Gate 27 ⌇ The Gate of Caring

The first line always establishes a foundation. When we were dealing with the sixth line of the 3rd hexagram which is called ‘Surrender,’ the very next hexagram is the 27.1. This line is called ‘Selfishness.’ Think about what caring is all about. The foundation of caring is Selfishness and if you look at this line, it has the Sun exalted and the Earth in detriment. Whenever you see Sun/Earth together in the same line, you know that this line has enormous impact. It is speaking for one of the basic structures that we have. Sun above/ Earth below. (the other lines with Sun exalted /Earth in detriment are: 8.2; 12.6; 14.6; 15.2; 20.3; 23.4; 29.5; 31.1; 38.3; 40.6; 48.4: There is one line Earth exalted/Sun detriment: 9.3) 

Here, the Sun exalted, The ego-driven first law of caring for oneself which is not necessarily at the expense of others. First lines have to know what it is to care. Caring begins at home. It begins with yourself, it begins with your own life. To care for yourself is to enhance the quality of your own life, this is where it begins: Selfishness is not bad. It is the foundation of caring. First you have to care for yourself. The Earth in detriment, Envy and its attendant misfortunes. In the white book, The power to care for oneself first.  You cannot give to anyone unless you have looked after yourself first. One the other side, we have The power of selfishness that is manifested through envy. “I cannot look after myself. I want somebody to look after me. I wish I could look after myself the way they do.”

The other side of this energy. You are always going to have that. We are a binary. Every single step along the genetic path goes into two different directions all the time. There are some of us who recognize intrinsically that we have to care for ourselves first and there are the others in our society who say, "I can’t care for myself. Somebody has to care for me.” This is the preemptive strike. This is weakness and strength. The strong ones can care for themselves and the weak ones cannot.

The first line is aware of its capacity to care because it is looking inwards. When you get to the second line and you get to projection, it projects out that it cares. Now look, the second line, and again when I make certain kinds of statements, they sound very strong and they are not intended to be frightening but the reality is that the second line of the 27 and all of the lines of the 27, but the second line particularly: they can lead to all kinds of disease and all kinds of health problems, all kinds of physical problems. All these things are rooted here in this 27th gate and the nature of  Caring. One of the things that is clear is that when caring is not evident there is all kinds of atrophying that takes place. If you have somebody who is dying and you have nobody who cares for them and there is nobody who imbues that caring in them, there is very little within that will hold on to the life process. Caring itself carries an enormous power with it: The power to enhance the quality of life. 

The second line, though, does not really know whether it has the equipment to care and because of that, it is constantly projecting out the caring. When people first read this line, they think that it is wonderful. The exalted, ‘Self-sufficiency.’ The obvious law that to give, one must have. But the second line does not know that. The first line does. The Moon exalted, The Mother. The great nourisher. These are nourishers who do not know how much they can nourish. Think about what that means: you have a certain amount of resources within you and there is somebody who is tapping into those resources and if you are a second line, you don’t know how far you can go. In other words, you can end up emptying out all your resources until you get found out - like all second lines - and you collapse because you have been depleted, and you are sick. Remember, that the 27 is directly pointing towards our immune system and our health system. This is the nourishment of our immune system and without proper caring, our immune system does not work properly. So in this second line where there is this projection outwards, there is no sense of how much I can give; nor is there in the detriment any sense of how much I can take, because the 27.2 in the detriment is, Weakness that can sap the strength and power of others. These are people who are projecting out their need for caring, and they are constantly pulling in. This is the child that constantly keeps on demanding his mother’s breast, whether that child needs to be fed or not. It is constantly demanding until the mother gets a breast infection and ends up with all kinds of pain, and there is no more milk available for the child. Nature steps in at some point and says, "Wait a minute," but it steps in with the mother being sick. 

The reality is that when you are dealing with the second line of the 27, there is something to be aware of: These people do not have any sense of what the limit is. That is true of all second lines. That is why they end up in those situations of getting caught out. By the way, we live in a time now where we have the great veiling planet of Neptune sitting in the 60th gate, the gate of Limitation. There are all kinds of people who do not know where their limitations are right now. In the same way, they do not know how much resources they do have. They do not know necessarily how far they can go, because the whole business of where the boundaries are suddenly is covered by this veil. This is the way the second line operates here. In this second line, because it is so important: this is caring, this is enhancement, because it is such an important dominant field in the tribe, it leads to all kinds of problems because you have people that are being sucked out and you have people that are just doing all that sucking in. Both of them can become very unhealthy. 

Next thing, now that I have said that, do not take a moralistic judgment, "Oh, boy, they have the 27.2". It is so important to understand that. It is necessary for us to go through all these processes. Each and every one of them have their value. If you are somebody who is getting succor from the nourishing mother, it can be quite wonderful and that caring can be marvelous. It may be hell for the nourishing mother but it can be wonderful for the recipient who says,  "Yes, she died, but she was great. She looked after me. She made my life possible." There is always the other side of all  these things. Don’t bring your judgments in.

When we get to the third line, bonds made and broken, this whole process of trial and error, this line is called ‘Greed.’ When people see that they get upset. Everything about the 27th hexagram is about living a better quality of life. That is what it is about. That is why you have the cliché of parents who say, "I will make the world better for my children than it was for me." They are going to enhance the quality of life. The third line, because it is a trial and error line, because it is all about adaptation, is trying to figure out how you have the right kind of caring so that you can get the right kind of enhancement in your life. Because they are looking for this enhancement they will go through trial and error, they go to what appears to be an obsessive kind of process to try to find the right caring. They are constantly breaking the bonds of the caring because they keep on looking for what will really enhance the quality of their life. Please understand, that life is a very difficult thing. We all know that. Caring enhances the quality of our process and makes it easier for us to live with the ordeal. Every human being needs somebody who is going to care about them and about what happens to them, because it helps bringing about an enhancement of the quality of their life. We are not here alone. This is deeply altruistic, this Channel. It is not about finding enhancement for oneself but to provide that to the tribe, through the law that is on the other side of this, in the 50th gate. 

It says, The obsession with having much more than one needs. Literally, it is not enough that I know about this caring. Is there something that can make my life even better and enhance it even more? That is the other side of this. Pluto exalted, Here, the psychological manifestation. The obsession and dependency on knowing what is hidden. The secret policeman. This is Sigmund Freud’s line. In the white book, The power derived from having more than one needs, whether sexually, mentally or materially. Remember, that it is more in the sense of caring more and having a better quality. It is all about enhancement and in the end, what the first three lines don’t understand is that on the other side there is the law. Caring has to submit to the law, because the law controls the frequency and the law controls the awareness. 

The caring that is coming out of the 27 is just a genetic role. I need to care about all these things. If I don’t, I will not have a better life. I need to. Even to the point that I will go around secretly and find out all of these things. On the other side of this, The lust for power to get more than one needs. By the way, it also has the obvious value of wanting more and more caring, but it is not the same as the second line. The second line wants more and more from the very same person as an example. The third line wants more from you and more from the next one and the one after that one. It is a different process.

If you look at the second, the third and the fourth line, they all have Mars in detriment, and one of the things that is clear to me is that Mars is a great disease initiator. Mars can always initiate illness out of its immature energy. When you look at this third line in the black book, and you look at the Mars in detriment,  Mundane and wholly without redeeming value, greed, a lust that inevitably cripples the addicts. The reality is that in this bond being made and broken and looking for the enhancement in life, there is also within that the reality that you may not find it, and then you become addicted to finding, the kind of caring and the kind of knowledge you need to allow you to care. The kind of thing that will make you feel better. The kind of thing that will allow you to feel good in caring. 

These are people that become addicted in that sense to all kinds of things: to drugs, to certain kinds of situations; and they can be crippled by that, unable to care for themselves, deeply depressive because they cannot find the enhancement in life. They cannot see how they can take their ordinary life and give it a quality that allows them to feel good about what it is to be alive. That is what caring is for. The result is that, - though the third line, unlike the second line, does not lead directly to sickness - the third line in its detriment will lead indirectly to illness. The moment that there is this inability to see that life can be o.k., that there can be this better quality in life, there is this obsession with trying to find out how you can make it better. If you take a look at Freud - I mentioned his name as part of that, he has the exalted fixed - you can see that: to seek out obsessively, to understand everything that was hidden underneath in order to find out how to care. Only when you get to that point where you can find that out, you find it out through trial and error, through adaptation, only at that point can you begin to work with that process. The people who have the detriment do not have a way of finding out what they need to know, and they do not really have a focus for finding out what they need to know. They keep going from one thing to the next, waiting for that moment where they find it. In that, it can lead to all kinds of physical problems in their life.

Just like the 4th line of the 59, when you get to the upper trigram, here you are dealing with channels that are really about our connection with others, about our intimacy in that sense with others, our nourishing of others and yet, in the first three lines there is really an inability to understand what the other is all about. In this case, the other is the 50th hexagram, the establishment of what the values are. It is the establishment of what the law is. When you get to the fourth line, it knows that there is something else at the other end. It knows that there are values over there and that there is awareness over there. It recognizes that what it has to offer is that it has this power of enhancement to offer, caring. It can offer this. This is the line of ‘Generosity.’ The natural sharing of attained abundance. 

Please understand that. It goes back to the first line,  to its resonance that says "First you have to look after yourself, and then you can give." When you get to the fourth line it talks about the sharing of abundance. This is not somebody who can be depleted. This is somebody who can only give once the abundance is there and attained, and then they are ready to share that energy. Jupiter exalted, Magnanimous and qualitative sharing. The gift of rewarding those who are  deserving.   But they are very focused. What these people are focused on is "I have to care." That is their whole trip. Everything else is put aside in that. They have to care and when you get to Mars in detriment, you get to this third example of the impact that Mars can have on us in terms of destabilizing our well-being. Remember, that this is a gate that is opening up to the immune system.  Mars in detriment, Indiscriminate sharing. That is going to bring the wrong people into your life. The wrong people coming into your life can make you sick. 

There are three kinds of illnesses that are rooted here. In the second line that illness is built right in through not recognizing what the barriers are; when you get to the third line, the illness is secondary. It comes from the ordeal of trying to find the right quality of life and stumbling along the way, and when you stumble you can really get hurt and ill. When you come to this fourth line, it is about bringing the wrong people into your life. This brings disease into your life. This line is notorious for sexual transmission. Somebody comes into your life and they give you gonorrhea. This is about bringing the wrong people into your life through indiscriminate sharing. Just because you can care does not mean that you have to care for everyone. This is the martian side. The immaturity in caring. In the white book, The power and strength to share generously  or  The potential loss of sharing through indiscriminate sharing: bringing the wrong people into your life and those people make you sick. Some of you that I am involved with in a long term project which is called ‘The Global Incarnation Index’, and it has to do with our incarnating Crosses that we come in on. The 27th hexagram is part of a Cross that is called the Cross of the Unexpected, and the 27.4 is one of the great classic lines of the unexpected. Many years ago, Martin made some charts for me of the discovery of Pluto, Uranus and Neptune. In all those cases, the Nodes were in 27.4 and 28.4. When the comet ‘Shoemaker Levy’ banged into Jupiter, the Nodes were in 27.4/28.4. 

If you look at charts of people who carry this energy, they are always capable of releasing the unexpected, which is both positive and wonderful and horribly frightening in this line. You can get the unexpected gonorrhea, you can also get the unexpected caring. All of a sudden, there is somebody there who really cares and is offering you that caring. "I did not know that you cared, really?" It is suddenly, out of nowhere. The unexpected is always part of this process.

When you start with the first line, it tells you about the essence. We saw that the essence is about looking after oneself, and when you get to the fifth line you get to the way the world projects on that. The world projects on the 27 as the Executor. Someone who is carrying the 27.5, they have someone on the other side saying, "They care. I know that they care." This projection is going onto them. They may, or they may not. In the same way that you can project on the 59.5 that that is somebody that you can love but you don’t know whether they are going to love you back. Here is somebody that you project on that they really care, but you don’t know if they really do. You don’t know, because it is a projection. 

‘The Executor.’ The ability to distribute effectively the resources of others. This is what caring is about for the mythology of our planet. Caring is about somebody who takes the responsibility to make sure that others are nurtured properly. That is what caring is supposed to be all about. Jupiter exalted, Either the gifted and principled agent of distribution or the good sense and ability to find one. “Yes, I know that you think that I really care but that is not something I can care about, but I’ll send you to somebody who will care about that.” The doctor who is an eye specialist and sends you to a nose specialist saying, "That is not my field, but they care for you over there." On the other side, Saturn in detriment. A restrictive nature that hampers distribution or the seeking of advice and assistance. And again, this is the concept of the paper tiger. This is somebody who is projected on that they can really care, but they themselves know that they don’t. That does not come out. 

In the white book, The power and strength to care for the resources of others  or Weakness and the risk of loss of power restrict caring. They will lose their power if it is shown that they cannot really care, if they cannot really be the executor. One of the things you see, just like the love of the Casanova gigolo has become themes in literature, so is the executor who doesn’t care about you and puts the money in their pocket. We have all kinds of stories running around about, "yes, I trusted this person to look after my interests. They look after their own interests and then they go to jail because the law catches up with them, telling them, "You were supposed to look after that person’s money and you put it all in your own pocket,” and they lose their power in the end.

I remember this great story in New York City about a day care center. There was this day care center which was supposed to look after children and the people who were running this center were starving the children so that they could make money from the food. They were starving the children. Typical of the 5. You project on them  “Aha, they really care." It is called ‘being taken for a ride.’ The 59.5 and 27.5 are really capable of taking you for a ride because you are projecting on them and you don’t get to see what is really there. By the way, in putting it this way, also understand that the fact is that they are the universalizing agents. They may in fact be great executors. But like everything having to do with anything, you can’t go in blindly. It is not just a projection field that you can accept and believe.

When we come to the sixth line and we come to ‘Wariness.’ Again, this is a transition line. It is the end of the process. This line says, A protection against an abuse of generosity. The Moon exalted, A practical and realistic approach to nurturing, whose appropriateness is guided by feelings and instinct.  Pluto in detriment, A tendency to be overly suspicious. Whenever you are looking at the 27.6, there is only one thing that can really stand out there, which is that the whole thing about this process is: Can you trust, or not? It is all about trust. It is all about seeing whether caring is of any value, if it is really having its proper effect. It is going to work properly. It is going to enhance the quality of life. The 27th hexagram goes to the 50th hexagram, which carries all of the basic frequencies of awareness that occupies our whole process. In other words, coming out of that is a basic fundamental question which is, “Can I trust anything in this life process? Can I trust caring? Can I trust the law? Can I trust awareness? Can I trust what I am taking in?” 

In the white book it says, The power and strength to be realistic in one’s capacities to care and nurture.  That realism can be very intense. It can be so intense that it is saying "Aha, alright, I am looking at that, but if I care for you, what will that do to the quality of life for all of this?" So often people with the 27.6, the only thing that they can care about are very broad, almost idealistic  things, where they see that there is really something worthwhile in caring about that. You cannot go to these people and say “We have all these starving babies in Africa, could you give me ten bucks." If you try to get 10 dollars from the 27.6, that is not so easy. "Well, yes. I know. But if I give you this money, out of that 10 dollars, 7 will go to administration, 2 dollars go to taxes and 3 cents will go to the baby that is dying in Gabon.  No, thank you. I don’t do that. I don’t trust you and I don’t trust that this caring will manifest in the world. I don’t think that it is of any value." This is the whole thing about the sixth line. It is looking for the awareness to confirm for it, to establish in law that if we do care, it is going to be productive. It is like all of these agencies over the last few years that are involved in humanitarian causes. The first thing they realized is that by the time that they get to their stuff on the ground somewhere, there are people stealing it. There are people making money from it. There is all kinds of stuff going on. The sixth line, looking at the law on the other side, says "o.k., when I can care and I know that my caring is actually going to enhance the quality of life, then I’ll care. If you say to me that I can give that ten dollars directly to that child, I will do that. But I will not give it 3 cents so that you can make your living of it, and I don’t trust you. You do not really care. You only care for yourself." The sixth line is always going beyond and it sets a standard here, because this is the energy for the basic process of our awareness. It says "Is there anything to trust?" and only in the moment that you begin to recognize that there are things that you can trust, can you begin to care. 

I know this so intimately in my work. I deal with people who do not know themselves, and I bring them, in the nature of our work, in the nature of doing an analysis, I bring them to what is reliable in them, what is consistent, what is in that sense  trustworthy. The moment that they can see what is reliable and trustworthy, they can begin to care for themselves again, because the disease of the world is self-hatred and self-suspicion. There is sickness in all the lines of the 27. The deepest sickness here, in the 27.6, is the thing that says "I don’t trust anything and because of that I can’t really care about anything." I lived my life with the 20.6 which is the line of ‘Wisdom.’ I never trusted any of my knowing. Knowing was never enough for me. I was very smart. I knew a lot of things but I did not trust any of it, because I knew that if I can say this, I can also say that. There was nothing to trust. When I went through my mystical experience and I was given an absolute in the sense of the Maia and I could see that this absolute was consistent, it gave me something to really care about. If gave me something to care about that I’d never cared about in my life. You, people, other human beings. That they can be informed. I was never interested in doing that other than from the moment that I could see, that it was worth caring about.

 All sixth lines are like that. I am very lucky. I get to do that in my lifetime - to live out the value of the sixth line. Not everybody gets to that point. And it is very important to understand that. The moment that you get to a sixth line, no matter where it is, this question comes up "Shall I really commit myself? Is it really worthwhile? Can I trust this process? Will it take me where I want to go?" This is always the case. So whenever you see sixth lines, do not jump to any conclusion about that line coming out. It may never come out, until there is really something that one can trust in worth caring about as a value.