Gate 25 — Innocence — Perfection of action through an artless and spontaneous nature

Full breakdown

We spent a long time on the collective gates of Love, and I hope by now you have a clear picture of how love finds its real expression on the inside, not the outside. Anything to do with love that grows out of the Ego, or that's based on electromagnetic connection, belongs to the outer expression of love, its particular external form — but it has nothing to do with the higher Self. Our connection to the totality, to the whole, belongs to the inner expression of love. So Love of Humanity doesn't mean the cliché "love thy neighbor" — it means the possibility of being fully yourself and letting other people be exactly what they naturally are. That's what creates a healthy aura.

When it comes to the physical body, the greatest problem in most people's lives is that most human beings simply don't like the body they've been given. This isn't only about aesthetic values. It touches the body's potential altogether — the way the mind works, the type of metabolism, its shapes and sizes, or the plain fact that the body feels like a burden. For the body to be healthy, the whole experience of living in it has to be accepted without a shadow of doubt, met with unconditional acceptance. That's what real love of self actually means, in terms of loving the flesh, loving being inside this body. To love the flesh means accepting what you are and what you've been given as the only possible thing, the correct and right thing, fully matching your karma and your life's geometry. And the only way to stay healthy is to surrender to life — that's the essence of gate 46: to yield and give yourself over to life, to let go into the waves.

Gate 44 is part of the mechanism built on gate 46, the foundation that points every one of these spleen gates in one direction: to be alive and to surrender to life. Collective love isn't actually what you probably think it is. It's collective in the sense that, in the world, it shows up within the collective — but always in relation to each individual part of that collective. The two collective gates of love sit directly opposite the two individual gates on the wheel, and it has to be clearly understood that the individual process sits at the very core of our experience, because we are individualized beings. So this isn't about the capacity to carry love out into the world — it's about what happens on the inside. The essence of it all is accepting your own being.

Gate 25 is complex, because it's part of the Circuit of Centering, and as such it's an important piece that turns any process, any configuration, in an individual direction. The Circuit of Centering, like the Circuit of Defense, belongs to the small circuits. The energy of the small circuits can always supplement the energy of any other circuit, and their influence can always be brought into the workings of other circuits. Wherever the Circuit of Centering is present, it steers the flow of things toward their individual nature. That's the first point. The second, about gate 25: notice that the Gates of Love are built into the individual and collective circuits, but not into the tribal one. The tribe gets to connect to love, to join the Gate of Love, through the channel 25-51. So gate 25 represents the possibility of expressing love for the individual being, but not only that — through it, the love of the higher Self also becomes available to the tribe. What's more, gate 25 carries a deep mystical meaning that we won't get into today, though I'll take it up in the course on Mystical Paths — the mystical meaning of any gate can't really be taught without looking closely at the structure of the hexagram itself. So today I'll work through gate 25 in the context of everyday life.

The gloss over the lines reads: perfection — the word "perfection" doesn't come up all that often, especially in the I Ching — of action — which immediately raises the question: what action could there possibly be in gate 25? It belongs to the G Center, after all, and has nothing to do with a motor — through an artless — unmotivated, selfless, unconditioned, unplanned, unpremeditated — and spontaneous nature. "Nature" is a term specifically tied to gate 10. Gates 25 and 10 are deeply interconnected, because both of them open up the possibility of centering human nature. Centering an individual's behavior so they can survive in this world — that's the whole point.