Gate 24 — Return — A natural and spontaneous process of transformation and renewal

Full breakdown

We move now to the individual acoustic process that sits at the center. The individual mind resonates with the frequency of awareness on the spleen side and with the emotional wave, and it's always timely, everywhere. It doesn't simply live in the present moment. There is only one truly existential gate, gate 20, and even that is relative — "now" is a moment of time that doesn't last very long. What we're dealing with when it comes to individuality is a relative present, one that's always reflecting on the past and projecting into the future. This doesn't happen visually. It's an acoustic process — what matters here is what's taken in by ear, what's actually heard.

Part of what we hear registers exactly in the present moment, and the rest we don't really hear well at all. We hear on a wave. That means we only remember part of what was said, far from everything. Engaging with the individual nature confronts us with the dilemma of knowledge: knowing what can be known; knowing what's available to be known but doesn't matter to us; and knowing the unknowable. If you can't tell these three apart, you'll never find quiet in your mind — and quiet is the one state the individual mind is always reaching for. In the same way the abstract mind doesn't want to keep watching some bad old film over and over, the individual mind wants to find stillness and peace.

This is the Channel of Awareness, the design of a thinker — Return, the Gate of Rationalizing. To consciously fight for knowledge, or not. Can this actually be known? That's the real question. It brings us back to the Channel of Struggle, 28-38, and to the fear of death carried in gate 28. Does life hold any value at all? Is it worth anything? Is there anything that can actually be known, and if there is, is it worth fighting for? Is this knowledge genuinely worthwhile? You could become a nuclear physicist and still not value that particular knowledge. It isn't only about figuring out what's available to be known. The task is understanding whether you should fight for that knowledge or not. The potential for awareness here lies in endlessly turning over unresolved questions. Return — you keep coming back to something again and again, because you can't resolve the question, and as long as it stays unresolved, quiet is out of reach. You have to work out whether it can be known, whether that knowledge is worth having, and whether it's worth fighting for.

The gloss over the lines reads: a natural and spontaneous process of transformation and renewal. It pulses. Right now there's no knowledge — and in the next moment, it's there.