Have you noticed any recurring themes? I mean for you to and by putting as many labels as I can I hope to make it easy for you to search for particular trigrams and hexagrams and decide for yourself what these patterns mean. Increase 42 and Decrease 41 have recurred numerous times (as they did before I began this blog) and so has Conduct 10.
Anyway, today Increase 42 has the second and fourth lines changing. The second line says that a gift comes from on high, we are presented to God by the King, and '10 pairs of tortoise shells cannot oppose it.' The tortoise shells were used in divination before the I Ching was written -- the idea here that this divination is very strong and numerous contrary ones cannot undermine it. We have received the fourth line before -- it suggests that we are in a position to serve the prince and to do so best we need to communicate the needs of the people to him because he has to give generously to the people below to meet the challenges of this time. The image says that penetration (Thunder, eldest son) under the earth (lower nuclear trigram) leads to abundance for everyone. Also, the fourth light line is 'dropped' to the bottom first line like a seed being sown. This is all part of the image of tilling the soil with a metal plow that allowed for the development of agriculture -- this occurred about 10 to 12 thousand years ago.
The resulting hexagram is Conduct 10. It means also 'treading,' as in treading on the tail of the tiger. It means to behave oneself and have good manners to prevent misunderstandings and injury. Here I think it means that if we receive a great gift we should not go crazy wild but should behave ourselves in order to keep it and make best use of it. I would say winning a presidential election is a 'gift' of the people; how that presidency is conducted determines the success of that president. Can Obama correct himself? Or is this who Obama is?
I hope Obama succeeds because our country needs for him to. We cannot afford another Hoover. I want to believe that the contrary positions Obama has taken on so many matters are somehow a mistake he doesn't mean but as time goes by it appears more and more that these are his real positions. I don't see how he succeeds if that is so. The link is to an editorial on consortiumnews.com about these issues.
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