The Left Angle Cross of Prevention (Version 2)

Full breakdown

We arrive at the second variation of Prevention, a natural progression from a focused identification with behavior. This isn't a fixed viewpoint on behavior — it's interpersonal, because we're dealing with a karmic cross: the person you correct here is the same person you warn, since correcting through warning is the same act.

Behavior can kill you if you're not careful. One of my early illustrations of gate 10's nature: you don't walk into the jungle carrying a gun meant for a street fight — not the smartest move. Prevention exists to tell you that a given behavior won't serve you well, trying to keep you from behaving that way at all — literally trying to stop you. Since this is a left angle, generalizing or trying to bring this into a larger group, it can feel oppressive or, just as easily, liberating, depending on how it's delivered. Often, someone carrying Prevention starts to sound like a stern schoolteacher: 'you can't do this, that's forbidden.'

There's more to it. Gate 10 is tied closely to the process of individual survival — it's the foundation on which that survival becomes possible. So what people with Prevention say can genuinely help you: 'don't do that. Don't behave that way. Watch out, do it this way instead.' Genuinely useful advice — but always delivered from a fairly heavy, judgmental subconscious.

Morality belongs to our world. If you carry a logical circuit, you carry moral principles — morality is, in fact, logical in nature, which is genuinely funny, since it's built on the same 'this' and 'that' that gives us duality in the first place. We try to think our way logically through categories of good and evil, right and wrong. People with this cross justify their interference, their corrections, their attempts to hold you back from some behavior, precisely in moral terms: 'I think that would be wrong.' There's always a moral undertone to it — and if you push back, since it operates subconsciously in them, they'll deny it: 'it's not that I think it's good or bad, it's about what's good for you.'

The left angle ends in gate 10's sixth line, which will be either a genuinely charming role model, a beautiful example of how to behave, or an insufferable hypocrite whose creed is 'do as I say, not as I do.' Such a person might tell you not to do drugs, then step into the bathroom and do a line of cocaine. In effect, they keep you from doing something wrong while quietly being hypocritical themselves — not unlike the ministers a few decades back who preached strict morality publicly while seeing call girls in their offices. Classic sixth line, with one difference: it knows how to ask forgiveness. I genuinely love that about it — 'please forgive me, and please send more money.'