Combine Upper and Lower Trigrams · Analyze Situations · Formulate Strategies

Every difficult situation contains two interacting forces: the world around you and the state you bring to it. In Combine Upper and Lower Trigrams · Analyze Situations · Formulate Strategies, the third volume of the Yijing Thinking Series, Fleming Chuang presents the I Ching as a practical framework for modern decision-making.

Starting with the eight basic trigrams, this book shows how the environmental upper trigram and the personal lower trigram combine to reveal the structure of a situation. A clear six-step method helps you describe the difficulty, identify the forces at work, judge whether they connect or conflict, consult the relevant hexagram pattern, and turn insight into three concrete actions.

The approach is applied to personal growth, relationships, communication, workplace decisions, and the uncertain space between completion and possibility. Classic pairings such as Standstill and Peace, After Completion and Before Completion, and Water and Fire become accessible tools for recognizing timing, adjusting your response, and moving with changing conditions rather than forcing your way against them.

With a condensed index of all 64 hexagrams and reusable inference worksheets, this volume invites you to use the I Ching not as fixed destiny, but as a disciplined way to think more clearly, act more wisely, and preserve your agency amid change.