Gate 29 ⌇ The Gate of Perseverance

The first line says ‘The Draftee.’ The foundation of this hexagram is The ability to adapt to struggle when necessary but not as a permanent state. In other words, make your commitment but don’t make that commitment for life, make your commitment to the experience, just to the experience. It is the experience that gives us the ultimate growth and value in the process. That is why when people are really down, if they find something that they really like to do, that they can commit themselves to, suddenly they begin to blossom. But without that, without being drafted into the experience they simply continue to go through their process saying, "Can I really continue to say yes to this commitment to life?"   Mars exalted, The innate nature to apply energy in times of war and peace. Bless young Mars. Mars says, "Yes, I don’t care how difficult it is. I have the energy and the power and I will do it." That is Mars at its best. "I am here to be alive. I am here to grow up" says the child Mars. "Give me a chance to grow up." 

The whole thing about the 29 is to understand that the experiential way, like any way, takes time. Everything takes time. To be well in this life, to be at peace in this life, to come to grips with what it is to be you in this life, it all takes time. That is what I tell people when they come to Design. You have to work with this awareness and knowledge for seven years before it really is going to be a part of you. Just so it can get down to the cells. Just so that you can continue that process. 

Neptune in detriment. The great mask of Neptune is dropping in here. A deep impressionability whose mark from times of struggle may make a return to normal conditions extremely difficult. When you have a child that has the 29.1, it will either go one way or the other. They are either going to have this wonderful depth of energy to say, "Yes, it is difficult. But life is life. Yes, the experience is hard but I go through it." And the other side in which the experience comes and they are shattered in it. In that moment of shattering in the experience, it becomes more and more difficult for them to commit themselves again to a new experience. The child falls into a pool, unable to swim, and it is a 29.1 - the deep within the deep. - If the child pulls itself up and it can, that child is always going to be able to fall into a pool of water. But the child that has to be grabbed by somebody else and dragged out of that pool, gasping, it is going to take a lifetime for that Being to go back into the water. 

This is the nature of commitment. Commitment is not just about saying yes. It is about recognizing that whatever you say yes to is going to present all those difficulties, and the moment you get stuck on the difficulties that is the moment that you loose this magical martian love and lust for life. That is the beauty that can lie here. But this is also the pain that can be on the other side. In the white book, The power to persevere when necessary but not generally, and the detriment, Hesitation in making commitments based on past experience. "No, I don’t want to try that. I can’t do that.  “Come on, you can.  "No."

The first line has the capacity for introspection and recognizes that it can say yes and make a commitment. We have seen that this commitment can lead to a continuing process of growth - after all, this is the Channel of Discovery, a Channel of succeeding where other people fail, or failing where other people succeed. This is one of those things to keep in mind about the nature of that commitment. When you come to the second line and you are coming to the projection, these people are projecting out that they are always ready to say yes. "Come and ask me. I am ready to say yes."  Persistence tempered by caution. The caution is that we are dealing with the lack of introspection because it is projection, so, though the capacity to project out that they are ready to be persistent and that they have the power to be persistent, they do not really know whether that power is there. The caution is not a mental caution. It is not an awareness caution that says, "Aha, I have to be careful about where I put my energy." This is just power. 

The thing to recognize about that is the Sun exalted, The power of sustainment as a guiding light. In the white book, Saying yes and the power to persevere.  This power is really there. These people project out that they are ready to persevere but they don’t know whether they can, or not. It may not work for them. They may be found out, they may not have the necessary resources to persist in that particular experience, whatever it may be. Venus in detriment, A tendency to over-cautiousness when persistence is perceived as adding to rather than ending disharmony. Here comes Venus again, stepping in with this additional interactive social quality and making the process more difficult by being there. Somebody who has the 29.2, and someone comes up to them and says, "Do you want to try roller blading?" and they say “yes.” They are always ready to say yes. They will always project out their yes and then somebody who is close to them says, "yeah, but that costs a lot of money and people get broken legs and it does not really work and I do not really want you to do that around here." If that is somebody who is important for them that they want to have as their friend, or somebody with whom they want to have a harmonious relationship with, they are likely to be much more cautious and restrained in that. In other words, they get found out because they discover in the moment that somebody makes a comment about it that they do not really know if they have the resources. They can suddenly become cautious about that. 

One of the things to recognize about all of the lines of the 29 is that there is always built into it this holding back from making the commitment but usually it is the product of having had a difficult experience in life that does it, rather than commonsense or rather than awareness that says "Yes, I have to be careful about how I use my energy and what I commit it to." The caution in people who say yes comes from people who got burnt.  Water does not like fire. These people can always get burnt from the experience. They can always suffer from the experience and say, "I can’t do that anymore. I can’t take those kind of chances anymore. I can’t commit myself to those kinds of things anymore." They become more cautious but not because they are aware. The difficulty of the experience is something that becomes a burden for them because they don’t know whether they have the resources for it.

When you come to ‘Evaluation,’ the third line. In this context, properly assessed inaction. By the way, properly assessed inaction does not mean that that is how they start their life. They have to learn that from experience. They are going to be less likely to jump in and say yes but nonetheless, they will. They have to learn from experience so that that genetic attribute of them can be triggered properly. Despite the urge and cost of inaction, the knowledge that it is sometimes better to fight another day. You have to learn that sometimes it is better to fight another day, but not necessarily. These people will make their mistakes. They have to go through that process. It is,  The power to wait. You see Mars there. You have to wait until Mars is about 40 years old. Mars has to grow up in order to wait. I am an Arian, I know that. 

On the other side of this in the black book is Jupiter in detriment, A preference for withdrawal in principle with little regard for effect. When the mistakes have really been heavy, there is this "Wait a minute now. Shall I do this?" For so long I taught you to really just see this mechanism of saying yes, because that is how it operates at the mundane level. At the mundane level, people will always go through this process because the fact is that you have to go through that process if you have this gate but you will always meet the difficulties of life and in meeting them, there are only two ways to go: this is the deep within the deep. What is at the other end? The other end is the love of the Body. The 46th gate. The magic of this Channel - 46/29 - is to discover the magic of what it is to be in form. What it is to be in a body in this life and what it means for this body to move through this life. This Channel can be deeply profound because of that. Because this is the love of being alive in the body and that is what all this commitment is about - to be committed to the life process; but you don’t know because on the other end the 46, Pushing Upward, is in the kingdom of heaven. The old I Ging. You have to come from ‘the deep within the deep,’ and you have to go through all this stuff until you finally get up to the kingdom of heaven and you discover, "Wow. This machine is really great." Not everybody gets to that place, and it is not because of this line or anything else. 

It is about the nature of what it is to be human, and to be unaware. If you are human and unaware, you do not like yourself and you dislike the wrong person because it is not you that you do not like, but your conditioning and what you have become. You do not get a chance to see the magnificence of that. Everybody who stands in front of a mirror has a complaint about the nature of their form. We do not accept the magnificence of what that is. We complain about it. We would like to get out of it. I have so many people who come up to me and say,  "I astro-project. I live here in my body in this life." This is the magic of the 29th gate. Until you can accept the beauty of what it is to be in form, there is no experience in life that is worth having because otherwise it is just pain and difficulty and a struggle. It is the work of life, this tough, heavy world. We are lucky people. We are privileged to live in a society where there is wealth and relative freedom. The world is filled with horrors. Yet at the same time, we still have this "Well, I need to fix this. I have to make this or that better. I don’t like what I see." This is loving what it is to be in these bodies. They are beautiful. This is where we belong. This is what the 29 has to come to recognize. "Aha, it is supposed to be like this." This is the glory of what it is to be human. 

Jupiter in detriment in the white book, The inability to make commitments. The power of caution. That power of caution means that these are people that are not ready to commit themselves to experience, and because of that they can become very weak. Their bodies can become weak. On the mundane level their bodies do not get the necessary exercise, the necessary process of getting involved in the experience, to do the things to keep it going. It all comes down to this whole business about: Can we accept that these are our vehicles and that they are perfect. Everybody gets exactly the model that belongs to them. So much of that deep philosophy is what is rooted here in the 29th hexagram That is why it is both the commitment to life and the commitment to death. "I don’t like this model. I will not fix it. I just let it die. I will let it fall apart." That is the other side of the 29. "I don’t love this body." This gate is not aware. It is just energy.

The discovery of ‘Succeeding where others fail.’ Everybody thinks that is about what they do, but it is about how you live in the experience of yourself. It is about the acceptance of form, and this is the only mystical possibility for abstract people. The only mystical potential for anyone who is abstract is here in this Channel. It is the acceptance that one is in the right place at the right time, and that begins with your body.

When you come to the fourth line, you come to the upper trigram and you have the recognition now that heaven is there. The first to the third line do not know that. All they know is the ‘deep within the deep,’ the pressure of all that water and the weight of what it is to live in the world – alas, carrying the world around. In the first three lines you meet the most serious people in the world. 29.1,2 and 3 can be so damned serious that it is frightening. There is no laughter in all of that. There is the deep recognition that this body has to deal with all kinds of difficulties in moving through the world, and it ain’t necessarily a nice trip. When you get to the fourth line it is like "Oh, there is a sky above." The ability to look across the Channel is quite different. It says ‘Directness.’ The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. “That is where I am going. Straight up. I am getting out of this water. I am getting out of this way. I am going to triumph in this process.” 

Saturn exalted, The wisdom to use the simplest and most direct approach to solve difficulties.  "Ah, now we have the theme of difficulties which is at the top of the lines. Now, for the first time we have a confrontation with the difficulties. Here is the ability to be fixed in your persistence and go right through the difficulties. You go through the difficulties with Saturn which means that you have to be disciplined. There has to be a great deal of restraint within you to be able to go through those difficulties but it is there as a potential. On the other side of the directness, the Mercurial side, Simplicity and directness all too often seen as inharmonic and aesthetically crude.  In the white book, The power to commit oneself to the simplest and most direct process. This is a wonderful energy, very fixed. “I have to persist. I said yes and I will go through it. I will get to the place that is on the other side.” 

The detriment is, The power of directness often offends others. “Get out of my way. I am going this way. This is my experience and I am fixed on it. I am not fixed on your experience. I don’t want to share it with you. Don’t take me away from my process now. I will go through my experience.” Collective people who do not share are always considered rude. This is just one of the jokes of being a collective person because you are expected to share.

The first line tells you the essence, that struggle is there for us step by step along the way and we are here to deal with each struggle and go through the difficulties of it, in order to achieve our success in this life. When you get to the fifth line, how it is projected upon by the world. The world sees this 29th gate as simply being about overreach or overambition. This is how the world sees the energy to say yes all the time. The ‘Overreach’ is The tendency to bite off more than one can chew. It is projected onto these beings that they have the capacity not only to be persistent but in their activity, in what they do experientially, to universalize the process. In other words, they can be very valuable contributors to that and because they have that capacity inside of them to universalize the value of an experience, the projection on them that they have this capacity brings them into making all kinds of commitments that are not necessarily of value for them. Biting off more than one can chew. Here we have a Sun/Earth axis in a line. 

Sun exalted, where The drive is in the design and not ambition-driven. So there is this genuine power of saying yes, The uncontrollable drive to say yes. It is a deep power inside to say yes, to commit oneself, but the Earth in detriment, Failed ambition or, in terms of the white book, Saying yes, overextending one’s resources and failing to persevere. That can be devastating. Failing to persevere at its highest level is failing to persevere in life, in this ordeal of coming to accept the perfection of what one is, the beauty of one’s form, the process that one is going through. It is not just about saying yes to many things and having the obvious mundane failures come. So many people with the 29.5 say yes to this and that, and at some point they cannot provide the resources for all of that. They can’t. They begin to break promises. They begin to disappoint people because what they said they would commit their energy to, they can’t commit their energy to anymore. 

When you turn that over and you get to the other side, the failed ambition on the other side, this can have the same kind of devastating impact as the experience of falling into the water and having to be saved and having to go through the trauma of that experience. This fifth line, in that sense, raises to another level what it means to make a commitment to this life in this form. Every time that I deal with abstract people, I always try to remind them that this is what their life is about. They are our teachers about the path of experience in life and they are designed for experience in life. And they do not have to chase after everything simply because it is projected on them. The 3.5 spoke of ‘Victimization.’ The people with the 29.5 can be victimized for their capacity to provide resources. Victimized by a projecting public that says, "This is the one." The young worker that goes into an office and they carry the 29.5, everybody in that office is burdening them with something. "You do the paper work over here. By the way, I have a job for you over here." The manager behind is saying, “This one has the energy to do anything," and everybody is coming and giving them something to work on, and the 29.5 says yes until they collapse, because it is projected on them and they can become a victim of their own power. 

Again, part of that is: if you do not love your form, you are ready to say yes to anything in order to find it, to see what it is. So much about what it is to fail in life is that the deepest failure is to not love what it is to be you. There is nothing else. In my work, this is the great disease that I see in the world - deep self-hatred. I am a mechanic and as such I provide information and I know damn well, that even though I am providing information that is amoralistic, that really tells you  the truth about what it is to be in these forms. That you are still there thinking, “yeah, yeah, maybe I can change this. Maybe I can work on this. Maybe I can fix this. Maybe I can be better at this.” You have to accept what it is that you are, and not what you think that you can become. There is no becoming. There is what you are. The real failed ambition here is not accepting your form. The moment you accept what you are, you know your own limitations. You know what is there to say yes to and what is there not to say yes to. Then this power of universalization becomes something very beautiful. By the way, biting off more than you can chew, you can talk to Adam and Eve about that. That is the line of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. This is what the garden is all about. If you want to look for the deepest spirituality about the descent of man into this quality of life, you look at this fifth line which is called ‘Overreach.’ “Yes, give me that apple. Yes, let me take a bite from the tree of knowledge.” But it is not enough, because if you only have a bite you don’t know and if you don’t know truly what it is to be you, you are going to be tormented. Your life will fail inside. The spirit inside. 

I know so many 29.5 people who have suffered so deeply in their lives by being abused by others because they have this enormous quality to commit themselves to them. They are deeply beneficial human beings to guide us into experience. I have a deep connection to fifth lines, through resonance, I really understand the pressure that they are under. As long as they do not accept the nature of what it is to be them, they cannot universalize the wonder of what it is to be in form. As an individual, I can only give you that as an example of the vibration that I put out to you about what it is for me to be inside my body. But I am not an universalizer of that mystical principle because the universalizer of that is the 29.5. They can universalize the magnificence of what it is to be in this form. Instead of being the victims from other people taking this energy away from them.

The sixth line is all about transition. The transition here is that the whole concept of commitment becomes something totally different. If you are looking at the circuit and if you are trying to see what the whole circuitry is - the nature of the circuitry finishes after this channel. You get to the 13/33, to the channel of the Witness, and you get to the essence to what the abstract process is about. It is about the nature of reflecting on the experience that you have been through so that that experience, after you have reflected about it, can then be added to the human library of what experience is. When you get to the sixth line, because of the nature of sixth lines it is saying "Will this experience actually be valuable in the library? Will anybody know about it? Do I really want to know about this? Is it really worthwhile?" All of these standard sixth line perspectives. 

The line is called ‘Confusion.’ The state that exists when momentum outstrips awareness. Because the whole circuit is available, there is the sense of "I am an energy" for the 29th gate. "I don’t know what is going on. I have all this energy to say yes. I have all this energy to go through this process but I really don’t know what is going on. I am confused about what all this is for." These are the people that will always say to you "Why do we have to live this kind of life? Why is being a human is like this? Why do we have to go through these things? Why must we have this kind of experience in order to live out the human process?" There is this great big question that is there. Why? Mars exalted, Driving blind and given Mars’ energy and determination, often blind luck. Jupiter in detriment, A tendency in confusion to withdraw rather than accept the condition and continue to persevere. These are people that can really step out. They can step out to the point that they can literally give up life. These are the kind of people that start dying just before they really die. It does not matter whether they die by an accident or they get sick, but you know before the time of death they are already dying and you can feel the essence of that. These are people that can withdraw in the deepest sense of the word. After all, sixth lines are about the mutative process because it is a transitionary process. Mutation can be positive and negative. You can get to the most negative level of the sixth line, like ‘Blaze of glory’ in 28.6, and you go burning yourself out into a flaming end. Please understand, it has everything to do with the nature of somebody’s individual design and not just the fact that this line may appear in their chart. If you have somebody who, in their design, has other compensations for that possibility, there are ways in which they can go through that and they will be alright. But it is so important to understand that that is there in this level of confusion. 

The power to persevere that makes no sense. It does not seem to make any sense unless I can see what its value is going to be, though not to me. This is the ultimate impersonal line. My experience has to be of value, not for me, it has to be of value for everyone else. These are the kind of people that do not want to do anything unless they can tell you about it afterwards. These are people that go on a vacation and they take 8.000 photographs and you have to go through the whole thing - now they have videos. They tell you, "This was my experience. Isn’t it great. This is for you. I want to share this with you." Unless it really appears to be of value, then comes the hesitancy of all sixth lines. 

The power in confusion to caution rather than saying yes.  When you see that, please remember that that yes can go to many different levels, ultimately to the point of saying - or not saying - yes to life. It is always there. One of the things that I know but do not teach is the nature of how the 29th gate controls death in our lives. It is so important to recognize that if you have people in your life you are working with, or children in your life who carry this 29th energy, that one of the most important things for them to understand it that life is a bitch. It is o.k. What to do? It will be difficult. The moment that they really know that, they do not have any false expectations about the heaven at the other end. As long as they understand. These are human beings, these are children that have to be clearly told,  "Life can be hard. You will find that out. But it is o.k. You stay with it. You will grow. You will mature. You will get to the other end. By the way, you are perfectly equipped for it."  

People who are abstract in their design are equipped for the abstract plane. The thing for them to recognize is that everything that is abstract brings crisis, change and instability and all kinds of problems. Belief systems that break down. All kinds of things are part of our human experience. These people need to understand that life is difficult but that does not mean that life is bad. It does not mean that being who you are is not capable of dealing with the difficulties that life offers. The joke of course is: when you go from the 29.6, you go to the 59.1 and it says, "You are confused? You don’t know whether your body is worth anything? Go make love to somebody, you fool, and find out how incredible it is to have a body."