Gate 30 — The Clinging Fire — Recognizing freedom as an illusion and accepting limitation as fate

Full breakdown

The essence of the abstract process lies in passing through experience. Because the abstract process will never attain awareness, it will eventually be removed from the system of energy circulation, once the great shift happens and every other current flowing out of the emotional system gains the capacity to be conscious of spirit. The abstract process is a purely human process. It's our evolutionary process, our empiricism, and in that context hexagram 30 is something unusual. It carries the potential to feel and to want new experience, and without that potential we wouldn't have our history at all. We wouldn't have any of the crises and transformations this whole current carries with it. Hexagram 30 sits at the beginning of Aquarius. What's distinctive about it is that it sets the direction we're moving in.

When the spring equinox eventually falls in Aquarius, it will land on the sixth line of hexagram 30, and that's when the Age of Aquarius will begin. That's exactly why hexagram 30 carries such weight for us. The Clinging Fire is the Gate of Feeling. It's the potential awareness to recognize feeling, or not. It's the energy that generates feeling, or doesn't. Don't get the terminology confused with actual awareness — this is the energy to feel or not to feel, with its potential to recognize Hunger and Thirst. Everything to do with the flow of passing through experience and the sensations tied to it connects to hunger at the start — hexagram 41, the codon of initiation — and to fullness, satiation, at the end — hexagram 35, Progress. Hexagram 30 carries the ability to recognize feelings connected to eating and drinking.

We talked yesterday about the human need to satisfy hunger, and you can see that the primary, basic human experience is recognizing hunger, along with the energy that drives you to keep following that feeling until you find food and can eat. Just like food, sexuality is a primary driving force of this current. Food and sexuality are tightly interwoven in this process. The best description I know of the Age of Aquarius and the nature of these gates is in the gloss over the lines: recognizing freedom as an illusion and accepting limitation as fate. That's exactly where we're headed — toward the illusion of freedom. But freedom doesn't exist. What exists is the knowledge that all of us belong to a pattern, that each of us has our place within it, and that limitation is a good thing. It isn't punishment. It's the nature of being that we're moving toward, and it's exactly where the emotional quality of these gates is leading us. It's essential to understand that the strength of the emotional motor in this current is powerful enough to carry us beyond experience itself — which is really what the energy of this current is reaching for — to set aside empirical experience and find satisfaction instead in the pattern that reveals the true value of the nature of being.