Concealment

Light in a dark room.

The situation

The environment is hostile to what you see clearly. Speaking plainly here will cost you.

What it asks of you

Keep your judgment internal and your manner accommodating. Endure and keep the light.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial The bright bird wounded in flight, letting its wings hang. Three days on the road without eating. 明夷于飛，垂其翼。君子于行，三日不食
2. second Wounded in the left thigh. A strong horse to carry him out. 明夷，夷于左股，用拯馬壯，吉
3. third Wounded, hunting in the south, and he takes the great head of it. Do not be in a hurry to set things right. 明夷于南狩，得其大首，不可疾貞
4. fourth Into the left side of the belly, right to the heart of the wounding — and out through the gate. 入于左腹，獲明夷之心，于出門庭
5. fifth Jizi hiding his light — mad in the eyes of the court, alive. 箕子之明夷，利貞
6. top Not light but dark. First climbing into the sky, then going down into the earth. 不明晦，初登于天，後入于地

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 000101 — 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 Emergence. 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 Emergence and The Team. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.