Coming to Meet

Kou is Breakthrough's shadow and sequel: one dark line has re-entered at the bottom. The inferior element returns — unexpectedly, charmingly, from below — and the hexagram's whole concern is the meeting: what we admit, entertain, and marry into our lives at the moment it first presents itself, looking harmless.

The Judgment's image is exact: the bold girl who lightly surrenders herself and thus seizes power. Whatever comes boldly and easily — the flattering idea, the comfortable compromise, the seductive shortcut — advertises its danger by exactly that boldness and ease. Meet it courteously; do not marry it.

Meeting others halfway — with open mind, patience, and tolerance — is right and necessary; the discipline is the *halfway*. We go to meet within the limits of dignity and correct conduct, and no further. When an idea or situation carries the element of seduction — when involvement would take us past those limits — the response is reserve, at once, at the door.

The same law governs the inner meeting. Evil observed in others rouses the ego to pay insult for insult, and the ego indulged this way develops demonic power. Undermine it by returning to humility: recalling how long our own fears and misconceptions held us — the very fears that produce the evil we now condemn.

The failures here are of the door. Left open: negative thoughts given serious consideration and thereby empowered — the whining complaint listened to until it persuades, the temptation entertained until it decides. The more we hear them out, the more completely they convert us; curbing is cheap only at the start. And slammed shut: brusqueness toward the inferior in others, disdain, the moralist's hard face — which is the ego at the door in a guard's uniform. Reserve is neither hospitality nor violence; it is the door held, calmly, at exactly halfway.