Gate 10 — Treading — The Behavior of the Self

Full breakdown

The deep code underlying behavior, which ensures successful interaction no matter the circumstances.

We've arrived at the point where the Cup of Love pours out. Gate 10 is the most complex of the Cup's gates by far — the other three are, mechanically speaking, far less complicated. Whatever the aura, or the body, or the spirit, the ultimate question that 25.6 eventually asks comes down to this: how do you express what you live through?

Gate 10 is the Gate of our Nature — the gate of simply being, of existing in our world. It's the single most powerfully conditioning gate there is: it conditions the behavior of the entire world. It does that through an intricate system, but the whole story of gate 10 comes down to the question raised by 25.6 — how to express living itself. How to express innocence. How to express your own rhythm in this life. How to express the existential quality needed to live out your own experience. All of that is concentrated in gate 10, because it's through this gate that the Cup of Love pours out on each of us as an individual process — we're all conditioned by the individual process of gate 10.

Gate 10 represents the possibility of loving yourself. The foundation of that love is loving your own existence in this world, because gate 10 has to do with living in the world, with being part of the process of life. The heading above the lines of gate 10 reads: the deep code underlying behavior — code here means something like a genetic aphorism. We carry a code of behavior imprinted in us from the very start of our development, imprinted into the structure of the form we're about to embody — something you could see if you traced the first 88 degrees of the Sun — that ensures successful interaction no matter the circumstances. Everything to do with behavior makes life easier. When you're not being yourself, life automatically becomes harder. The more fully you live your own nature, the stronger your capacity to survive, whatever the circumstances. Being yourself is a tremendous achievement — and when gate 10 connects to gate 20, being yourself becomes the possibility of being awake. Awake, in the present moment, in this world.

The behavioral code matters enormously when you're reading a chart. You need to understand the structure of the hexagram and how the themes or key principles associated with each line work. You already know, for instance, that first lines are introspective, and so on. What matters is knowing that a code of behavior is built into the structure of every line, and you can see it by looking at gate 10. If you want to understand the nature of any 4th line, all you have to do is look at the behavior of 10.4: the behavior of 10.4 is to be an opportunist. From there you can see that opportunism is built into every 4th line — that correct behavior, in that case, is to wait for the right opportunity, the right moment, to bring your influence into the world effectively. In the same way, if you're a 2nd-line being — someone everyone can see straight through — that means being a hermit, being careful and watchful about who might get inside you and pull you away from your own nature. In other words, when you look at the nature of any given line, you don't just have the key principle describing its place in the structure — you also have a built-in reference telling you which code of behavior best fits that line. These line-specific behavior codes matter a great deal when you're reading someone's chart.

Think about the nature of genetic continuity. Because of it, lines that occupy similar positions in the structure are deeply connected to one another. From the basic teaching of Human Design, we know that, as a single global unity, we live inside an emotional environment generated by every possible combination of the Solar Plexus. We know that humanity's ultimate understanding will come from the Solar Plexus center. Think about the nature of that spirit as it plays out in today's world. Gate 22.1 is called the Second Class Ticket. It's one of the things human beings feel deep in their nature — that somehow they've all ended up holding second-class tickets, that somehow they never got the chance to occupy, or fit into, the place they feel they truly deserve. Think about genetic continuity as it applies to 10.1.