The Left Angle Cross of Separation (Version 1)

Full breakdown

This abstract, collective process is built on participation. Look at the different flavors of sexual theme running through the throat: gate 12 speaks of romance in a very different language than gate 35's desire. 12 simply says, 'I'm happy' or 'I'm unhappy' — that person may not even know why, but it's felt as personal. Gate 35 says instead, 'I'm unhappy because of you.'

Because it's collective and participatory rather than personal, Separation is about the aftermath of experience — experience itself doesn't bind anyone; it naturally leads toward crisis, and from crisis, toward separation.

There's something even more important here: as groups of people grow larger, the ability to live in a community full of strangers becomes more and more essential — part of the arc of progress is reaching a point where you can be a separate individual while still belonging to the structure of society itself. This is the impersonal urban life so many people live now, walking down a street among people you genuinely don't know at all. Given our deep tribal conditioning, this can feel frightening and unsettling — a stranger wandering into a tribe long ago might not have walked out alive; strangers were a threat, because they looked, felt, and dressed differently. Progress, and this Cross of Separation, let us live in a society where we don't necessarily know everyone around us — a genuinely important phase of our development.

Grace runs underneath all this as its quiet, active theme, since the unconscious Sun sits in gate 22. Only through grace can we make room — hold space, if you like — for a wide range of other people's experience and work with it without falling into personal or tribal entanglement. Without it, we couldn't bring all these forces together at all; there would simply be too much friction. We need the genetic trait that lets us make peace with something different from ourselves.

Through this separation, a far wider range of experience becomes possible than we'd ever reach by waiting only for controlled, familiar experience — right up until we arrive at a moment, like today, where anyone famous for five minutes has already published a memoir by age twelve.