I Ching · Death & the Afterlife
Symbol · The Sixty-Four Hexagrams
Enthusiasm
Thunder Out of Earth
Stored energy breaks free and carries people of their own accord — until the mood outlasts its moment.
What it meansThunder bursting out of the earth, sound that was stored and is now released. The ancient kings answered it with music and with honours to the dead. Enthusiasm is treated as a natural force that needs a form, or it discharges anywhere.
Symbol · The Sixty-Four Hexagrams
Small Preponderance
The Bird Flying Low
Not well to strive upward, well to remain below: exactness in small things, ruin in great ones.
What it meansThunder on the mountain, loud and local, carrying no distance. The counsel is a list of small excesses that are safe: more reverence in conduct, more grief in mourning, more thrift in spending. Where only small things can be done, the tradition says do them slightly too much.