Gate 32 — Duration — The only constant thing is change

Full breakdown

Hexagram 32 is part of the Channel of Transformation, the design of one who follows or one who is wound up. Its fuel is the energy of gate 54, the Maiden Marrying, the Gate of Ambition. Gate 32, like every gate of spleen awareness, like every gate of awareness in general, carries a fear inside it, and here that fear is the fear of defeat and failure. That's why every line of gate 32, on some level, is dealing with the fear of failure. Gate 32 is the Gate of Duration and Continuity. It's deeply conservative. It's the mirror image of emotional revolutionary energy on the other side of the bodygraph. Its conservatism serves the tribe's benefit. It tries to conserve — literally, to preserve — material success, because it doesn't want to suffer defeat.

Everything to do with the instinctive current relates to the tribe's material success. Gate 32 is intensely preoccupied with its own success and deeply afraid of failure. The instinctive current is connected to the nose. People with gate 32 can smell an approaching failure coming, because one of their qualities is a memory for defeats, unlike gate 54, which only remembers victories. That's exactly why they're so given to conservatism. They know transformation can happen at any moment. Here, awareness shows up as recognizing what can be transformed and what can't, what needs to be transformed and what doesn't. Gate 54's ambitions don't always have to be satisfied. There's a time to climb the hierarchy, and there's another time to change your whole product line. Every process has its own time. The awareness of gate 32 is trying to judge clearly what's possible to transform and what isn't.

The potential awareness here is a regulator of fluids. Our memory is held in our water. The water in the body's cells carries our memory. That's what belongs to the memory current. Any activation in this current will always point to the possibilities of deep cellular memory within a human being. There's a memory of what didn't work, once upon a time. By the way, the scent of failure gets laid down in memory over the course of a life, case by case, every time you see something that isn't working and breathe in the smell of those failures — until eventually you can catch the faintest whiff of it, that particular odor of an approaching failure.

If you look into the I Ching, over the lines of hexagram 32 you'll find the gloss: the only constant thing is change. The nature of gate 32 shouldn't be misunderstood. It's conservative, but radical conservatism leads to destruction, to an inglorious end, to ultimate failure. Picture people who keep manufacturing teletype machines long after fax machines have taken over our lives. There comes a time to recognize that you've reached a certain point, arrived at a certain level, and that's it — there's no road further without change. If you don't change, the natural course of things will push you to the side. Gate 32 carries a deep inner knowledge of the constancy of change — of the evolutionary process itself. Its conservatism is about exactly what needs to change, what has to change right now — it doesn't deny change itself. That's crucial to understand, because it lets us see that the tribe is capable of changing. Change is the essence of the most conservative gates of the tribal circuit, and they're the ones that show us how to actually achieve it.