Gate 13 — Fellowship — The Listener

Full breakdown

Universal ideas and values, ordered into a structure, that inspire humanistic cooperation.

We've arrived at the collective process. Until now we were looking at the individual process, whose whole point is direction — representing a direction. What the individual role offers is the chance to embody that role in the present moment, simply to give creativity an outlet. Collective roles are very different. They rest on a similar underlying process: the logical collective role projects forward into the future, while the abstract collective role always looks back into the past. Collective gates establish where everything came from and where it's going, which gives them a sense of continuity, wholeness, and well-being. Broadly speaking, everything to do with the stability of our existence really belongs to the collective field.

We've reached hexagram 13, Fellowship, which carries exceptional importance for human nature. The abstract circuit represents our experiential path — our path through experience, which is quite literally the path of human existence. That path begins with hexagram 41, the initiating codon, the primal experience, and culminates in the 13/33 channel — the channel of the Witness and the Prodigal. When it comes to any abstract process, there's one thing you need to understand: nothing is truly known, learned, or experienced until the process is completely finished. That's one of the keys to living inside the abstract stream (you can see the same thing in gate 46 of the Cup of Love): being completely inside the experience, head first, immersed in what you're living through. If you're not fully absorbed in the experience as it happens, you won't gather enough information to properly reflect on it later. If you never check the rearview mirror, you're bound to miss things you've already driven past.

Gate 13 is the Gate of the Listener, but more importantly, it's the gate of secrets, because it gathers the reflections that make sense of the past. It's also one of several gates within the Rave system that relate specifically to memory. The heading above the hexagram's lines reads: universal ideas and values, ordered into a structure, that inspire humanistic cooperation. Structurally ordered universal ideas and values represent the entire process of accumulating past experience. Time is a continuum — an unbroken, continuous whole — or, for a passenger riding in a car, that continuum is distance. We manage this through the calendar. Here comes a big date: 2000. It gives us that sense of wholeness, and looking back a thousand years, we can say that period is now complete. "Inspire humanistic cooperation" means that it's this space-time continuum, this continuity and gathering of historical record, that inspires humanity. That's true — it inspires in the sense that, unlike our mammal cousins, we don't have to start over from scratch with every new generation.

Human beings have the capacity to hold on to an enormous range of information and then exchange it, share what they remember — that's the nature of the collective process. This ability to share history genuinely inspires people. Today that process moves far faster than it did, say, a hundred years ago; our systems for gathering information and for transmitting, distributing, and redistributing it keep getting faster, and the faster we receive it, the more advanced each new generation becomes relative to the one before, because the important information the previous generation gathered and mastered, the new generation begins studying the moment it arrives in the world.

This is where the value and benefit of gate 13 lies — it preserves our experience so that it can inspire humanity.