Alignment

Coming together around a center.

The situation

There's a group forming and a window to join it properly. Hesitating until it's obviously safe means arriving without standing.

What it asks of you

Commit early and openly. Half-commitment reads as absence.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Join them sincerely. Sincerity filling a plain earthen jar — good comes from unexpected directions. 有孚比之，无咎。有孚盈缶，終來有它吉
2. second Join from the inside, not by campaigning for it. 比之自內，貞吉
3. third Joining the wrong people. 比之匪人
4. fourth Joining from the outside. This works. 外比之，貞吉
5. fifth Joining out in the open. The king drives the game from three sides and lets the front run free; the townspeople need no warning. 顯比，王用三驅，失前禽，邑人不誡，吉
6. top Joining a thing with no head to it. 比之无首，凶

The line texts are the oldest layer of the book. They are pictures, not instructions, and they are meant to be held against your own situation rather than decoded.

How this one is built

Written out as six lines, bottom to top, this pattern is 010000 — a solid line is 1, a broken line is 0. Every relationship above is arithmetic on those six digits, not interpretation: reverse the order and you get the other side, flip every digit and you get the opposite reading, take the middle four and you get what sits underneath. Anyone can check the result, which is what separates a structure from a fortune.

The sequence is built the same way. The sixty-four are arranged in thirty-two pairs, and turned upside down it becomes Mobilization. The rule holds for all thirty-two pairs without exception — twenty-eight joined by reversal, four by inversion.

In the received order it sits between Mobilization and Small Gains. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.