The circle is in flood-tide: ease, warmth, and help arriving from all directions. Spend the season deliberately. Undertake the big things now — start the recurring gathering, patch the old rift, take on the ambitious group project that would be too hard in leaner times; blessings like this exist to be built with, and there's even room for error (line 1: mistakes made in sincere effort self-correct in a time of increase). Practise the image's two disciplines: see the good in your friends and imitate it; find the faults in yourself and drop them — the fastest way a group deepens. And keep the flow moving: generosity downward — toward the newer, quieter, or struggling members, and outward beyond your circle — is what keeps the tide in. Line 6 is the season's only real danger: the friend who takes the group's warmth and passes none on ends isolated, struck from an unexpected quarter.
Increase in Community
Friendship and community
A season of growing circles — build boldly, give generously.
Read this hexagram through friends, social groups, belonging, conflict, and shared life.
Hexagram 42 in friendship and community means increase: a season of blessing where your circle grows with a tailwind — warmth compounding, generosity returning multiplied. Use it: deepen the bonds, start the group, widen the table. The season's one law is circulation — increase shared keeps flowing; increase hoarded stops the current dead.
Your social capacity is increasing — confidence, openness, opportunity to meet people — and the counsel is to act on the season: it furthers to undertake something. Move toward the groups and people that draw you; initiate boldly and sincerely, because friendships begun on this tide carry. Enrichment may even come through the season's misfortunes (line 3): the invitation that flops, the connection that fizzles — in a time of increase, even these instruct and strengthen. Keep the heart steady amid the abundance (a rich season stirs appetite as well as growth), and give as you receive: the most magnetic thing about a person in increase is what flows through them to others.
The shadow is the tide misused: carelessness (assuming the season is permanent, letting effort dissolve into it), appetite (growth converted to greed — for attention, status, more invitations), and withholding — the warmth received and hoarded, which reverses the whole current. Watch also the ego's credit-taking: this weather wasn't purely your doing; gratitude keeps the sails full where entitlement luffs them and the friends quietly drift.
The six lines in friendship
Great deeds are favoured
The tailwind is real: start the ambitious group thing now. Sincere effort at scale succeeds — and even its mistakes self-correct.
The increase none can oppose
Value the good for its own sake, and connection gathers that nothing can block. What was lost socially is restored by the same law.
Enriched through misfortune
Even the season's setbacks feed you — the flopped plan, the false start. Stay sincere and centred, and the disappointment joins the increase.
The trusted intermediary
You're the bridge — between two friends who fell out, between factions in a group. Serve the transmission impartially, and your word moves great things.
Kindness that does not ask
Generosity so natural it never checks for recognition — and is therefore recognised everywhere. The apex of the season.
Increase withheld
Taking the group's warmth without passing it on: the heart unsteadied by acquisition. The flow reverses — resume the giving before the season closes.
What bold social step belongs in this favourable season, before it turns?
What good habit of a friend's could I simply imitate this month?
Is the warmth flowing through me to others — or pooling around me?
Switch the lens
Hexagram 42, Increase, signals growth, support, and expansion that must be handled with generosity, humility, and right use.
Love's season of increase — build boldly and give generously.
A season of increase — build boldly and pass the gains downward.
A tailwind season — build boldly, and pass the gains downward.
The household's season of increase — build boldly and give downward.
Money's season of increase — build boldly, keep it flowing.
The wind is with you — imitate good, root out faults, build.
Learning flies with a tailwind now — attempt the hard thing.
A fertile season with a tailwind — build boldly, give freely.
Act now — the wind is with you; cross the great water.
A change with a tailwind — build boldly, and pass it on.
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