Coming to Meet in Spirit

Kou is Breakthrough's shadow and sequel — one dark line re-entered at the bottom, the inferior returning from below. Meeting others halfway, with open mind and tolerance, is right and necessary; the discipline is the halfway. You 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 you 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 your own fears and misconceptions held you, the very fears that produce the evil you now condemn.

Line 1 marks the only cheap moment to stop the inferior element — at its weakest, the lean pig that looks pitiful but grown will rage; apply the bronze brake to negative tendencies in their first stirrings, for what willpower holds today with two fingers will drag it by a rope next season. Line 2 shows containment done rightly — the fish kept in its tank, neither indulged nor violently suppressed, gentle constant pressure without the rebound force provokes, and kept private, not paraded to guests. Line 5 is the gentlest and strongest line: the melon shaded with willow leaves, tolerance and quiet protection replacing correction, your own light veiled, so that what force could never extract simply falls ripe from heaven. And line 6 permits horns out — a withdrawal so complete it reads as brusqueness — when the lower nature clamours for reasonable explanations of a path reason alone cannot walk.