Gate 26 — The Taming Power of the Great — The absolute maximization of the power of memory, through which continuity is sustained

Full breakdown

We're moving from a small will to a small Ego. The small willpower of gate 40 grows into the great willpower of gate 51, and the small Ego of gate 26 grows into gate 21, which will be the great Ego. Here we're dealing with the small Ego. That's exactly why, in sexual terms, both gate 40 and gate 26 are Gates of Refusal and Denial. They're weak at their very foundation, which is exactly why they need so much rest. Picture gate 26. We know the instinctive side of the tribal circuit is tied to groups of people organized on the material plane, to the culture of our working lives. With gate 26 — which is the gate of the sales manager, the sales consultant — one thing is completely clear: while everyone else on the shop floor is sweating it out, fighting to get the product out on time, or better yet ahead of schedule, while a mountain of administrative and organizational work is going on to keep the company running well, gate 26 is off playing golf. It plays instead of working. You need to understand that the Ego can't operate the way the people who depend on it wish it would. Everyone wants the Ego to behave like the Root Center or the Sacral. But the Ego is nothing like them.

Back in my Gray Course days, I used to tell my students about one of the spicy little secrets of our design: there's no direct connection between the Ego and the Sacral. If there were, we wouldn't die. If the Sacral were wired straight into the Ego, it wouldn't let the Ego get lazy, wouldn't let it sleep — that lazy dozing would simply stop happening. Where there's a direct connection between Ego and Sacral, the Ego no longer gets to say, "I'm a motor, but I'm not working today." The Ego can get away with that only because it's a motor of a very particular kind, sitting in a very particular position. Society's difficulties with the Ego come from a false premise — that willpower ought to behave the way sacral force does. It doesn't, because the Ego has nothing to do with a generator.

The gloss over the lines of gate 26 speaks of the absolute maximization of the power of memory, through which continuity is sustained. Gate 26 is the Gate of the Egoist, the Gate of Exaggeration. The tribe expects a certain amount of exaggeration — it wants to be hyped up. That matters a great deal to the tribe, and it likes it that way: the best refrigerator, the best car, the best country. Exaggeration — talking things up, inflating a story right to the edge of outright deception — is one way to secure the tribe's wellbeing and keep its spirits up. Gate 26 represents the force applied to memory, or a shortage of that force, or insufficient resources of memory. The essence of the Ego is easy to grasp once you understand that manipulation is one of its inherent, built-in properties. Please don't hear that word as an insult. There are a small handful of gates called "taming" gates. The Taming Power of the Small, gate 9, is the ability to take a broad spectrum of energy and narrow it, focus it toward specific ends — the ability to tame the wild energy of the Root Center and lower its pressure through focus. Here, in gate 26, there's the ability of the Ego to manipulate instinctive memory.

Because this is a small Ego, it needs to be in demand — it needs attention, coaxing, and reassurance, something like a psychological massage. While everyone else is working hard, the Ego is sitting out on the golf course, and the boss calls it as if it's always right there on hand and asks, "Did you see the client?" "Oh, sure," gate 26 answers, "of course I saw him." That may not even be true. Maybe gate 26 wanted to meet the client, maybe it thought the meeting was necessary — but this is the Ego, and nothing else matters. "I really don't have any strength left," gate 26 says. Only once the true nature of the Ego is understood can gates 37, 44, 25, and 45 learn to handle it properly, to find a common language with it. As long as that nature stays misunderstood, conflict with the Ego is more or less constant.