I have re-worked the 'Basics' article on Ideal and Shadow so that it reflects a new perspective that emerged from the divinatory work at the Vallecitos Retreat. We found this quite valuable and hope that you do too. The Article has been re-worked and contains an example of how this can function in a Reading (link).
The Ideal Form and the Shadow Site form a pair of figures that let you grasp the ideal potential of the situation and a necessary transformative potential that is, for the moment, shadowed and unavailable but will manifest spontaneously if you do not seek it out. This focuses you on the sort of motivations and activities that the Primary Figure seeks to inspire and those it asks you to let go of.
The Ideal Form gives you a hexagram that represents the most effective way to think about your entire situation, the ideal way to visualize it and act on it. It will further the emergence of the bright spirit and idealizing energies that the situation contains.
This is a quite effective perspective that was developed over the last few years after I came through contact with the students of an old Chinese master in South Africa. It works by reflecting the positions of the trigrams of a Figure in the King Wen or Later Heaven Sequence of Trigrams back into the Fuxi or Early Heaven Sequence. It is a brilliant move that has a solid foundation in Daoist thinking about the relation of these two primal trigram sequences.
The Shadow Site gives you a hexagram that represents what is, at the moment, counter-indicated in your situation, covered by a sort of negative screen that can contain often painful memories. This screen or shadow is blocking transformative energy. If you completely release your awareness from these configurations by focusing on the Ideal, the necessary energy the Shadow Site contains will manifest itself spontaneously.
I had been pondering the possible meanings of what I call the Shadow Site, the reflection of a given hexagram in the Reverse Sequence of the 64 hexagrams, for quite a while. One of its functions made immediate sense to me when it was paired with the Ideal Form as a sort of negative mirror. This is the way Change seems to work, tactically pairing opposites with a situational rather than an abstract moral judgment on their innate qualities. Another realization came as I was working in depth with the Reverse Sequence in deep divinations as representing a kind of mystical re-birth, a union that can only be achieved through indirection or not-acting (wu-wei). From this came the awareness that whatever is shadowed is necessary for the completion of the transformative possibilities of the moment but cannot be reached through conscious action. It can and will manifest synchronistically, however, when there is no conscious effort directed towards it. This sort of indirection frees the quality in question from the linear flow of time and the karmic chain of cause and effect.
I have tried these out in quite a few divinations and, to my mind, they add a special and quite effective way to see what we should and should not be doing, practically rather than morally, at a given moment along with what we might achieve directly and what we can achieve only by renouncing our desires for it.
Stephen