Hexagram 20, Contemplation

This is the hexagram of standing somewhere high and looking. It is also the hexagram of being looked at, which people forget.

The figure

Earth sits in the lower place and Wind sits above it. Earth is the mother, receptive and yielding, the wide ground. Wind is the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating, the breath that passes over everything and gets into everything.

Together the picture is wind moving over the earth. Nothing on the ground escapes it. It touches the grass in every paddock and finds every gap in every fence. That is what perception does when it is working properly. It goes everywhere and it does not shout about it.

The old picture attached to this hexagram is a tower. From the top of the tower the king looks out over the land and sees how things are. And from the land the people look up at the tower and see the king. Seeing runs both ways. If you are the one who sees, you are also the one being watched, and how you carry yourself is part of what you teach.

Contemplation is paired with Hexagram 19, Approach. Turn Approach upside down and you have this figure. One climbs toward influence, the other stands at the top of it and looks.

When it comes up in a reading

When Contemplation comes up for a question I tell people to stop and look before they do anything. The moment is for seeing, and the seeing has to be wide. Stand back far enough to take in the whole situation, including the parts you have been avoiding. Get above it. Look at it the way you would look at a map.

The second thing I say is that seeing is enough for now. There will be a time for acting and this is probably not it. People hate this counsel because looking feels like doing nothing. Most of the bad decisions I have seen, my own included, were made quickly by someone who had not looked properly.

The third thing is the tower. You are visible. Whatever you are weighing up, other people are watching how you handle it, and your example will carry further than your words. If you want the people around you to be calm and clear, be calm and clear where they can see you.

So I would ask: what have you been too close to? Take one step back from it, then another, until the whole shape comes into view. Then tell me what you see.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you in casts, you see. Patterns, undercurrents, the real meaning under the stated one, all of it registers for you without effort. It is how your attention is built, and it was there before any training.

You watch before you act. You study before you commit. When you do move, the move is informed by a lot of quiet looking that nobody saw. And you pass on what you see. The pure hermit sees and says nothing. You translate what you have seen into something other people can understand, and that is a different gift altogether.

People like you end up teaching, writing, advising, analysing, anywhere that perceiving and explaining matter more than doing. Your contribution is very often the one remark that changes how everyone in the room understood the problem. You carry a natural authority because what you see tends to be right.

The gift is clear seeing shared generously. You also give permission. In a culture running too fast to notice its own life, your way of stopping to look reminds other people that they are allowed to stop too.

The shadow is watching that replaces living. The observer who never steps in, who comments on every game and plays none of them. Some things can only be learned by doing them, and the mature form of this hexagram knows it. The other shadow is the quiet superiority that can creep in when you see more than the people around you. Seeing more does not make you more. Keeping the watcher humble is the practice.

At maturity, the person who carries Contemplation has spent a lifetime seeing clearly and helping others see. The accumulated perception, handed out over decades through teaching or counsel or plain conversation, is a real contribution. The world is clearer for the people who got to borrow your eyes for a while.

If a line moves

When a line moves in Contemplation, the bottom two lines speak to the beginning of the matter, the first narrow glance and the view from close up. The middle lines are its heart, the widening of the view and the turn toward looking at yourself. The top lines are its end, where the seeing is whole or where it has become a lofty detachment from the life below. The changed line gives the second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading, and the How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to find it.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page describes Earth and Wind and the family the eight belong to. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line is built from. In my own tarot work I set Contemplation beside The Hermit, the one on the mountain holding the lamp, though that is my association and no older than me.

What would you see about your own situation if you stood on the tower for an hour and just looked?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.