47 – Forty-Seven K’un / Exhaustion
A Dead Sea, its Waters spent eons ago, more deadly than the desert surrounding it:
The Superior Person will stake his life and fortune on what he deeply believes.
Triumph belongs to those who endure.
Trial and tribulation can hone exceptional character to a razor edge that slices deftly through every challenge.
Action prevails where words will fail.
SITUATION ANALYSIS:
This is the realm of the Shaman.
You have exhausted every alternative, spent yourself completely, taxed body and mind beyond your former limits.
Survival and salvation lie beyond your reach now.
Only transcendence to a new existence — a higher plane of being — will see you through.
The Old You is just a dry husk.
You can’t return to it.
Metamorphosis is the only grace offered.
You can only return to your homeland as a New You.
Six in the third place means:
Hemmed in by stone, with nothing to climb but thorns: a trap of his own making.
Struggling home, he cannot find his wife.
Misfortune.
A man permits himself to be oppressed by stone,
And leans on thorns and thistles.
He enters the house and does not see his wife.
Misfortune.
This shows a man who is restless and indecisive in times of adversity. At first he wants to push ahead, then he encounters obstructions that, it is true, mean oppression only when recklessly dealt with. He butts his head against a wall and in consequence feels himself oppressed by the wall. Then he leans on things that have in themselves no stability and that are merely a hazard for him who leans on them. Thereupon he turns back irresolutely and retires into his house, only to find, as a fresh disappointment, that his wife is not there. Kongfu (Confucius) says about this line:
If a man permits himself to be oppressed by something that ought not to oppress him, his name will certainly be disgraced. If he leans on things upon which one cannot lean, his life will certainly be endangered. For him who is in disgrace and danger, the hour of death draws near; how can he then still see his wife?
32 – Thirty-Two Hêng / Durability
Arousing Thunder and penetrating Wind.
Close companions in any storm:
The Superior Person possesses a resiliency and durability that lets him remain firmly and faithfully on course.
Such constancy deserves success.
SITUATION ANALYSIS:
Endurance is the key to success in this situation.
However, durability is not synonymous with stone-like rigidity.
True resilience requires a flexibility that allows adaptation to any adverse condition, while still remaining true to the core.
Can you maintain your integrity under any circumstance?
Can you influence the situation without giving opposing forces anything to resist?
Then you will endure to reach your goal.
