I Ching, Yijing or Zhou Yi
"Oracle of the moon": © 2000 LiSe
Yi Jing, Oracle of the Moon
Dùn, hexagram 33
Save your bacon
Sometimes you are the pig, running for your life. Other times you are the one who has to chase after the things that sustain your life. Don’t ever let them escape, they are too valuable. One single idea or love that escapes can mean that you miss all the subsequent generations of ideas and loves it would have triggered into life.
The more you live others lives, the more piggies of your own you will lose. And eventually you will be eaten yourself. Withdraw from all things that are not compatible with your hopes for life. Making a real life is not only making it – the largest part is escaping from losing it.
Dùn: The ideogram is pig (1)+ meat (2), which is a suckling pig, one raised to be eaten. And going (3 road and 4 foot). Another old version of the character (5) shows a suckling pig being taken by a hand, or maybe held up, presented, by a hand: a pig offered in sacrifice. GSR.428d. To escape, to run off, to hide, to go into obscurity, to conceal oneself; to cheat, deceive, impose upon. DunRen: a suspicious person, dunxin: a revolting spirit (heart).
The trigrams: Mountain below Heaven:
Where mountain meets heaven is the place where you are free from small human affairs, where hermits dwell, and maybe even where the gods reside. In your mind it is where your highest ideals meet with your own reality. Can you make them true, live them, worship them?
Mountain is everything solid, including your own solid part, your body. It can also be what you see as solid, your "I", even though it isn't really all that sturdy. It is what gives grip on your life, or seems to do.
When this solid stuff wants to live according to heaven's laws, you will need to stay away from what tries to pull you down or keeps you in the dirt. The little piglet has to run for its life.
Or maybe you raised a beautiful little pig to offer to Heaven. It seems so easy, but in real life there are innumerable things which counteract. So you have to chase after your lofty ideas, hold on to ideals, find back motivation, all those beautiful things which always run away again.