Gate 34 ⌇ The Gate of Power

When you look at any gate and you look at its first line, it speaks for its nature. The nature of what it is to empower survival, the basis and foundation of empowering survival is to be a bully. Above the lines it says, Power is only great when its display or use serves the common good. Its display - power people never have to use their power all the time, they can show it. If you watch animals confronting each other because they have a conflict over territory, they put on an incredible show. Listen to two cats arguing over who belongs in the backyard. This is an incredible performance of display. There is no real power being used. The power is secondary. Someone who has the 34th gate in an undefined Sacral center is not the kind person that will be able to push their power out all the time. ‘The Bully.’ The indiscriminate use of power. Saturn exalted, The less negative, the resort to power as a manifestation of frustration. To stay alive is a frustrating process because it is an ongoing, moment by moment, day by day process. You can have a job and feed yourself today, but if you do not go to work the next day then you give all that up. How will you survive? It is an ongoing process of releasing that power.

Pluto in detriment, The comeuppance that is the inevitable destiny of the bully. In order to survive you have to be able to show your power. If you don’t do that, you will only stay alive out of the generosity or kindness of others. Don’t bet on it. You have to live out your own power to stay alive. The energy to display power as a response to frustration. The frustration is all about: don’t get in the way of my survival! We are here to be able to survive alone. That is our nature. It doesn’t matter whether you have the 34th gate, or not. You get it all the time from other people or transits. The ever present risk of retaliation to power displays. This line does not say: use power. This is the indiscriminate display of power. It is not the use of power. The bully does not really have to do anything to you other than scare you. The 34.1 realizes that it has this power. It knows that it is there and it knows that if it does not show this power, that it will be difficult for it to stay alive. This is the whole thing for human beings to understand. I meet so many people who through conditioning have been made weak. I am a pure individual and I ride this wave of how wonderful it is to be empowered and alone in the survival of life. How difficult it is for people to show their power. How difficult it is for them to see that there is somebody in their life who just isn’t good for them, and they do not have the power to defend their survival and say, “Please, I cannot survive with you.” People who have jobs that they hate and do not have the power to say, “I cannot do this. This is not for me.” The 34th gate goes to the 57. It goes to the creation of the archetype for survival, to be alive as a human being. The fear of the 57th gate is the fear of tomorrow, the fear of consequences, the fear of what can happen to us. It is so important to understand that the very basis of power is display. In the animal world, display works most of the time and conflict is generally avoided and survival is ensured. Somebody usually backs down and it is over. This is the beginning of the use of power. It is not about violence. It is about the display of one’s power to survive on one’s own. After all, this is individual.

The 34 and the 27 are the only gates of the Sacral center that are pointed at a functional awareness. As we go through the lines of the 34, please understand that there are so many different variations of this. The 34 connected to the 20 is always displaying their power. This is part of their doing. The 34 connected to the 10 has a totally different process because it has to do with the empowerment of their identity. The 34 and the 57 is another process. So again, we are looking at the basis of this as energies, but how it actually works out in someone’s chart is dependent on: what is the nature of their integration system and how is this working in that configuration, not simply what it is in the gate itself because again, there are so many different qualities at work. When the 34 is connected to the 57, the power is aware. An aware bully is very different from an unaware bully. The awareness about what it takes to survive. "I know what it takes to survive" is different from the blind need to survive. Please understand, that you have to take into consideration the way it operates in the actual design.

When you come to the second line, they  project outwards. The first line is not what you think. The first line is not the obvious bully. Like all first lines, they can be hidden bullies and if you scratch them the wrong way, you will see a display of power. The second line is always projecting out this power. "I have the power to survive." In the black book this is all about victory. It is not about winning anything. It is about "I can do it. I can survive. I can be my archetype. I can follow my convictions. I can do what I want to do." I mentioned all the other gates in that statement. Momentum. Mars exalted, The ability when victory is in sight not to lose perspective. Venus in detriment, A tendency to be emotionally carried away by the smell of victory. My power is bringing me to the capacity to survive. I want to use more power. Because momentum is a projected field, these people can really crumble. They look enormously powerful because they project out all this power, when underneath they are very insecure and very frightened. The need to know that the victory is there, otherwise they fall apart.

The power that grows when victory is in sight  or  The power for growth limited by impatience.  This is the negative side. The whole process of being a second line is that you don’t really know what is there and you have to deal with the consequences of your actions all the time, because you are going to be found out. What people say about the 34.2 is, "Their bark is worse than their bite." They bark a lot but they don’t always bite.

We saw that the first line knows that it has power and that it may have to use its power to protect itself to survive. We know that the second line projects out this power and can be found to be weak inside, a paper tiger. When you get to the third line you get to ‘Machismo,’ you get to the real display of power. Remember something about the nature of the 3rd line. It is the adaptive line. It is preparing the ground for the transpersonal process. It knows that there is something else at work. The other thing is that because it is trial and error, it will make mistakes in its display of power. 

The indiscriminate display of power. Saturn exalted, The great malefic, where machismo unfortunately is invariably backed up by natural and uncontrived power. In the white book, The display of power that defines any role. Understand what that is all about. The third line is saying, "I cannot be a surviving human being unless power display is part of my role." These people will look for ways in which they can display their power in life to enhance their survival success. In other words, "I will not succeed as a business man unless I am really powerful and display my power." I will not succeed as a lover until I beat up my woman. This is the need to display power in any role to guarantee the survival of their way and their conviction. There is a great deal of violence that can come out of this line because it is about trial and error. There is a lot of battering that goes on. Children, couples. It is the display of power and unless the mistakes become part of an awareness process, every role gets imbued with this. 

Mercury in detriment. A reasoned and calculated display. The communication of disinformation. "I will cut your throat unless you pay your bill." That is not necessarily true, but it frightens. The person that is saying that to you is using that power in their role, because they will not be able to feed themselves unless they get that bill back and they have no way of asking nice. They have to display their power. It may not be true. They may not come and cut your throat but...Pay them. Will you. It is so easy to take that description and say. “Terrible!” It is not true. There are certain roles that require that kind of display of power. Nothing can be done about that. That is the nature of beings human after all. When push becomes shove, you’d better be ready. This is a competitive field. We are here to survive and there is all kinds of competition for survival in the world, on all kinds of levels, and the reality is that certain roles need to have this power, otherwise you can never get to the 6th line, its resonance, and recognize what common sense is in terms of what power is really for. Trial and error is a learning process.

When you get to the upper trigram, you get to the line of externalization - there is no question anymore that the power is there, and they know it. They know that they have to put that power out across the channel. In this case, there are three channels. It is putting its power out in a very strong way. This line is called ‘Triumph.’ The freedom in absolute victory to unlimited use of power. Victory in this is being left alone. Victory is being allowed to survive out of your own power and not being interfered with, not being conditioned away from your individual responsibility for survival. In the white book it says, The inherent confidence to use power subtly. These people are fixed in showing their power. They are showing less power, the less they are interfered with. If you do not get in their way, you think that they are very nice. If you get in their way, they are nasty. If you do not get in their way they get more and more confident as they grow older, and these are the kind of people that have a great reservoir of power, but they do not use it in an uncomfortable way. It is subtle, they know how to manage it. 

If that confidence is broken, and most of the time that happens already early in childhood, the moment that there is interference you get this abuse of power. Then they are pushing harder and harder with their power, in order to be able to get that triumph they know is inherently their right. This is also a gate that can lead to all kinds of problems. Violence is something that can also be there in the detriment of the 4th line. There is always the potential for abuse because people refuse to get out of the way. These are people that are pushed out of the way finally in that display of power. Ego gratification in the unrestrained use of power with impunity, inevitably leading to abuse. Very important, i.e. in children coming into the world. We have a whole generation that has been born with this Pluto transit. We have a whole generation of children that carry each of these lines. Millions of them in the world now. They will come into their maturity in the next century. It is very important to be clear about that if you have a 4th line child in your life, you have to encourage their confidence by allowing them to express their individual process. If you do not encourage that confidence, you  have a child that will have all kinds of problems. 

By the way, the abuse in this can be brought out by a parent as a mirror. The parent says, “No, we do not do it your way," and they beat the child. You get the whole thing reflected back on the child. It is very important to keep in mind, whenever you are looking at long term transits, that every day and every moment there are thousands and thousands of children coming into the world with that configuration. This knowledge is very important for raising these children, so that we have a generation of children who have great power, Pluto in 34, with the capacity to work this out because they have not had negative — better unaware — conditioning in their process

The first line is the nature of the hexagram and the fifth line is the way the world looks at it. Everybody who carries the 34.5, everybody else projects on them that they have power. Due to that they are rarely interfered with. The line says ‘Annihilation.’ The way in which we see that power at its universal level is that it eliminates everything. For some people, that is a frightening term. The total annihilation of resistance. It comes out of the projection. I have the 57.5 and I have three parts of the integration, but I do not have the 34. When I was in public school and there was a bunch of guys beating up weaker guys, a typical male trip, but they never bothered me. I did not have to do anything. I did not have to put on any scene. The fifth line always gets a projection. These people are being projected on as having so much power that you would not want to interfere with them, because you will get burnt. Like the second line, it can be a paper tiger. Nobody is really sure, because they are projecting onto that power. The resistance to release power other than when necessary. Because the power is already projected on them they do not have to let it out all the time, only when there is interference. This is the kind of person where, once they use their power, it enhances their power reputation a thousand times. By the way, if they blow it, they really lose. 

The discomfort with the need to always release power. This is something that becomes very difficult for the fifth line. This sense of  “no matter how powerful I am, no matter how much they project on me that I have the power, there will always be some force that will take it away from me by interfering with me.” You see that i.e. in the paranoia of dictatorships. Everybody is projecting on the dictator that he has all of this power, but at the same time there can be a coup d’etat going on underneath. They are aware of that and there is a part of them that says,  "Alright, I have to keep on maintaining the power," and they get tired of being in control all the time, of having to control other people to keep them from interfering with them.

When you get to 6th line, you get to the end of the whole process. If you look at the 20.6, you have the line of ‘Wisdom.” If you look at the 10.6, you have the line of the ‘Role Model.’ If you look at the 57.6, you have ‘Utilization.’ All of which talks about the fact there is much more involved in this life than just the release of power. These people learn it very early. Like all 6th lines, they are looking to the whole circuitry, and individuality is enormously complex. ‘Common sense.’ Knowing when enough is enough. Earth exalted, The good sense when having bitten off more than one can chew to spit part of it out. The classic story: You have somebody who gets in your way, and you are a power person. You want them out of your way and you push them out of your way, you punish them in some way. But it does not stop, they still come back. They are still determined to get in your way. There is this sense of: How many times do I have to hit them? How often do I have to put them in their place? You take on this responsibility. You bite into this responsibility of maintaining your power so that you can survive, and then you discover, "Oh". 

One of my dogs went out and killed some chickens from my neighbor. He came over and said, " ...!" So I put my dog on a chain for about six hours. She was in deep psychic pain about that treatment. Then I realized what I was doing and I took her off the chain. My neighbor came back soon afterwards to tell me that my dog was wandering around. “If you do not like it, shoot her. I will not continue to use this power, because that is not what it is all about. There must be another way.” The restriction of the release of power when one does not have the strength to maintain it. Why keep on dealing with all of this? Very often 34.6 people just withdraw. They pull their power away and they simply say, "Enough is enough. I do not want to be like this. I do not just want to be able to survive by using my power in relationship to others, because I know there is much more.” You can thank the stars that we have a 6th line and its resonance in the 3rd line. This is what people call the beginning of our idealism. The beginning of the understanding that we are more than just an animal. There is something else than just maintaining our survival. There has to be. 

The lack of restrictions that can sap one’s strength. The moment this kind of person constantly gets involved in this display of power, they just fall apart. They get very depressed. It is not what they want. They see that power is essential but not that it has to be constantly used against somebody else. Somehow there has to be a way, the example, the role model, there must be a way in which that power can be used in a healthy fashion. It is not enough what is there. There has to be much more. It goes to the 9.1, which is also in the Sacral center. As we go around this wheel, we will see how all of these things are deeply related to each other.