What the parts of a reading do
A judgment, an image, sometimes a moving line or two, sometimes a second hexagram. Each part has one job.
A completed cast gives you a hexagram, possibly with moving lines, possibly transforming into a second hexagram. Wilhelm's chapters then hand you several distinct texts. They are not interchangeable paragraphs of oracle-speak; each does a different job, and the reading goes better taken in order.
The Judgment
The oldest layer and the actual answer: a compressed verdict on the situation as a whole — whether the time favors movement, what it asks of you, where the danger sits. Read it first and read it twice. Everything else in the chapter is commentary radiating from these few lines.
The Image
The two trigrams as a natural picture — clouds rising over heaven, water over the mountain — followed by one sentence about how a person conducts themselves inside that weather. Where the Judgment says what the time is, the Image says what to be like in it. It is the most quotable part of every chapter and the easiest to carry through a day.
The moving lines
Read only the lines that came up moving — a six or a nine in your cast. An unmoved line is scenery; a moving line is the live point of the situation, the place where it is already becoming something else. The line texts are the most specific counsel in the book, and one moving line that lands precisely is worth more than the rest of the chapter. If several lines move at once, weigh them in order from the bottom, and treat the highest as the situation's leading edge.
The second hexagram
Flipping each moving line to its opposite produces the transformed hexagram: not a second answer, but a bearing — where the situation is tending if the movement in it completes. Read its Judgment and Image more lightly, as horizon rather than instruction. The counsel for acting is in the first hexagram and its moving lines; the second is what the acting is moving toward.
Holding it against the question
Last, put the reading and the question in the same room. The oracle's images are wide on purpose; the discipline is asking where, concretely, this picture touches your actual circumstance. A reading that seems to miss is often answering the question under the question — it is worth sitting with a miss before casting again. Every chapter is in the reference for reading beyond your cast, and the glossary covers the recurring formulas — no blame, perseverance furthers, crossing the great water.