Gate 41 — Decrease — Limiting resources in order to maximize the development of potential

Full breakdown

Pressure centers matter enormously, as does everything else. In essence, we're something like a sandwich. One pressure presses down from above, another presses up from below, and everything else is simply squeezed into the middle and flattened. These pressures govern the world we live in. They supply the energy that unlocks the entire life potential tied to inhabiting a human body and living out human awareness. They touch our very essence and are inseparable from our lives — they're always present. When I say they're always present, I don't mean the definition of the pressure centers in your personal chart specifically. As long as they exist in the world, they're part of the world's aura, and everyone is in contact with them. So when we look at the pressure centers, we're looking at the fundamental source of all human processes — in a sense, the root of all evil, if you'll forgive the phrase — please understand that. Fundamental, original pressure is necessary to set all these processes in motion.

I'm starting with gate 41 for a particular reason. We live in a time when hexagram 41 is being activated by the outer planets, so we're in for a deep, extended experience of living this energy. Hexagram 41 represents the fuel, or the pressure, of the abstract energy within the Sensing circuit, the Feeling stream. This stream is unique — it belongs only to human beings. It's the evolutionary and genetic material necessary for us to have the experience of being embodied in human form. Without this stream, the process of human evolution would be impossible. What's at stake here isn't only the fundamental pressure that kicks off the life process in general, but also the understanding that no other life form carries pressure quite like this. It's an extremely specific pressure, a wholly distinct stream, directly tied to the experience we have simply by being human.

In our genetic code, hexagram 41 is the sole initiating codon. In other words, it's the initiating codon in the sense that it's where the genetic structure of the human being as a whole begins. Hexagram 41 is the reference point in our evolutionary process — the single most important pressure that has made us, now and forever, homo sapiens, modern humans. Hexagram 41 is the trigger that set us in motion on this stage, where we're still moving toward completion.

Human beings possess a unique capacity to feel, and that capacity creates a need for experience, a desire to live things through. In the desire for life experience — to feel the feelings tied to it and then express them — lies the whole process of human development. These desires carry us from one experience to another, from one set of feelings to the next, as we develop and mature through the process. Because of this, crisis, with everything that comes with it, is also set in motion. In other words, it's perfectly clear that the evolutionary process is built on crisis, on change, on the transient nature of things. (Sic transit gloria mundi; ars longa, vita brevis; all things pass, and this too shall pass.) Hexagram 41, Decrease, is the Gate of Contraction, and its fuel is the energy to feel, or not. All the potential for feeling that exists across our genetic spectrum, everything we're capable of living through, feeling, experiencing, is rooted in gate 41.

An analysis of sexuality from the standpoint of Human Design identifies gate 41 as the Gate of Fantasy, capable of imagining any feeling at all, because every one of them is already present here. The old Chinese image for hexagram 41 is a gardener who, late in autumn or on the eve of winter, prunes the garden to prepare it for the coming season. Nothing is lost in the process, because everything that plant could ever become — every twig, every leaf, every flower — is already present within it, held as compressed potential, waiting for its moment. In the same way, gate 41 holds an enormous potential for every kind of experience that can be lived through, every kind of feeling that can be felt. This is the key to human being. The mechanics of this gate are always tied to hunger. Human beings differ sharply from our animal relatives in this respect. Animals experience only one kind of hunger — the primal, predatory hunger that keeps them alive. But human beings are dual in this regard. We can experience ordinary physiological hunger, tied to survival on the material plane, but we also carry another, deeper hunger — a hunger for experience, for impressions, for feeling. Fly to Mars to see what the Martian rocks look like. Why? Just to see what they're like. Discover America. Why? Just to see what's on the other side of the earth. So here's the thing to take in: the primary, fundamental fuel of the evolutionary process is hunger for feeling, for impressions, for experience.

The understanding that touches the essence of an abstract being's life rests on a very simple principle — this is the key to your being, whatever your abstract definitions happen to be: take one step at a time, and don't repeat a step. That's really what this gate is telling you, just as gate 64 in the Ajna, carrying far too much potential information, works the same way. Built into this gate is a mechanism that's only willing to release one thing at a time. In other words: all these feelings make up the natural resource of gate 41. But the gloss over the lines speaks of limiting resources in order to maximize the development of potential. If you let all these fantasies swirl around inside you at once, you actually decrease your own potential. If you focus your energy — this is the design of the channel — on one fantasy, one feeling, then you can move all the way through it. And once it's finished, you can move on to the next one.

This is the key to the abstract process. Potential expands to its fullest precisely through the knowledge that the resources are always there. You don't need to indulge every fantasy all at once — you can take up one at a time and move through the correct evolutionary process. Remember, when you look at a hexagram, the first line always represents not just its foundation, but the most essential truth contained within it. So what actually lies at the foundation here?