Gate 6 — Conflict — The Gate of Friction

Full breakdown

The fundamental component of the design of progress. The law: growth cannot happen without friction.

Gate 6 sits in the Channel of Mating, a design centered on reproduction. This is Conflict — the gate of Friction. Its energy is the intimate wave of hope and pain. Its potential is awareness about whether or not to enter into a bond — call it, if you like, the emotional wave. The Channel of Intimacy. Understand how the wave actually works: it doesn't carry you from one side of the line to the other. Don't confuse this. The emotional wave doesn't take you from exaltation down into detriment and back up again. Those particular energies come to you from other people whose planets sit in a position that fixes one side of the line or the other, or they arrive through transits — the same way any other process shows up in a chart. What matters to understand about the wave of hope and pain — and I'll illustrate this as we go through the lines — is that it operates within every manifestation of the line. It doesn't matter whether we call it detriment or exaltation; both carry the aspect of hope and pain within them. Exaltation has its own wave of hope and pain, and detriment has its own. But the wave itself doesn't travel between detriment and exaltation — don't confuse the two things.

In our biology, gate 6 is the gate of the acid-alkaline balance (pH), which sets up barriers. The subtitle of the 6th hexagram in the I Ching reads: the fundamental component of the design of progress. The law: growth cannot happen without friction. Remember that the other side, gate 50, is tribal law. Gate 6 represents biological law. Life and reproduction cannot exist without friction — without this gate. There's a great deal packed in here. Gate 6 is where the motor sits. It generates six different waves. Don't overlook the mystical mystery built into the nature of this gate, because the law of growth rests on its wave. We would never have found ourselves in the evolutionary field at all if we didn't live on an emotional wave. It's the emotional wave that makes the collective field fruitful and fertile — and that quality isn't limited to reproducing children. The emotional field is fertile, but it can also be sterile. That's its other side.

The reality is that growth cannot happen without gate 6 — that's the law. Growth can't proceed without the motor. That's why, when someone carrying gate 6 enters your life, they dominate your frequency — this gate carries the force of a motor that drives growth. And by the way, if you're not in resonance with that force, the opposite can happen. In other words, a process of decline can set in, which shows up as friction and conflict at the everyday level. It matters a great deal to understand that this gate carries enormous power. It's the gate of fusion, of alloy, of synthesis. Feelings, moods, and sensitivity blend and fuse together here — three streams that pass through the Solar Plexus.

In a sense, it's out of gate 6, through the work of its motor, that these three streams flow. They're born here; they grow out of the law of gate 6. This is the source of our feelings and our moods. The key is that every line of gate 6 that I'll walk you through resonates with the wave and, in that sense, is the ultimate expression of one aspect of it. I like to think of them as six different gears in a gearbox, each one expressed through the language of one of gate 6's lines.