Hexagram 42: Increase Changing to Hexagram 29: The Abysmal

I Ching casting meaning · Yi → Kan

The open sky of Increase is descending into The Abysmal — deep water, doubled, where the growth you achieved is being tested by genuine danger. The bigger operation faces a crisis; the expanded life hits a season where increased scale makes every problem larger. Don't dramatize it and don't deny it: this is a passage through something genuinely risky for what you've built, and the strategy is the one water uses — keep moving, stay deep, don't stop in the middle of the rapids. Your routines are your rope: the core practices that survived the growth, done faithfully. Increase that survives the abyss emerges as something beyond mere size — it becomes resilient. Flow through the danger without freezing.

A casting that moves from Increase into The Abysmal means the situation you asked about is not static — it begins as one pattern and resolves into another. The first hexagram describes where you stand; the second describes where events are carrying you.

Highlighted in red: lines 1, 2 and 6 are moving — counted from the bottom. A moving line is where the change is actually happening: it flips from yang to yin or back, and that flip is what turns Increase into The Abysmal.

The situation: Hexagram 42, Increase

True increase. Wind and thunder multiply each other.

Wind and thunder feeding each other — energy that multiplies instead of canceling out. This is one of the great draws: genuine increase, the kind where resources, opportunities, and momentum all rise together. The classic instruction has a spine to it, though: increase flows to people who use it well. See good, copy it fast. See your own faults, cut them faster. This is also the season to do something significant with the surplus — invest in people, take the meaningful risk, fund the thing that matters. Increase hoarded curdles; increase circulated compounds. You're being given more because the universe expects you to move it.

Structurally, Increase is Thunder below Wind — the inner state meeting the outer condition. That pairing is the lens for everything above.

Where it's heading: Hexagram 29, The Abysmal

Deep water, twice. Flow through danger without stopping.

The changed hexagram is the trajectory, not a verdict. As the moving lines settle, the energy of Increase gives way to The Abysmal (Kan) — Water below Water. The advice that belongs to this outcome: Keep flowing. Hold your routine and values; motion is the way out.