11 Yes (Good) - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel January 17, 2026
Judgment
The Low goes and the High comes.
Lines
1
Pull up the tares and the wheat goes with it.
2
Embrace the hard places. Crossing the river, after losing a friend I make it to the middle.
3
Without lows there are no highs. Without going there is no return. It’s tough, but it’s not a problem. Don’t stress. Eat.
4
Fluttering about without wealth. Call on your neighbors, not with demands, but with faith.
5
The Great Emperor marries a commoner.
6
The castle walls have fallen into the moat. No soldiers, so I’ll give my own orders.
Qabalah
“Malkuth is in Kether”
The Ace of Cups and the Ace of Disks.
In this Hexagram, we are once again given an image of something close to the perfection of Heaven: the Prelapsarian World, the Garden of Eden. Unusually here, Heaven, which traditionally remains high, is below the Earth. They are interwoven and unified before the Fall. This is “Heaven on Earth”, but in the text we see that the seeds of decay have been sown, and that this pleasurable condition will not last.
1 The opening line is remarkably close to Christ’s Parable of the Tares in Matthew 13.
29 But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.
30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.
In this line we see the intermingling of the Low and the High, Matter and Spirit, Earth and Heaven. “Et in Arcadia ego” - even in Paradise, evil has been seeded.
2 The condition of material existence necessitates our affirmation of difficulty. We must find the balance in any situation.
3 A profoundly Solomonic wisdom, there is a time for every thing. One could say the I Ching itself is the “clock” that indicates what sort of “time” it is. As for the affirmation at the end, it is a direct mirror to Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes 9:7 :
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.
4 As in previous hexagrams, we get by with a little help from our friends.
5 In a way, this is another image of the High and Low coming together - the union of the Holy Spirit and Mary, the Divine and the Mundane marrying.
6 By the final line, the condition has decayed. The divine structure has fallen, and individuals must take hold of their own fate.
Qabalistically, this Hexagram illustrates the axiom “Malkuth is in Kether”, base matter exists within the Divine. Before the Fall, God was interwoven with the world. It is the nature of things to change, and accordingly this state of Paradise could never last. Though the state is finite, the hexagram affirms that it does return time after time.
