Mars/Jupiter Application

An I Ching meditation on this upcoming transit:

* Hexagram 47 of the I Ching, called “Exhausting,” depicts a marsh whose water is being drained into an abyss below it.

* Hexagram 47 depicts a draining, depleting, or exhausting situation.

* When Mars in its fall, in the watery sign of Cancer, is in a square to Jupiter, we have the potential for a great drain of energy, resources, confidence, happiness, money, and faith.

* Hexagram 47 in conjunction with the Mars/Jupiter transit tells us that whatever we feel we’ve gained might be easily drained, taxed, depleted, or sucked out. Or we might be dealing with a general sense of depletion that is exaggerated by the expanding and enlargening influence of Jupiter.

* Hexagram 47’s first line depicts someone who isn’t thinking clearly or seeing clearly, and it depicts them in their defeatist mode, sitting on a bare tree stump, and getting lost in their despair.

* Hexagram 47’s teaching has to do with joyousness and how a good and persevering attitude allows us to withstand periods where something is being drained out, or where we feel depleted or even a tendency toward being defeatist or glum.

* Hexagram 47 also has to do with the natural way in which things gained are lost, and where a spirit of enthusiasm is tested by sudden losses to gains, or unexpected setbacks that drain things we’ve gained.

* The first line depicts a person persevering in and getting lost in the kind of hollow joy that swings into hollow defeatism. When we wallow in what’s been gained we will inevitably feel confused and bewildered and stuck when something gained is challenged, drained, or lost.

* Real faith is faith without attachment to the joy of gain or the sorrow of loss. Real cheerfulness is the attitude that appears to remind us of loss when we gain and gain when we lose. Real cheerfulness steers us around our ambitions and aversions.

* When 47 line 1 changes it leads to hexagram 58, which is called “Joyousness.”

* Hexagram 58 depicts two lakes, conjoined, and thus shows an image of happiness, shared and large resources, and an abundant source of water, which is life and joy.

* Hexagram 58 suggests that the Mars/Jupiter dynamic simultaneously displays the wisdom of drain or gain, and the importance of how we interact with what we gain or what we lose.

* Hexagram 58 is all about the proper joy leading to good results. Self aggrandizing joy is intimately related to what will eventually be drained out from beneath us, and easily exhausted. However, deep joy feeds others, spreads, is shared, and moves circularly to fulfill us over and over because we are not possessive of it.

* The figure in line 1 of hexagram 47, sitting on the stump of a cut down tree, is someone caught in the cycle of joy/gain and sorrow/loss, and the lesson is about moderating the “bigness” of our ambitions…a direct relationship to Mars and Jupiter.

* As this transit unfolds, notice what energizes you, notice what depletes you, notice how you respond to gain and how you respond to loss. Think again about real cheerfulness being about what steers us out of the traps of both self satisfied joy or defeatist self-pitying sorrow.