Your reading

good morning, Vietnam?

Your reading resulted in the following hexagrams:

	changing to
22		52

Hexagram 22, Beauty

Key Questions

How can you make the essence visible to others?
What do you choose to communicate?

Oracle

'Beauty. Creating success.
Small yield from having a direction to go.'

This is about natural beauty, like the beauty of a plant, whose form is the perfect, simple expression of its nature. It's also about the way people create images to communicate something of a person's or thing's inner nature.

This becomes a fruitful way to engage with the world when you have a purpose in mind – like someone who becomes a suitor for the sake of his bride, or a figure of authority for the sake of those she teaches. This is an image created for the sake of communication and relationship, as a first step towards a chosen destination.

Yet it only bears a 'small yield' because it is only a first, small step. Becoming something for someone is not sufficient to bring about significant results on its own – it's not the same as wholehearted conviction, or ultimate fulfilment. No created image could ever express a whole person.

So this is not a time to concentrate on results: it's a time for imaginative, lively exploration of beautiful ways the essence could flower and be seen.

Image

'Below the mountain is fire: Beauty.
A noble one brings light to the many standards, but does not venture to pass judgement.'

Sequence

Beauty follows from Hexagram 21, Biting Through:
'Things cannot carelessly unite and be completed, and so Beauty follows. Beauty means adorning.'

Changing Lines

Hexagram 52, Stilling

Key Questions

What if there were nothing you had to do now?
What if there were nowhere else you had to be?
Where is your inner point of balance?

Oracle

'Stilling your back,
Not grasping your self.
Moving in your rooms,
Not seeing your people.
Not a mistake.'

To still yourself is to come to rest in your own right place. It's not the opposite of motion, but of being pushed into motion by outside influences. Whether you move or stop is determined inwardly, by your sense of the nature of the time.

Attaining this kind of stillness means firmly, even stubbornly, resisting the forces that would disrupt your equilibrium. Hold yourself still, as if in meditation. Don't seek to 'grasp your self ' by hunting down your every thought; you can no more make them stop by force of will than you can make your back still by holding it with your hands. Instead of twisting and spinning in circles trying to grasp your self, keep still.

In the same way, you can move freely in your rooms (or the chambers of your mind, which can be just as crowded) and simply not see the other people there, because you hold yourself still and do not resonate with them. Even if you feel as if you 'ought' to be constantly sensitive to their presence and needs, in a time of Stilling it is no mistake to exclude all these things, and be quiet within yourself.

Image

'Joined mountains: Stilling.
A noble one reflects, and does not come forth from his situation.'

Sequence

Stilling follows from Hexagram 51, Shock:
'Things cannot end with stirring up; stop them. And so Stilling follows, which means stopping.'

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