Support Arriving From Where the Effort Was Not Made

Six in the second place describes advancement that is going forward and feels like grief. The text grants good fortune to firm correctness and then says the great blessing comes from the grandmother, which is a specific and slightly startling promise inside a line otherwise concerned with sorrow. A querent drawing this is usually doing everything correctly and getting no satisfaction whatever from it.

The source of relief is an ancestress, and the ancestral cult of the period the text belongs to is what makes that intelligible rather than merely consoling. The framing is the period's own and is reported as such. Underneath it the counsel is portable and worth having: what eases this situation is not the thing being worked on. It comes from an older relationship, one that owes the person nothing in any transactional sense and supports them regardless.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Kun becomes Kan and the figure becomes Before Completion, King Wen 64, the final hexagram of the classic, in which every line sits in the wrong place and the crossing is not yet finished. That is a fair account of where sorrowful advance leads if nothing else changes. Progress continued on effort alone stays permanently near the end and never quite at it, and the blessing this line names is precisely the thing that is not effort.