23 Stripping - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel April 10, 2026
Judgement
Stripping, don’t go too far.
Lines
1
Stripping the bed of its legs.
2
Stripping the bed of its frame.
3
Stripping it.
4
Stripping the bed and stripping the sleeper.
5
One catches the favour of courtiers like catching fish.
6
A great fruit goes uneaten. The Sage finds a way out, while the small are stripped of their homes.
Qabalah
Netzach to Malkuth: The Path of Qoph. The Moon.
The hexagram gives us the image of a landslide, both with a mountain losing earth, and visually . The ideogram shows us a carving knife, the image of stripping away, peeling, and cutting. This is the subject of the famous William Blake line:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Judgment: When walking on eroding soil, one must be careful or the whole structure may collapse. Further, if one is cutting something, they must not go too far or risk cutting themselves.
1 A thorough cleaning. The legs of a bed are stripped and a weak foundation is strengthened.
2 The bedframe is now undone, the continuation of the foundation’s strengthening.
3 Beyond the bed, this is a stripping away of surfaces and appearances. Blake puts it well: melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
4 A strange and humorous image, after one has removed the sheets from a bed, they remove the clothes of the one in the bed. A thorough stripping.
5 The image changes a great deal, away from the bed motif. Now rather than taking something apart, we are bringing something together. This is the animal magnetism of Mesmer, the ability to energetically attract.
6 The image changes again, cataclysm comes, what had been saved is lost, a wise man escapes, but everyone else loses everything. This is a natural disaster. Consider the food perfectly preserved by the explosion of Vesuvius in Pompeii.
It is important to dig into the image of the bed that repeats through the lines; the place of sleep and dreams, the place where we are unconscious. This is the thing that must be cleansed, rearranged, and understood clearly. As stated before, this is the “cleansing of the doors of perception”, the stripping away of surfaces to see what truly lies below. David Lynch says it well: the sleeper must awaken.
Both individually and as a species, we must awaken. We undergo personal catastrophes to grow stronger and more aware. The same is true of worldly catastrophes. The wise hunger for this learning, but most fear traumatic growth. Should our tribulations not awaken us, the last line warns us that coming catastrophes will strip us of everything.
Personal disasters are the most common source of awakening: break ups, car crashes, near death experiences, and deaths. These strip away the monotony of our lived experiences and reveal the gnashing maw of reality in vivid detail and provide us with a truth that cannot be easily ignored or repressed.
Even God had to engrave and strip himself to create the world. This is described in the first verse of the Sepher Yetzirah:
With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom
engraved Yah
It is through engraving the divine that he made space for reality to be created. This is why writing is so significant in the text, being that words were cut into clay or stone.
The hexagram corresponds to the Path of Qoph, which is the image of the back of the head, and to the tarot card of the Moon. This shows us clearly that the subject is the Unconscious mind. This is the realm where things grow dirtier and dirtier, and where we sink all our unpleasant perceptions. It is the veil between the conscious and the Unconscious that must be pierced and stripped away. Jung put it perfectly:
Until you make the Unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
