The Left Angle Cross of Defiance (Version 1)

Full breakdown

Crossing into the left angle always happens through the interpersonal — you can't self-actualize here except through interaction with others. In the structure of any hexagram, the first line carries its truth, while the fifth line carries what everyone else would like to believe is the truth — which isn't necessarily the same thing.

The fifth line, with its own temptations, can generate real expectations in others. So when we arrive at Defiance and its fifth-line projection, we run into other people's expectations — forces that always set the standard direction a person is then expected to follow. People with this cross seem to have their own answers, their own better principles, and will end up resisting the common direction — though that's not necessarily their intention. Because this left angle starts from the fifth line, the people around them simply expect defiance, even if this person isn't actually trying to defy anything. Picture children filing out during a fire drill, and one of them, carrying this cross, simply peels off from the group — not out of any conscious wish to resist, just because that's what happens; everyone else reads it as defiance regardless.

As for the sixth line, remember the relationship between the fifth and sixth lines in any Profile: the fifth line wants to make its inner content common property, generalizing experience, and so carries the greatest potential to inform or transform others — but it's the sixth line, sitting on the roof, especially at the midpoint of its cycle, that decides whether the fifth line's heresy is actually worth anything. In Defiance, with its fifth line present, that fifth line will say, 'we need to tear this down and go this way instead — follow me' — and the sixth line gets to judge how justified that really is. When a fifth line sits in Defiance, we're dealing with an anarchic kind of authority.

When these forces are genuinely rebellious, they break apart the prevailing direction entirely — and that's fine; it all grinds against itself through gate 2, which never disappears from this formation as we move from right angle to left. It stays present the whole way, part of direction itself. Look at the world: people still live at a Stone-Age level and still survive; many, many things run in parallel at once. Defiance exists to keep disrupting the status quo of direction — bringing its own aspect of heresy and schism, along with genuine variation, small but real differences that keep the whole system honest.