Providing Nourishment in Spirit

I is the hexagram of the open mouth, and it concerns everything that passes in and out of you. The subtlest nourishment is mental: worry, doubt, and resentment are a diet as surely as bread is — a bowl of worms that weakens whoever feeds on it — and even idle fantasy is not harmless, for what the mind rehearses, it becomes. Your dependence on the higher power for life's necessities calls for a correct receiving attitude, and the deepest means of receiving is meditation: it cleanses the inner vessel so the light force can enter with its healing effect. Calm and stability in all you say, think, and do — this is how you nourish your higher nature, and everyone near you. Be temperate in what enters, and careful in what leaves.

Line 1 shows the magic tortoise, which lives on air, needing nothing — and someone abandoning that inner sufficiency to gaze enviously at another's portion; self-pity follows the drooping mouth, and you had wings before you envied theirs. Line 3 names the junk diet plainly: pleasure, sensation, recognition, emotional dependency — everything that promises fulfilment and delivers craving, into which a decade can vanish. Line 4 turns hunger noble: intense craving redirected to the highest source, sharp-eyed and insatiable — wanting more is not the fault, wanting the wrong things was. And line 6 is the mouth's final transformation, from feeder to source: one who has fed rightly becomes food for others, held safe only by awareness of the provider's danger — the forgetting of one's own dependence on higher guidance.