Gate 64 — Before Completion — Transition, like birth, requires decisive forces to come to pass

Full breakdown

When we turn to pressure from above, please don't lose sight of that great irony about the nature of the mind that Human Design has revealed. Pressure from below is a motor. Pressure from above isn't. It's pressure, and nothing more. It's a bit like recycling waste for reuse: it moves in a circle and then comes back out, but there's no motor in it. Just pressure. And that means that whatever pressure gets exerted from above on the Ajna center, whatever pressure gets embodied in the Ajna as concepts, it doesn't have the inner force to manifest itself in actions or deeds. It's very important to understand this. The mind — the Ajna center — exists solely in order to study and grasp the nature of being. That's what it's there for. It doesn't have to, and can't, decide what to do. It investigates — in three different ways depending on mental ability — the life experience of people (what does it actually mean to be alive in this world?), and that has nothing to do with action. At a seminar on Rave readings, we talked about how to explain to people the nature of authority in their design. When we turn to authority, we find that the mind is always in a subordinate position relative to true authority, wherever that authority actually sits. Always. If you don't know that inner authority exists, and you're not living out your true nature, then the mind will end up running your life. That can create a great deal of worry and anxiety, and cause real trouble. The nature of inspiration — the nature of the Head center and its pressure — in the collective sense of the word, is to push us to find meaning mentally in the past (an abstract process) and to project into the future (a logical process). So that, as a result of all this effort, we can understand what it means to be human within an unbroken whole, stretched out in time between past and future. And because this process is collective, we're able to share this vision and this inspiration with each other.

The great law of the collective mind is that there's nothing new. Nothing new under the moon. There are only attempts to find meaning in the past and to look into the future from the present moment, which is itself relative. Hexagram 64, Before Completion, is the gate of Confusion. The essence of confusion, as you can understand from the mechanics of the energies, has to do with cyclical mental images. It's the gate of Confusion because a vast number of mental images from the past are piled up together in no particular order, where everything is caught in a ceaseless churn. As for fuel, this is the pressure of mental activity — or not. It can be the busiest and most unpleasant mind there is — or not. When the mind tries to run life, it gets very busy, and as pressure, it's unpleasant. It's in confusion. When the mind isn't trying to rule over life, when it isn't the authority for living, then the pressure just flows through the stream of all these images, without leading to mental stress or discomfort over how life is unfolding, how the world is put together.

When you're living out who you truly are, mental activity doesn't overwhelm you, forcing you to think about what you shouldn't be; there's no way to find meaning in all these things, and mainly because they have nothing to do with you. This gate carries within it everything you've lived through, experienced, and felt in the past — the turbulent stream of all these images keeps flowing back to you.

Over the lines it says that transition, like birth, will require decisive force to come to pass. Jurgen used to mention midwives when talking about 53/42, and I've worked with a lot of midwives who had that channel. Here, in the abstract pressure of the mental plane, a process of birth is happening too. The very concepts point to this. Bringing something to completion requires decisive force. Finding meaning in something is a very difficult process, because there's no logic in it at all. There's only time. The abstract mind is nothing more than time itself. All that time from the past, everything that can be used, so that in the end some kind of meaning can be found. Making sense of it, grasping it — these can wait for their connection with gate 47.