Gate 56 — The Wanderer — Stability in and through movement; eternal continuity achieved by linking together brief actions

Full breakdown

The Throat center is the most complex of all, for entirely objective reasons. It holds eleven gates, and it represents our capacity for metamorphosis. This center carries the potential of our manifestation in life. The gate of the Wanderer is one of the primary gates that provides an outlet into the mind. One of the essential features of the mind is its ability to conceptualize the nature of human existence in this world. The first thing Human Design teaches us is that the mind can't dictate how we should live, but it's certainly well suited to examining our life, and other people's lives, from different angles.

Gate 56 is one of two collective gates of communication. These are metamorphic — transforming — gates, and they work in a rather unusual way: they translate our inner vision into the language of words (inner vision being the ability to turn what we see with our inner eye into concepts). These are special gates, because our capacity, as human beings, to communicate with each other and make ourselves understood is directly tied to them. In a sense, they're translator gates. They try to turn inner vision, inner sight, into language. Gate 56 is the voice of the abstract mental process.

Every Throat gate has a voice. The voice of gate 56 is full of hope or despair, because it's the voice of belief. It says "I believe" or "I don't believe." This is the gate of Stimulation, and one joke about it is that, genetically speaking, it's a stop codon. Literally, the point of stimulation is a place — a level of development — where you stop. In other words, you can tell stories, but don't try to actually live out what you believe. Gate 56 is very important, because without it there would be no process of human learning. Learning is the key to understanding its importance. The essence of the abstract process lies in going through experience — it's the experiential path, full of crises, mistakes, and problems, where an endless number of cycles each have their own beginning, middle, and end. Without this path we'd have no history, we'd have no philosophy, and we wouldn't reflect on the experience of being, which is what gives us a sense of meaning in life and opens up the truth of our existence. Gate 56 stimulates us by telling stories. It's able to take the images from our mind that, in the abstract process, are called ideas, and turn those ideas into a story, so that once the story's been told, you understand which idea lives inside you, and you can discover what its meaning is.

Stimulation. Our capacity to develop as a civilization is closely tied to these gates. That is, we keep extracting more and more information from our experience, encoding it and recording it in books, or storing it in computers, so that every subsequent generation can draw on the experience of the one before it. There's no other animal like us. This is something unique, and this process has its origin in gate 56. What's at stake here is manifestation in the form of understanding expressed in words, or not. What's understood at the mental level can then be put into words. The heading over the lines in the black book reads: stability in and through movement. It's important to understand this about the nature of ideas. Channel 11/56 is the channel of Curiosity. It's the design of the Explorer, the Seeker. Nothing about it says this is a design for finding truth, or a design for finding the absolute. It's a design for someone who explores and searches, and anyone with this channel spends their whole life exploring and searching — exactly that, and nothing else — regardless of what they find. So: stability in and through movement. Once you know that ideas, beliefs, and impulses are transient, you get to the very heart of these gates. Eternal continuity is achieved by linking together brief actions. Ideas exist to be looked at from different angles and then shared. They're born to stimulate other people into action. End. Move on to the next idea. Don't get stuck in the mental process, saying you have an idea as if you're about to invest your money, your soul, or your life in it. Nothing like that. This is the gate of pure stimulation — sharing your story with others through communication, whatever that story happens to be. "You know what happened to me yesterday?" That's gate 56, and you can believe it or not.