Gate 7 — The Army — The Point of Convergence

Full breakdown

The point of convergence. By design — the need for leadership, in order to guide society and bring it order.

In essence, the Sphinx gates are, in many respects, the most influential ones. They lead into the gates of influence. When we looked at prenatal development in the second grey course, we noted that 31/7 is the first channel to arise during the formation of a human being — so it carries particular importance. Looking at the logical circuit, you can see that the logical system, for all its importance to us, comes with a deep limitation: it's very hard for logic to get access to energy. There's no direct channel in the logical system connecting the Throat to a motor. Connecting the Throat to the G-center or to the Spleen doesn't hook up any motor at all, which is why the output of the logical system is so often committees, discussions, and studies of every kind.

Experimentation is the goal of the logical process. Unlike gate 13, which exists to look backward and gather up — literally accumulate — the experience of the past for humanity's benefit, gate 7 looks out through the car window toward the future. And it says there's a straight road ahead. It looks like the next couple hundred kilometers should be fine. Above the lines it speaks of a point of convergence — the place where humanity's future comes together into a single point. And that point, where different paths converge, matters enormously to us. Humanity needs to be guaranteed reliable, safe patterns. By design — the need for leadership, in order to guide society and bring it order. The single most important thing for humanity to grasp is that this process is hierarchical. We have to deal with the fact that society needs organization and guidance — there are those who lead and those who are led, organizers and the organized. The essence of the logical path is that a pattern is built on a hierarchical structure.

Think about what gate 7 actually does. It sets a pattern, and since the pattern is meant for the future, if it manages to get expressed, it can carry real influence. Take a classic example of what happens in a collective process. At the end of the Second World War, most of Asia was in deep poverty, and after the Americans moved into Europe, they invested in rebuilding Japan's infrastructure. The Japanese started building factories that produced goods for export rather than for the domestic market. As we all know, they pulled it off brilliantly — they became an extraordinarily successful society, earning their living by building enormous infrastructure for mass-producing goods bound for the world market. Thanks to its success, that pattern became highly influential and spread to other Asian societies, so that suddenly we found ourselves in the age of the so-called Asian Tigers. All of them followed the same pattern aimed at prosperity and wellbeing — building and building enterprises in order to sell their goods abroad. Nobody paid attention to the fact that if you follow a pattern like that long enough, you eventually reach a point where the whole place is full of enterprises and nobody's buying what they produce. This year (1997), with Saturn in gate 21 — and before that too, because of its retrograde motion — the world is going through a monstrous financial crisis. The logical system exists to provide us with safe patterns. Unfortunately, if those patterns aren't properly tested and experimented with enough, there's always a chance of running into trouble and plunging a society into chaos, because without a reliable pattern, everything falls apart. The overwhelming majority of the Asian middle class lost at least half their savings in the last three months. Humanity was shocked by a pattern that had seemed to be working correctly but turned into a terrible problem once the experiment with it was pushed to the limit. And a pattern like that can't be brought back to life, because it's a pattern — it's spent.

What's needed at that point is mutation, and right now there's no mutation in the world capable of leading us out of this bind. Once again, a long road has to be walked before its cards are played out. In fact, even though gate 7 exists to provide us with safe patterns for the future, that doesn't mean, as my example shows, that any given pattern is guaranteed to keep working for a long time. But that's precisely the job of the individual roles — they know that time is everything, and the only real test is the test of time. The logical system, meanwhile, is desperate to get hold of energy so it can run its experiments in the world. But if an experiment works, that doesn't mean we should immediately jump on the bandwagon. It has to be tested again and again. That's the nature of the "I" roles at play here. So what kinds of leadership roles are there? People carry six variants.