Gate 61 — Inner Truth — Awareness of the fundamental universal principles

Full breakdown

As you may have noticed, in the collective mind the abstract and the logical streams are deeply interconnected — they need each other in order to realize themselves. It's Yin and Yang, if you like, the basic duality embodied in a kind of Tao. The collective process is grounded in what already exists, in what's already caught up, already drawn into the movement of life. In other words, as long as we're alive and moving through space, we're interacting with what surrounds us in that movement. The person with an abstract mind, with abstract definitions, interacting with what's around them in the relative present, reflects on it as a phenomenon of the past. The person of logic, taking part in that same movement and taking in information, projects it forward onto future paths. They're doing the same thing, really — relating themselves to what they're passing through and experiencing. But if you turn to individuality in gate 61, if you arrive at Inner Truth, there's nothing like that there. This mental process isn't visual. It's acoustic, like everything connected to individuality. The inspiration gate 61 brings isn't visions and images passing through the mind, but a static inner noise that creates mental busyness.

When engaging with individual knowing at the mental level, it's important to understand what its laws are for the Knower. A person of Knowing has to know what's available to be known and what's valuable; they have to know what knowledge is optional — to make it through this life, literally to make ends meet, you don't need to know how a jet engine works — and a person of Knowing also has to know what's unknowable. The unknowable should be left alone. If you don't know that there are things beyond knowing, and you can't let go of fruitless attempts to know the unknowable, you'll drive yourself crazy. Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, is a remarkable image. It's a bit like a yang sandwich with a yin filling — meaning inner truth is a deep penetration inward through yang propaganda, in order to reach the yin essence underneath. This is the gate of Mystery. It's the gate of a personal story — in English there's a play on words here: mystery, and my story. It's individual knowledge, and it represents a spontaneous mutation. That's why it has no grounding in either the past or the future. It isn't a pattern. It isn't a sequence. It's a spontaneous and mysterious personal story — a spontaneous mystery of my story.

This is mysterious knowledge, and its fuel is the pressure of the unknown, or the unknowable. That's what drives gate 61. These gates have to know for themselves. They have to Know, the same way gate 28 needs to know that life has meaning, or gate 55 needs to be deeply steeped in the knowledge that life is spiritual. Gate 61 is the inspiration for the entire mental plane of knowing, but all it really wants is one thing: silence in the mind, quiet. No voices, no dialogues, nothing. Maybe music. The mechanics of this energy is a struggle for silence. Please understand that silence, in this case, means that you know what you need to know. Whenever I'm talking with someone who has gate 61, I always bring up the Delphic oracle, who said:

"Know thyself." Knowing yourself is the only thing truly worth knowing. Everything else is secondary. If you know yourself, then you yourself are the unknowable, and there's no need to go chasing after the unknowable elsewhere. When you truly know yourself, you come to know the mystery of life, because then you're living out the great mystery you were made for. Because you're built in such a way that you're meant to live out your mystery, and your story.

What gate 61 wants to find out: What is my story? Who am I? How is the world put together? How does everything work? What does it all mean? To grasp the inner truth. Over the lines in the black book it speaks of awareness of the fundamental universal principles. Knowing what the universal principles actually are doesn't mean inventing those principles, doesn't mean believing they were established at some point in the past, and believing that people back then knew something we don't know now. Nor does it mean imagining that these principles will become known at some point in the future. You see, the most remarkable thing about human beings is that the collective, just like the tribe, is always at the mercy of mutation. It's mutation that makes all of this interesting. Only mutation breaks the old abstract cycles — literally, breaks us out of the old cycles. Mutation breaks patterns, and mutation brings new understanding, a new vision of the world, new knowledge, new wonders. And this keeps happening, all the time.