Gate 48 ⌇ The Gate of Depth

The line of introspection. The foundation is called ‘Insignificance.’ One of the things to understand about depth is that it takes time. Each of these lines require a different kind of spacing in the life because they can actually reach the point in which the Well is rich with what is inside of it. Moon exalted. An instinctive recognition of what is practical and deserves attention. This is part of the foundation of what depth is about. On one side depth always represents the possibility of something that is practical and deserves attention. When I have people who come with the first line, I always remind them, "Yes, you are going to be able to have an understanding of many things, but the only things that you will get to experiment with are those things that are practical and really are deserving of somebody else’s attention." The martian side is, An Ego tendency to apply energy to trivial considerations. What I said to you about the basic dichotomy that exists within the nature of the Well - the Well has these two sides. It has the capacity to recognize and understand patterns that are of benefit to humanity - this is a collective process - and on the other side it has the recognition of the patterns and all the trivia that is connected to those patterns. 

A taste for recognizing what is practical and deserves attention  or  A taste for trivia. By the way, I love trivia. This is not about good or bad in these things. The essential truths of my life are in the trivia. This is what I have discovered. I am an eclectic and therefore I collect everything. What I discovered about the garbage is that what I was collecting I assumed to be flowers - that when I looked to the flowers and I dug into the earth, I recognized that their root is all that stuff I considered to be garbage. All of that trivia, like clichés - I love clichés. I hated them when I was intellectual and ignorant. I thought that they were terrible, but now I realize that they are the funniest things we have and that they are essentially true. The little things, the trivial things are not about not respecting them. You simply have to recognize that depth is something that is not just about what is important. It is also about what is simply there. 

The collective field - to recognize and be aware of the collective environment is the foundation of depth. Depth is not limited to a prejudice that says, "I can only be deep because it is a value". This is not the mind. This has nothing to do with the way we think. This is the depth that is coming into us all the time and we are not necessarily consciously involved with this process at all. It is simply there and suddenly it blurts out of our mouth, and we hear that we have collected these patterns. They are suddenly just emerging. So, recognize that the basis of depth is not to be judgmental from the mental perspective about what your depth is made up of. Fear of inadequacy is the fear here and so often when people come to me with the 48th gate - I have both my Neptunes here, so I know it deeply - I say to them, "Relax, you are deep. You cannot judge your depth from your mind." That is what Neptune taught me. I was never allowed to see it. It is a depth that takes place at a lymphatic level. It has nothing to do with the way we think. It collects everything. It collects, in each person that carries that gate, exactly the depth that you need. This is the beauty of it.

This line is called ‘Degeneracy.’  If you look at the 18.2, it is called ‘Terminal disease,’ which meant that no correction can take place. There is nothing that can be corrected. This is a very important lesson for the 48.2. This is a projection field. It cannot look inside so it is not looking at its depth, it just wants to have its chance to experiment on the other side. Due to that wish and due to the fact that it does not know the other side, it is just projecting outwards and fails to recognize something intrinsic: it does not matter how much depth you have, the experimenter controls it. Remember that. This is very important. No matter how much depth you have, it is the 16th gate that is in control of manifestation, of expression and it is the 16th gate that says, "I will experiment with this, or not". The awareness that to successfully establish a new form one cannot neglect the most positive attributes just to accommodate inferior elements. This would lead to deterioration. The other side, The misguided urge for harmony that when associated with inferior values degenerates into decadence.  

You are a 48 and you are working as a graphic artist for an advertising agency, and you have a very important client for your company. The client wants you to design a soap box for them. You go about your job and you design a soap box with your 48 depth and talent. You know what pattern will work, you know what kind of pattern the collective is really going to appreciate and you design the box, you colour it and put all your letters on. This is classic for the 48.2. Then the client comes and says, "The box has the right shape but I do not like the colour. I don’t like what you have written. I don’t like the letter type that you used. I don’t like where you have put it. I want you to change all these points and experiment with blue instead of red and with this kind of type."  The 48.2 in the detriment can always say yes to that based on the rooting of the 18.2. “It is not good enough, I am inadequate. I cannot really challenge the authority because I cannot correct them. I will give up my artistic integrity and I will allow them to degenerate my creative skills. What my intuition brought out for that box was correct, whether they like it or not.” 

But in the 48 there is this deep fear of inadequacy. That fear out of the projection line can immediately lead to the talent being broken. I met so many of these people and they all suffer from this until they finally realize that unless they stand by their intuition and allow it to be correct for them, they will soon discover that there are people who will resonate to that. They should only work with those people. A confidence in awareness to resist inferior influences. It is all about confidence. You either have confidence in your taste, or you don’t.  A lack of confidence that invites interference and decadence. You can only have confidence when you know the mechanics. If you have a defined Splenic system and the 48th gate, you have to recognize that you must rely on that. It is you. It does not mean that it will be right for everyone. It means that it will always be right for you. The confidence comes in accepting that that is correct for you. As long as you recognize that there is the opportunity - the possibility - to stand by your intuition. 

All projected fields generate interference from others. Every second line is looking for somebody who is going to smack it because second lines are always the projections that lack depth, so they end up banging into something. But it does not mean that they are inferior in quality. I know wonderful 48.2 artists who went through hell during the early part of their career because they had people telling them what they should paint. "Don’t paint in oil, paint in water colors. Those brushes are too big. Use smaller ones." They did what they were told. When they had their reading done they all understood the mechanics, and this whole burden disappeared. They were relieved of the whole load. Confidence can only grow out of the recognition of the mechanics. If you have it, you have to learn to rely on it. That is what our work is about. Trust what is you.

When you come to the third line and the fourth line, you come to the themes of individuality. The theme about individual depth is the most difficult of all the lines in the 48. Both of these lines are indications of long term processes. I have both my Neptunes in the third and the fourth line. Until you get to your half-life point, to your mid-life, that is when you begin to get a benefit from the depth that can be developed here. Both ‘Incommunicado’ and ‘Restructuring’ are by their very nature long term processes, and this means that the depth is not there for a very long time. The Well really has to fill up. The third line is called ‘Incommunicado.’ This line speaks for itself. It is a line of adaptation, this is the end of the lower trigram process. 

The Moon in detriment, Symbolized by the ‘no-moon’ phase where the potential of light is unrecognized, unavailable and unknowable. The redeeming value is in the transience of such a stage which can give strength to those so afflicted. Mercury in detriment, The profound anxiety when a profound intelligence is forgotten in the wilderness. The depth is there but it takes many years for it to flower. The process is such that anybody who has that line knows that there is depth within them. There is this urge to bring it out. It is very difficult for people, like myself, who are very individual. These two lines that I have my Neptunes in, the only way that they get to the Throat is via the 57/20, so my depth is always coming out through this manifestation to my Throat. Yet I had to go through a lifetime process of not knowing what the hell I was here for, having no idea and not getting out any of what I thought was the depth within me. This is a long term process. 

Where the development of taste and depth is a long-term process, and on the other side, The tendency in a long-term process to anxiety. This can be deeply frustrating. It is one of the most frustrating lines because it is the capacity to be totally ignored for your depth. Many people can be psychically damaged by this. These are the people that become obsessed with skills. They think, "If I have the right skill I can get my depth out," and are constantly looking for another skill.

The fourth line people are the most gifted. They are very talented people but most of them never get to live out their talent in their life because this is a deeply frustrating line, much more frustrating than the Incommunicado, because the Incommunicado does come to an end and one gets used to the fact that one’s depth does not seem to come out. You get a delightful sweet surprise when it finally does. The reality is that when you are dealing with the fourth line, remember that it is about externalization. It is the recognition that one has to make on the other side and it is a very fixed process, a one-track-process. Here in the ‘Restructuring’ you have, The good sense to take advantage of the restriction on short-term activity to assess the situation and restructure for long-term goals that will facilitate development when activity resumes. On other side, A resistance to restructuring on speculation with the tendency, when activity resumes, to have to do so anyway. Please understand how this works. Let’s say that you are a writer having this line. You have the depth, and all of a sudden there is a transit and the 16 comes along and you start to write. The depth is coming out and it feels wonderful and then it suddenly stops. It might stop after an hour, or after four days. It depends on the transit and on what is going on in your process. But the fact is that this is the line of stopping and starting. These people can go absolutely nuts because they think - like the 18.4 - that they are incompetent. So they start writing something and it stops and they burn it, they throw it away. They forget about it because they say, "I could not do it. I could not fulfill that. I could not keep on doing it." This is a lie. 

The nature of this line is that it takes a long time for these individual theme lines to mature into their creative depth. What that means it that processes start and stop. They stop for a reason. They stop so that new depth can be added before you can return. This used to drive me crazy. I start writing something - I am an automatic pilot. I am what I call a bio-fax-machine - it is there and it is great and then it stopped. I got really angry. Why did it stop? I was ignorant and thought that it was my talent and my depth. “This hand and this pen will do what I say,” but this does not work. This can be very frustrating. Only when I was aware of this knowledge, only then, for the first time in my life could I do that. I have been working on a book for over four years now and I work on it when I can. I have never done that in my whole life. When I did the White Book, I sat still for two and a half months and worked 14 hours a day. That is my style. But there is a part in me that has to work on things in this 4th line way, and I learnt from that knowledge to trust it, to see that I can go back. Before I never thought that I could go back, that it would still be there waiting for me to go back to and that it would continue. 

This is so important for the people with the fourth line. They have to see that whatever comes out is correct for its time, for its moment, and it is not to be destroyed. One has not to be frustrated that one cannot continue. I always tell these people about respecting and honoring the muse, who is not always there. The awareness that depth and its possible expression will face restrictions with a resulting taste for short-term projects. Learn to accept what you get existentially, creatively. Whatever you get, it is o.k. When it stops, it is time to refill the Well. A taste for long-term projects that will be frustrated in restraint. “I want to write a book starting at page 1 and I want to get to the last page and I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.” Of course it always does and then you end up with this deep frustration. Whenever you see people with the third and fourth line, understand that they have their roots in the 18.3 and the 18.4. This is the root for the deep frustration. "I want to correct it now and get the whole thing done."

When you get to the fifth and sixth lines, you are in the collective themes and the 48th belongs to a collective circuit. We know that fifth lines have a special quality; they are the penultimate of a hexagram, they bring together all of the basic qualities of the hexagram and have the capacity within them to universalize them. The fifth lines that are in a collective circuitry have a deep resonance to that circuitry, and universalization is something that can be powerfully moved through  those fifth lines. Here it is called ‘Action.’ A natural urge to apply energy to action.  In other words, "I have got it. Let’s do it. I have the pattern, the depth. Let’s do it.” These people are interested in getting the pattern out, getting the corrective process out, getting the experiment done. Remember, that the fifth line in terms of its emotional wave has to do with seduction. All fifth lines are deeply seductive. Let me seduce you to do an experiment with my wonderful depth. 

On the other side of that the Moon in detriment. An over-reliance on the need for protection that in times of social renewal is obsessed with the details of planning at the expense of action.  The 18.5 - on one side you have ‘The Therapist’ and on the other side you have the ‘Mental patient.’ They belong to each other in the same bag which gets carried over to this fifth line. So the natural urge to apply energy into action. "I know how everybody can be made to feel better. Let’s do it." The collective answer. On the other side is the fear that the experiment won’t work. It is safer to keep on working out the details of it. "Yes, well. I really think that I have an answer, but I am still doing my research. I am not ready to experiment with it. I am not ready to tell you what it is." 

A taste for action   or   Insecurity with one’s depth that can fail to take action. “I am not ready.” Endless planning and detail working and in its own way this is the instability of the Mental patient that we have in the detriment of the 18.5. It is so difficult to get logic into action that the moment that the opportunity is there, you have to be ready and the people in the detriment are not always ready. They are afraid of the authority that they have challenged. They are afraid of their depth not being adequate enough and they are afraid of failing, of having everybody say, "Look, you were wrong all along and you have wasted your time." Rather than getting to the point of experimenting, they don’t let anybody know what their depth really is. These are people that keep diaries that nobody ever sees, with all their theories about the nature of living. Later, you find out that they were totally different than what you thought.

The sixth line, the roof of the house. The line of transition is called ‘Self-fulfillment.’ An undiminishable resource. Venus exalted, The valued center that as it gives, it receives and thus can continue to give.  When it gives, it receives. Remember, that this is a sixth line. The 18.6 is not Work on what has been spoilt, it is spoilt. This is the little Buddha that everybody has to nurture. This is the one that has be looked after and treated well. On the other side of this Self-fulfillment the depth is there, regardless. They are not inadequate. These are people with depth and understanding but they do not particularly care about whether they experiment with it or not, in order to really see for sure if they understand. Only if they give out their understanding will the opportunity for experimentation come back, and the moment they do that they are of value to other human beings. They can be very gifted. They already can intuitively recognize what is beyond the skills on the other side, what the indication or direction is afterwards, when the experiment is actually proven. They recognize intuitively what can transpire out of that experiment. Moon in detriment, A tendency to superficiality that, though generous and nurturing, will lack the inspirational quality that can transform its gift into a common currency. In the white book, A depth and potential talent that is of value to others  or  Where the depth is limited, the taste will be superficial and affect the quality of the possible talent. All depth is limited unless it can be experimented with. This is the ultimate limitation of all depth. The moment that you recognize something and understand it you have to check it out and if you do not do so, you are not truly a logical being and you will not be able to provide for the love of humanity, to provide a logical pattern that is reliable for humanity to move towards the future.

So it becomes very important for the sixth lines to give their pattern to somebody else, if they themselves do not want to check it out. "We know that you understand, but if you can’t check it out, give it to somebody else." There is no selfishness in this. This is self-fulfilled. If the sixth lines consider that they can become enormously valuable because what they offer for experimentation can lead to something that is totally beyond the talent. It is where it goes to throughout the whole being. By the way, these are people where everybody else says that they are inadequate. This is the funny thing about this line. But they are not.