Gate 36 — Darkening of the Light — The Law of Cycles, in which a decline is a natural but temporary stage

Full breakdown

We've arrived at the Darkening of the Light, hexagram 36. This is where we start looking at the Gates of Possibility. It's the possibility of releasing emotional energy, the emotional wave. Hexagram 36 is, without question, the source of the single most powerful wave that exists. It has direct access to the Throat, through the Channel of Transitoriness — the design of the jack-of-all-trades. It's the design of the empirical path, the design of acquiring experience. Everything here comes down to passing through experience and the feelings tied to it, and gate 36 is loaded with enormous force in that process. When people see it labeled a gate of crisis, the whole trick is getting them to understand the nature of the gate, and why all these crises keep happening there in the first place. This is the gate of inexperience. It's initiated by hexagram 41, where fantasy is born to set the stage for a possible new experience. That energy then rises into the Solar Plexus system, where it becomes feeling — a passionate, overwhelming desire to live the experience fully.

By the time it reaches gate 36, that feeling has become fully formed — a complete concept of it, in the emotional sense of the word. There's readiness here now, depth if you like. This gate mirrors gate 48 — an attempt to move through experience, to actually live something — and the deep frustration comes from the fact that releasing this energy depends on gate 35, which is why gate 35 comes under such enormous pressure. This is the human path. Because this is the gate of inexperience, a crisis always arrives regardless of what the experience actually is — small and barely noticeable, or monstrous, but inexperience always leads there. You can't avoid making mistakes if you've never tried something like this before. To avoid mistakes, you'd need to be improbably lucky. That's the heart of the crisis. Awareness here, and the power to generate feeling or not — this energy generates a feeling and pushes it outward so it can steer the experience. Sexually, this is the gate of sexual penetration. Here, you have to do it. When you reach gate 36, you have to do it, whatever the experience turns out to be. All that energy is already inside you, so you're ready for the experience at any moment. In that sense, the change can be very sudden.

The potential awareness here is a wave of hunger passing through peaks of hope and pain. The frustration here runs very strong. I must have this experience, no matter what. I have to get it. That's exactly the energy churning here, and of course when you're full of hope it looks like, "Yes, I'll pull it off." When you're full of pain it's, "Why can't I make this work?" — and the frustration that comes with failure. What usually happens is this: whatever you can't get from one source, you take from another (or, in another reading: what you can't get from one source, you give to someone else). Either way, none of it is personal. The classic story: someone consumed with desire goes looking for their lover, doesn't find them home, heads down to a bar, and finds a substitute there instead.

Absolutely nothing personal about it. It's simply about living the experience. If there's no one appropriate around to share it with, a substitute will be found somewhere else — which is exactly why crises are so common in this process. It has nothing to do with anyone in particular; it just keeps happening, popping up like a jack-in-the-box.

Keep in mind that on the wheel, gate 36 sits directly opposite gate 6, where the motor gets started — and gate 36 is its mirror. Nothing puts out a wave with the force that gate 36 does. When you see it in action, it's genuinely striking.