Gate 15 — Modesty — Behavior That Balances Extremes

Full breakdown

The love that belongs to the Cup, electromagnetic love, isn't something we actually understand. We carry deep confusion about the true nature of love. Love shows up in our world in countless forms. Most human beings only really know the kind of love we call electromagnetic connection — for them, love is a matter of attraction and repulsion. There's a tendency to shrink love's true nature down to just that attraction and repulsion. The Ego and the Self are very different from each other, and the Ego's possessive love is very different from the Self's love. The Self's love is never really directed at the other person's personality — it has more to do with the one who's loving. But real love turns out to be the outcome of how human beings actually live their lives. That's what genuine love means. As we go through the four gates of the Cup, I'll try to convey not just the nature of each line, but also the nature of the gates themselves, and the effect they have in the world.

To really understand the Cup of Love, the best approach is an analogy — a vessel, a container that holds all four gates of the Cup. Call it a cup. This vessel has an outer wall. Our outer wall is what we call the aura — you get penetrated the moment someone enters your aura. The outer side, the aura, is gate 15, love of humanity. Essentially it's a collective aura, a single totality. But that's just our surface. The cup also has an inner wall, and something is held inside it. That inner layer is no longer the aura — in us, it becomes flesh. It's a closed sack that contains all of us, our flesh, our container, and gate 46 is love of the body, love of the flesh.

If you have a vessel bounded by an outer and an inner wall, capable of holding something, then something has to actually be inside it. In our case, what's inside is blood. What's truly inside us, we call universal love — that's gate 25. Put it all together: love of Humanity, which creates the Aura; love of the Flesh, which creates Maya; and blood, which animates all of it with Spirit — and that has to go somewhere. It moves like this: you take the cup, and its contents pour out over the edge; the spout it pours through is gate 10, because gate 10 is the Gate of the Path — the potential for self-love. Together, these are the four gates of the Cup.

Every living thing on earth, down to the cellular level, carries gate 15. It's the only truly universal gate, and it has an extraordinary character, reflected in its heading. Quality of behavior doesn't actually belong here — that belongs to gate 10, which is polar to gate 15. The 10/15 polarity matters enormously, because it concerns behavior that, while impossible to see or understand individually, becomes a collective characteristic of the whole. This isn't about the individual behavior of gate 10 — it's about the collective behavior of humanity. The heading over gate 15's lines: behavior that expresses balance between extremes. Only then can you truly understand what the extremes actually are. Extremes create balance across humanity — everything has to be part of the human drama, all of it. Gate 15 is what differentiates us, because here exists every possible variety of rhythm that can be created — in a sense, every extreme of behavior, the full spectrum, the entire range of behavioral diversity.