I took this reading on April 16, 2023  for a friend who said he was entering a new chapter in life and wanted some guidance on how to approach it.

The reading is rooted in Hexagram 14: Great Possession, with line 4 reversing, giving us Hexagram 26: Great Accumulation as the final destination.

14 is Fire over Heaven and has all kinds of marks of success. But success in the I Ching is a very social concept, and the Great Possession it speaks of is really trust more than anything else. You’re that person who’s doing his job, doing it well, holding the team together and loved by everyone. People need you, turn to you, and respect you. There’s really no higher success than that.

The imagery in the hexagram asks us to think of it as a great fire in the sky. The sun, perhaps? You can’t be more genuinely indispensable than the sun. It’s powerful, effective, and reliable. The text of the hexagram also emphasizes humility. And, accordingly, the sun is quiet. Think of what it would be like if the sun shouted about how great it is every day: we might try to find another star to orbit. (I wish I had come up with the idea of a yelling sun, but Rick and Morty did it first.)

So what does it mean that Great Possession turns into Great Accumulation? Doesn’t that seem like a hat on a hat, making you an insufferable lucky bastard who has wealth on top of success and admiration? Or perhaps it seems backwards. You’d think you need to accumulate first, then you have something great to possess. Right?

A lot of this I think has to do with translation issues, so let’s look at the imagery. Mountain above heaven; that is to say, action of stopping or capturing on top of creative energy. 14 is a lot of success, energy, responsibility, power, capacity to act and create. And 26 is putting a boundary around it. Slowing it down. Making sure it sticks. And, more importantly, making sure it’s put to use.

What do mountains do to an ecosystem? They capture moisture in the form of rain, sucking it down from the leaves to the roots of the trees nourished by said rain into its gullies, canyons, and valleys and sending it every downward and horizontally across the landscape.

There’s a great line in the original text of 26: “Not eating at home is auspicious.” That is, get out, get some fresh air, bring some of that energy out into the community, into other people’s faces. Use what you have to give back.

The modern meaning of the character that is often translated as “Accumulation” here is 畜 xù. It’s generally used in reference to livestock and could be translated as “raise,” as in “I raise chickens and pigs.” Here raise means several things, including “help to grow,” “own in some quantity,” “feed and care for.”

And I think this is a good way to look at the essence of 26 and especially how it’s an evolution from 14. If you have genuine power that you’re able to spend, use it to promote life. Use it to nourish and raise your community. You are not the one doing the accumulating. The bigger picture is. With all that blue-ribbon success you found in 14, you’re the cosmos’s flush bank account now in 26, and it wants to spend you on good things. Let it. Keep up that humility and work ethic that you’ve had so far, but let nature spend you the way it wants to. Let it spend you the way the mountain spends its rain on the hills and valleys below it. That power isn’t yours to keep. Open it up.