Today: Mired in apathy / swept up in human folly / take a stand and commit – From the I Ching

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?

28 – Twenty-Eight.  Ta Kuo / Critical Mass

The Flood rises above the tallest Tree:
Amidst a rising tide of human folly, the Superior Person retires to higher ground, renouncing his world without looking back.

Any direction is better than where you now stand.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

Several high-priority concerns demand immediate attention.
All are crucial.
None will be denied.
Yet some demand the denial of others.
Like two atoms seeking to occupy the same space, these irresistible forces and immovable objects threaten to ignite a cataclysm that could irreversibly alter your world.
This is no time for fatal heroics.
You are at Ground Point Zero.
Remove yourself from this situation without delay.
Find sanctuary.
Later you may deal with these concerns on your own terms, from a position of strength.