The Left Angle Cross of Refinement (Version 2)

Full breakdown

Your cross's energy provides for needs — not the needs of today, but of a fairly distant future. Right now, this is the voice of the organic-farming movement: 'sure, commercial fertilizers and pesticides let us produce a lot of food, but the soil is wearing out, the ecosystem is losing its balance, and we're storing up serious trouble. Sustainable agriculture is the long-term answer.' You're here to be the voice pointing us toward the long, sustainable course, especially around food and the things we actually need to survive.

Once we cross into the left angle and its transpersonal connection, this beauty becomes available to others too. These forces carry refinement forward. Gate 19 in the right angle says, 'I need.' Gate 19 in the left angle says, 'would you...?' I'm not saying the right angle is rude or ill-mannered — but the essence of refinement is getting exactly what you need for your direction, and nothing else. With 1 and 2 unconscious, the need to find direction shows up beneath the surface.

Two of the four variations of Refinement can look genuinely erratic, because the unconscious Earth sits in gate 2, meaning 'genius as madness' — knowledge purely as power. The mechanism runs like this: madness always sits inside direction — going the wrong way, choosing the wrong direction in life. So refinement, in the end, comes down to understanding that everything reduces to direction, and what you actually need in life is the right direction, not simply food right now, but the direction that will eventually bring you food.

Gate 19, under pressure and tension, very often attaches itself to the wrong forces to get the principles it needs. It's a classic pattern for a desperate 19 to hand over their last dollar to someone promising, 'we're going to make a fortune trading online tonight.' Good luck with that — there's often a real air of desperation running through it.

And yet this refinement is a necessary piece of the tribe finally understanding that direction genuinely matters. It isn't enough to know there are sheep in the field you can kill and eat for a month — there's a bigger direction at stake here. And, naturally, this left-angle cross loops back to the very first variation of the right-angle Sphinx Cross — refinement moving toward the single most essential element of life, and all of it comes down to direction.

If we're all moving forward and stop resisting that motion, everything works in our favor. Carrying gate 49 myself, I've met countless people in genuine need, countless 19s. Naturally, they keep grabbing whatever harmonious-looking gate comes their way, because they're living a false self. We all run into this, whether we're living our true self or our false one. But without Authority and Type, without the ability to recognize what's actually right for you as a person with gate 19, you'll keep chasing gate 49 endlessly — and there's no shortage of 49s, believe me, an infinite supply. So it matters enormously, in realizing any of these crosses, to actually live the cross's mythology by living your Strategy, the mechanical Strategy itself. Only then will you truly see it, because it will show up in everything you do. I've told people for years that everyone has their own mythology — we are all wonderfully specific fractal pieces of the great archetypes, and you live yours out through your cross.