Gate 22 — Grace — The quality of behavior best suited to handling everyday and trivial situations

Full breakdown

This is the Channel of Openness, the design of a social or antisocial being. Gate 22 is the Gate of Grace — and in English there's a wonderful play on words here: the gate of grace and the gate of disgrace. Depending on the wave, either quality can show up. This channel carries a deep mutation. Only through this channel can mutation actually spread through the population, and that gives it unusual properties. Every mutation enters the human population through 12/22. Gate 12 already brought about the mutation of our larynx, which let us articulate the sounds of language. The mutation that will come through gate 55 will let the nature of spirit express itself. The pressure in gate 22 demands recognizing the right moment of social openness, so the mutation can be released. The great gift of gate 22 is knowing exactly when mutation becomes possible. If that moment goes unrecognized, it's disgrace — because the mutation doesn't work. The Gate of Openness can provoke social opening, or it can fail to.

Remember the nature of gate 39, which teases gate 55. It can be entirely antisocial, the same way gate 55 can show either the highest pitch of emotion or absolute coldness, with no emotional display at all. The awareness available here is openness during eating. Individuals are very good at talking to people while they're eating. I learned this a long time ago, when I was a teacher. I spent about ten years of my life teaching in official institutions of various levels. I always ended up in schools where eating during class wasn't encouraged — for the sake of appearances, I suppose. Everywhere except university, students weren't allowed to eat during lessons. In the early '80s I worked at an experimental school on Ibiza. I took in troubled kids who, officially, couldn't be taught the normal way. I put them all in one class and spent four months teaching them the history of the universe. I loaded them with every kind of information, using memorization techniques. An hour into the lesson, they'd get hungry.

Here's something worth knowing about the nature of the mind. When you're genuinely engaging your mind and you're not getting hungry, something's off, because real mental effort burns an enormous amount of energy. I let my students eat constantly through the whole lesson — it kept their strength up, and that, among other things, let me load them with information at full capacity. The brain drains your energy fast, so it matters a great deal that you're able to eat while you're thinking hard about something. Talking to people while they eat is a very good use of time for individuals — it's exactly the right moment for that kind of thing.

There's something funny in the nature of these lines that I've thought about for years — the relationship between gate 15 and gate 22. Gate 15 embodies Love of Humanity, the Gate of Extremes, the hexagram called Modesty. And when it comes to Grace, at their highest expression these gates are marked by extraordinary modesty — that's their remarkable strategy. They genuinely earn that description: modesty. And grace, charm, attractiveness could just as easily be attributed to gate 15. What's really going on is that individuals need attention. They're trying to draw other people's attention. That's the nature of the individual process. Gate 22 has a specific quality of its own. It isn't gate 12 or gate 55, with their magic and mutation. It always stays in the background, wherever the energy of those two gates is present, because in a large community an individual is always at risk.

Looked at sexually, gate 22 is romantic by nature, and that shows up as the power of attention and a willingness to listen. In romantic relationships, listening matters enormously — the ability to hear each other out. Gate 22 has the power to sharpen attentiveness in the people around it. That's exactly its charm. When gate 22 is surrounded by other people, it enhances their capacity to pay attention, to actually listen. That matters. And it has to listen to others first, before speaking — it has to wait its turn to be heard. That's how it's built: to go second. It's a design that gets its response on the wave. When gate 22 tries to act pushy or defiant instead of being courteous, it loses. Watch how people with gate 22 drive, and you'll notice they always yield, letting other cars merge in. That's their attentiveness at work. It's part of their power.