The I Ching > VI. Returning through the psychic stations

VI. Returning through the psychic stations

In summary, the choice, as indicated by Jung and Confucius, is ours: to ignore or to pass through the psychic stations to our psychic ground. We can look at this choice through a very simple diagram. Let’s use a single straight line to indicate our time from birth to death. If we do not individuate, this line of our psyche remains at the same thinness, as we have not taken advantage of this opportunity to work on ourselves. If we are well-meaning and follow the urge for natural individuation, we grow at random and may thicken this line at different points. But if we do the loop with consciousness and cooperate with the basic promptings within the psyche, the growth and expansion are immeasurable. On the surface, we are still ourselves in our everyday activities, but our perspective, our orientation, our psychic state, our groundedness in the cosmos are different. They give us psychic spaciousness and thickness of personality. They give what Confucius calls the power of the person. This return to the ground to reclaim our psychic wholeness is no different from what Jung calls the Tao of personality.

So, as individuals, how to make life graspable and wonderful involves this continuous loop or return to our psychic ground, as suggested by Hexagram 24 as the way of heaven and by Passage B of The Great Learning. Why would our life be more graspable? Because we have a good sense of ourselves, on all levels, and because we are acting in accordance with our place in the cosmos. This is the meaning of Tao for the human being: the way of the universe as we humans participate in it.