Scope of Questions
A number of inquies reached me regarding hexagram 03 – Difficulty at the Beginning. Here are some of them:
- A user has undergone great personal upheaval: he has ended his long-time marriage and entered a new, very fulfilling relationship. The user strives for healing: healing for himself, healing for his new relationship (he definitely wants to avoid the unhealthy patterns of his marriage) and healing for the relationship with his children. His question to the I Ching: “Where am I at today? What is the next step to achieve my goals?”
- A user feels lost in the world: she has the feeling that she has not yet found their place in life nor reached what one should have reached at their age. And reaching any of it seems quite doubtful. Is she putting too much pressure on herself?
- After a year with a lot of time out, with new, unfamiliar activities and an interesting relationship, the user came across following saying: “Once you discover what moves you deep in your heart, you can begin to do what you really want.” The user’s question to the I Ching is therefore: “What can help me to identify what moves me deep in my heart?”
- A user asks: “How I can learn how to stop my tendency to put myself under so much pressure?”
- A user describes his situation as follows “I’ve been in negotiations for a one-month unpaid internship. I wanted the job, the team is nice. But at a certain point in the process everything slipped away, the process came to a halt, it became too much for me, I withdrew my application.
Why did things stagnate? Because the company was insecure due to the Corona crisis? Then why didn’t they just say so? Or did they not want me because I made such a bad impression?
I’d like to know the reason. The first answer I received was 02 – the receptive. Should I have been more patient? I concretized my question: What was the real decisive factor that I did not get the internship? Did it fail due to external circumstances – or should I have simply waited in confidence? As an answer I received 03 – difficulty at the beginning.”
Later, the user informs that she found out that the matter had been decided against her long before . The bottom line is that she just lost time.
Interesting is her own interpretation of the experience: “You could also say I didn’t want to be crazy this time according to Einstein’s definition and do the same as always (= optimistically hope that it will work out with the application), but hope for different results (= that it won’t be a put-off for once).”
Somehow there is a logical error here. She did the same thing as always – and refers to it as “optimistically hoping”. But couldn’t it also be that what she’s always doing is consistently believing that things won’t work out? She holds on to her old basic conviction – and wishes the environment to convince her that she herself is wrong…?! - A user asks: “What does life want from me? I do what is indicated, but somehow my whole structure, my self-image is no longer right for me. I just don’t understand what the universe wants to tell me. Maybe that I should practice patience?”
Some Reflections
Thank you very much for these detailed descriptions of the situations the I Ching answered with hexagram 03 – difficulty at the beginning.
“Once you discover what moves you deep in your heart, you can begin to do what you really want.” (Question 3) is a very nice comment on hexagram 03 – difficulty at the beginning. For this quotation refers exactly to what the upper trigram, Kan, the water, is about: our own source of being.
I recently reread the quotations on the functional circuit kidney (KI), to which I assign Kan, the water:
[T]he functional circuit kidney (KI), which is the seat of our spiritual heritage and origin of our will, determination, vitality and strength. The kidneys store the basic principles, the essential, the energy of our ancestors and the essence that creates new life. They represent a rich and concentrated source of energy and contain the reserves we can draw on in times of greatest need.. Glossary
Our own primal ground, our source of being holds our potential – and also our pitfalls (or, more precisely: those buttons that our environment sometimes pushes and thus promptly and regularly brings us down). And this is exactly what the question regarding the internship (question 5) reminds me of. If you look at the user’s exact question –What was the real decisive factor that I did not get the internship? – then the logically correct answer is that the decisive factor was the withdrawal of his application. And the only person who had that in his hands was…
This leads to the question: What made him do that? Why didn’t he just wait and see? Which brings us exactly to those pitfalls… the abysses which are also part of our source of being.
Bear up! Our source of being contains abysses… but it also contains springboards! ?
The current interpretation can be found here: https://www.no2do.com/hexagramme_en/788878.htm
