Gate 59 ⌇ The Gate of Sexuality

Every single hexagram, and this is very funny but also sad, but it is how things work, is expressed as an essence through its first line. The first line is a foundation. Here we have the foundation of the ‘Preemptive strike.’ It says, The authority and vitality  that in understanding purpose and direction, can recognize and eliminate barriers before they become impregnable.  Preemptive strike is a military term. It means that you get them before they get you. It also means: You get them before anybody else does. This is what I call the Cave Man line. You know these pictures of the cave man. He sees a beautiful woman, he takes out his club, racks her on the head and grabs her by her hair and drags her off to his cave. It is one of the things to understand about the nature of human union. At the foundation of human union is that the strong overwhelms the weak. This is the nature of the basis of the union. It is why, when women of your generation living in this time in the world are confronted with so much hostility, the moment that you assert strength rather than living out the archetype, the stereotype of Yin weakness. This is all about the strong overwhelming the weak. Mercury in detriment, in this position The ability and intelligence to recognize, but a deep indecisiveness about how and when to act. This is a first line and because of that it knows that it is fertile. It knows that it has the power to break down a barrier, but it does not really know very much about the other side, like all first lines. Think about something else. Think about the nature of resonance. When I was doing the sexual course, people were always saying to me: What about the Mind? I did the sexuality which came out of the Solarplex, and the Caring which came out of the Splenic. The sexuality of the Mind is in resonance to wherever the sexuality is, i.e. let’s say that you are somebody who has a Mind that has a dominance of first lines. The way your Mind is going to operate sexually, what your Mind is going to think about partnership is that it will think about it in this way. It is going to be the ‘cave man mentality.’ It is going to be: When I am strong and they are weak, I can get them. That is the nature of the first line. 

It also tells you something very intrinsic about how the human blood line, genetics, survives. It survives by the strong and the weak coming together. Not the stereotype of strong and weak  but the truth of strong and weak. This is the basis of keeping the genetic pool alive, because if the weak are left to the weak, their offspring becomes weaker and weaker and eventually dies off. This whole business is the first line can look like violation at one level, there is physical and psychic rape in the first line, there is violation in the first line simply because the strong can be overwhelmed in their strength, and the weak can be so weak. There can be this enormous imposition of this power on them, but at its core is the protection of the species, at the core is this underlying tribal support system that says, "We cannot leave the weak out there. We have to integrate the weak with the strong, so that the next generation is healthier." Not to allow the weak to continue reproducing without strength. The basis of union is strength and weakness. 

Jürgen: When the male is doing his dance to attract the woman, when he shows himself  to overcome the barriers, there is a certain moment where the genetics are right and the woman says, "I got so weak." They call that the weakness of the heart. This is a classic syndrome of spring fever.

When you are dealing with the first line, you know that they have the recognition that they can break down barriers. It is like all foundations. It is introspective, and so it recognizes that within it is the power to break down barriers. When you get to the second line you get to projection, and of course they do not know that they can break down barriers. That is just what they project out, but they do not know it themselves. So there is no movement from them. It is what we call shyness, but it is not shyness. The self-imposed that is in this line at the beginning – self-imposed barriers - is a genetic barrier. This is not like they self-impose this from their mental plane. This is a genetic barrier that is there. It is a self-imposed barrier. They are not allowed in that sense to live out that first line. They have to wait for that to come to them because they are projecting that outwards. ‘Shyness.’ Self-imposed barriers. A preferred and natural separateness that protects against the inevitable instability engendered by union.  Now, remember that the second lines are always getting found out. In that moment that they are projecting outwards and somebody picks up that projection and comes into them with their boldness, they may find that very uncomfortable. After all, it is not necessarily something that is going to work. It can, or it cannot. It is part of the process. Here in the Shyness line, The restriction of the sex drive to maintain separateness. It is a way of keeping oneself back so that one does not have to deal with what happens. The first to the third line is not well equipped to deal with the other side. They are involved in their own process, and yet this is a channel that is all about intimacy. There is always an aspect within them that is very uncomfortable because they have to deal with the power of the other side, because the other side brings the emotional wave. It brings the passion and the desire. It brings the up and down of the power. This can be quite a thing to deal with. 

The Pluto in detriment. This is a whole generation of people that have Pluto affecting this 59th hexagram. People somewhere around 1957-1960. A calculated shyness, rooted in deep psychological barriers, that even in dynamic individuals will always resist interaction.  These are extreme cases of people in whom only boldness will work. Only when someone consistently is coming to break down that barrier can it possibly work. This is a deep genetic restriction. When you see someone with the 59.2 in detriment, what that says basically is: there are very few people that are their genetic match. Because of that they can be very uncomfortable in that role of being the shy one, and they assume that there is something wrong. There is nothing wrong. There are only very few people to make that match. 

Infertility, rooted psychologically or biologically, that conditions the drive for separateness. The infertility lies in the incapacity to be able to initiate union themselves. They cannot break anything down themselves. If nobody comes to break it down, it will never get broken down. It does not matter what kind of lover they have, until they are getting the right one, until they are getting the right kind of boldness, the right genetic mix, there can be no fertility for these people. I have many women I worked with who have the 59.2 in detriment, because it is a generation I have a lot of contact with. So many of them are concerned that they are truly infertile, that it is not possible for them to have children. It is difficult, but it is not impossible. The reality is that is has to do with the right genetic mix. Without it, it does not happen. 

By the way, when you get to the fifth line, the line of universalization, you get to what we have in the modern world, the enormous expansion of genetic mixes. So that people who are limited in that sense no longer have to stay limited. They would have been the ones in the old tribe that would have been the spinsters, or the men without children. They would have been the ones that never had children within the confines of the tribe because they did not get to meet enough in the world, to meet exactly that right genetic mix that is going to be able to produce that genetic material.

When we get to the third line, to the line of ‘Openness,’ we get to the line of bonds made and broken. So many people misunderstand this because they put an awful lot of attention on the ‘broken’ instead of the ‘made,’, but nonetheless. Bonds made and broken is a genetic strategy to be very open, to achieve union and then to close up. That is all. That is the way bonds made and broken works. Bonds made and broken can be a couple which does not see each other for a long period of time, and then they come back together again, then they separate again. Or somebody who works every day and does not see the partner all day and after work, they come back together again. This kind of bonds made and broken can work at many different levels. The thing to understand about this is that this is a genetic imperative that says, "We are going to have this moment,” – remember, this is the resonance to the real One-night stand - and the three says, "Come on, let’s do it. Let’s try, and tomorrow I don’t want to see you anymore." That is the nature of bonds made and broken. 

‘Openness.’ Where one is empowered through union and intimacy with others, and the other side, Where the drive for empowerment can lead to promiscuity. Remember, that this is about adaptation. It is saying, The search for identity and security can only be achieved through the dropping of barriers, in order to define oneself through union. This is the ultimate idea of what union is: to let go, to dissolve yourself into a relationship, to define yourself in that union. By defining yourself in that union to generate, in the ultimate sense, the genetic material that can come out of it, but that’s it. It does not mean that that relationship is meant to survive. It does not mean that this union is meant to survive. It means that that is exactly the right strategy to produce the genetic material that will come out of it. The women of the generation of 1957- 1960 are an enormous generation of single mothers. They are all running around saying, "Why do I have this child with that man, and he is gone?" Sometimes the man is carrying the third line, and sometimes they carry it. But the moment that that is there it is reflected and lived out, and that is part of the process. 

The whole bulge in the divorce rate comes from this kind of energy. The thing to recognize about it is that it is not inherently bad. It is not about that. It is literally about defining yourself through union and then saying, "Excuse me, but I want to go back to be by myself for a while, o.k.?" That is really what it is saying. It is saying, "I am defining myself through union with you because we can produce something here. That is what the genes want, but I don’t necessarily want to stay with you. My genes are just interested in this experience, to produce this possibility, not necessarily that we are going to stay together. Third lines can always bring in the whole process of trial and error. This is the nature of the promiscuity, that is the sense that in defining oneself, it does not last. If one is not psychologically balanced or one does not have a proper kind of understanding, you keep on going through this process endlessly, trying to define yourself through somebody else and constantly going through this breaking down of the bond, and thinking finally that all of this is just pointless.

When you get to the fourth line, you get to the upper trigram and you get through this process of externalization, of being fixed. After all, this whole hexagram is about establishing union. It is not about establishing a good sex life. It is not about establishing having children. The overview of that is to establish union. The fourth line is fixed on establishing union. It is fixed on establishing friendship. Friendship becomes the focus for everybody who carries this line. Think about what that means. If you have a Mind that is fourth line dominated, the only people that will ever pay attention to your mind are your friends. Otherwise it is not going to work. It is all about finding the confident, or not. The fourth line is fixed on this. Venus exalted, The dropping of barriers to union to establish a universal union. Mercury in detriment, An intellectual understanding that is rarely put into action. Here in the white book, The power derived from non-sexual intimacy. The power is, "Aha, I broke down their barrier. If I try to come at them as a lover, they would have rejected me. But I got them. I came in the backdoor as their friend and I did it." That is the power. 

The other side is  underneath that power, where the idea "I broke through. I am their friend now" is not enough, because it cannot restrain the sex drive. One of the things that happens is that the fourth line operates in a wave of Kindness/Meanness. That kindness is always at work in the friendship phase and the meanness is always coming into work the moment that you step into the sexual phase. That is, you have a friend for many years and you have a sweet and wonderful relationship, and one night you make love to each other and the next day you are not very nice to each other anymore. You know too much about each other because you have been friends. The moment you become lovers, that is a totally different story. Lovers need to have secrets. Friends can’t afford to have secrets. This is the other side of this. The other thing is, to keep in mind something: On the level of sexual violation that takes place in the world, most women are raped by men they know. They are raped by men who are in their families. They are raped by friends. 

The fourth line is the resonance to the first line and it is still about weakness and strength, but at another level. At the moment that you know somebody for a very long time, there is often this moment that you really can be overpowered by them and there is always this sexual tone that underlies all friendship. Be aware of that. The moment that somebody is operating on the friendship level does not mean that there is not sexuality within them. It means that they are working out an operating strategy and ultimately, by the time they get to a certain point, they get to live out the sexuality. It usually turns out that they say, "Why couldn’t we have stayed friends?" There is also complete sexual rejection in this line. There are also people who have this line who become brothers and sisters in monasteries. Or there are people with this line who only want someone to cuddle. They only want to feel the warmth of the friendship.

We have union, we have sexuality. It is very rare in the 384 lines that you see the word Love. If you look for it, you will discover that it is not easy to find. If you look here in the fifth line, right away it stands out there. It is the only one of these lines that speaks of love. This is the universalization of union and that is why we have love movies, love stories and love poetry. What union really is is the Cave man, but what we want is it to be much more exalted. We want Romeo und Juliet. This is the projection that the world puts on union. The fifth line carries it out. This is one of the lines that is deeply misunderstood because of its name, ‘Femme fatale/Casanova.’ The easiest way to understand this is that it is the other that is projecting onto this person that they can break down the union. They are the ones that can make it work. So what happens to the fifth line is that they are the ones that get loved. They attract all of the love that gets projected on them. Remember, they may not be very good as lovers. It is simply a projection, but it is coming from the outside and says, "Aha, this one. This is the one that will break down the barrier." They may or may not. It is very easy for them to become the femme fatale or the Casanova because people love them, but they do not necessarily love. This is one of the dilemmas. 

This is one of the common things that you see in literature. We see this endless stream of somebody who loves somebody else, and that person does not love them. This is the classic theme of the fifth line. The fifth line is always attracting love but it does not mean that they are loving back. It simply means that they are attracting that love. The power to use love to break down any barrier. Given the Sun’s ‘lightness,’ there is no negative connotation inherent in this description. Uranus in detriment, Here the negative potential of this power becomes evident. The gigolo, the adventuress.  “If they love me, why don’t they pay. It is o.k. with me. If they love me, let them take me to Monte Carlo. Let me gamble, let me have a good time, dress me up in nice clothes.” Every time you are looking at fifth lines, you really get to see the way the world looks at these energies. You can see that it is not the whole story. It is the mythology that we put out. The fifth line is always carrying that global mythology.

When we come to the sixth line, the line of transition, we come to the end of this process. This line is called ‘The One night stand.’ I already mentioned that this line is deeply misunderstood. The one night stand, though it is clearly the resonance to the bonds made and broken of the third line, so there is always the potential for this kind of sexuality. It is the resonance above that. All sixth lines have within them this sense of the soul mate, or not. This is all about, "Yes, I know how to do it. I know I can do it with you, but so what? Where is that going to take me? Where am I going to go with all of that. Remember, that the sixth line is always looking at the complete circuit and when you take a look at this circuitry, you are basically looking at what it is to be a member of the tribe. Oh, then the six stands back and says, "Wait a minute. I know what this is all about. This is about children, houses, mortgages, the job I have to have, the neighborhood I have to live in, the friends my kid has to have, the government that runs the city. And you want me to get involved with you, tonight when I have to think about all of that? No. This is not worth it." 

In the black book it says, The tendency, based on the personality or circumstances, to accept only temporary unions that may otherwise be impossible or dangerous to continue.  Because it is not going to lead to where that sixth line wants to go. It wants to go to the 45th gate that says: I have. I want. I have what I need. If it cannot say that it is not going to be involved at all. Here, The power for intimacy, regardless of conditions.  The power is always there, but that does not mean that it will be used. On the other side of that, A drive for sexual and intimate diversity. By the way, if you meet a 59.6 and you watch them in a cafe, you see what this line means. They are watching everything that moves, every muscle, every tone, every shape. It is not that they do anything about it, they are looking at everything and think, "Maybe." So don’t be carried away with seeing this as somebody who is driven by their sexuality to step into union. They know all that stuff but there is a much deeper sense of:  What else is there? 

When you move in this gate to the next line, the 40.1, you move deep into the tribe. You go to the part of the tribe that has to work it all out, that has to provide the Ego energy to support the family, to make the marriage bargain, to do all of those things. The thing that the 59.6 knows is that the next step - "god forbid" says the 59.6 - is the 40.1. The moment I make this step that I will have to play out that whole movie starting at the 40th hexagram, they are not going to do that unless they really see that this is something unusual for them. The soul mate, or not. By the way, in terms of resonance: If you see someone who has the 59.6 and who has many third lines in their design, they are more likely to experiment early in their life with all kinds of short term relationships until they get to the point where they realize, "Oh, I have to wait." Resonance has a lot to do with how we function, and where the resonance is to these things.