Judgment
Possession in Great Measure. Supreme success. Possession in great measure brings supreme success when combined with modesty. The superior man restrains evil and furthers good, thus obeying the will of heaven.
Image
Fire in heaven above: the image of Possession in Great Measure. Thus the superior man curbs evil and furthers good, and thereby obeys the benevolent will of heaven.
Phosphor Vision
Terence McKenna - Timewave Zero: I-Ching as Temporal Fractal
Terence McKenna (1975)
In 1975, deep in the Colombian Amazon on psychedelic mushrooms, Terence McKenna experienced a vision: the King Wen sequence of I-Ching hexagrams mapped to time itself, creating a fractal wave measuring novelty across history. The Timewave Zero theory emerged—64 hexagrams encoding not divination but temporal dynamics, each hexagram representing a state of increasing or decreasing complexity. McKenna possessed the I-Ching in great measure: Wilhelm's translation, understanding of King Wen's arrangement, mathematical confidence to transform static oracle into dynamic cosmology. Fire in Heaven—clarity of vision applied to universal patterns. He built software that generated the timewave graph, predicting novelty inflection points, identifying historical resonances. The 2012 endpoint prediction proved wrong, but the methodology demonstrated Hexagram 14 perfectly: possession of ancient wisdom not merely preserved but audaciously applied. Most I-Ching scholarship focused on preservation, translation, commentary. McKenna asked: what if this 3,000-year-old sequence encodes the structure of time? That's great possession—not hoarding knowledge but deploying it to make manifest what nobody else could see.
Historical Context
- Period
- Zhou Dynasty
- Oracle Bone Etymology
- Fire (☲) above, Heaven (☰) below—illumination above creative power, the weak line in fifth position making strong lines beautiful through modesty.
- Traditional Use
- Wilhelm describes this as possession in great measure: holding great resources that must be managed with humility. The weak fifth line represents modesty preventing arrogance. McKenna: ambitious application tempered by acknowledging speculation.
- Character Analysis
- The character 大有 (dà yǒu) means 'great possession' or 'great having.' McKenna possessed I-Ching knowledge in great measure and used it to construct temporal cosmology. The weak line: his explicit acknowledgment that Timewave was speculative model, not scientific fact.
- Energy State
- Fire illuminating from above, creative power below. The weak yin line in fifth position (normally strong ruler position) creates modesty within great possession.
- Trigram Symbolism
- ☲ Fire (Upper) - The Clinging, clarity, illumination ☰ Heaven (Lower) - The Creative, strength, power Light illuminating creative force—possession made manifest through application.
Sources
Lines
Line 1: 無交害匪咎艱則無咎
Line 2: 大車以載有攸往無咎
Line 3: 公用亨于天子小人弗克
Line 4: 匪其彭無咎
Line 5: 厥孚交如威如吉
Line 6: 自天祐之吉無不利
Practical Guidance
Transformations
When changing lines appear in a reading, this hexagram can transform into another.
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