hexagrams are adjacent in the Sequence without being part of a complementary pair. By this point it might not surprise you that this moment’s marked with Hexagram 38, Opposing.
As you can see from the arrows, this is another moment of changing direction. Travelling south and west instead of north and east, perhaps. Coming instead of going, as you might say: turning around.
From then until the end of the Vessel Casting pattern at Hexagram 50, every pair is ‘coming back’. It takes a full-size Shock to flip us around again and make us look forward.
Really, you might think someone had done this on purpose.
Once you start looking at where individual pairs find their complements, there’s more to see. For instance, the greatest distance between two complementary pairs is that between 3 and 50: it takes a long time to complete a Vessel. The second greatest distance begins with Hexagram 5, which has to Wait until Hexagram 35 for its complement. (Oddly enough, 3/4, 5/6, 35/36 and 49/50 are eight of the twelve ‘Steps of Change’ reached by changing single lines in 63/64, at the very end. The remaining four are 37/38 and 39/40, the closest complements.)
(And isn’t the third-biggest distance between 21, Biting Through, and 48, the Well, two hexagrams about closing or bridging a gap?)
(Add your own parentheses ad lib; there is so much to this book that we haven’t yet seen. I can’t recommend it as a soporific, though.)

I don't have it in my head very well (hardly at all) what was written, and/or used, and/or discovered when - do you think when patterns like this are found to exist, it's an indication that the authors had created them and used them at the time the hexagrams were put in this order?

Maybe you've already said that somewhere.

And maybe when, where, and by whom etc. doesn't matter very much, in practice (?)

I don't think anyone has a very clear idea of the earliest possible date for the Sequence. It doesn't help that the earliest copies are written on bamboo slips, which naturally get shuffled!

However, there are a good few links between the text and the Sequence - enough that I reckon they're fully intentional and part of the meaning.

I've not yet had time to properly understand the post, I will have to figure out each complement for myself, don't think there's a chart anywhere. Possibly it's easy for some to do it in their heads but I can't.

In terms of meaning, from what you write in wiki, it seems to be very close to the idea of the shadow. Yet the complement has the 'credentials' the shadow really doesn't. As I've said elsewhere the complement is intrinsic to the sequence, the shadow isn't, it's just an idea of 'let's make the 2 ends mirror each other' as far as I can see ?

In wiki you write the shadow is how not to think about something and the complement what not to do but I've always found that a confusing distinction.

Yay I understand the Blog post. At first with the diagrams I thought it wouldn't be possible.

Trojina said:

I've not yet had time to properly understand the post, I will have to figure out each complement for myself, don't think there's a chart anywhere.

Click to expand...

The complements are the same as what's labelled "opposite" in Resonance Journal. Which is confusing...but to your next point about these vs. the shadows, I think the complements have a flavor of "complementarity" in addition to a form of just "not."

I think there are subtle differences between all the contrasts, but distinguishing those in useful ways is something I'm very much not good at (at all) (to say the least). I think Hilary has said she has plans for more mini-courses like the one on the shadow? There are the articles in the Treasure Chest which is what the courses are based on...but the biggest thing is probably p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e with our own readings. (Something I don't do enough of.)

What Liselle said, pretty much! With especial emphasis on 'it's confusing'. 3 is not 4, because they're opposite sides of a coin. 3 is exactly not 50, because they're complements/opposites, halves of a whole, etc. And 3 is not 62, its shadow, because that would be a wrong-headed way to think about it that masks its real nature.

In practice, you just have to try using these things in readings so you have something to relate them to, and then it starts to make sense. I suppose in a nutshell, 50's 'what not to do' (but also 'what completes this') while 62 is 'how not to think'.

Looking at the complements in the Sequence, I do get a strong sense of hexagrams looking/ reaching forward or back to find their other half, as it were. The feeling of the great distance to travel from 3 to 50, the huge stretch involved, seems to be part of the hexagram's meaning.

hilary said:

In practice, you just have to try using these things in readings so you have something to relate them to, and then it starts to make sense.

Click to expand...

It's too bad aha! moments can't be summoned on command (lol), because those are important, I think. Once one or two happen it does wonders for trust in these things. It doesn't suddenly make them all clear (lolol) but it makes it easier to at least believe they could be.

Looking at the complements in the Sequence, I do get a strong sense of hexagrams looking/ reaching forward or back to find their other half, as it were. The feeling of the great distance to travel from 3 to 50, the huge stretch involved, seems to be part of the hexagram's meaning.

Click to expand...

So 1 and 2 are as close as can be as are 63 and 64. It seems odd given one would think the gap between pure heaven and pure earth would be larger and the gap between not yet complete and complete would be larger.

And 11 and 12 are as close as can be and probably others.
17 and 18
27 and 28
29 and 30
38 and 39
53 and 54
61 and 62
63 and 64

...sorry way behind the times here doing it for myself on paper

Trojina said:

Here is an old Blog on the shadow where Karcher also discusses in the comments

Click to expand...

I've read that blog article, probably more than once, and never managed to notice the comments? :bag: So thank you for mentioning them!

What Karcher says about "great" and "small" would also apply to 28 and 62, surely, and I wonder if it also applies when "great people" and "small people" are mentioned...

...which isn't going to be solved by glancing at Bradford's book 2 for a mere 5 minutes, as he uses da4 ren2 for "great person" in both 1.2 and 1.5 - "da4", not "shen" - although I'm off on the wrong track, aren't I. Karcher isn't saying "shen" means "great"; he's saying it means "bright spirits." And somehow, in a way I don't think - ? - he explains in that comment, he's saying "shen" (bright spirits) became associated with "yang" and "great," and similarly for "gui."

Bradford does use "gui" and "shen" (specifically gui3 and shen2) in places like 15's Tuanzhuan (a long poem I'm not familiar with, other than seeing it's called Commentary on the Judgements in Yijing Terms in WikiWing.

gui3 3634 38.6 55.T souls, ghosts, demons
shen2 5716 113+5 20.T (and) spirits, divine forces (both)

Click to expand...

which in book one is translated

Ghosts (and) spirits (both) haunt the superfluous

Click to expand...

Except that then in 29.4, "gui3" apparently also means "(a) (simple bamboo) basket, tureen of rice." Is this another Shuogua-type inscrutable thing? (Thank you to Harmen and his videos for helping to explain the Shuogua inscrutableness...)

(Summary: what I was wondering about, before going off on ridiculous tangents, was whether Karcher's point about "great" and "small" in 9 and 26 also applies to "great person" and "small person.")

I don't know, I can never read Karcher well, but Hilary will know.

Liselle said:

What Karcher says about "great" and "small" would also apply to 28 and 62, surely, and I wonder if it also applies when "great people" and "small people" are mentioned...

Click to expand...

You mean, 'great people' would really be spirits and 'small people' would really be ghosts? You could have fun with that, but I don't think it's what it actually means. I think they're roles played/ positions held/ choices made by ordinary flesh-and-blood humans such as the one asking the question.

...which isn't going to be solved by glancing at Bradford's book 2 for a mere 5 minutes, as he uses da4 ren2 for "great person" in both 1.2 and 1.5 - "da4", not "shen" - although I'm off on the wrong track, aren't I. Karcher isn't saying "shen" means "great"; he's saying it means "bright spirits." And somehow, in a way I don't think - ? - he explains in that comment, he's saying "shen" (bright spirits) became associated with "yang" and "great," and similarly for "gui."

Click to expand...

Yes, that seems to be the idea. I... er… don't know how true it is. I've never seen anything hinting at this elsewhere - neither that the lines were ever called 'great' and 'small' instead of 'yang' and 'yin' (or 'hard' and 'soft', before yang/yin), nor that 'great' and 'small' ever meant spirits and ghosts. Which doesn't mean these things aren't the case, of course...

Except that then in 29.4, "gui3" apparently also means "(a) (simple bamboo) basket, tureen of rice." Is this another Shuogua-type inscrutable thing? (Thank you to Harmen and his videos for helping to explain the Shuogua inscrutableness...)

Click to expand...

No, just a completely different and afaik unrelated Chinese character that's pronounced the same way. The 'gui' that means 'ghosts' is in 38.6 (loaded into the cart).

Hi Hilary
What is the Exploring the Sequence book and where is it. Can I ask if it is an exploration of the numerical sequence 1-64, is it an exploration of one of the other methods of laying out the Hexagrams or is it a theory you have come up with yourself.
I dont find any coherence in any of the existing ways of laying out the Hexagrams so I hope that you have discoverd something new. It has rankled with me for many years that the "pairs" that make up the numerical sequence make little sense, though they do make meorizing them Hexagrams that much easier as one only has to really remember half of them.

Dave:bows:

Hi Dave,

'Exploring the Sequence' is a book I wrote a couple of years ago, and you can find it in the Change Circle library. I had thought it was going to be a mini-course, but somehow when I started looking at what the Sequence really is, it grew into a 36,000 word book. You know how these things happen

It's an exploration of the received Sequence, 1-64, which turns out to contain a multitude of stories and structural patterns. It also turns out that the structure of the Sequence as a whole is closely tied to the themes of the hexagrams - there's a lot of meaning created through these patterns, big stories being told, and a lot that can feed directly into understanding readings. I had any number of 'How can I possibly have missed seeing that all these years?' moments. I suppose it's because I hadn't started looking.