When you live by someone else’s answers, every question that emerges becomes a source of anxiety and nervousness.
Every quarter starts with a gate that belongs to the cross of the Sphinx, which provides it with its fundamental direction in life. Like the other three quarters, the Quarter of Initiation is divided in two halves by one of the 4 gates that make up the cross of the Vessel of Love. As is suggested by the monopole functions of these particular two crosses, the holistic approach or purpose in each quarter is consequently processed very differently in the first 8 gates of the quarter - which are driven to filter in accordance to the holistic purpose of the Sphinx gate at the beginning of each quarter - than it is in the second group of 8 gates, which compose the second half of the quarter, where the sense of purpose is driven by a holistic frequency that is entirely different through the added magnetism of Love.
It is a well-known fact that the third line of each hexagram stands for the way in which the nature of the hexagram is going to ‘materialize’ in real time and experience. If you take a look at the two lower trigrams that rule over each of the two halves of this quarter, and focus on the difference in their third lines, you immediately get to see how many things are associated with the YANG and YIN qualities of our mental approach to life as a whole. Considering that the YANG stands for the Spirit and the YIN stands for the Form, if you follow the logic of things, it is easily deductible that the first half of this quarter stands for the relationship that human mind has always had to the world of ‘Spirit’ (Mutation, the precedent quarter), and that the second half reveals the relationship that mind has always had to the world of ‘Form’ (‘Civilization’, the following quarter).
Given that the direction that imbues the human mind with its purpose in this quarter is rooted in gate 13 - ‘Fellowship of Men’, the gate of the ‘Listener’ - which is the pathway of delivery for the ideas and beliefs of the past, we can assume that most of the resistance in emotional beings to let themselves flow along with convention is rooted in the fact that their personal emotional experience never seems to match the expectations created by those dogmas inherited from the past, as there is no fixed morality that can ever be attached to a human being’s emotionality. Such is the purity of the power of the emotional wave as an engine for the development of human consciousness and/or awareness.
Under these mental premises the questions emerge naturally and unavoidably, and the pressure of these initial doubts tends to bite deeper into the ‘inner flesh’ as our personal experience only confirms the absolute lack of certainty of any kind that we have in our own Spirit. You can see, by the number of activations, that the dominant center in the first half of the quarter is the always unstable and profoundly volatile Solar Plexus, which in its attempt to process the emotional wave and find clarity can only raise the existential doubts (gate 63) realized in the absence of Truth ‘in the now’.
It goes from telling us how and what we are supposed to see and what the things are that we ‘have to’ be certain about - no less - the ‘future’ (17), what we are supposed to eat, to wear and the things we need to have under control (21), what we are supposed to compete and fight for when challenged if we want to be respected (51), the way we are supposed to grow and mature (42), the difficulties and limitations we are supposed to overcome (3), the things we are supposed to care about and how (27), and the truths that we should identify ourselves fully with in order to define ‘who we think we are’ (24). If you look at the basic anatomy of this set of 8 gates in the body graph, it is obvious that the drives and concerns of this second portion of the human mind are of a very different nature, and so is the nature of the purpose that can potentially be fulfilled through each of them when operating correctly in the individual design.
But combining them in the most simple terms of the centers that are involved, it shows us clearly that this half of the Quarter of Initiation is dedicated to use the rational mind (Ajna) to compete over power and energy resources (Sacral), and also over the basic but fundamental strategic intelligence to control them. Pooh, let me take a breath here. Where did all the questions go? Who has time to think here? At least, it’s all rational, right?
Yes, it is… but the logic is deceptive. Logic is the way of life, but feeling is what defines and determines the ‘human way’, and therefore reasons could never be enough. You see, if you look at the only three gates of this quarter that are actually located in the mental centers (Head and Ajna), the setup for homogenized thinking is clearly set. The emotional nervousness and impatience (mental pressure) of the captivated spirit can be concretized into nothing more than a seemingly reasonable question (63 - Doubt) that can never be satisfied with any conclusive answer about anything because it never asks about ‘what is’, but always asks about ‘what could be’.
What ‘could be’ and ‘what is’ are always as far from each other as now is from tomorrow, so we had to develop the material capacity to codify ‘time’ before we could re-create virtual reality. Mind is indeed a measuring instrument to define our individual relationship to the environment, but how could we ever do that without all those reference points in the past that we call conditionings? And what are we if we never get to differentiate ourselves from them?
The righteous mental anxiety about ‘right and wrong’ answers that can be found in the pretended conceptual certainty displayed by gates 17 and 24 is due to its assumed responsibility over the application of theories to the five other gates (colored in red) that stand between the two of them in the Rave Mandala. Please, do take a look at the graphic above and do not miss out on the details of this, for they are shockingly awakening. Gate 17 pretends to be of service to humanity when it tries to answer the question(s) of the 63 about ‘what could be’ by turning it into a subjectively distorted and prejudiced opinion about ‘what should be’.
All in all, we could resume the whole purpose of being part of a mental species as a process in which we helplessly learn to be observers of our own experience, constantly measuring and reflecting on the many ways in which waves become particles overtime… since as I once wrote to Ra: “It is all a Monopole game”.
The funniest of all of this is that while the not-self mind has always been doing this since the beginning of time, the potential for a self-realized truth that empowers unique and differentiated awareness has always been there, just taking one step back (24 – Return) and shift your attention from whatever your mental focus is on ‘what should be’ to the material (YIN) reality that sustains its evident truths right in front of your own eyes. Evidence is far better than any answer when it comes to truth. You see, we can never know what is true for someone else.
The only possibility for mind to ever occupy its rightful place as a communication tool in our lives starts with the premise of knowing what your own individual question is that matters. Do you have any idea about what this says in regard to the importance of your type’s mental dilemma? By the way, Ra’s answer to my monopole message was: “Yes, Alok, yes”.
Alokanand Diaz, a 1/3 Emotional Manifestor, was one of Ra Uru Hu’s first students and has dedicated over 20 years to Human Design.
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