Hexagram 60Limitation
Upper : Water (Kan) - ☵Lower : Lake (Dui) - ☱
"Limitation. Success. One must not persist in a bitter limitation."
Water fills the lake. Yet, a lake has shores (boundaries). If the water overflows, the lake spills over and inundates everything. If there is insufficient water, it dries up. Limitation gives form to life. Without boundaries, energy dissipates into the void. Discipline, budget, time: setting rules creates freedom. However, the oracle warns: overly rigid discipline ('bitter') destroys joy and turns against itself.
"Water over the lake: the image of limitation. Thus the noble man establishes measure and boundaries, and examines what virtue and just conduct demand."
Measure in all things. Neither mortifying asceticism nor destructive debauchery.
The Ego must define its boundaries. If you have no limits (saying yes to everyone, yielding to all impulses), your personality dissolves and exhausts itself. One must learn to say "No." However, do not construct a paranoid fortress (the bitter limitation). Jung saw in the Persona (the social mask) a necessary limitation to function in society, provided one does not completely identify with it.
The Quantification of Energy (the foundation of quantum physics). Energy, light, or matter are not infinite and continuous flows. They exist only in discrete, limited, indivisible quantities: the 'Quanta' (like photons). Nature itself imposes strict structural limits on reality to prevent it from collapsing (the ultraviolet catastrophe).