Cutting Through

An obstruction that must be removed.

The situation

Something is jammed in the middle of this and won't dissolve on its own. Tolerating it prolongs the damage.

What it asks of you

Deal with it directly, on the record, by the rules.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Feet locked in the stocks until the toes disappear. Nothing goes wrong. 屨校滅趾，无咎
2. second Biting through soft meat until the nose disappears in it. Nothing goes wrong. 噬膚滅鼻，无咎
3. third Biting into cured meat and hitting something spoiled. A little humiliating, nothing worse. 噬臘肉，遇毒。小吝，无咎
4. fourth Biting through dried meat on the bone and finding a metal arrowhead in it. Keep going through the hard part. 噬乾胏，得金矢。利艱貞，吉
5. fifth Biting dried meat and finding gold. Correct, and dangerous, and nothing goes wrong. 噬乾肉，得黃金。貞厲，无咎
6. top A cangue on the shoulders until the ears disappear. 何校滅耳，凶

The line texts are the oldest layer of the book. They are pictures, not instructions, and they are meant to be held against your own situation rather than decoded.

How this one is built

Written out as six lines, bottom to top, this pattern is 101001 — a solid line is 1, a broken line is 0. Every relationship above is arithmetic on those six digits, not interpretation: reverse the order and you get the other side, flip every digit and you get the opposite reading, take the middle four and you get what sits underneath. Anyone can check the result, which is what separates a structure from a fortune.

The sequence is built the same way. The sixty-four are arranged in thirty-two pairs, and turned upside down it becomes Presentation. The rule holds for all thirty-two pairs without exception — twenty-eight joined by reversal, four by inversion.

In the received order it sits between Reflection and Presentation. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.